What is the explanation for high technology in Star Wars?
It makes no sense, it was a long time ago (in a galaxy far… Well, that’s irrelevant). We haven’t invented laser knives yet, let alone laser swords!
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Some of their technology is vastly ahead of ours, other technologies are way behind. The behind stuff is far more interesting. Comms in Star Wars is weird and anachronistic with other tech in the show. Getting clear signals for comms seems nearly impossible.
I also get a giggle out of tech used in the show only to drive plot: like how protagonists can scan ships for life forms but protagonists also only power down ships to evade the eye of a passing baddy ship.
I remember someone explaining that the EU content explains the comms seeming anachronistic, when they are actually so super advanced that you need jamming in order to not immediately have all your light fighter ships get zapped by big guns.
Anacrhonistic?
They have instantaneous duplex comms, over millions of light year distances, without line of sight! That’s FTL communications.
It is modeled after the style of early radio comms for the cinematic drama, but technologically speaking they would be so far advanced from us that it might as well be magic.
I’ve never thought about it before…
It would be fun head-canon to imagine that they created very little of it, and the rest was found throughout all the ruins in the galaxy. As if all intelligent life was suddenly wiped out just a few thousand years before humans arrived.
Sounds like Stargate.
Long ago before the dark times before the mouse took over the Rattan empire conquered most of the inner rim. They invented a lot of the tech before their empire fell apart due to poor genetic planning.
They were mentioned in Andor.
The rakatan that is, not the rattan furniture empire.
As you can see by my edit, I am very much aware but spell check doesn’t like the word and I didn’t know how to spell it.
Their delicately weaved ships
It was also because they abused the dark side to power their tech, but dark tech has an effect on living beings. As a result of being around their dark tech for so long, it made them a more brutal, savage race than they already were. That culminated in them creating a supervirus with the intention of unleashing it upon everything that wasnt rakatan. But their slave races got wind of the virus, stole a sample, and altered it. Now, it only effects the rakatans and cuts them off from the force. I dont remember much of kotor 2 but i’d have to imagine kreia had some pretty interesting things to state on the matter considering the similarities between kreia’s goals and their goals.
But wasn’t the reason they were conquering everyone was so that they could utilize their genetic material to reproduce as they had somehow made themselves mostly sterile with all of their meddling in bio technology and the force?
From what I remember that’s also why humans are literally everywhere and why we are able to intermingle as it were with the more exotic humanoids.
I believe the general sterility was related to dark side degredation. They really just got brutally fucked by abusing the dark side as an entire culture and species. Which like, fuck them, they’re evil, but damn they really shot themselves in the foot.
As for gathering genetic data from the lesser races, I do not recall. They wanted to wipe out all other races afair so i dont see why they would want to keep their dna around, and from the rakatans i remember, their race would rather die than intentionally infuse themselves with the lesser races dna. They did conquer huge swaths of the galaxy and kept most everything theyd find as slaves, but those were viewed as highly expendable, not even worth treating decently enough that they survive the year.
Edit: yeah i went ahead and read the entire forum page for them, no mention of harvesting dna. It does mention that the cause of their collapse was dark side degredation though so ngl kinda proud i remembered that. That page is missing a ton of info on the rakatans though, so you could very well be correct and that page simply doesnt mention it.
So mind you I haven’t read any of this shit in almost 20 years but from what I remember it was something along the lines of using the humans as walking breeding tanks not that they would be combining DNA, but that the humans would have to be able to be compatible enough to house a growing embryo from the aliens as a surrogate mother
I spent a couple minutes searching and i cant find anything about that. That would be some pretty cool lore and go a ways to explain why humans are compatable with so many species. I did find some sources that state that humans were their preferred slaves, and that they massively helped humanity by taking their slaves all across the galaxy during a time when the infinite empire was the only group to have hyperdrive tech. Humans were working to colonise their solar system and the surrounding areas when we got conquered by the rakatans. It is worth noting that coruscant is the cannonical home world of humans in star wars, which means the rakatans at one point conquered coruscant. It’s also worth noting that “Earth” does exist in legends lore, han solo goes to Earth and i think he fights dinosaurs, i cant remember.
Star Wars has a plethora of aliens living alongside humans, there is no reason to assume there are even more advanced aliens and the current ones can’t make tech.
That’s fair
star wars also has the wierd thing of having magic in it as well. the night sisters.
Scientists doing shit in the future?
*in the past.
(“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”)
Peter Griffin explained it well.
“In the future, but somehow, in the past”.
Like palpatine
I stand corrected !
I don’t think I understand the question. People invented it?
People and aliens.
that’s so discriminating. are ypu saying aliens aren’t people?
from our perspective, everyone in star wars is technically an alien, because it’s happening “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”
I honestly can’t tell if you’re making an unfunny joke, or if you just don’t know what “people” are.
aliens are people too, man
And how do they know which button to press?
It’s like most technology today. You just randomly keep pressing buttons until something happens, then memorize what you did to get there. There really is logic in most of it.
A few years ago I’d have jokes about data ports being the same fitting as power sockets, but USB-C has ruined that
The Star Wars universe is full of trillions of sapient, dextrous beings, humans* or otherwise. Just because the inventors don’t (necessarily) show up on screen doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
If you want a “too simplified as to be almost certainly wrong” answer: E.T.
His species are canonically native to the Star Wars galaxy but we don’t see them most of the time in the SW lore. Let’s assume they’re the ones who invented it all. Easy.
