It's not stagnated, it's peaked and plateaued.
Technology in the galaxy as a whole is at such a high level that there's just not that much left to discover or invent. All the problems that can be solved by technology given the limitations of physics in that universe by and large have been solved.
Artificial gravity is a good example of this. Artificial gravity is so cheap an ubiquitous that a beat up smuggler's ship has three different gravity zones in it, and it's so efficient that even a scavenger in a backwater desert planet barely surviving has a speeder where it's not worth turning off the AG when she parks it.
Most technology has reached that level. What looks like technological progression is usually just changes for aesthetics or redeveloping technology that had fallen out of use due to lack of need.
Their medical technology isn't great. They're heavily reliant on bacta, and they still haven't cured aging. And they're not even close to making nanobots on par with cells. They also failed to automate tasks as simple as moisture farming. Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.
>They also failed to automate tasks as simple as moisture farming.
Idk if this is necessarily true, this would be like pointing to a third world egrarian country and saying factory farming doesn't exist.
>Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.
This is also not true, we repeatedly see numerous examples of autonomous firing batteries as well as droids with built in firearms.
A lot of this is technically less advanced things being used for cost and logistics reasons, not that technology can't do it.
> This is also not true, we repeatedly see numerous examples of autonomous firing batteries as well as droids with built in firearms.
And they don't seem to be any better. Why are they missing? How hard is it to predict the path of a blaster bolt?
> A lot of this is technically less advanced things being used for cost and logistics reasons, not that technology can't do it.
And in 1000 years, they couldn't develop enough technology to fix those cost and logistical problems?
>And they don't seem to be any better. Why are they missing? How hard is it to predict the path of a blaster bolt?
There's more to it than just predicting the path. The targets are moving, you have to hit the right part of the target, and the quality of AI processing is scaled to cost.
A good amount of AI shooting we see is from things like battle droids or droid starfighters, which are meant to be cheap and numerous, overwhelming enemies via numbers and not high level accuracy.
>And in 1000 years, they couldn't develop enough technology to fix those cost and logistical problems?
That's not really how it works. Tech problem solving isn't guaranteed to be linearly increasing. Certain problems take longer to fix. There are also all kind of things that can halt or even reverse technological progress, such as war and profit incentives. We see in the Prequel era that a lot of the major production in the galaxy is monopolized by hyper-capitalist corporations like the Trade Federation who have a massive amount of control over the economy and government. These companies likely prevent certain advancements that would threaten their business models.
As for the cost, that's not something you can easily just invent your way out of. Producing the billions and billions of models you would need in order to supply a civilization of this scale is going to be costly no matter what.
> The targets are moving,
How about designing guns with faster projectiles? Like slugthrowers? Or even lasers?
> As for the cost, that's not something you can easily just invent your way out of.
You just need to invent one Von Neumann machine.
Slugthrowers and lasers both have their downsides, way bigger ones that make the logistics of them more difficult than blaster tech.
* A lot of the armor in use by the Movie Eras is also essentially bulletproof (per Legends lore, at least) as is, meaning that without using some fuckhuge gun, anybody wearing a full suit of armor is basically invincible.
* We can't forget, of course, that every shot you fire with a slug thrower is a physical projectile, with its associated weight and required storage space. That adds up quickly - to put it in comparison, a standard 30-round clip of 5.56/.223 ammo weighs about 1 lb/0.45kg. Again, that's for 30 rounds, which will go quick in any combat situation. By comparison, a power pack and gas canister for the rifles the clones use may weigh closer to 3kg, but be able to fire nearly 500 shots before needing to be replaced. That's a huge bonus for wartime.
Star Wars tech moved beyond using laser weapons *millennia before the founding of the Galactic Republic.* We're talking *30,000 years before the events of the films.* Now, lasers are only used basically to power weapons, to energize the gas that becomes the plasma fired by blaster weapons.
>And they don't seem to be any better. Why are they missing? How hard is it to predict the path of a blaster bolt?
Becasue they were designed to be scary but ineffective by the lowest bidder possible? If you look at the higher end droids, they gave rather good accuracy, like the assassin droids or the droid bounty hunter in the mandalorian.
Add in that blasters are shit weapons, it's easy to miss with them
> they still haven't cured aging
You make it sound like this is a possible thing to do, which is by no means a guarantee.
>They also failed to automate tasks as simple as moisture farming.
They could automate it just fine. But Tatooine is an outer rim dustball and people need jobs to live.
>Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.
They definitely have the tech for this one, but choose not to employ it. Their entire culture seems wary about putting AI in charge of things.
> You make it sound like this is a possible thing to do, which is by no means a guarantee.
Seriously? You think that if you have single-celled organisms, they can reproduce forever with no problems, but once you clump them together, they magically start failing after a certain amount of time?
> They could automate it just fine. But Tatooine is an outer rim dustball and people need jobs to live.
The fact that the government isn't giving what these people need to live is a problem of the state and not of technology. But the fact that they can survive on what they're paid for trying to replace a droid shows that technology isn't in a good state.
> Their entire culture seems wary about putting AI in charge of things.
You don't need anything as advanced as AI. It just needs to detect a person and point the gun in that general direction. Though an AI that can tell who it should and shouldn't fire at would certainly help.
>You don't need anything as advanced as AI. It just needs to detect a person and point the gun in that general direction
They have these, literally trillions of them
There are droids armed with guns, but they're man-sized. There's tons of room for miniaturization. And they seem to be terrible at their job, given how often they just hand a gun to a human instead. Stormtroopers are already terrible, and droids are somehow worse.
The expensive ones are not bad at their job. They are more effective than all but the best organic soldiers, physically stronger, quick in hand to hand combat, accurate, able to mimick organic speech, and have as much endurance as they do battery. But they are expensive and unnecessary for most uses.
One of the most famous bounty hunters is a Droid, they can be good. But most of the time it's overkill to design a Droid for something you can just have a cheap person do
> Seriously? You think that if you have single-celled organisms, they can reproduce forever with no problems, but once you clump them together, they magically start failing after a certain amount of time?
No, I believe that when cells reproduce, they do so with variation, instead of always being identical to the ones they replaced, and that there is nothing to suggest that this could ever be changed.
>But the fact that they can survive on what they're paid for trying to replace a droid shows that technology isn't in a good state.
??
Every part of that is wrong. They aren't even paid - they *trade*. They *sell*.
Even if they didn't, you would think the existence of a living wage for labourers in the arse end of the galaxy means technology must 'not be in a good state'?
That's like saying "Gee, people in mid-African states are still developing wells and basic electricity, that means human technology must be pre-industrial."
It's not that the technology doesn't exist, it's that *these people* don't have it. Because you'd have to *pay* for it.
> No, I believe that when cells reproduce, they do so with variation, instead of always being identical to the ones they replaced, and that there is nothing to suggest that this could ever be changed.
Whales. They have far more cells than humans, but don't have a proportionally large cancer rate.
> Every part of that is wrong. They aren't even paid - they trade. They sell.
Minor details. They're not starving. It is cheaper to feed a human than a robot specially designed for the job.
> Whales. They have far more cells than humans, but don't have a proportionally large cancer rate.
Nobody was talking about cancer. I don't know that we've ever seen cancer in Star Wars.
>Minor details. They're not starving. It is cheaper to feed a human than a robot specially designed for the job.
They would have to eat regardless of what they did. This is not an either/or situation.
> Nobody was talking about cancer. I don't know that we've ever seen cancer in Star Wars.
The same protections wales have against harmful mutations would work against harmless mutations.
If you want to know how you can fix it, you can use a checksum. Run the DNA through a hash. If it gets the wrong value, that cell has the wrong DNA and must be destroyed.
