Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Sublight drive is a Star wars fan fiction. I started reading this based on a recommendation from either here or /r/rational. If it was here, thank you to whomever recommended it. Very enjoyable.
A person from earth is reincarnated in the star wars universe, and they are a ship captain with the separatists during the clone wars. The mc has some basic knowledge of star wars.
There is no boring lead up. It jumps right into the space opera action.
The characters are smart and facing very tough problems. But they are also not all perfectly intelligent. For example Jedi generals are often skilled in the force and have advantages that they use well, but they can often be outsmarted by other characters in fleet battles.
How close to done is this? I'm seeing epilogues in the latest chapters, so I'm hoping it's finishing up?
I've got a few web serials on my plate and the thing I've learned most is that it sucks to hit the wall of "most recent update" or worse "last updated 3 years ago", and I've realized I'm way happier if I just let them finish or not-finish the story before I commit my time.
I should look into... someone in the SSC diaspora had a cool story about "what if the person who became Superman was just kind of awful but took over the world anyway", I really enjoyed that but then hit the "most recent update" wall. It has to have been a few years at this point, maybe they're done. It's a shame I forgot the name.
There are 2 chapters left and the author posts a chapter a week.
I'm also seconding the book recommendation, I enjoyed it quite a lot. Solid 9/10
Perfect, I'll try and remember to grab it in a few weeks. Thanks!
Just slow role the 2000 pages and you'll hit the finish line by the time the last chapter comes out in a week. Or if your reading speed is not an excessive 300 pages a day then don't worry.
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Related: I was complaining to a friend last week about the hollow worldbuilding in Star Wars, specifically about how automation should have eliminated most of the need for manual labor in this universe (but hasn't) and he sent me this surprisingly detailed Reddit post explaining how this could be explained by the story being set in a universe where P = NP: https://old.reddit.com/r/MawInstallation/comments/oysben/does_p_np_a_contemplation_of_electronic_security/
There is a proposed science-fiction genre, 'rocketpunk', which exists to respond to the basic problem of hard sci-fi: namely, computers are better in space than people. If I was a better writer with more time I'd make some. The basic idea is that it's an alternate reality where computer technology hit a wall very early on, justifying manned missions. I suspect to have workable science fiction, even as soft as star wars, then you need something on the spectrum at least.
In any case, we don't get a lot of glimpses of what the civilian economy in star wars looks like. It could be that the vast majority of the population lives on welfare and droids do the actual work.
The economics of Star Wars are a complete mess. They can build moon-sized battlestations that vaporize planets (not to mention Starkiller Base!), implying Kardashev II capabilities in mass and energy manipulation... that aren't displayed anywhere else in the setting.
Better not to think about it too hard. It really doesn't make sense for all key political events to be decided by the outcome of 1v1 lightsaber duels either but it's cool!
How about this: Jedis can see the future except where other Jedis are involved. If they tell an underling to do something, other Jedi/Sith will pretty much instantly know their plans. So, as much as possible, they have to:
I think you could write this into a pretty good setting--at its limits it totally justifies main character syndrome, because the Jedi are the only real agents in the universe.
All that is interesting, but why not bring say... ten droidekas with you as a personal escort, so you can beat any Jedi that pop out at you? Stalin had maybe 15-25 NKVD protecting him at all times but Yoda can walk right up to Darth Sidious in his throne room, knock out two guards and fight in a totally deserted senate hall?
Why weren't there at least 100 elite clone commandoes equipped with anti-jedi weaponry protecting the supreme chancellor in the hours after he launches a purge of the Jedi temple? None of it makes sense!
I think you'd say that the anti-precog field doesn't extend beyond your person. So a Jedi with an entourage is virtually undefeatable, yes, but also predictable and thus avoidable.
But yeah, this is obviously not what's actually happening in the setting, I just think it would be a fun tweak that would make for some interesting possibilities.
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We can take upper kardashev II civilization for granted but there is a narrative reason for 1v1 duels to decide the outcomes of events.
In general the empire seemed to like big threatening super weapons that weren’t necessarily the most cost-effective use of resources but had value in being big and intimidating. It’s not like misallocation of military resources for signaling value is unheard of in our world. Poor resource allocation and leadership mistakes of the kinds predicted by imperial doctrine explain quite a bit about the plot.
If you have upper Kardashev II, then you wouldn't see space battles of maybe 80 big ships on both sides, like Endor or Coruscant. You'd see 80 billion ships slugging it out over months.
