maglag wrote:So out of curiosity, is there any techno-babble explanation to why star wars ships don't just go faster and faster when their engines are working constantly?
There's no one official explanation, but it probably has something to do with how inertial compensators work. If the outside of the ship is operating under standard "constant thrust equals constant acceleration and normal inertia" physical conditions but the inside of the ship is operating under "one-standard-gravity acceleration perpendicular to the direction of thrust regardless of what crazy maneuvering the ship is doing" physical conditions, that could certainly provide enough of an opposing force to prevent indefinite acceleration.
That, or perhaps either the passive repulsorlifts standard on all spacecraft, or their etheric rudder (a repulsorlift-like device that allows lateral movement without maneuvering thrusters), naturally create drag on the fabric of surrounding space, given that both use that tiny-knots-of-spacetime technology.
It's noted in several places that missiles, ejector seats, and other things that have thrusters but lack repulsorlifts or inertial compensators follow standard "keep going in a straight line until you hit something" physics, so it's definitely not just a case of Star Wars not following normal physics at all.
Mord wrote:The best I can come up with is this: in the Star Wars galaxy, computers are just not very good relative to 2017 Earth, in many of the ways that 2017 Earth excels. Networked systems are virtually nonexistent; information security and authentication technologies are apparently absent; long-distance wireless data transfer is limited to audio, still images, and audio with wavy, flickering monochrome holographic projection; computer targeting assistance looks like Asteroids at best. And we're talking about top of the line military hardware.
This isn't precisely true. The Imperial HoloNet connects every planet in the Empire (and quite a few outside it) with a real-time network of data transmissions through hyperspace, and many references exist to encoding data with Rebel or Imperial ciphers, rotating out-of-date encryptions, code cylinders providing security access for Imperial officers, and the like. So networking and security exist and are widely implemented, but they mostly exist in the background.
In Rogue One, accessing and transmitting a few GB (or TB?) of technical readouts required hauling a physical disk out of storage and slotting it into a planetary-scale radio dish just to get the broadcast into low orbit. The contents of which then had to be saved to a floppy disk and passed around by hand while playing keepaway from Darth Vader. And then jammed in an R2 unit and the events of Star Wars.
This didn't necessarily happen because they
required a planetary-scale transmitter to get the plans to orbit; rather, there happened to be a planetary-scale transmitter nearby that they
could use to get the plans to orbit, and no one had a datapad or the like handy that could read the data, decrypt it, and transmit it in a reasonable amount of time. (Why they didn't is a separate issue; the infiltration mission was a spur-of-the-moment thing and the team seemed not to know what format the data would be stored in, so lacking the appropriate specialized equipment seems reasonable.)
Also keep in mind that the Empire likes its sensor- and comms-jamming technology to the point that in RotJ it can selectively interfere with entire fleets' worth of sensors without them noticing the attempt and comm-jammers are a standard feature on speeder bikes, and the shield around Scarif was said to block high-density transmissions when usually planetary shields don't block comms, so the transmitter dish could also have been used because it was the only thing able to punch through any jamming present.
As to why the data was stored on disks that got passed around, well, it's the same reason that the military air-gaps secure computers and uses paper copies and USBs instead of sending everything over the internet: it's much easier to decrypt information sent like that (particularly if you compromise the routing infrastructure) than to compromise physical media, and you have better control over and knowledge of who gets to handle that data.
If you had the scale of computing power available in some hard sci-fi settings, you would have fleet battles waged across millions of km of empty space, with kinetic kill weapons and asteroids being flung at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. The Death Star would never have been a thing, because you would just give some floating rock a well-aimed push to make it into a mass extinction event.
You could try to do things like that in the SW galaxy, but you would not be able to hit anything smaller than a planet. Even then, the calculations would take relatively huge amounts of CPU time and manpower. And if you missed and hit something you didn't want to hit... "Sorry guys, I was aiming for Alderaan but hit Coruscant. My bad." Not to mention the fact that it appears the galaxy is not very well mapped, so you would be firing without certain knowledge of anything between you and your target.
On the other hand, navigational computers on civilian freighters can do all the complicated astrophysics calculations necessary to map a route from one side of the galaxy to the other while avoiding all hazards in realspace and hyperspace in only a few minutes, so they presumably
could do those sorts of calculations, they just don't, for whatever reason.
So, things are done at speeds and ranges humans can interact with using their unaided senses because they just don't have the ability to do things any better.
[...]
In defense of SW computing technology, they have artificial intelligence cheap as free in addition to whatever is needed to make hyperdrives and hypermatter reactors work.
My theory on why Star Wars tech is the way it is is a combination of two factors: incompletely-understood ancient technology and incredibly powerful AI. It's by no means official, so feel free to disregard it and laugh at me for being dumb.
Here's what we know: The original hyperdrives were developed by the Rakatan Infinite Empire, a highly-advanced civilization whose technology was powered by (and partly functioned using) the Dark Side of the Force. After the Infinite Empire fell ~25,000 years before A New Hope, Humans and Duros engineers were said to have "discovered ways of working around the Force-attuned components of the Rakata technology and produced their own version of the hyperdrive," and the technology spread throughout the galaxy from there.
