What’s the power requirement of a lightsaber? A blaster? A Death Star? Let’s put it this way: it would take a nuclear reactor to power Luke’s more civilized weapon and 2,000,000 trillion of them to fuel a battle station.

In a well-researched and fairly surprising infographic from Ebates, engineers and physicists from the California Institute of Technology have outlined the power requirements for all major Star Wars weapons in terms of batteries, barrels of oil, Tesla Powerwalls, car batteries, nuclear reactors, and percentages of humanity’s energy usage.

First up, a lightsaber:

To get this estimate, the infographic uses a clever method: calculating how much energy it would take to destroy a certain amount of blast door like Qui-Gon does in The Phantom Menace. Melting almost a cubic meter of steel takes about the same amount of energy an average lightning bolt carries with it. All that energy could come from 120,000 AA batteries, 67 Tesla Powerwalls, or one whole nuclear reactor.

From there, the infographic lays out the physics of everything from blasters to x-wings to hyperspace drives. It also goes through how much energy it would take to destroy Alderaan (but you could watch an episode of Because Science for that information too!).

Check out the full graphic below:

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IMAGES: Lucasfilm; Ebates