what's the point of stormtrooper armor?

[Fanatical Meat]

mythbusters did a great show on this. they determined the speed of the shots.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a17230/adam-savage-star-wars-lasers/

There were many nut shots too

 

[UglyCasanova]

I just wanted to pop in and say.....I really hate Star Wars.

 

[JBT]

I was just thinking this the other day. The stuff is terrible. It doesn't seem to protect from anything.

 

[lxskllr]

I just wanted to pop in and say.....I really hate Star Wars.

I wouldn't go that far, but I don't like it as much as most seem to. I've only seen the original three. I liked them ok at the time, but don't think they aged well.

 

[sdifox]

I was just thinking this the other day. The stuff is terrible. It doesn't seem to protect from anything.

Recruits are waaay cheaper than real armour so the empire contracted it out to Chinese forgers.

 

[JTsyo]

Are the blasters supposed to be lasers or some kind of launcher of hot plasma beam-bullets? Lasers are invisible and nobody is swinging a light saber to block a light-speed anything... and even if they did we wouldn't see it because it's invisible and traveling at the speed of light... so if the jedi knight sees the laser being fired with his time freezing eyeballs he still needs to swing his sword arm faster than the speed of light to interdict the light-speed laser beam with his light-saber.... but since we can see the jedi knight flipping and cartwheeling and swinging saber to interdict a stray blaster laser beam then said jedi must not be moving fast enough (faster than light) to intersect the laser beam... therefore none of this makes sense. or does it make sense because the blaster is really hot plasma that travels in perfectly straight lines.

there I go, now I've ruined Star Wars.

People have put in a lot of effort explaining the SW universe, blasters included.