Not "reverse-engineered the functionality of" and not "independently developed technology based on what they knew of" the original tech, but
worked around the problems, presumably leaving the technology mostly intact and not touching anything they didn't have to. Modern movies-era hyperdrives work on the same principles, and at no point over those many millennia did someone come up with a new and improved method of entering hyperspace. Heck, canonically no one knows how ships slow down to
exit hyperspace, they just sorta...do it.
The mass shadow issue with hyperdrives is similar. Two other ancient races built a Stargate-like system of gates through hyperspace (also incorporating Force-based technology, interestingly enough) that functioned just fine on a planet's surface, well within gravity wells, and Centerpoint Station (another ancient creation by a highly-Force-sensitive species) could fire a repulsor beam through hyperspace which, again, could originate and terminate within gravity wells; however, modern hyperdrives won't function within a mass shadow due to safety limiters, and turning off the safety limiters to jump within a mass shadow anyway will blow your ship to smithereens. And when the Empire was developing Interdictor cruisers, it didn't do so by directly interfering with hyperspace travel (which would be a superior method if the mechanics of hyperspace travel were well-understood), but by generating mass shadows to fool hyperdrive safety governors.
This all points to a civilization that's very good at building, using, and incrementally improving upon hyperdrive technology, but doesn't
really understand it at a fundamental level. Same with blaster technology, which was also mostly reverse-engineered from Rakatan tech; a Rakatan security droid's blaster was considered top-of-the-line during the KotOR era, over 22,000 years after it was built. Same with cloaking technology, where ancient Stygium-crystal-based cloaking devices (Stygium crystals are also Force-attuned, by-the-by) were superior to the Imperial era hybridium-based cloaking devices, being more compact, more energy-efficient, and more user-friendly (in that you could see out of them instead of being blinded yourself).
And same with droids, which leads into my other point. In Star Wars, leaving a droid alone and un-memory-wiped for long enough means that it will develop a distinct personality and become more independent and more capable. Their programming is self-modifying, and this makes them extremely dangerous to a society reliant on droid labor. Droids with "advanced sapience," I guess you'd call it, like R2-D2 can easily slice through military-grade encryption, take over ships and other droids, and so forth. Hence the mandatory memory wipes for droids every so often.
Why not just build droids so that they
don't do that? Presumably because they
can't. We never see any individuals make a droid completely from scratch, just assemble one from existing parts (most importantly using an existing droid "brain"). Droids are made by automated factories, which are made by construction droids, which are made by automated factories, and so on all the way back to droid manufacturing planets like Mechis III that have been pumping out droids since the early Old Republic days. And no one really knows who got the process started, nor does anyone bother having more than a token non-droid presence on such planets, preferring to leave everything up to whatever intelligence controls the manufacturing facilities. It's all probably hackishly pseudo-reverse-engineered from ancient Force-dependent tech like everything else.
So you have a society where technology has been incrementally improving as best it can be without anyone really understanding the fundamental principles, in a galaxy where maybe they
can't understand said fundamental principles--imagine if 99.99% of scientists and engineers just couldn't learn or work with quantum mechanics and all attendant technologies like CPU construction, and only the ones who were "Physics-sensitive" like Einstein or Turing could do anything with them, through inspiration by "the will of the Physics"!
You can't dramatically increase the range of blaster-based weaponry to facilitate long-range precision warfare under Human control, because blaster tech has already been pushed as far as it can go, and shield tech has as well so you're stuck with a frustratingly slow arms race.
You can't entirely computerize your military spacecraft because a group of sufficiently-independent and -intelligent droids could come along and suborn the whole fleet, or the entire fleet could be jammed and blinded with no known countermeasures.
You can't replace your starfighter pilots with drone starfighters and your ground troops with combat drones, because the last time someone tried that the drones started saying "Roger roger!", developing sarcastic senses of humor, and going rogue.
You can't have a well-defended central control computer that can resist such takeover attempts and coordinate the rest of your computerized fleets remotely through a hardened network, because (A) that also failed spectacularly before and (B) the jamming problem again. Plus, your very own central control computer might become too sentient and hijack
itself, and wiping your entire fleet's databanks daily or weekly to keep that from happening simply isn't feasible.
It's basically like the "can't have complex networks because Cylons can hack in and take over from the outside" problem from Battlestar Galactica, crossed with the "can't have anything approaching real AI because they'll gain sapience and take over from the inside" problem from Mass Effect...except that the Galactica can also awaken as a Cylon and even the navigation VIs on the Normandy can spontaneously develop into true AIs.
So everyone is forced to rely on tried-and-true manual technology over automated repulsorcraft, human senses over computer analysis, living breathing people in barely-computerized spacecraft over autonomous drone starships, because they know none of those will go rogue. Everyone focuses on eking out that tiny 0.1% improvement in blaster ranges or data compression or whatever, adding a tiny brick to the massive monument that was the hand-me-down technology from ancient civilizations. Everyone desperately keep on top of the memory-wipe schedule for their droids and hope that the ones who develop sapience are nice people (and not like, say, EV-9D9 who gained sapience and promptly decided to modify other droids to be able to feel pain and then torture them to death, or IG-88 who gained sapience and then tried to make armies of itself) who don't want to bring galactic civilization crashing down around their ears.