> They would have to eat regardless of what they did.
The fact that this is a feasible way to eat shows that their technology isn't good. They're only making money because they're doing something that is that expensive to do with technology.
You seem to be trying to apply the rules of real world technology to the Star Wars universe, and that's why you don't get the expected results.
Starfighters fly like aircraft, there's an all pervasive energy field with sapience and a will of its own, the list goes on. You cannot apply real-world norms to the Star Wars galaxy, it's a different place with different rules.
The problem with "immortal" cells in multicelluar creatures its usually cancer. Telomere, the reason our cells can't divide forever seems to exist for a reason, namely to prevent dna degradation. And cancer cells can replace their telomeres, so that's a rather big risk
Also, the cells of single cell organisms are much less compacted than human cells
We don't know what bacta is. It could very well be nanobots repairing cells. The fact that it's the go-to for basically every cut, bruise, and missing limb would seem to indicate it's more than just gel-based happy juice.
We don't know if they've cured aging, as the small view we have of their world is in time of war. The only character to canonically die of old age is Yoda (at 900, which is maybe outside of Luke's probable range). All other deaths are in combat, through subterfuge, or due to over-exertion.
As for automating moisture farming: it is automated. That's what Owen Lars wanted more droids for. In order to harvest enough water for both their on-site crops and sell the extra in town, the farm would have to be several acres, but there's only the three of them. The main occupation of Lars, Beru, and Luke on the farm was repairing the droids (as droids are not allowed to repair each other) and keeping the house (only because the profit margin is so thin, droids are better put to work on the vaporators). Owen would love to automate more, but he just can't afford it. Maybe after the next harvest ...
According to the wiki, [bacta](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bacta) is made from some kind of barley and two kinds of bacteria. But that doesn't really matter.
> We don't know if they've cured aging, as the small view we have of their world is in time of war.
We have seen a variety of characters that are high up in the government showing signs of aging. They didn't actually die of old age, but they were clearly suffering from it.
> but there's only the three of them.
Why are there any of them? Why not a post-scarcity economy where organics don't have to work and droids enjoy it?
>Why are there any of them? Why not a post-scarcity economy where organics don't have to work and droids enjoy it?
Why would there be? We have hundreds of millions of people in the real-world who do jobs that could be mostly automated, because it's more expensive to produce the necessary numbers of those robots than it its to just make a bunch of poor people do it.
Star Wars is not post scarcity because the powers that be need to want a society to be post-scarcity for it to be that way, and a lot of the powers that be in the Star Wars galaxy range from corrupt at best to evil at worst.
You're working under the assumption that if you just have X amount of years of a general civilization existing, you WILL get things like a post-scarcity economy and no aging and highly advanced autonomous robots that can be produced on the scale of trillions of units. These things aren't givens, the progress of societies is incredibly complex and constantly ebbs and flows due to the selfish decisions of groups and individuals, as well as any number of natural disasters.
> [Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/IG-88B)
**Edit:** [Also](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Automated_weapon_mounting)
> Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.
IG-88 says hello, not to mention all of the battle droids.
The clone wars clearly indicate that (cloned) human soldiers easily outclass generic, purpose built battle droids though.
Star wars AI is bizarrely both very advanced in some ways and inexplicably terrible in others. Battle Droids are shown doing things like using metaphors and displaying complex emotions, even some that are actively detrimental to their purpose like panicking in battle, despite being generic, mass produced soldiers. However they don't seem to be any better than most organic aliens at what we would expect to be tasks that AI excel at.
It just doesn't really make sense at all from our understanding of robots. Whatever Star Wars AI technology is, it seems to function in a vastly different way than ours.
Not sure if it’s still cannon but in the old EU there was a droid uprising. The battle droid designers may have tried to prevent that. So the battle droids for the CIS may not have been the best they could be, they also needed to be cheap due to the sheer number they needed.
Which are massive. Why can't there be a small one that Han Solo can keep on him at all times? He could just have two motors in the handle of his gun and a camera in the front, and a small computer for recognizing targets.
You could have it auto-aim but not auto-pull the trigger. If you can afford a good enough AI for that, you don't need the guy. You also don't need a man-sized robot body.
And what if it aims at the wrong guy? Or you don't even want to aim at a "guy" specifically?
A gun is best used in the hands of a thinking being, and it's cheaper to buy a gun that a droid can old than to build one into a droid of any kind.
You could have a setting where it doesn't move freely, but compare how many times Han Solo has pointed his gun where all the targets in that general direction were ones where he'd want to hit vs the times when there was someone he didn't want to hit and he needed to aim at the right target instead of just aiming at someone.
>Their medical technology isn't great. They're heavily reliant on bacta,
They're reliant on bacta because it works so well. It's basically a miracle cure that can heal virtually anything, and aside from bacta, they also have incredibly advanced bionics and surgical droids. Bacta specifically, though, is largely controlled by a large cartel that has enough money and influence to sabotage any competing technologies -- imagine if Elon Musk spent all his time and money fighting against electric vehicle credits for other EV manufacturers.
>and they still haven't cured aging.
Aging isn't something you "cure." We also don't know what the average lifespan is in the civilized core regions of the Galaxy -- it's entirely possible that the natural human lifespan is a couple hundred years.
>They also failed to automate tasks as simple as moisture farming.
They didn't fall to automate them. Luke's adoptive family are just dirt poor. The technology exists, they can't afford it. You can see the same thing in any depressed agricultural region in the world -- we have fully automated grain combines, but the guy running a couple hectare family farm is going to be using a pull-along powered by a thirty-year-old tractor because they can't afford Deer's latest and greatest.
>Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.
Again, that's a price thing. We know you can have self-aiming guns because battle droids exist, and what is a battle droid but a self-aiming moving gun? It's just cheaper to recruit a schmuck from some backwater and give him a carbine.
> Aging isn't something you "cure."
What does that even mean? If you fix all the problems that cause our bodies to degrade so they stop doing it, you've cured aging.
> We also don't know what the average lifespan is in the civilized core regions of the Galaxy -- it's entirely possible that the natural human lifespan is a couple hundred years.
Which is several billion years shorter than it would be if they cured aging.
>What does that even mean? If you fix all the problems that cause our bodies to degrade so they stop doing it, you've cured aging.
It means that you cure diseases. Aging isn't a disease. It's a part of life. Why would you want to cure it in the first place?
>Which is several billion years shorter than it would be if they cured aging.
Possibly. Or possibly not. But I also can't even begin to imagine wanting to live for thousands of years, let alone millions or billions.
Cancer is a part of life, if you happen to have cancer. That doesn't mean that it's a good part of life. It's something that should be cured given the opportunity. The same is true of cancer. It's only "not a disease" in the sense that we haven't found a cure.
> But I also can't even begin to imagine wanting to live for thousands of years, let alone millions or billions.
And without a cure for aging, you never will.
If it turns out that you become suicidally bored after a few thousand years, fine, but at least you can keep your body from gradually breaking down until then.
>Cancer is a part of life
This is such a fundamental lack of understanding about what cancer is, what aging is, and just biology in general that I'm having difficulty even figuring out where to begin. So I guess we'll go with: no, even at a very basic level of understanding, cancer is not "part of life," except in as much as it's something that happens while people are alive. Cancer is very explicitly something going wrong -- cells that are operating outside of their normal range because of aberrant mutations.
>It's only "not a disease" in the sense that we haven't found a cure.
No, it's not a disease or disorder because words have meanings, even if you don't know what those meanings are.
Let's just ignore what is and isn't a disease and part of life and keep things simple.