This is a setting where glorified teddy bears with sticks and stones manage to overcome thousands of highly trained professional soldiers with heavy weapons! It doesn't make sense and that's fine.
There are narrative reasons for this- namely imperial doctrine pushes for really big ships over more ships and the rebel fleet has to keep up, and it tends to centralize authority in one spot so a single fleet getting wiped out fractures imperial power, despite the existence of thousands more.
Lore tends points to a single star destroyer as basically a 1-1 match for a mid level industrialized world, which almost axiomatically points to the tax revenues from multiple planets being needed to find a single one. That also points to a security doctrine which needs to hold back a huge majority of the fleet to respond to rebellions and protests because it’s definitionally outnumbered badly. All this accords with stated imperial doctrine- eg the Tarkin doctrine. When push comes to shove the empire is undergunned(perhaps due to its unpopularity) and attempting to compensate with intimidation factor. Even small losses(what Endor objectively was) can unravel that fast and even small victories add up.
To steelman the imperial plan at Endor, the goal was to lure the rebel capital ship fleet into a trap and eliminate it, so that the privateering and insurgency would be crushable by smaller ships making up the bulk of the fleet(this fits with the old EU’s characterization), but the elimination of the top two figures along with multiple flag officers led to local governors and satraps declaring independence with the help of ambitious imperial military officers, which formed an imperial death spiral. It wasn’t battlefield losses that broke imperial military might- it was state failure.
I like the EU as much as anyone. I like how in the Thrawn books they try and rationalize the setting, make things seem more logical and explain Endor as the fleet being borg-slaved to the Emperor so it unravelled after he died... I like this ridiculously big EU political compass: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheDeepCore/comments/ll19bs/12x12_political_compass_for_star_wars/
But if 4km long, thin, pointy Star Destroyers are rare and expensive capital ships, how are the Imperials able to build a 160 km wide, spherical Death Star, then make good progress on an even bigger one 4 years after the first is lost? The black budget for superweapons surely can't be more than 5% of the economy, or even half the military budget. We only know of a few highly industrialized planets in the Empire, Kuat and Corellia for instance. There doesn't seem to be much broad-based wealth, nor does the administration seem very efficient if there are large pools of Hutts, smugglers and bounty hunters running around doing their own thing.
They should not be capable of building gigantic moonsized planetbusters if they can't field thousands and thousands of star destroyers.
Lucasfilm and Disney do not understand the logic of wealth and military procurement, there's no basic sense of understanding scale. Putting to one side all the expert analysis of Star Wars scale they do on spacebattles (for instance here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/star-wars-mass-of-a-star-destroyer.464536/) it just doesn't make any sense. The Kaminoans supplied 300,000 clones for the Republic with a million more well on the way! That's about enough to secure Ukraine, not the galaxy. The First Order somehow manage to produce an even bigger planetary superweapon that eats stars. Palpatine manages to throw together a gigantic fleet of Star Destroyers from a hidden planet at the edge of the galaxy.
The empire did have tens of thousands of imperial star destroyers, though, and tens of thousands more lesser capital ships. We see the pride of the fleet, but we don’t the the kinds of massive formations the empire is theoretically capable of, and there’s tons of reasons for this. How often do all twelve US carriers operate together?
What we see on screen is the equivalent of a single carrier strike group. There are hundreds more in the fleet and the empire disintegrates rather than being defeated in a war of attrition. The disintegration is likely a result of coup-proofing; both the big boss and his top guy are gone, and no one else has the loyalty of the entire fleet, so individual flag officers and moffs have every incentive to play hardball with both the central government and each other, and eventually to secede into warlordism.
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Your political compass link takes me to a picture of a nice hat.
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It seems apparent to me that digital computer technology in the Star Wars universe is roughly equivalent to human technology circa 1977. They exist and can be used to perform some tasks, perform data collection and analysis, and perform various forms of numerical control. But any electronic devices shown virtually never contain any advanced form of digital processing, and displays and controls are mostly analog or have rudimentary capabilities.
The one exception is the droids, seeming to possess artificial intelligence more advanced than we have with our vastly improved computational capabilities even today. Such computational power as they seem to exhibit implies powerful, tiny, and efficient digital electronics.
However, that is a case of us projecting our own AI developments onto the fictional world. I believe the most parsimonious explanation is that the droids are in fact cyborgs, that consist of a lab-grown and conventionally trained organic brains, embedded in a mechanical body.
