I generally agree, with some nitpicks.

The old canon several times mentions that wielding a lightsaber is actually extremely difficult and unintuitive...

...because the 'blade' is literally weightless, that alone would throw off a lot of wielders of more conventional swords...

... but also because the saber, potentially as a byproduct of the 'coherence field,'... produces strong, unituitive gryoscopic forces when moved or rotated at various angles and speeds.

...

The old explanation I remember is roughly that force sensitives essentially just intuitively know how to counteract this, to varying degrees of proficiency, but a non force sensitive, a non force user... they'd pick it up and awkwardly flail about with it as it seemingly gains and loses weight, is being pushed and pulled in crazy directions that make no sense compared to just, a physical sword or staff.

Sort of like trying to use a very, very poorly balanced real world melee weapon, but the weapon's poor balance also actively changes, like its center of gravity just seemingly randomly alters as you move it.

Basically, a non force user fights the weapon, whereas a skilled force user understands it, and in a more physically tangible sense, literally allows the weapon to guide their combat movements and style, they know when to go 'with' it and when to go 'against' it, to achieve the actual desired motion.

This is kind of sort of depicted in the Mandalorian, with the Darksaber seemingly becoming exhaustively heavy, massive, and Mando has to... learn how to use it, how to work with it.

And also: yes, Han uses a lightsaber in the OT, but most of the early expanded universe did just explain that by saying he is actually force sensitive, that his absurd luck and piloting skill in various situations does mean he is actually a untrained force user, he just also is a stubborn ass who thinks the Force is bullshit, at least initially, lol.

...

But anyway, yes, they used to make lightsabers out of a wider variety of crystals, not just 'kyber'... and yes, i also do remember many different variants of how 'kyber' was actually spelled.

For the life of me I thought its proper spelling was 'khyber' until i bothered to look it up in an actual wiki in the last couple of months.

That could be me misremembering, or maybe that was what I originally read decades ago now, or maybe what i am rembering got 'telephoned' through a bunch of people first, on some forum.

....Man now I kinda want to set up SWGEmu, hahahah!

Yep!

The sort of proto sabers seem to be prior to them figuring kyber crystal magic, iirc, and needing to carry a more crude power/plasma source with them.

Sort of like a radioman in WW2 had to carry around a whole backpack sized radio, whereas nowadays we have like, a cell/smart phone, or just a proper encrypted handheld radio with way, way superior battery/power system in a more compact package.

I see your Schwartz is as big as mine!

Yep, you got it!

There indeed are older kinds of weapon tech, ... but yeah, they havent't been widely used for like... thousands, tens of thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin 4.

It does indeed end up being a sort of... largely post technological progress setting, most things are ossified... almost everytime something is doing something 'novel' with tech... its basically been done before, or its just outright a 'find the lost relic' scenario, and yeah, you do run into weird situations where 'ancient relics' can actually be quite useful in more or less rare and specific scenarios.

Hell, you can even say that... the Force itself is roughly analagous to the Warp, in many ways.

Not quite sure if I am understanding you correctly, but I think you are saying it isn't like, a flat, edged geometry...

...its more like a sort of ... very angry, 'fuzzy', elongated cylinder with a roughly hemispherical 'endcap'.

And the sort of... exit point, or emmitting point of the 'blade' is... more like an camera aperture or a nozzle.

But you also say this O, this eye of the needle... is spinning?

That is a bit of lore I am not familiar with, could you expand on that?

...

But yeah, lightsabers work internally differently than say, the Mandalorian Darksaber... which actually is a proper blade, and uses... some other kind of arcane way to generate and sustain itself, I'm not up to snuff on that lore.

Also just kind of as a general addendum:

There are various materials in the Star Wars universe that can deflect or totally decohere and disperse the ... 'coherence field' of plasma bolts / saber blades.

The Imperial Guards have pikes, staffs that are made of some kind of metal alloy, which can block lightsaber blades, and presumably also deflect blaster bolts.

They may be made out of Beskar, the same material as Mando's armor? I am not sure.

Also, the uh... whatever the Darth Smiley's helmet is made out of in The Acolyte... while I think that show is basically a complete mess both as a show and in lore terms... that material/alloy, cortosis, is actually present in a good deal of the older canon, and it seems to have some kind of ability to nullify, extinguish, not just repel, the 'coherence field' of most other 'plasma' based weapons.

Huh.

I do not recall ever reading or hearing about what is now the 'legends' version of the canon... that lightsabers form some kind of self recycling loop, in that manner.

...

But anyway, that also makes no sense in our real world physics.

It... still net expends energy to maintain plasma in a contained space.

Said plasma would want to basically explode outward in every direction, and a real world magnetic field would have to be stronger than that (real world) force, and ... also... it would be absurdly thermally hot that any wielder of a lightsaber would basically oven cook themselves within seconds of turning it on.

...

As of yet, nuclear fusion in a tokomak style, contained plasma loop... is still a net energy loss, and that is the closest real world equivalent to a 'self cohering plasma bolt' that I can think of...

Barring I guess 'ball lightning', maybe, which is theorerically proposed to maybe be some kind of naturally occuring instance of something similar, but to my knowledge, no one has ever like, made a ball lightning generator to test those theories.