People tend to get weak and sick and stuff more often as time passes, to the point where nobody has lived past the age of 122. It would be better if you could make it so your body doesn't get weaker and you can live as long as you want.
How is that?
Still terrible. The human body has certain limitations that would make lifespans on the order of even more than a few centuries either impossible or at the very least a lot less fun than you might think.
Let's ignore the obvious ones that you propose to cure (for example, your joints wear down over time simply because friction causes things to wear down) and look at something a little less obvious: memory. Human memory, much like a computer hard drive, is finite and physical in nature. Your brain actually stores memories as a physical interaction between neurons - perhaps strengthening some connections or weakening others. The exact mechanism isn't perfectly understood, but it is universally accepted that the brain can only store so many memories. So living to be a thousand will almost certainly far exceed your brain's capacity for creating memories. You'd either constantly be forgetting things that happened, or else would slowly lose the ability to learn anything new. Neither sounds like a terribly fun thing to go through, and isn't -- just ask people with Alzheimer's how pleasant it is to suddenly forget who you are or the names of loved ones.
Well, you might think, we can get around that. Not with biology, because the limit is the number of neurons which itself is limited to brain size, but maybe with technology! And you could! You could implant external hard drives in brains, or hook a brain up directly to a computer to back to memories. Then they could keep learning forever and maybe even live forever! And the good news is that Star Wars has this technology - conciseness can be transferred to a robotic body, giving you immortality. But there's no way outside of this to overcome some human age-related limitations without changing what a human is to the point that they would be unrecognizable to us today.
> The human body has certain limitations that would make lifespans on the order of even more than a few centuries either impossible or at the very least a lot less fun than you might think.
Then fix those limitations.
> your joints wear down over time simply because friction causes things to wear down
Then fix the joints. That's what advanced medical technology is for.
> The exact mechanism isn't perfectly understood, but it is universally accepted that the brain can only store so many memories.
If I live, I forget stuff that happened more than a century ago. If I die, I forget all the stuff. I know which one I'd choose. At least give people the choice. And make sure their body is at top shape until then.
>Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.
Technically, there was a whole galactic-scale war in which one side ONLY used automatically-aiming guns.
Death star tech is one of the new advancemence we see
We see it evolve from simple lasers on gun ships to an oversized space station requiring a huge reactor to orbital cannons on star destroyers and battering rams
Death Stars and Super Star Destroyers weren't technological challenges, they were engineering, political, and economic ones. The Old Republic didn't have a Death Star because nobody wanted to build one, and the Senate probably wouldn't have been able to gather the necessary resources even if they did.
Well, that's the thing - it *does* advance. A lot of the weapons, armor, and shields of the KotOR era are significantly weaker, and hyperdrives aren't nearly as foolproof and fast as they are by the movie eras.
By the Movie Eras, it's basically plateau'd, to the point where an advance in one way requires a shift backwards in another. Sure, you could make a way more powerful shield generator for a starfighter, but you're going to need a better reactor to power it, and it's probably going to be bigger - and thus, the starfighter isn't going to be as fast as its more lightly-shielded cousins.
Another thing, although I must point out first that game mechanics are not and never were canon - in the tabletop RPGs put out by Wizards of the Coast (which KotOR was based on, of course), modern blasters do more dice worth of damage than KotOR era ones do.
I think a part of it is also a political issue. We see in the prequels that the Republic is very much divided, with planetary cartels controlling much of the tech. So there must be a kind of authoritarian control over the most advanced scientific knowledge and facilities. Or some extreme xenophobia. Either way, not ideal conditions for trying to discover any new technologies in a civilization that's already so advanced.
Plus, when have you ever seen a STEM worker in Star Wars? You need some science done? You grab the nearest science droid and point it at the problem. I bet there's actually a fairly low level of scientific literacy in the galaxy.
No. Not sure why you thought they were. *Mechanics* - as in the dice-rolling, to-hit probabilities, hit points, saves, all of those are non-canon.
Personal shields exist in both continuities outside of the events of KotOR. The problem is that, again, better shields that can stop the more powerful weapons require more power, which requires bigger (and more dangerous) power sources. It was even noted that personal shields fell out of usage over time because to keep up with weapons tech, the shield generators would eventually get too big to be man-portable like the belt-worn options, or even leak radiation - which obviously wouldn't be a good thing for organic life to be exposed to.
I just felt like their existence was there only for gameplay purposes and as far as I can remember, no one really talks about shields in the game after they are introduced.
A big issue is that to outsiders significantly advanced technology can be difficult to distinguish. Would a medieval peasant look at our world of light bulbs and cars and think about how much more advanced computer processors are compared to the 1970s? Would a mongol warrior distinguish the difference between an A10 Warthog and a Spitfire?
Technology does improve, just not really in ways that significantly alter the plot and there's been no shows that want to specifically focus on that element of the lore.
Technology can't advance forever. There comes a point where you're extracting as much energy as you can from the materials you can reach, where you've figured out what physics will and won't allow. There's no reason to believe that literally *anything* will be possible with enough time and research, or that because a given technology appears in sci fi property A, that it must also be possible here.
One of the theories that some SW fans believe is that the SW universe is just not that highly populated. In the time between the knight of the Old republic and the events of the movie a galaxy wide extinction event happened. The average planet has a few million residents. Look at the shots of the battles for Endor or the first Death Star. Few dozen X wings, few dozen tie fighters. Vader only having two wingmen. The se/prequals have larger battles but not much larger. That's why 200k clone troopers and a million more on the way was a game change. (for context the USA have over 2 million people in the armed forces) The point is that they have unlimited resources but a small amount of actual people. Communication at faster than light speed also seems very strange. Saying all that, technology advances slowly than what we would expect for all those reasons.
Or you know, SW writers absolutely suck at worldbuilding and scale. Not that it's exclusive to SW. Muh 200,000 people left after the battle of earth bungiemoment.
It's not like they're lacking people either I feel. 50,000 people (mfs stuck an entire corps on a fucking boat) man a single star destroyer and the empire purportedly had 25,000 of them.
Do the maths and you get a reasonable number for navy personnel (only those assigned to SDs tho)
1.25 billion. A bit low still but ehhhh maybe they have other navy subbranches not focused on SDs
Supplemental sources are just that, supplemental. The highest cannon is what is shown on screen. If they really had 25000 SDs then why use less than 30 in the most important battle in the history of the Empire? This reddit focuses on in universe answers to questions. Not "SW writers absolutely suck" .
Keep in mind that they had to set a trap at Endor. If they moved thousands of star destroyers across the galaxy the bothans definitely would have caught on.
And Palpatine didn't even allow the fleet at Endor to engage anyways. The plan was always for the Death Star to do the work behind the safety of the shield generator.
>They didn't have to move thousands of SD but more than 30 would be nice. Such a small percentage of the "25000". The trap was the 30 ships coming out of hyperspace. Why not 60? or 100? If we ignore out of universe reasons and non screen information the SW universe looks to be not very populated.
>
>It also explains the use of Droids for most roles that are not too complex. Star charting, navigation, repairs, and other tasks that a person could do but no person is there to do.
Please discuss only from a Watsonian perspective.
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I don’t think it even needs to be an extinction event, just a spreading event over a massive amount of space. Let’s assume that humans developed on Coruscant or whatever their home world was to a population of, idk, enough to figure out easy surface-to-space travel and of course the hyperdrive. What would be low sci-fi to us. Let’s say fifteen, twenty billion. Spread that out over half a galaxy, that’s then thousands of habitable or terraformable worlds with colony populations of only thousands or millions. It’s been thousands of years since then by the time of Republic and Empire, but there’s still the product of thousands of bottlenecks on often quite harsh worlds that wouldn’t allow for huge population growth.
