Blaster/Legends



Blasters were weapons that fired blasts of deadly energy. Blasters ranged in size from pistols to starship cannons. They were considerably more potent than primitive weapons like slugthrowers.

Technical Information
To understand blasters, one first needs to understand how a laser works since this is the key to the inner workings of a blaster.

Blaster is a term that can be used interchangeably with the term "laser" for everyday conversation. Regardless, blasters and lasers are particle beam weapons, which fire a "bolt" of energy. The designs of blasters are a fair bit older than that of lasers, becoming less common in newer ships. With their design, blasters have high fire cycle rates, enabling them to multifire, a mode of fire in which the rate of discharge is increased at the cost of accuracy. Blasters, because they are weaker than laser of similar size, are limited to starfighters.

Laser Mechanics
Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. A laser beam is a coherent shaft of light. When referring to light (or any other wave pattern for that matter), coherence is the "sameness" in multiple waves. In other words, each light wave emitted from the laser device has the same wavelength and amplitude as all the other waves emitted from the same device.

Lasers are generated by introducing energy to the lasing medium. The lasing medium is the substance used to generate the laser beams. Tibanna gas is a favored medium. When an atom of the medium is excited by energy, one or more of its electrons will “jump” to a higher energy level. When the atom stabilizes again, meaning that the electron(s) have returned to their original energy levels, a photon is released. A photon is a “packet” of light and the reason that light travels in both a wavelike and a particulate manner.

Blaster Mechanics
Blasters were a considerable improvement on the laser design, however. The bolt fired from a blaster was not just light. Some of the gas used to generate the beam was energized to a plasma state and fired with the highly energized light at supra-light velocities, perhaps partially in hyperspace. This combination of light and plasma formed the deadly bolt fired from a blaster. Because the bolt traveled at faster-than-light speeds, targets could show signs of damage before the visible portion of the bolt hit. This was because the visible portion, as well as most of the heat, was a side-effect of the actual, lethal bolt.

Most personal blasters therefore had two kinds of ammunition: a gas cartridge and a power cell. Very weak weapons, like the Drearian Defense Conglomerate Defender sporting blaster, relied on the power cell and used only a small quantity of gas; immensely powerful weapons, like the illegal Tenloss DX-2 disruptor pistol, used abnormally large amounts of gas.

History and usage
Among the oldest and most venerable of blaster technology is the triple blaster, which dates back to the Old Republic. It works by using three separate blasters connected to the same targeting system, often found in coordinated sets of two or four, to fire simultaneously on a target. No company still mass produces them, and by the Rise of the Empire, triple blasters become exceedingly rare.

An updated version of blaster technology is the autoblaster, a modern redesign. Designed for the B-wing fighter, it has an even higher rate of fire than other blasters, but is not available to other models until after the Battle of Endor.

Blasters are allowed on civilian vessels except for heavy blaster cannons during the Rise of the Empire, when they are restricted to corporations through the purchase of Imperial licenses.

The most common manufacturer of blasters during the films is BlasTech, which among other lines has a contract with both the Imperial Military and the Rebellion. It also manufactures the Protector civilian fighter-grade blaster line.