Steampunk Meets Star Wars: Jules Vernes' Lightsaber

I'm going to let Rob Beschizza from Gadget Lab speak for me here, not out of laziness (only partly), but simply because he puts it so damn well:

If, by some act of reverse metempsychosis, we took all that was worthy in George Lucas' imagination and injected it into Jules Verne, this might have resulted a century earlier: the steampunk lightsaber, hand-crafted here by a friend of "CaptainChewbacca" at the Stardestroyer.net forums.

If Jules Verne had invented a lightsaber, I wonder what would have come out of the hilt. An ionically charged spurt of charged phosphorescent gas, discharged with the turn of a valve and combusted by a flint?

In fact, the entire Star Wars cycle envisioned as a steampunk saga is a wonderfully satisfying thought: Han Solo, for example, as the Colt-wielding pilot of the Millennium Zeppelin. And the very thought of Steampunk Vader makes me get weak in the knees.

Steampunk Lightsaber [Gadget Lab]