Can I interest you in a 24-horsepower Yoda?

Ignoring the prequels (of course), how much power does Yoda put out when he’s using the Force? It’s perhaps less than you’d realize.

Yoda’s greatest display of raw power in the original trilogy came when he lifted Luke’s X-Wing from the swamp. As far as physically moving objects around goes, this was easily the biggest expenditure of energy through the Force we saw from anyone in the trilogy.

The energy it takes to lift an object to height h is equal to the object’s mass times the force of gravity times the height it’s lifted. The X-Wing scene lets us use this to put a lower limit on Yoda’s peak power output.

First we need to know how heavy the ship was. The X-Wing’s mass has never been canonically established, but its length has-16 meters. An F-22 is 19 meters long and weighs 19,700 lbs, so scaling down from this gives an estimate for the X-Wing of about 12,000 lbs (5 metric tons).

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