I mean, the one we got a movie about didn’t seem all that bright, but he managed to build a communicator array out of a Speak-n-Spell, so they must have something going for them.
ET: “Phone home.”
Later…
ET: “Execute order 66.”
“Trillions” is probably a major lowball, coruscant alone officially a population in the trillions, and when you actually do the math making some estimates based on densely-populated cities on earth it’s more likely in the quadrillions.
And there’s million of inhabited planets, most not even close to as densely populated as coruscant of course, but there are a good handful of other ecumenopolises (ecumenopoli?) around the galaxy
His species are canonically native to the Star Wars galaxy
Not that I don’t believe you, but seriously wtf
![Asogians first appeared in the 1999 film Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, the first installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.[1] Their appearance was a homage to the title character of Steven Spielberg's 1982 classic film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to make good on a promise—after Spielberg included a Yoda cameo and Star Wars toys such as Boba Fett in E.T., George Lucas promised to include an E.T. cameo in the next Star Wars film he made—The Phantom Menace.[2]](https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/603c159d-334a-4782-a740-e04d35c5f542.jpeg)
what the actual shit
And they’re nudists!
Didn’t one of the new movies have a whole thing about the mil-industrial complex?
Unless otherwise specified, my assumption is that laborers working for oligarchs made the tech
I absolutely love Star Wars - I saw the first movie four times in the theatre back in 1977/78 as a kid.
But let’s be clear: Star Wars is “cowboys and indians in space.” (Yes, that’s a dated and culturally inappropriate comparison - it is also perfectly appropriate for the era.)
Technology has never played a significant part in it - light sabres are magic swords, FTL travel is a well-worn convenient trope that ‘just happens’ (unless it doesn’t). Droids are servants.
Basically, tech has never been a core aspect of the SW world, mostly because the show has never been science fiction.
* Star Wars is “cowboys and indians and samurai in space.”
I love this eye opening take. Thank you.
If you ever end up watching Andor, they explain more of how the empire mines entire planets to collapse acquiring minerals they need, destabilizes galactic views of planets to ensure resistance would be minimalized. It also goes into how the weakness in the DeathStar was created and how some engineers were essentially enslaved/forced into to building it. Believe they gun down most of the lead engineers in Rogue One.
Edit: light speed is really one of the only non-defined technologys I find. But they have tractors everywhere, so I assume the point is with mass amounts of energy… You can do near anything
show
*movies
By the time of the movies humans have had hyperspace travel for something like 20,000 years. Seems it stands to reason the trillions of sentient lifeforms working and communicating during that time would create some cool shit
Star Wars is a nice movie but it’s a pretty mediocre SF. They mix very low and very high technology in mostly absurd ways. You have FTL and lasers but robots are mostly shit, AI is very basic and it’s use weirdly limited, warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space. I know they did it like this because of cinematography but as a SF it’s just not that good. So I really wouldn’t bother trying to rationalize the tech. It’s mostly like this because “it looked nice”.
warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space
not even that. Star wars warfare looks like what someone from the boomer generation thought warfare looked like in WW2. But really it’s what movie warfare from WW2 looked like, because showing actual war would confuse and bore people. lucas was enamored with serials.
I meant “today” in SF sense, like current century vs some time 1000 years from now :) Of course your right, the battle scenes were inspired by WW2 movies.
My favorite SF warfare descriptions come from Banks. Battleships firing at each other from light years away or hiding inside suns, everything controlled by AI, microsecond long battles. Absolutely not adaptable to screen.
banks / culture series offers a lot of fascinating insights. but yeah, hard to adapt for movie audiences… similar to the constraints of storytelling and level of nerdistry you can cram into a film frame… I felt the same way about Tom Clancy’s mil-fantasy level of intense inspection about the hardware and users motivations… but he rarely went full silly like Dale Brown with the execution, but very little of clancy’s obsession with detail gets into the films made from his IP.
thinking about these tropes has led me to think I need to make some games exploring them heh
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Even Andor is true to that formula.
In one part, two characters are speaking over “radio” comms using code talk - presumably in case there are any Empire operatives listening in. And prior to that they kept missing each other because they weren’t at their radios at the same time. Derp!
So you’ve got hyperspace travel and laser guns, but no data encryption, or text messaging. Alright then.
Except of course, they do have those things when the plot calls for it, and that’s another reason to consider it fantasy. In most sci-fi the rules stay pretty consistent, but in fantasy it’s flexible.
so re: encryption - if you can muddle your messages meaning and transmit in unencrypted mode, that convo can hide in the huge volume of calls happening all the time.
once you go through the trouble of encrypting it and running it through spectrum hopping and other security methods, you’re simply pointing two REALLY BIG FUCKING ARROWS at the convo participants that say “THESE GUYS HAVE SECRETS THAT SHOULD BE REVEALED WITH BRUTAL METHODS”, your encrypting the messages actually draws attention.
It’s fantasy, part of the fun is the mystery of this strange looking technology and how old, used, and dirty it is. Makes you wonder, what kind of history did this object see?
Relevant aside: I just learned Lucas renamed Star Wars to Star Wars: Episode IV in 1981, before knowing he’d help make the three prequel films. It was just a stylistic choice, to make Star Wars feel like just a small piece of a larger epic.
Once you explain the mystery of the technology away, or the mystery of the rest of the saga, some of that magic disappears.