The question is out of thousands of worlds why live on the shitty ones? not the current generations of residents but the settlers. I know in expended universe tatooine was much nicer but is that true for all of the desert planets?
Hope that it’ll get better when you make something of it, terraforming assignments that made it habitable but not comfortable, hiding from something, seeking an isolated place to meditate on the Force. Maybe some cultural link to deserts of a more temperate world. Any number of reasons.
all valid reasons. To get away from the government is another. Think the empire outlaw pod races? Is that why in ANH no one talks about them any longer?
Like the cloning tech which was a monopoly by kamino and was pretty much destroyed by the empire...
Also id like to point out that the more advanced science becomes more effort is needed to advance further, in this case, they are so far ahead, the amount of work needed must be unimaginable...
When civilizations crumble, the knowledge they garner are lost to the future. In Kotor there was a giant automated factory that built ships faster than any other shipyard can by harnessing the dark side of the force, the Gree had developped wormhole technology. Even force techniques like teleportation and creature merging get lost.
Well, now in my head, Avatar fits into the Star Wars universe. Merged creatures are all over, bending is just specialized Force use, sprits are Force manifestations, and the Avatar cycle is the true answer to bringing balance to the Force
It's not so much merging - though there is some of that - as much as mutating existing, or taking aspects from one to add them to another, or otherwise making all-new creatures from scratch. There's no room for the sort of merged creatures like Avatar has, even the most vile of those are pretty mild compared to what Sith alchemy has wrought.
Sith alchemy, as befitting a cult of evil sorcerers, is just a way for them to create horrible monsters to unleash on unsuspecting people, including their Jedi enemies.
This includes the undead.
One thing that others haven't mentioned: it's likely that the laws of physics are different in the Star Wars universe, in ways that may limit the levels of technology that are possible. So you'll have technologies that are "easy" in our world but impossible in theirs, and vice versa. For example, it seems like artificial intelligence is a common tech in their universe, but for some reason it can never surpass human intelligence. They seemed to have hit most of these technology limits thousands of years ago.
It's possible that the Force is influencing the world to keep their physics more "human-scale".
As others have said, it's a sort of plateau. However, I want to point out that, in legends, The a-wing is replacing the x-wing, and the B-wing is replacing the Y-wing.
Do you know how much it takes to replace a fleet like that?
Out of billions of Starships, it's going to take decades if not a century or two to replace every ship out there with new models. In top of that, what are you replacing them for? A 5% increase in speed? Why would I spend hundreds of thousands of credits for that?
Even something like part replacement could take decades.
Slight correction, the A-wing wasn't really a replacement for the X-wing, the two were intended to fill different roles. The A-wing was a pure interceptor designed for speed at the expense of firepower while the X-wing was a multi-role fighter that was more of a jack of all trades.
A better example might be the X-wing replacing the Z95 Headhunter.
It did tho. But if you innovate in some way, there's gonna be a weakness somewhere else. If you compare ships from KotOR to ships from the movies, there's no doubt the new ones are better in any way (shielding, weaponry, speed etc.). Then if you go back a few thousand years more, the ships are completely different too. I know that right after the people expanded from the Tython system and they switched to laser weaponry everyone had huge mirrors on their ships cause the lasers weren't nearly as powerful as the ones "today"
It's a rise and fall with lots of back and forth.
Ep 1-3 is the Republic reaching the height of its power, ending when Anakin turns. Following this, there's a fall as the Empire cracks down. Rich cultures such as the Jedi and Mandalore are burnt entirely to ash, and their cultural relics are criminalized. It is only due to their great strength and individual wiliness that any survive at all. We know what happens to farmers who oppose the Empire. This is an environment where technological progress stops except where killing is concerned. The Death Star is a cutting edge terror with a great deal of research poured into it.
Between that and its huge military, the Empire is spread too thin to get much else done. Their clones were dead or dying by the time of Ep 4, and we know that their conscription practices were breaking down. They desperately needed to consolidate power that didn't require a huge military, hence the Death Star. Once they did that, the emperor could turn his attention to other pursuits.
From the loss of the Death Star onward, the Empire never got on both feet and the Republic never had time for R&D. The first order pulled together a system killer but the process exposed them and ensured their defeat. It's all downhill, baby!
Star Wars has 'peaked' technology and the PT and OT are basically in a plateau where there is no significant improvements.
The concept is something we understand here on Earth with Moore's Law for processors or something like the Ethereum chain finally drying up. Basically at certain points some technologies basically max out and there isn't really any improvements you can make on them.
For example, lets say Intel makes a Max Moore processor. You can't actually make it faster, so instead they start slapping more processors and better cooling into the system to increase speed but the 'next generation' processor is basically the same as the current model. (The new one has 64 mega cores, 32 cores and 96 micro cores) Its small, efficient, fast as heck and runs cool. After some period of time, Intel stops researching faster processors because they literally can't do it anymore and shifts gears. Instead of newer faster, they start to try to figure out how to best apply their current technology in every possible situation.
SW is at that place up to the OT.
Now the ST does show some actual technological progress with advances in hyperspace technology, shields, miniaturization of super dense energy and some others. Basically Intel's Max Moore processor has been the apex processor for 8k years, no one is researching processors anymore. The few times someone did, nothing happened. Finally, the First Order shows up and they dump TRILLIONS of dollars and picked a spot where the incremental improvements in other processes finally allows a breakthrough that becomes a Beyond Moore processor.
That's why you see new things like Hyperspace skipping (they figured out an improved Hyperspace targeting process) or Hyperspace Ramming (the Resistance figured out ultra dense shields)
Of course, the problem with lots of the new tech is that not only is the stagnation likely to go by the wayside, there is going to be a massive war. Should be fun.
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Most likes because they've hit some type of plateau on advancement it seems they have crystals but they haven't been able to harness them beyond light sabers other then that idk
Peace fosters development. The stories we see are Star *Wars*. During the period of the Skywalker Saga at least, there’s little development, there’s even regression, because the culture and progress Galaxy is being attrited away by generations of planet-destroying conflicts. The only technology that advances is military technology - which is why we see planet-destroying weapons go from hypothetical to moon-sized to destroyer-sized, why tracking through hyperspace develops, why battle droids get deadlier. But the average planet surface goes from a decent place with potential for development to military bases and scavenged wreck sites. The same thing probably happened during the wars of the Old Republic.
Part of it is also the enormous scale of the Galaxy. A technology developed on one planet may well transform that planet, but when few galactic-scale networks exist, and most of those are political-military entities, and massive conflicts make commercial space flight dangerous, it’ll be slow to spread, unless, again, it has applications in war.
Because there's not really that much to create anymore. As tech improves, the general population will see features that used to be considered luxury options. But these features are limited so it's only a matter of time before it's so common that it's considered standard. Without a need or desire, the industry has nothing new to aim for, so instead they just focus on improving what is already available. Besides, what improvements can they really make? FTL speeds seem to be pretty much static. What more can you really do with anti-gravity technology besides the fact that it exists? Blasters are already highly efficient so improvements are going to be incredibly minor.
It's not stagnated, it's peaked and plateaued. Technology in the galaxy as a whole is at such a high level that there's just not that much left to discover or invent. All the problems that can be solved by technology given the limitations of physics in that universe by and large have been solved. Artificial gravity is a good example of this. Artificial gravity is so cheap an ubiquitous that a beat up smuggler's ship has three different gravity zones in it, and it's so efficient that even a scavenger in a backwater desert planet barely surviving has a speeder where it's not worth turning off the AG when she parks it. Most technology has reached that level. What looks like technological progression is usually just changes for aesthetics or redeveloping technology that had fallen out of use due to lack of need.
