Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-25606723-20151127143941/@comment-26863727-20151212164200

Edacnik wrote: Their armour is crap. Their training is crap. Deal with it. A Spartan could take so many blasts of a stormtrooper blaster it's not even funny. What Stormtrooper armor does is give them a CHANCE of surviving a direct hit. The unarmored  (save for those derpy helmets) rebels at the beginning of ANH die instantly after being hit, while Stormtroopers stagger before falling over, and we learn that the chance of survival is high enough that the Empire does check for wounded, all packed into one handy scene. Here's a quick analysis of what blasters do to different materials.

Stone/concrete type things: blasts off chips and causes charring.

Metal: melts it, and we see in ANH that a Stormtrooper's rifle can be set at a level high enough to destroy a thick metal grate in two frames, that is, 2/24 of a second. Why they are rarely set to this level probably has to do with ammo consumption.

Wood: strangely, despite the Endor bunker fight, we never actually see a tree get shot in Star Wars. Novels though, describe the effect as causing the wood to splinter, smoulder, and sometimes catch fire.

Cloth: fire

Flesh: I don't really have words to describe this. I think the energy sort of courses through the body at a voltage(?) high enough to almost instantly kill an unarmored human with a direct hit.