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.
- 105
- 3
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
Are there any good longer texts written on the topic of SW as a collapsed society? I'm intrigued.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link