What Was It Like To Be Hit By A Blaster Bolt?

Violent, and strange. A blaster bolt is a packet of high energy plasma, so it does not punch through you like a bullet. The heat vaporises flesh on contact, the energy dissipates into the body and cauterises the wound, the fluid inside you boils and causes severe internal bleeding, and the concussive force of the bolt travels outward and damages organs the plasma never reached.

A bolt is not a bullet#

The important thing to fix in your head first is that nothing solid hits you.

A blaster bolt is a contained packet of high energy plasma. There is no lump of metal transferring momentum, no fragmentation, none of the mechanics a slugthrower relies on. That difference is a big part of why the galaxy standardised on blasters in the first place, and we have covered that argument in more detail elsewhere.

The galaxy fields an enormous variety of blasters, from hold-out pistols to heavy repeaters, and the bolts they throw vary in power and profile. What happens to a body on the receiving end is broadly the same in every case. Only the scale changes.

The instant of impact#

The bolt travels into the target's body, and the first thing that matters is heat.

Plasma at that temperature does not tear tissue, it vaporises it. Flesh in the bolt's path simply stops existing. The energy then dissipates outward into the body from that channel, and one of the immediate consequences is that the wound cauterises itself. The hole seals as it is made.

That single detail changes the whole character of the injury. Somebody shot with a blaster does not usually go down in a spreading pool of blood. They go down with a neat scorched puncture and comparatively little external bleeding, which is why a hit can look survivable from a distance when it is nothing of the sort.

The part you cannot see#

Under that sealed exterior, things are considerably worse.

The liquid inside the victim's body boils on contact with that much heat. Boiling fluid inside a closed system produces severe internal bleeding, and it keeps damaging surrounding tissue after the bolt itself has expended its energy. The heat that made the wound look tidy is the same heat cooking everything behind it.

At the same time, the concussive force of the bolt travels outward through the body. That shock does not respect the narrow channel the plasma cut. It reaches organs the bolt never came near and damages them anyway, which is how a shot that appears to have caught someone in a survivable spot ends up killing them.

So the honest answer to what it feels like is that there are two injuries happening at once. There is the burn, which is immediate and specific and dreadful. And there is the pressure wave, which is diffuse and internal and does most of the actual killing.

Why deflection became a whole discipline#

The Jedi response to this is worth mentioning, because it tells you how seriously the galaxy took blasters.

Form III, Soresu, was developed specifically because blasters had become the dominant weapon and the older lightsaber forms could not answer them. Shii-Cho techniques were built for melee and did not translate. Makashi had nothing suitable at all. Soresu was designed around a blade's ability to deflect bolts and, with enough practice, reflect them back at the shooter, and it is built on tight controlled movement because any wasted motion opens a gap a bolt can slip through.

That is an entire combat philosophy constructed around not being hit by one of these. It puts the injury in perspective.

There is a second half to it that is easy to skip past. Soresu does not only stop bolts, it sends them back. Reflecting a shot at the person who fired it was one of the major breakthroughs in lightsaber combat during the era of blaster supremacy, and it became the main way a Form III fighter damaged anyone. Which means a fair number of blaster casualties in the galaxy were shot by themselves, at their own chosen power setting, from whatever range they thought was safe.

Surviving one#

People do survive blaster wounds regularly, and the reason is bacta.

Bacta is a thick gelatinous substance with near miraculous regenerative properties, made from kavam and alazhi bacteria mixed with ambori fluid. It helps the body regrow tissue including nerves, skin and muscle, and it works on exactly the injuries a blaster produces: burns, concussions, damage to internal organs, broken ribs. It will even knit bone back together.

It is not a pleasant treatment. Bacta sits somewhere between liquid and slime, and most patients submerged in it feel as though they are being swallowed alive, which is why doctors sedate them first. The drugs and the fluid together tend to produce a drifting, half-meditative state that patients describe as being somewhere else entirely, and a few compare it to being back in the womb. Most stay conscious throughout. Coming out is the worst part, and people generally feel rougher for several days afterwards than they did going in.

Given the alternative, most people take the tank.

The short version#

Getting shot by a blaster is not one injury, it is three arriving together. A burn that removes tissue outright. A seal that hides how bad the first part was. And a pressure wave that goes looking for organs the bolt never reached.

The cauterisation is the detail that sticks. A weapon that closes its own wounds sounds almost merciful until you work out that it is closing them around boiling fluid and ruptured tissue. Whoever is looking at you afterwards will see a small tidy hole and think you got lucky.