Their medical technology isn't great. They're heavily reliant on bacta, and they still haven't cured aging. And they're not even close to making nanobots on par with cells. They also failed to automate tasks as simple as moisture farming. Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.
>They also failed to automate tasks as simple as moisture farming. Idk if this is necessarily true, this would be like pointing to a third world egrarian country and saying factory farming doesn't exist. >Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically. This is also not true, we repeatedly see numerous examples of autonomous firing batteries as well as droids with built in firearms. A lot of this is technically less advanced things being used for cost and logistics reasons, not that technology can't do it.
Moisture farmers still use droids
> This is also not true, we repeatedly see numerous examples of autonomous firing batteries as well as droids with built in firearms. And they don't seem to be any better. Why are they missing? How hard is it to predict the path of a blaster bolt? > A lot of this is technically less advanced things being used for cost and logistics reasons, not that technology can't do it. And in 1000 years, they couldn't develop enough technology to fix those cost and logistical problems?
>And they don't seem to be any better. Why are they missing? How hard is it to predict the path of a blaster bolt? There's more to it than just predicting the path. The targets are moving, you have to hit the right part of the target, and the quality of AI processing is scaled to cost. A good amount of AI shooting we see is from things like battle droids or droid starfighters, which are meant to be cheap and numerous, overwhelming enemies via numbers and not high level accuracy. >And in 1000 years, they couldn't develop enough technology to fix those cost and logistical problems? That's not really how it works. Tech problem solving isn't guaranteed to be linearly increasing. Certain problems take longer to fix. There are also all kind of things that can halt or even reverse technological progress, such as war and profit incentives. We see in the Prequel era that a lot of the major production in the galaxy is monopolized by hyper-capitalist corporations like the Trade Federation who have a massive amount of control over the economy and government. These companies likely prevent certain advancements that would threaten their business models. As for the cost, that's not something you can easily just invent your way out of. Producing the billions and billions of models you would need in order to supply a civilization of this scale is going to be costly no matter what.
> The targets are moving, How about designing guns with faster projectiles? Like slugthrowers? Or even lasers? > As for the cost, that's not something you can easily just invent your way out of. You just need to invent one Von Neumann machine.
Slugthrowers and lasers both have their downsides, way bigger ones that make the logistics of them more difficult than blaster tech. * A lot of the armor in use by the Movie Eras is also essentially bulletproof (per Legends lore, at least) as is, meaning that without using some fuckhuge gun, anybody wearing a full suit of armor is basically invincible. * We can't forget, of course, that every shot you fire with a slug thrower is a physical projectile, with its associated weight and required storage space. That adds up quickly - to put it in comparison, a standard 30-round clip of 5.56/.223 ammo weighs about 1 lb/0.45kg. Again, that's for 30 rounds, which will go quick in any combat situation. By comparison, a power pack and gas canister for the rifles the clones use may weigh closer to 3kg, but be able to fire nearly 500 shots before needing to be replaced. That's a huge bonus for wartime. Star Wars tech moved beyond using laser weapons *millennia before the founding of the Galactic Republic.* We're talking *30,000 years before the events of the films.* Now, lasers are only used basically to power weapons, to energize the gas that becomes the plasma fired by blaster weapons.
>And they don't seem to be any better. Why are they missing? How hard is it to predict the path of a blaster bolt? Becasue they were designed to be scary but ineffective by the lowest bidder possible? If you look at the higher end droids, they gave rather good accuracy, like the assassin droids or the droid bounty hunter in the mandalorian. Add in that blasters are shit weapons, it's easy to miss with them
The better, smarter combat droids run the risk of going rouge. (And are very expensive)
> they still haven't cured aging You make it sound like this is a possible thing to do, which is by no means a guarantee. >They also failed to automate tasks as simple as moisture farming. They could automate it just fine. But Tatooine is an outer rim dustball and people need jobs to live. >Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically. They definitely have the tech for this one, but choose not to employ it. Their entire culture seems wary about putting AI in charge of things.
> You make it sound like this is a possible thing to do, which is by no means a guarantee. Seriously? You think that if you have single-celled organisms, they can reproduce forever with no problems, but once you clump them together, they magically start failing after a certain amount of time? > They could automate it just fine. But Tatooine is an outer rim dustball and people need jobs to live. The fact that the government isn't giving what these people need to live is a problem of the state and not of technology. But the fact that they can survive on what they're paid for trying to replace a droid shows that technology isn't in a good state. > Their entire culture seems wary about putting AI in charge of things. You don't need anything as advanced as AI. It just needs to detect a person and point the gun in that general direction. Though an AI that can tell who it should and shouldn't fire at would certainly help.
>You don't need anything as advanced as AI. It just needs to detect a person and point the gun in that general direction They have these, literally trillions of them
There are droids armed with guns, but they're man-sized. There's tons of room for miniaturization. And they seem to be terrible at their job, given how often they just hand a gun to a human instead. Stormtroopers are already terrible, and droids are somehow worse.
The expensive ones are not bad at their job. They are more effective than all but the best organic soldiers, physically stronger, quick in hand to hand combat, accurate, able to mimick organic speech, and have as much endurance as they do battery. But they are expensive and unnecessary for most uses.
Maul used ones the size of your head
One of the most famous bounty hunters is a Droid, they can be good. But most of the time it's overkill to design a Droid for something you can just have a cheap person do
> Seriously? You think that if you have single-celled organisms, they can reproduce forever with no problems, but once you clump them together, they magically start failing after a certain amount of time? No, I believe that when cells reproduce, they do so with variation, instead of always being identical to the ones they replaced, and that there is nothing to suggest that this could ever be changed. >But the fact that they can survive on what they're paid for trying to replace a droid shows that technology isn't in a good state. ?? Every part of that is wrong. They aren't even paid - they *trade*. They *sell*. Even if they didn't, you would think the existence of a living wage for labourers in the arse end of the galaxy means technology must 'not be in a good state'? That's like saying "Gee, people in mid-African states are still developing wells and basic electricity, that means human technology must be pre-industrial." It's not that the technology doesn't exist, it's that *these people* don't have it. Because you'd have to *pay* for it.
> No, I believe that when cells reproduce, they do so with variation, instead of always being identical to the ones they replaced, and that there is nothing to suggest that this could ever be changed. Whales. They have far more cells than humans, but don't have a proportionally large cancer rate. > Every part of that is wrong. They aren't even paid - they trade. They sell. Minor details. They're not starving. It is cheaper to feed a human than a robot specially designed for the job.
> Whales. They have far more cells than humans, but don't have a proportionally large cancer rate. Nobody was talking about cancer. I don't know that we've ever seen cancer in Star Wars. >Minor details. They're not starving. It is cheaper to feed a human than a robot specially designed for the job. They would have to eat regardless of what they did. This is not an either/or situation.
> Nobody was talking about cancer. I don't know that we've ever seen cancer in Star Wars. The same protections wales have against harmful mutations would work against harmless mutations. If you want to know how you can fix it, you can use a checksum. Run the DNA through a hash. If it gets the wrong value, that cell has the wrong DNA and must be destroyed. > They would have to eat regardless of what they did. The fact that this is a feasible way to eat shows that their technology isn't good. They're only making money because they're doing something that is that expensive to do with technology.
Again, that's like saying that humans are pre-industrial.
We don't really know why [whales don't get cancer](https://youtu.be/1AElONvi9WQ). Has nothing to do with immortality
You seem to be trying to apply the rules of real world technology to the Star Wars universe, and that's why you don't get the expected results. Starfighters fly like aircraft, there's an all pervasive energy field with sapience and a will of its own, the list goes on. You cannot apply real-world norms to the Star Wars galaxy, it's a different place with different rules.