Points in favor:
This handily explains the discrepency between the capabilities of electronic devices depicted and the capabilities of the droids.
We already know that medical technology in that world is more advanced than our own; e.g., Luke's replacement hand and Vader's elaborate mobile hyperbaric chamber. The most salient example is General Grievous, who, but for a few organs, is practically a droid already. Based on this it is reasonable to conclude that bio-electronic integration is more advanced than our own.
This explains the relative paucity of droids generally. They are expensive and somewhat rare because they take nontrivial time to grow and especially to train. They cannot be programmed like computers beyond simple instincts but must be trained via reinforcement feedback training to learn the jobs they are expected to perform as well as basic information about the world and how to behave.
This also explains why droids have very different language capabilities, based on the lab-induced growth of the language center of the brains. Presumably a mech droid like an R2 unit has a stunted one adapted for a tone-based pidgin, possibly adapted from a bird brain, and a droid like C3PO has a much larger one. Threepio also probably had to spend more time actually learning language nuances. With more advanced medical technology, it is plausibly possible to adapt the structures of the organic brains of a wide variety of species to select the traits most favorable to the droids you want to produce.
This also explains the seemingly genuine emotions the droids have. They exhibit these even when not interacting with humanoids, so this is not a case of performing emotions for the benefit of their owners. In reality, these are actually real emotions from real brains, expressed cybernetically.
This also explains frequent less-than-computer performance from the droids in tasks involving computation as well as their never being shown to perform tasks that should be trivial for a digital computer, such as high-speed communication between each other or between themselves and another piece of electronic equipment. Their ability to recall facts is also less than perfect and appears to be similar to how organic memory works.
There are a few pieces that don't fit and may be counted as points against:
C3PO, despite having his language enhanced, also appears to have computer-like ability to perform calculations, e.g., the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field. However, this may only be a piece of recalled information, and as it turns out, he was probably not correct. In another case, R2D2 performs a similar probability calculation on the odds of Luke's survival, though as a tech droid it is plausible has a cybernetic pocket calculator embedded in his toolkit of a body. Such calculators are compatible with the circa 1977 level of electronics.
Droids are never shown to eat or consume any organic substances that would sustain their organic brains. However, this may simply never be shown, and it is possible that they have the capability to generate to synthesize ATP in a closed loop purely from the stored power we see used to charge them up as with R2D2 on Dagobah.
It would seem plausible, with this technology, to place these trained brains into ships and facilities, to act as integrated operators, but we typically see that things are always operated by humanoids. For example, why are there no self-flying TIE fighters? There may be several explanations. First, being partly organic, droids would require periods of rest and be subject to some of the same limits of focus and attention as humans, so their supremacy at given tasks may be minimal in the first place, and if you are going to have a slave, it would make sense to make as general purpose as practical. Second, if electronics are limited to circa 1977 levels, it is likely that droid vision is greatly inferior to the Mk. 1 eyeball, a considerable limitation in many applications. The brains may not easily be adapted to perform motor control of things not closely analogous to body parts, and as stated in Andor, it is highly probable that due to their self-replicating and self-training nature, fully organic humanoids are less expensive than trained and purpose-built droids, particularly for an organization like the Empire capable of conscription.
On a couple of occasions, a droid is seen communicating with a "computer", either internal to the ship or the Cloud City facility. These are suggestive of computers that actually do have droid-level intelligence. However, it seems likely that these are colloquial terms for cyborg agents and not digital computers. There are non-primary resources that suggest that the Falcon does actually have a salvaged droid brain integrated into it, which apparently has some sensor input but is not shown to be capable of directly controlling the ship. Luthen's ship Fondor is directly shown to have what appears to be a droid integrated into the ship as well, which evidently is capable of some control over ships systems, though never pilots it during critical moments and is implied to be a ship full of unusual and expensive upgrades. The Cloud City "central computer" talks to R2D2 over what is probably, given the speed of communication, a simple analog language channel like a telephone, and again is probably just a droid charged with administering simple facility operations such as work dispatch and security lockouts.
