Quote Originally Posted by Anonymouswizard View Post
I never said it made sense. But if you're quibbling about bowcasters firing quarrels then there's some space wizards who'd love to discuss realism with you.

Personally, I assume that it holds just enough quarrels that we never have to see Chewie reload on screen. It's not realistic but it's enough for me.
In visual media, if you want to have thing A and thing B be two different things, you have to show that they're different; if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it is a duck. If the bowcaster was meant to be a crossbow, it'd act like one; if the bolts it produced were meant to be plasma-coated quarrels rather than blaster bolts then there ought to be something differentiating them from blaster bolts or we ought to see the quarrels or something so that the audience can see that it's not just another blaster variant; instead, we have something that looks like a blaster with a bow attached at the muzzle, which produces bolts that look, sound, and behave like blaster bolts do.

The two most reasonable conclusions to draw from what is shown in the films are that the bowcaster is a blaster stylized to look like a crossbow or that the bowcaster is a weapon which uses a slightly different operating mechanism ('justifying' the bow part of the weapon) to produce the same effect as a blaster - i.e. a bowcaster is to a blaster more or less what coil guns, electromagnetic rail guns, pneumatic guns, and conventional firearms are to one another.

Also, as to your implication that I'm being pedantic and over-analyzing something, my response to you is that an exercise in critical thinking is never wholly wasted whereas blind acceptance of the statements of authority, whether due to respect for that authority or due to apathy or disinterest in the subject matter, breeds a certain laziness of thought - especially when what that authority claims to be the case is so clearly unsupported by the evidence as is the case for the claim that bowcasters are crossbows that coat their quarrels in some kind of plasma. Moreover, suggesting that critical thought either should not or cannot be applied to a setting merely because magic exists within that setting is simply offensive, especially when it comes to something as simple as weapon classification by observable characteristics and there is no indication that the setting's explicit magic has anything to do with the setting's notionally-technological systems.