Q. What DOES happen if you get dirty optics or a flawed laser? Will the emitter mechanism explode....?
Author's response
Not specifically the emitter, but the crystal itself. That’s just as bad. Imagine a two inch wide shaft of stone (crystal) exploding under the exciter pressure of five million watts. I saw that happen in New Mexico. Seven people died and thirteen more were badly injured. It was like a bomb going off. The only reason I wasn’t hurt was that I had just come in the door on the other side of the lab…fourty feet away. As it was, the shock wave knocked me back out the door. I was eleven when this happened and it made a definite impression. In the case of a lightsaber, my design varies from canon (actually the followup books), in that it has only one crystal rather than two. The crystal is a focusing device directly behind and centered within the conter-rotating field coils, and shapes the beam itself. Based upon my expertise with various lasers, I designed it so that a high voltage source located deeper in the grip, generates a high tension light, and the light produced is carried by a light-pipe to the crystal which focuses the beam itself, and if the crystal were flawed, or even dirty, it would explode under the photonic ‘pressure’ as it were, probably taking the user’s hand with it, if not killing him outright.
Alorkin