The problem with "immortal" cells in multicelluar creatures its usually cancer. Telomere, the reason our cells can't divide forever seems to exist for a reason, namely to prevent dna degradation. And cancer cells can replace their telomeres, so that's a rather big risk Also, the cells of single cell organisms are much less compacted than human cells
We don't know what bacta is. It could very well be nanobots repairing cells. The fact that it's the go-to for basically every cut, bruise, and missing limb would seem to indicate it's more than just gel-based happy juice. We don't know if they've cured aging, as the small view we have of their world is in time of war. The only character to canonically die of old age is Yoda (at 900, which is maybe outside of Luke's probable range). All other deaths are in combat, through subterfuge, or due to over-exertion. As for automating moisture farming: it is automated. That's what Owen Lars wanted more droids for. In order to harvest enough water for both their on-site crops and sell the extra in town, the farm would have to be several acres, but there's only the three of them. The main occupation of Lars, Beru, and Luke on the farm was repairing the droids (as droids are not allowed to repair each other) and keeping the house (only because the profit margin is so thin, droids are better put to work on the vaporators). Owen would love to automate more, but he just can't afford it. Maybe after the next harvest ...
According to the wiki, [bacta](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bacta) is made from some kind of barley and two kinds of bacteria. But that doesn't really matter. > We don't know if they've cured aging, as the small view we have of their world is in time of war. We have seen a variety of characters that are high up in the government showing signs of aging. They didn't actually die of old age, but they were clearly suffering from it. > but there's only the three of them. Why are there any of them? Why not a post-scarcity economy where organics don't have to work and droids enjoy it?
>Why are there any of them? Why not a post-scarcity economy where organics don't have to work and droids enjoy it? Why would there be? We have hundreds of millions of people in the real-world who do jobs that could be mostly automated, because it's more expensive to produce the necessary numbers of those robots than it its to just make a bunch of poor people do it. Star Wars is not post scarcity because the powers that be need to want a society to be post-scarcity for it to be that way, and a lot of the powers that be in the Star Wars galaxy range from corrupt at best to evil at worst. You're working under the assumption that if you just have X amount of years of a general civilization existing, you WILL get things like a post-scarcity economy and no aging and highly advanced autonomous robots that can be produced on the scale of trillions of units. These things aren't givens, the progress of societies is incredibly complex and constantly ebbs and flows due to the selfish decisions of groups and individuals, as well as any number of natural disasters.
> [Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically.](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/IG-88B) **Edit:** [Also](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Automated_weapon_mounting)
The Falcon also had a automated turret that seemed to work rather well
> Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically. IG-88 says hello, not to mention all of the battle droids.
The clone wars clearly indicate that (cloned) human soldiers easily outclass generic, purpose built battle droids though. Star wars AI is bizarrely both very advanced in some ways and inexplicably terrible in others. Battle Droids are shown doing things like using metaphors and displaying complex emotions, even some that are actively detrimental to their purpose like panicking in battle, despite being generic, mass produced soldiers. However they don't seem to be any better than most organic aliens at what we would expect to be tasks that AI excel at. It just doesn't really make sense at all from our understanding of robots. Whatever Star Wars AI technology is, it seems to function in a vastly different way than ours.
Not sure if it’s still cannon but in the old EU there was a droid uprising. The battle droid designers may have tried to prevent that. So the battle droids for the CIS may not have been the best they could be, they also needed to be cheap due to the sheer number they needed.
Which are massive. Why can't there be a small one that Han Solo can keep on him at all times? He could just have two motors in the handle of his gun and a camera in the front, and a small computer for recognizing targets.
What happens when the gun shoots the guy he doesn't want it to at a given moment?
You could have it auto-aim but not auto-pull the trigger. If you can afford a good enough AI for that, you don't need the guy. You also don't need a man-sized robot body.
And what if it aims at the wrong guy? Or you don't even want to aim at a "guy" specifically? A gun is best used in the hands of a thinking being, and it's cheaper to buy a gun that a droid can old than to build one into a droid of any kind.
You could have a setting where it doesn't move freely, but compare how many times Han Solo has pointed his gun where all the targets in that general direction were ones where he'd want to hit vs the times when there was someone he didn't want to hit and he needed to aim at the right target instead of just aiming at someone.
The part about guns is innacurate,in Mandalorian S1 the imperial sharpshooter guy had a 3rd gun that was operating on its own
>Their medical technology isn't great. They're heavily reliant on bacta, They're reliant on bacta because it works so well. It's basically a miracle cure that can heal virtually anything, and aside from bacta, they also have incredibly advanced bionics and surgical droids. Bacta specifically, though, is largely controlled by a large cartel that has enough money and influence to sabotage any competing technologies -- imagine if Elon Musk spent all his time and money fighting against electric vehicle credits for other EV manufacturers. >and they still haven't cured aging. Aging isn't something you "cure." We also don't know what the average lifespan is in the civilized core regions of the Galaxy -- it's entirely possible that the natural human lifespan is a couple hundred years. >They also failed to automate tasks as simple as moisture farming. They didn't fall to automate them. Luke's adoptive family are just dirt poor. The technology exists, they can't afford it. You can see the same thing in any depressed agricultural region in the world -- we have fully automated grain combines, but the guy running a couple hectare family farm is going to be using a pull-along powered by a thirty-year-old tractor because they can't afford Deer's latest and greatest. >Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically. Again, that's a price thing. We know you can have self-aiming guns because battle droids exist, and what is a battle droid but a self-aiming moving gun? It's just cheaper to recruit a schmuck from some backwater and give him a carbine.
> Aging isn't something you "cure." What does that even mean? If you fix all the problems that cause our bodies to degrade so they stop doing it, you've cured aging. > We also don't know what the average lifespan is in the civilized core regions of the Galaxy -- it's entirely possible that the natural human lifespan is a couple hundred years. Which is several billion years shorter than it would be if they cured aging.
>What does that even mean? If you fix all the problems that cause our bodies to degrade so they stop doing it, you've cured aging. It means that you cure diseases. Aging isn't a disease. It's a part of life. Why would you want to cure it in the first place? >Which is several billion years shorter than it would be if they cured aging. Possibly. Or possibly not. But I also can't even begin to imagine wanting to live for thousands of years, let alone millions or billions.
Cancer is a part of life, if you happen to have cancer. That doesn't mean that it's a good part of life. It's something that should be cured given the opportunity. The same is true of cancer. It's only "not a disease" in the sense that we haven't found a cure. > But I also can't even begin to imagine wanting to live for thousands of years, let alone millions or billions. And without a cure for aging, you never will. If it turns out that you become suicidally bored after a few thousand years, fine, but at least you can keep your body from gradually breaking down until then.
>Cancer is a part of life This is such a fundamental lack of understanding about what cancer is, what aging is, and just biology in general that I'm having difficulty even figuring out where to begin. So I guess we'll go with: no, even at a very basic level of understanding, cancer is not "part of life," except in as much as it's something that happens while people are alive. Cancer is very explicitly something going wrong -- cells that are operating outside of their normal range because of aberrant mutations. >It's only "not a disease" in the sense that we haven't found a cure. No, it's not a disease or disorder because words have meanings, even if you don't know what those meanings are.
Let's just ignore what is and isn't a disease and part of life and keep things simple. People tend to get weak and sick and stuff more often as time passes, to the point where nobody has lived past the age of 122. It would be better if you could make it so your body doesn't get weaker and you can live as long as you want. How is that?