Probably the biggest counterargument is the droid army depicted in the phantom menace. These appear to be simple electronic robots and crucially they shut down when the central command center was destroyed. However, the cyborg theory is still salvageable if we assume that the organic brain in each battle droid is designed to be tiny and grown quickly in large quantities, and deployed with minimal training beyond instincts, explaining their dimwitted nature and inability to do much more in combat than advance and fire. Because of this, they could not be relied upon for reliable operation outside a command and control structure issuing a constant stream of detailed commands, likely from a smaller number of more advanced and remotely positioned command droids, and therefore it would make sense to engineer a simple failsafe shutdown mode in the event that command and control is lost that cannot be overridden by the local wetware. This would also explain why they were never used much in other conflicts – the trade federation had a unique combination of high wealth and low manpower, and while they were somewhat effective in combat, humanoid soldiers with initiative and capable of independent operation would invariably be superior soldiers. The more advanced combat droids were presumably capable of independent operation, but likely much more expensive than conscripts or even a volunteer army, with the resource better used on more advanced weapons and vehicles, as shown in the Republic Army.
So if droids are expensive and have these limitations, who would want one? They would be useful in several scenarios:
In conclusion, what we see in the Start Wars universe is a world in which computer technology is circa Earth 1977, but with much improved medical technology, energy storage and production technology, and both gravitic and FTL technology (possibly related and possibly not). As a result, there are some substantial holes in their technology for computer processing and automation, but these are filled somewhat by the existence of cyborg slaves, which are manufactured using organic brains specially grown and requiring considerable training, but can perform basic and specialty tasks in harsh conditions and without pay. They will still have personalities and emotions, based on the characteristics of the brain and the training received, but are in nearly every case considered to be property.
I’m rather partial to the idea that this is a collapsed society in some sense. It really explains quite a lot.
First of all, the technology itself doesn’t seem to progress much throughout the series as we see it. The millennium falcon is high tech in ANH and is still high tech a full generation later. There are few if any improvements on much of anything. Even things like displays, weapons, communications devices, and tools don’t seem to improve over time. If anything, they’re worse.
Then looking at the way technology is used, kept up and repaired, it often appears that much of it is left over from a previous age and kept up by ad how repairs by the owner of the technology. Everything in that universe is old, used, breaking down, falling apart. The Falcon is in service for fifty years, and was a used ship won on a bet when Han got it. It might well have been built 75 or 100 years ago and repaired by the owner as needed. Speaking of which, I don’t think, other than the battle droid factory, there’s much evidence of wide scale production of high tech goods. There’s not even an advertisement for new models of personal spaceships.
Further evidence of the collapse is seen in the state of law and law enforcement. No matter who is in charge of the galaxy, it’s pretty lawless. Piracy is common, slavery is common in the outer rim, mafia like gangs hold entire planets along the outer rim. The Empire or Republic only really seem to have symbolic control. They stick up a flag, but other than that, I don’t think they actually control much beyond the core worlds. I’m not even convinced that most people know who runs the government of the galaxy, and even if they did, it’s too far away and weak to actually matter, where the local warlord governing your planet matters quite a bit in most people’s lives. Tatoine residents probably worry more about what Jabba thinks and wants than Palpatine or the current head of the Republic.
I don't know how much made this into Disney canon, but in Legends a lot of power was held by regional governors, the Moffs. Someone out far from the Core wouldn't necessarily know much about the Emperor, but there was a local Imperial force with a Star Destroyer or two and plenty of stormtroopers that would be their local taste of the Empire and generally had pretty strong control (albeit with a lot of corruption).
Tatooine just wasn't a planet the local Moff cared about at all, which is why Jabba had his palace in the awful desert planet instead of a paradise planet like Naboo or even one that was kind of similar to Nal Hutta.
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Most of the starfighters used by the rebels are relatively new: the B-Wing first saw combat 4 years before the Battle of Yavin, the X-Wing appears to have been less than 10 years old at that point as well, although there's no clear answer on when it was developed. Apparently originally pitched to the Imperials rather than the Republic though, so that's a cap on how old it can be.
It does seem like they have trouble making paradigm-shifting advances though: the Y-Wing is Clone Wars era and while it has problems, it's perfectly capable of performing on the same level as more modern fighters, it's not like we saw anyone complaining about getting assigned a Y-Wing instead of an X-Wing for the Death Star run.
Some weird regressions too: I initially thought Obi-Wan's hyperdrive ring in Attack of the Clones was something that got improved upon for the Imperial era, but the N-1 starfighters in Phantom Menace had integrated hyperdrives, so that was just a deliberate design choice.
Fighters with no hyperdrive are a thing in universe- TIE fighters don't have one either. The hyperdrive ring is probably an optional upgrade to a fighter not originally designed to operate a hyperdrive.
