Aaron's Tech Blog

I usually think about a lot of things before I fall asleep, and occasionally I think about something that I become afraid of never thinking of again (also known as forgetting).  So a few weeks ago I decided I would start writing down a descriptive sentence of what I want to remember, and then the next day I will elaborate on it more.  Just being reminded of the story should be enough to recall most of the details.  So here goes the first one:

"Solenoids in X-Wing Triggers"

In the fourth grade I was introduced to something I had only been vaguely familiar with: Star Wars.  This was mostly due to my friend Jeremiah, who I presume was interested in Star Wars because of his older brothers' interest in it.  I remember Jeremiah read a lot of Star Wars books, and soon I was reading a lot of them too.  I think we ended up watching the Episodes IV, V, and VI at some point in 5th and 6th grade, and I was hooked.

I greatly respected Jeremiah and his knowledge of Star Wars, because to me it seemed like he knew everything there was to know on the topic.  Oftentimes I posed questions to him.  I think I stumped him more often than not, mostly because I asked bizarre things that probably George Lucas himself has never thought about.  One such question was whether all of the power that is fed through the X-Wing's 4 laser cannons goes directly through little wires in the triggers that the pilot squeezes to fire shots, or whether the triggers drive solenoids that complete a different, higher power circuit.

 In posing this question I had already considered a lot of things in my mind, such as how there must be a very high voltage to drive lasers powerful enough to burn through armored ships, how the distance electricity can arc is directly related the how high the voltage is, and how a voltage of that magnitude might just arc right out of the trigger and to the pilot.  This would be bad, so then my little elementary school mind thought of a solenoid to solve the problem.

I think I first learned of solenoids while working on one of our garden tractors with my dad.  For those that don't know, a solenoid is a coil of wire with a metal rod (maybe a magnet?) inside of it.  When electricity is run through the coil, it generates a magnetic field, causing the metal rod to move.  You can then use this as a switch by attaching one wire of a circuit to the metal rod and the other wire to the point that will be hit by the rod.  When you turn the key on the tractor, it sends 12V through the coil of wire, with a very low current, as it doesn't take much to generate the magnetic field.  This moves the metal rod, which connects the other circuit's wires, and a high current flows through that on the way to the starter, which requires a lot of energy because it is turning the engine over.  This way you avoid having a high current  flowing through the key mechanism, so that if it got wet or otherwise malfunctioned you would not get hurt.  For my X-Wing concept I was trying to avoid high voltage in the trigger.

Alas, Jeremiah did not know whether X-Wings are built with solenoids for the pilot's safety.  Quite likely no one knows, because a functional X-Wing has never been built.  Maybe they have some other unfathomable technology that solves the problem.  But if anyone ever builds one in the future and doesn't have that technology, would you please let me know if you used a solenoid?