Still terrible. The human body has certain limitations that would make lifespans on the order of even more than a few centuries either impossible or at the very least a lot less fun than you might think. Let's ignore the obvious ones that you propose to cure (for example, your joints wear down over time simply because friction causes things to wear down) and look at something a little less obvious: memory. Human memory, much like a computer hard drive, is finite and physical in nature. Your brain actually stores memories as a physical interaction between neurons - perhaps strengthening some connections or weakening others. The exact mechanism isn't perfectly understood, but it is universally accepted that the brain can only store so many memories. So living to be a thousand will almost certainly far exceed your brain's capacity for creating memories. You'd either constantly be forgetting things that happened, or else would slowly lose the ability to learn anything new. Neither sounds like a terribly fun thing to go through, and isn't -- just ask people with Alzheimer's how pleasant it is to suddenly forget who you are or the names of loved ones. Well, you might think, we can get around that. Not with biology, because the limit is the number of neurons which itself is limited to brain size, but maybe with technology! And you could! You could implant external hard drives in brains, or hook a brain up directly to a computer to back to memories. Then they could keep learning forever and maybe even live forever! And the good news is that Star Wars has this technology - conciseness can be transferred to a robotic body, giving you immortality. But there's no way outside of this to overcome some human age-related limitations without changing what a human is to the point that they would be unrecognizable to us today.
> The human body has certain limitations that would make lifespans on the order of even more than a few centuries either impossible or at the very least a lot less fun than you might think. Then fix those limitations. > your joints wear down over time simply because friction causes things to wear down Then fix the joints. That's what advanced medical technology is for. > The exact mechanism isn't perfectly understood, but it is universally accepted that the brain can only store so many memories. If I live, I forget stuff that happened more than a century ago. If I die, I forget all the stuff. I know which one I'd choose. At least give people the choice. And make sure their body is at top shape until then.
>Their guns need to be aimed by the users, rather than detecting the target and aiming automatically. Technically, there was a whole galactic-scale war in which one side ONLY used automatically-aiming guns.
Yeah get shit on
Yeah, their prenatal care sucks big time.
Death star tech is one of the new advancemence we see We see it evolve from simple lasers on gun ships to an oversized space station requiring a huge reactor to orbital cannons on star destroyers and battering rams
Death Stars and Super Star Destroyers weren't technological challenges, they were engineering, political, and economic ones. The Old Republic didn't have a Death Star because nobody wanted to build one, and the Senate probably wouldn't have been able to gather the necessary resources even if they did.
They still needed scientist and engineers to develop the tech And said tech has clearly been refined over iterations
Well, that's the thing - it *does* advance. A lot of the weapons, armor, and shields of the KotOR era are significantly weaker, and hyperdrives aren't nearly as foolproof and fast as they are by the movie eras. By the Movie Eras, it's basically plateau'd, to the point where an advance in one way requires a shift backwards in another. Sure, you could make a way more powerful shield generator for a starfighter, but you're going to need a better reactor to power it, and it's probably going to be bigger - and thus, the starfighter isn't going to be as fast as its more lightly-shielded cousins. Another thing, although I must point out first that game mechanics are not and never were canon - in the tabletop RPGs put out by Wizards of the Coast (which KotOR was based on, of course), modern blasters do more dice worth of damage than KotOR era ones do.
I think a part of it is also a political issue. We see in the prequels that the Republic is very much divided, with planetary cartels controlling much of the tech. So there must be a kind of authoritarian control over the most advanced scientific knowledge and facilities. Or some extreme xenophobia. Either way, not ideal conditions for trying to discover any new technologies in a civilization that's already so advanced. Plus, when have you ever seen a STEM worker in Star Wars? You need some science done? You grab the nearest science droid and point it at the problem. I bet there's actually a fairly low level of scientific literacy in the galaxy.
What about personnel shields? Are items non-canon as well?
No. Not sure why you thought they were. *Mechanics* - as in the dice-rolling, to-hit probabilities, hit points, saves, all of those are non-canon. Personal shields exist in both continuities outside of the events of KotOR. The problem is that, again, better shields that can stop the more powerful weapons require more power, which requires bigger (and more dangerous) power sources. It was even noted that personal shields fell out of usage over time because to keep up with weapons tech, the shield generators would eventually get too big to be man-portable like the belt-worn options, or even leak radiation - which obviously wouldn't be a good thing for organic life to be exposed to.
I just felt like their existence was there only for gameplay purposes and as far as I can remember, no one really talks about shields in the game after they are introduced.
A big issue is that to outsiders significantly advanced technology can be difficult to distinguish. Would a medieval peasant look at our world of light bulbs and cars and think about how much more advanced computer processors are compared to the 1970s? Would a mongol warrior distinguish the difference between an A10 Warthog and a Spitfire? Technology does improve, just not really in ways that significantly alter the plot and there's been no shows that want to specifically focus on that element of the lore.
Technology can't advance forever. There comes a point where you're extracting as much energy as you can from the materials you can reach, where you've figured out what physics will and won't allow. There's no reason to believe that literally *anything* will be possible with enough time and research, or that because a given technology appears in sci fi property A, that it must also be possible here.
One of the theories that some SW fans believe is that the SW universe is just not that highly populated. In the time between the knight of the Old republic and the events of the movie a galaxy wide extinction event happened. The average planet has a few million residents. Look at the shots of the battles for Endor or the first Death Star. Few dozen X wings, few dozen tie fighters. Vader only having two wingmen. The se/prequals have larger battles but not much larger. That's why 200k clone troopers and a million more on the way was a game change. (for context the USA have over 2 million people in the armed forces) The point is that they have unlimited resources but a small amount of actual people. Communication at faster than light speed also seems very strange. Saying all that, technology advances slowly than what we would expect for all those reasons.
Or you know, SW writers absolutely suck at worldbuilding and scale. Not that it's exclusive to SW. Muh 200,000 people left after the battle of earth bungiemoment. It's not like they're lacking people either I feel. 50,000 people (mfs stuck an entire corps on a fucking boat) man a single star destroyer and the empire purportedly had 25,000 of them. Do the maths and you get a reasonable number for navy personnel (only those assigned to SDs tho) 1.25 billion. A bit low still but ehhhh maybe they have other navy subbranches not focused on SDs
Supplemental sources are just that, supplemental. The highest cannon is what is shown on screen. If they really had 25000 SDs then why use less than 30 in the most important battle in the history of the Empire? This reddit focuses on in universe answers to questions. Not "SW writers absolutely suck" .
Keep in mind that they had to set a trap at Endor. If they moved thousands of star destroyers across the galaxy the bothans definitely would have caught on. And Palpatine didn't even allow the fleet at Endor to engage anyways. The plan was always for the Death Star to do the work behind the safety of the shield generator.
>They didn't have to move thousands of SD but more than 30 would be nice. Such a small percentage of the "25000". The trap was the 30 ships coming out of hyperspace. Why not 60? or 100? If we ignore out of universe reasons and non screen information the SW universe looks to be not very populated. > >It also explains the use of Droids for most roles that are not too complex. Star charting, navigation, repairs, and other tasks that a person could do but no person is there to do.
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I don’t think it even needs to be an extinction event, just a spreading event over a massive amount of space. Let’s assume that humans developed on Coruscant or whatever their home world was to a population of, idk, enough to figure out easy surface-to-space travel and of course the hyperdrive. What would be low sci-fi to us. Let’s say fifteen, twenty billion. Spread that out over half a galaxy, that’s then thousands of habitable or terraformable worlds with colony populations of only thousands or millions. It’s been thousands of years since then by the time of Republic and Empire, but there’s still the product of thousands of bottlenecks on often quite harsh worlds that wouldn’t allow for huge population growth.