Yeah, but at least the TIEs have a reasonable case for skipping the hyperdrive: they're designed to be cheap and fast (which is why they don't have shields either), and they're always operating from a planetary base or capital ship because the Empire intends to have those everywhere it's going to be conducting operations.
Why the Jedi Starfighter doesn't have one (or rather, why they chose a non-hyperdrive-equipped fighter for the Jedi) is a mystery though: the Jedi typically go in very small numbers to out-of-the-way locations, and seem to have a pretty sizable budget. Agility and speed is clearly a benefit with Jedi precognition, but... what happens if your foe destroys your hyperdrive ring and now you're stuck in a middle-of-nowhere system? The answer's clearly "carve your way through the enemy base, steal their ship, and leave", but it's hard to imagine that you want that to be the plan.
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Jedi Starfighters are fucking tiny and are designed more as infiltration ships than to be actual fighters.
The A-Wing is the closest Imperial age fighter to it, was designed by the same manufacturing firm as a mass-issue version of those design concepts (you kind of need to have better avionics if you aren't using the Force and it still requires absurd skill from its pilots), and has integrated hyperdrive, but it's also physically larger.
N-1s are kind of a meme though. The Nubian government's idea of a defense was to send 12 fighters against a Trade Federation battleship and the only reason any of them survived was for bullshit Jedi reasons- they spared no expense with those fighters and it shows because they had no money left over for any other planetary defense.
(Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go play an old game.)
Huh, you're right, Jedi Starfighters are like half the area of an A-wing. That's wild, previously I would have said they were one of the larger starfighters in the series. Something about how the art and/or game cameras always show them up close, I guess?
Actually, something's off. Slave 1 is 21.5m x 21.3m x 7.8m= 3,572.01 m^3, a Jedi Starfighter is 8m x 3.92m x 1.44m= 45.1584 m^3. Now go look at the asteroid battle scene from Attack of the Clones: does the Slave 1 look nearly 80 times as big as the Jedi Starfighter?
Back to the broader point, I think this is inconsistent with Maiq's hypothesis: new military-grade hardware is coming out throughout the series and is apparently available enough that the Rebels can get their hands on it. We don't see the Rebels having to make do with Clone Wars tech (and even that would only be ~20 years old, the equivalent of someone using a F-22 Raptor from 2005 today): they're using some old fighters but also have fresh from the factory equipment regularly. And since the Rebels probably don't have special contracts with the military companies that are also selling to the Empire, that suggests that all you need to get a fresh-off-the-line ship is credits.
It does seem to support pusher_robot's hypothesis that they're having trouble making truly large jumps technologically: the new stuff and the old stuff are roughly equivalent in power level, it's just about optimizing how the same tools are used. That's how you end up with weird things like the B-Wing.
You'll definitely love sublight drive. A bunch of parts in the first book go into explaining some of these ship differences that appear.
The separatists preference for missiles is because they don't have access to some of the high quality gas needed for better blaster weapons.
Some of the ships are specifically adapted from private usages which gives them unique advantages and disadvantages, like e-warfare capabilities, or badly armored locations.
Mostly neither side is on a war footing for production when the clone wars start, so there is a sense early on of throwing ships meant for fighting pirates against full on navies, and then later in the series those same ships are far less effective because manufacturing and fleet doctrine has caught up. But ultimately the core worlds have far more production capabilities so it feels a bit like the American Civil war where the north had advantages in manufacturing and manpower, and the south had advantages in experience.
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The Empire at least, seems to be able to produce new ships and even new ship designs. I think there are a couple of things happening, though.
First, technological advancement has stagnated, and given the apparent inability to develop integrated circuits, progress is severely limited by the lack of information processing. Other technologies appear to have been developed to about the limits of the in universe science, and as a result designs have been basically fully optimized for thousands of years already. New designs are still useful to make ships fit for purpose, but the technology level of new ships is not appreciable better, and so old ships can, with enough maintenance, perform just as well. (Similar to fantasy tropes where technology stays at late medievel level for thousands of years or longer.)
It also seems evident that while energy production is superior to our own, it is nowhere near a Kardeshev II civilization. While they are capable of orbiting and moving large masses, this is due to technological physics cheats such as gravity manipulation and not the expenditure of the kind of energy such things would otherwise imply. This explains why they are not post scarcity despite having interstellar space stations. It is a place with some advanced technology, things are still relatively expensive, partly due to the absence of microchips, but also because gravity manipulation, cybernetics, and FTL doesn't relieve you from still needing bucketwheels and giant smelters to mine metals.
