What is the explanation for high technology in Star Wars?
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
Yeah, Star Wars isn’t science fiction at all. It’s fantasy.
We have just come to associate spaceships with science fiction. But in Star Wars there isn’t the least bit of science behind the technology.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Spelling is hard. I’m not at fixing it I’m imagining that they flew rattan based ships now.
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.
Sounds like Stargate.
But why would that be necessary as an explanation? We also invented all our shit, why wouldn’t they have done the same? I get that it’s a fun concept but as far as I can see nothing in the story even remotely suggests it.
Just thinking fantastical ideas for fun
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
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
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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
In the Lord of the Rings, what is the explanation for swords and other metal goods?
At some point in the past, the arts of smelting, smithing, casting were discovered, refined over the centuries, different races and cultures advanced them in different ways, and eventually led to swords, mithril shirts, magic rings, etc.
Same thing with star wars, in-universe they have tens of thousands of years of history, I think canonically the old Republic was founded 25-or-so thousand years ago, if you go back that far in real earth human history and you’re pretty much at the point where a handful of weird wolves are starting to get comfortable enough with humans to let us start domesticating them.
And at that point in the star wars timeline, space travel and other advanced technology is already pretty well-established, so there’s probably at least that long again of incremental technological advancements leading up to that point.
Basically they just got a massive head-start on us
As far as how and where the technology is made, we get little glimpses of it here and there, droid factories on Geonosis, corelian shipyards, various mechanics, scrapyards, tinkerers, etc.
But that’s all just kind of backdrop. Star wars is a space opera adventure thing, not a mockumentary about the history of lightsabers and hyperspace drives, or a how-its-made for blaster pistols and gonk droids. It wouldn’t make sense for most star wars media to really go into depth about that kind of stuff and probably would piss people off if they did (not that most star wars fans don’t exist in a perpetual state of being angry at star wars about something anyway)
You wouldn’t go into a Fast and Furious movie expecting a whole history and mechanics lesson on automobiles, the movies are focusing on a handful of people who (race cars? Fight terrorists with cars? I really don’t know I’ve actually never seen any of them) there’s a whole in-universe world around them where all of those things happened/are happening out of sight and out of mind but it’s not directly relevant to the plot so it gets kind of glossed over, you can just assume most of the history and engineering stuff has been handled by people somewhere off-screen at some point in time.
Same with star wars, there’s untold trillions or more people scattered across millions of inhabited planets working dead-end jobs making widgets that have built on millennia of science and technology, but the stories focus on a handful of freedom fighters, smugglers, soldiers, warrior monks, etc. who mostly just use those things and probably don’t have much more idea how their hyperdrive works than you do about the alternator in your car.
It’s one thing to not understand your car alternator when you can call a tow truck, and quite another when you’re traveling light years in interplanetary space. Plus we do see things getting fixed, but it’s never in detail. In Star Trek you get plausible technobabble: “We can’t go to warp because all the relays are blown on the nacelles, and it’ll take at least 4 hours to replace them.” In SW you get “We can’t go to light speed for some undefined reason. Let’s watch Chewie moan angrily while smacking something with a wrench, then R2 shoves something in a hole and gets blown across the room via electric shock. And now the hyperdrive works.”
It’s the same, Star Trek uses technobabble and Star Wars uses non-verbal technobabble to explain FTL
I’m less familiar with old Trek (TOS), so maybe it’s an unfair comparison, but the slapstick elements of percussive maintenance in SW seem wildly less serious than the types of repairs happening in say TNG. I can’t think of a time Geordi had an mechanical problem he couldn’t figure out and smacked it to get it working again.
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.
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!
“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
ET: “Phone home.”
Later…
ET: “Execute order 66.”
Technically it’s the other way around isn’t it?
It would never occur to me that Star Wars technology would need an explanation besides people inventing things over time. According to Lucas the story was originally going to be told by R2D2 when he was 2000 years old. It was going to be in our far future and our galaxy. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” was going to mean in R2D2’s past, told at a time when he was far away from here. They decided to drop the narration, and all that remained was that opening line - which has led people to think the whole story happened in the distant past in a galaxy other than ours. But this clears up a few little things like saying womp rats are a couple meters long.
Was R2D2’s narration intended to be subtitled…?
A: beepboop whistle.
12 parsecs?! Wow! And then what happened?
I think I read somewhere that during the filming for the original trilogy scenes they read Chewie’s lines in English so the actors would know what they were reacting to. Not sure if it was the same for R2
No, the narration would have been spoken. R2D2 originally had a human sounding voice with sarcastic or snarky dialog. Supposedly there’s an early script floating around that contains his lines. Random trivia: the name R2D2 is attributed to sound engineer Walter Murch’s notation for “Reel 2, Dialog track 2”. I love that one.
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 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.
show
*movies
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
(I meant reactors, but tractors are pretty funny so I’m leaving it)
* Star Wars is “cowboys and indians and samurai in space.”
I love this eye opening take. Thank you.
star wars also has the wierd thing of having magic in it as well. the night sisters.