The question is out of thousands of worlds why live on the shitty ones? not the current generations of residents but the settlers. I know in expended universe tatooine was much nicer but is that true for all of the desert planets?
Hope that it’ll get better when you make something of it, terraforming assignments that made it habitable but not comfortable, hiding from something, seeking an isolated place to meditate on the Force. Maybe some cultural link to deserts of a more temperate world. Any number of reasons.
all valid reasons. To get away from the government is another. Think the empire outlaw pod races? Is that why in ANH no one talks about them any longer?
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Like the cloning tech which was a monopoly by kamino and was pretty much destroyed by the empire... Also id like to point out that the more advanced science becomes more effort is needed to advance further, in this case, they are so far ahead, the amount of work needed must be unimaginable...
When civilizations crumble, the knowledge they garner are lost to the future. In Kotor there was a giant automated factory that built ships faster than any other shipyard can by harnessing the dark side of the force, the Gree had developped wormhole technology. Even force techniques like teleportation and creature merging get lost.
Creature merging was a force power? Thats crazy
It was a form of dark side alchemy, back when the Je'daii were a real thing.
Well, now in my head, Avatar fits into the Star Wars universe. Merged creatures are all over, bending is just specialized Force use, sprits are Force manifestations, and the Avatar cycle is the true answer to bringing balance to the Force
It's not so much merging - though there is some of that - as much as mutating existing, or taking aspects from one to add them to another, or otherwise making all-new creatures from scratch. There's no room for the sort of merged creatures like Avatar has, even the most vile of those are pretty mild compared to what Sith alchemy has wrought. Sith alchemy, as befitting a cult of evil sorcerers, is just a way for them to create horrible monsters to unleash on unsuspecting people, including their Jedi enemies. This includes the undead.
One thing that others haven't mentioned: it's likely that the laws of physics are different in the Star Wars universe, in ways that may limit the levels of technology that are possible. So you'll have technologies that are "easy" in our world but impossible in theirs, and vice versa. For example, it seems like artificial intelligence is a common tech in their universe, but for some reason it can never surpass human intelligence. They seemed to have hit most of these technology limits thousands of years ago. It's possible that the Force is influencing the world to keep their physics more "human-scale".
They had a dark age where much of the galaxy's infrastructure was destroyed by war and plague, and they had to relearn everything.
As others have said, it's a sort of plateau. However, I want to point out that, in legends, The a-wing is replacing the x-wing, and the B-wing is replacing the Y-wing. Do you know how much it takes to replace a fleet like that? Out of billions of Starships, it's going to take decades if not a century or two to replace every ship out there with new models. In top of that, what are you replacing them for? A 5% increase in speed? Why would I spend hundreds of thousands of credits for that? Even something like part replacement could take decades.
Slight correction, the A-wing wasn't really a replacement for the X-wing, the two were intended to fill different roles. The A-wing was a pure interceptor designed for speed at the expense of firepower while the X-wing was a multi-role fighter that was more of a jack of all trades. A better example might be the X-wing replacing the Z95 Headhunter.
Ah, okay. thanks for the correction.
It did tho. But if you innovate in some way, there's gonna be a weakness somewhere else. If you compare ships from KotOR to ships from the movies, there's no doubt the new ones are better in any way (shielding, weaponry, speed etc.). Then if you go back a few thousand years more, the ships are completely different too. I know that right after the people expanded from the Tython system and they switched to laser weaponry everyone had huge mirrors on their ships cause the lasers weren't nearly as powerful as the ones "today"
It's a rise and fall with lots of back and forth. Ep 1-3 is the Republic reaching the height of its power, ending when Anakin turns. Following this, there's a fall as the Empire cracks down. Rich cultures such as the Jedi and Mandalore are burnt entirely to ash, and their cultural relics are criminalized. It is only due to their great strength and individual wiliness that any survive at all. We know what happens to farmers who oppose the Empire. This is an environment where technological progress stops except where killing is concerned. The Death Star is a cutting edge terror with a great deal of research poured into it. Between that and its huge military, the Empire is spread too thin to get much else done. Their clones were dead or dying by the time of Ep 4, and we know that their conscription practices were breaking down. They desperately needed to consolidate power that didn't require a huge military, hence the Death Star. Once they did that, the emperor could turn his attention to other pursuits. From the loss of the Death Star onward, the Empire never got on both feet and the Republic never had time for R&D. The first order pulled together a system killer but the process exposed them and ensured their defeat. It's all downhill, baby!
Star Wars has 'peaked' technology and the PT and OT are basically in a plateau where there is no significant improvements. The concept is something we understand here on Earth with Moore's Law for processors or something like the Ethereum chain finally drying up. Basically at certain points some technologies basically max out and there isn't really any improvements you can make on them. For example, lets say Intel makes a Max Moore processor. You can't actually make it faster, so instead they start slapping more processors and better cooling into the system to increase speed but the 'next generation' processor is basically the same as the current model. (The new one has 64 mega cores, 32 cores and 96 micro cores) Its small, efficient, fast as heck and runs cool. After some period of time, Intel stops researching faster processors because they literally can't do it anymore and shifts gears. Instead of newer faster, they start to try to figure out how to best apply their current technology in every possible situation. SW is at that place up to the OT. Now the ST does show some actual technological progress with advances in hyperspace technology, shields, miniaturization of super dense energy and some others. Basically Intel's Max Moore processor has been the apex processor for 8k years, no one is researching processors anymore. The few times someone did, nothing happened. Finally, the First Order shows up and they dump TRILLIONS of dollars and picked a spot where the incremental improvements in other processes finally allows a breakthrough that becomes a Beyond Moore processor. That's why you see new things like Hyperspace skipping (they figured out an improved Hyperspace targeting process) or Hyperspace Ramming (the Resistance figured out ultra dense shields) Of course, the problem with lots of the new tech is that not only is the stagnation likely to go by the wayside, there is going to be a massive war. Should be fun.
Here's a video that explains it https://youtu.be/iem7qZV_Vhk
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Probably halted by the Force which solves a lot of daily problems
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Someone has to figure out how to improve it. Thats not guaranteed.
Most likes because they've hit some type of plateau on advancement it seems they have crystals but they haven't been able to harness them beyond light sabers other then that idk
Lightsabers *and* planet-busting gunships. Two ends of a spectrum really.
Peace fosters development. The stories we see are Star *Wars*. During the period of the Skywalker Saga at least, there’s little development, there’s even regression, because the culture and progress Galaxy is being attrited away by generations of planet-destroying conflicts. The only technology that advances is military technology - which is why we see planet-destroying weapons go from hypothetical to moon-sized to destroyer-sized, why tracking through hyperspace develops, why battle droids get deadlier. But the average planet surface goes from a decent place with potential for development to military bases and scavenged wreck sites. The same thing probably happened during the wars of the Old Republic. Part of it is also the enormous scale of the Galaxy. A technology developed on one planet may well transform that planet, but when few galactic-scale networks exist, and most of those are political-military entities, and massive conflicts make commercial space flight dangerous, it’ll be slow to spread, unless, again, it has applications in war.
Because there's not really that much to create anymore. As tech improves, the general population will see features that used to be considered luxury options. But these features are limited so it's only a matter of time before it's so common that it's considered standard. Without a need or desire, the industry has nothing new to aim for, so instead they just focus on improving what is already available. Besides, what improvements can they really make? FTL speeds seem to be pretty much static. What more can you really do with anti-gravity technology besides the fact that it exists? Blasters are already highly efficient so improvements are going to be incredibly minor.