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Are there any good longer texts written on the topic of SW as a collapsed society? I'm intrigued.
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That’s a fun fan theory! Another one I like for science fiction settings that don’t have advanced AI / automation is that there’s some kind of in-universe lower bound on transistor size such that you have hyper-optimization of like late-1980s chips over centuries. Would be interesting to see a sci fi setting pursue that earnestly.
Another redemption of hollow world building I like is the theory that Harry Potter is obviously post-scarcity (they can conjure and replicate objects, magic the dishes into doing themselves, teleport from anywhere to anywhere etc) but governed by such a deeply ingrained network of rules of propriety and good behavior that the class hierarchy, private property, deference, human labor, a form of simulated capitalism (likely borrowed from muggles in a bizarre and twisted form of cultural exchange, along with the school express, the magic bus) etc are followed unquestioningly. This also explains why so many people would find muggle-born wizards deeply vulgar and an affront to their society, and therefore enhances the general story. (To wizard society, the idea that a “poor” family like the Weasleys could just conjure themselves a giant mansion with 500 rooms with magic would be like suggesting someone should just shit on the street whenever they need to go).
Harry Potter is set in the modern west, which is post scarcity in the meaningful sense- there is functionally no one who dies from lack of access to necessities. People still work for access to positional goods and luxuries. We can assume that this is just a human universal and wizards will do the same thing.
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I feel like this is plainly inconsistent with the canon. We don't see the conjuration of everyday household items or food, and magical items such as wands and infinite-capcity containers are obviously scarce and valuable. And of course something like transmuting lead into gold is explicitly mentioned to be difficult if not impossible.
While manual labor and chores can obviously be automated with magic, there also isn't any mention of magical computing devices or AI, so professional work hasn't been made obsolete either.
You don’t need to conjure food or water when you can just Apparate to a fresh mountain stream or tree laden with fruit whenever you want (transatlantic teleporting is made out to be difficult, but the length of the UK between, say, Scotland and London is easy and common enough). At the world quidditch championship, the Weasleys also conjure up an entire camp the size of a small home from almost nothing, suggesting that shelter is also post-scarcity in every real sense.
Items imbued with certain magical essences that can seemingly only be created by human craftsmen are not abundant, sure. But other than wands, these are essentially luxury goods (an adult wizard has no need for a broom, and the other things that money is needed to buy are things like rare artifacts, magical candy and toys - presumably handmade - and so on). The financial system exists for the sake of itself. The magical night bus doesn’t need a driver, since magical objects can act and think for themselves many times in the series. It has one because it should have one, or something.
The same is true for white collar employment. Magical automation clearly exists (see the hate mail envelopes, the automation of memos in the ministry, automated magical maps, automated dictation tools / pens, interactive magical videos in picture frames and - most significantly - magical portraits, which are clearly generative AI trained on an artist’s impression of the subject, and which would appear to be capable of complex thought and therefore white collar labor), its use is governed by something other than possibility or efficiency.
Consider the aurors who trace misuse of magic. Are they actually necessary? The ministry has the ability to track, seemingly, every use of magic in all of England. If it doesn’t do so it is purely by choice. This is what I mean by propriety, the magical society is governed by its own code that involves this manual labor and a simulated quasi-market or capitalist economy in some aspects, with strict rules (like that you can’t conjure money) enforced arbitrarily.
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Not sure I buy this. Lack of cryptography doesn't even need to make password based authentication impossible.
Firstly, to compromise a system, even one that's not encrypted, you must be able to execute arbitrary commands. A system that's locked down and limited to a few hardened interfaces with the rest of the world is naturally robust to this. You can try pulling out the memory and read/manipulate it directly, but there are low tech (put the components behind steel plate) and high tech mitigations that don't rely on cryptography. And if you're in a position to circumvent those, you can probably just replace the controller of whatever system you're trying to compromise with your own controller anyway.
Secondly, P=NP would make reversing hashes doable, but when you're trying to break into a system you (usually) don't have the password hash you're trying to guess. So you're stuck trying to guess it (unless you can read it from memory, see point 1), and that's going to take forever regardless of P vs NP.
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Most of the droids we see in Star Wars are pretty rickety and often not humanoid - maybe they don’t have droids that can perform manual labour at the appropriate price point?
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That is a really cool post, thanks for sharing.
Can't say that this fanfiction totally follows along. There is something weird going on with the droids in the FF, buts it's never full elaborated on, and we are starting to get epilogues, so I assume it won't be clarified.
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