Where does technology come from in Star Wars?

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Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Hickak@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

What is the explanation for high technology in Star Wars?

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dutchkimble@lemy.lol ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Scientists doing shit in the future?

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- tiramichu@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  *in the past.
  
  (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”)
  
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  - Trollivier@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Peter Griffin explained it well.
    
    “In the future, but somehow, in the past”.
    
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  - dutchkimble@lemy.lol ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I stand corrected !
    
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swordgeek@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- Venator@lemmy.nz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  * Star Wars is “cowboys and indians and samurai in space.”
  
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- Venator@lemmy.nz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  show
  
  *movies
  
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- LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- davidagain@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I love this eye opening take. Thank you.
  
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ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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 would bother trying to rationalize the tech. It’s mostly like this because “it looked nice”.

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- mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space
  
  not even that. 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.
  
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  - ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - tiramichu@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Even the latest Andor is true to that formula.
    
    In one part, two characters are communicating over “radio” voice comms using code speak - 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.
    
    So you’ve got hyperspace travel and laser guns, but no data encryption. Alright then.
    
    Except of course, they do have encryption when the plot calls for it, and that’s another reason to consider or fantasy. In most sci-fi the rules stay pretty consistent, but in fantasy it’s more flexible.
    
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toddestan@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I get the impression in the Star Wars universe that technological advances have slowed to a near halt. All of the tech is really old, and very little has changed for quite some time. A brand new X-wing or lightsaber or landspeeder isn’t all that different from one that was built 50 or even 100s of years ago. That’s one of the reasons why stuff in Star Wars looks so used - as tech doesn’t go obsolete, stuff ends up staying in service until it’s completely worn out and every bit of life has been squeezed from it.

That’s why you don’t really see where the technology comes from - the big innovators, discoveries, etc. are long in the past. Though we do get to occasionally see factories and manufacturing facilities where things are being built.

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- VitoRobles@lemmy.today ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  brand new X-wing or lightsaber or landspeeder isn’t all that different from one that was built 50 or even 100s of years ago.
  
  If you want to get extremely weird… The Old Republic takes place 3600 years before the original trilogy.
  
  Tech is mostly the same.
  
  Compared to 3600 years in reality, we went from pooping in a hole to pooping into a magic toilet that sings you songs while spraying you with water.
  
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  - mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    pooping in a hole to pooping into a magic toilet that sings you songs while spraying you with water.
    
    which then sends the poop where? down a hole.
    
    it’s holes man, holes all the way down
    
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- XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I always had the impression that the advanced tech takes a large amount of resources not readily available everywhere. The rebels are scrounging for resources from any place that defects or will trade with them, while the empire is free to demand, raid, and liberate whatever supplies they needed. Part interchange is going to be more important to rebels strapped for material, so they use all similar, basic, reliable stuff. We see lots of shinier, smoother equipment in the cities where luxury is accessible and full of variation. Meanwhile, the vast shiny imperial hangars are comfortably stocked with lots of clean ships for all different roles.
  
  The shitty robots never feel that far off from the US military. There’s all kinds of should-be-obsolete equipment that sticks around just because it fills a role (usually one role) and it still works. Regarding the low quality of their performance and capabilities, I’d imagine microprocessor manufacturing is still hard without perfect conditions. Clean rooms, electron microscopes, and general precision well beyond human visual capability. In our world now, if China were to try to take Taiwan by force and the chip manufacturers really do blow up the facilities, we’re screwed. Globally. It’ll set us back decades because that’ll reset chip size and density. Even if we magically restart facilities that used to be around, they’ll be on the older, larger architectures we can’t fit in ourr pockets
  
  So, basically, what we’ve seen coming from most of the wartime interactions the US has had with most of the receiving countries. HMMV vs Hilux. 15 different standard guns vs AK-47. Unstoppable convoys vs IEDs. Satellite comms vs horseback messengers. And then the USA still roots for Luke & crew…
  
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  - SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    because that’ll reset chip size and density.
    
    It will be extremely devastating, but not decades worth
    
    The main part of the production, the EUV lithography machines, are made by ASML, a dutch company.
    
    It will be expensive and very annoying, but production can be started elsewhere without too much trouble (just very expensive). TSMC is just currently being (imo rightfully) used as a protection against China
    
    But even TSMC is starting to slowly set foot in other regions
    
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  - mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Even if we magically restart facilities that used to be around, they’ll be on the older, larger architectures we can’t fit in ourr pockets
    
    ok so you’re not wrong on the fundamentals but… you should know - you’d need to go back to the 80s for the fabrication scale to actually have much effect on the size of devices.
    
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Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
star wars also has the wierd thing of having magic in it as well. the night sisters.

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LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It would never occur to me that Star Wars technology would need an explanation besides people inventing things over timke.

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- lovely_reader@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Was R2D2’s narration intended to be subtitled…?
  
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  - LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - ILikeTraaaains@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    youtu.be/fUKxgg4yPxs
    
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  - tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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
    
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  - PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A: beepboop whistle.
    
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Fondots@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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, within 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.

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- tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.”
  
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  - sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s the same, Star Trek uses technobabble and Star Wars uses non-verbal technobabble to explain FTL
    
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drahardja@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The Incom Corporation, of course!

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apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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.

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- dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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njm1314@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Same place any technology comes from I suppose.

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smee@poeng.link ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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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- Scubus@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A long time ago, presumably meaning before humans evolved. The ancient jeh-di invented the sabers, and they eveolved probably around the time life started on earth if i had to guess.
  
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Archangel1313@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s been around for tens of thousands of years, getting added to, modified and improved upon, by every culture that uses it.

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CobblerScholar@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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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Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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Nay@feddit.nl ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve never thought about it before…

It would be fun head-cacon 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.

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- spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Nay@feddit.nl ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s fair
    
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- Lumidaub@feddit.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Nay@feddit.nl ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Just thinking fantastical ideas for fun
    
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- Forester@pawb.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - fox2263@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They were mentioned in Andor.
    
    The rakatan that is, not the rattan furniture empire.
    
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  - Scubus@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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palebluethought@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t think I understand the question. People invented it?

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- spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  People and aliens.
  
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  - jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    aliens are people too, man
    
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  - lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    that’s so discriminating. are ypu saying aliens aren’t people?
    
    from our perspective, everyone in star was is technically an alien, because it’s happening “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”
    
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br3d@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
A few years ago I’d have jokes about data ports being the same fitting as power sockets, but USB-C has ruined that

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jwiggler@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- can@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Lucas had the dream of it in 1980.
  
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tehsYs@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
And how do they know which button to press?

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- andrewta@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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