Modern Realm Management Question

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 2:19 am

So I'm making a modern(ish) realm management system. It is actually for a Star Wars game, but since Star Wars is absolutely not science fiction, it is mostly meant to model 40s era economics IN SPACE. Preferably something that can cover 1850s to 1950s so that different regions of the galaxy can be at different levels of development, but if that's too tricky, I'm sticking with the 1940s IN SPACE theme that the original trilogy had.

Players can run a corporation, and can pay people to exploit resources, which they can then exchange for other resources, with which to create armies and give their enemies a very bad day. Population units are standardized to a certain amount and I've already figured out how much you need to pay individuals for doing a certain job, but I'm having trouble figuring out what percentage of a community needs to be doing a certain job. Base unit is ten million people, but if ten million people live out in mining country, a significant chunk of those ten million are going to be working at cantinas or grocers or repair shops or transportation or other jobs that spring up around the mining communities without being directly employed by the mining company. This is particularly true since every unit of 10 million is assumed to have a small city somewhere, which will have all manner of taxi drivers and barbers and retail outlets that aren't employed by the mining company.

And this is a good thing, because paying the salary of even one unit of a full ten million people for even a low-paying amount of labor would cost billions of credits, and I'd like my players to be able to break into the colonization game sooner than never.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 4:22 am

Is this a system in itself, or to be attached to a starwars system already in place?

Wulfbanes · Post by **Wulfbanes** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 11:02 am

There's no actual question in your post, Chamomile.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 9:57 pm

Yeah, communication is not my strong suit, particularly when trying to boil a very complicated system into one particular problem. I need to know what percentage of people in a mining/farming/whatever community would actually be directly working for and having their salaries paid by a mining/farming/whatever company.

@Wiseman: It's attached to Saga Edition.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 10:18 pm

Did you have a particular planet or biome in mind? What about era? Old Republic, Empire, or New Republic?

Regardless, Star Wars' technology is pretty advanced. No shit, right? It's not much of a stretch of the imagination that the number of farmers is restricted to a small handful of engineers and homesteaders -- like Luke Skywalker. I don't think you'd lose anything by just declaring that agriculture was bankable technology that required few operators for its impact on the economy; akin to Hollywood or modern finance.

Other industries might require a bit more thought. On one hand, Star Wars has plenty of droids. On the other hand, Star Wars is also gritty as shit and we know that in the Tatooine outskirts and almost certainly within the Empire space life is cheap and shit is expensive. Jerjerrod specifically complained to Vader about needing more men -- not material, more men. It's definitely not a stretch to think that the construction and even mining industries in Star Wars would require a lot of tiny workers hitting things with wrenches and pickaxes.

What percentage of people work for a particular non-service industry is up for debate. On one hand, it should actually be pretty small for any particular one, especially since it's THE FUTURE (that happened a long time ago). On the other hand, we know that in failed and authoritarian states labor gets wasted like fuck. If you told me that 70 or even 90% of the people on the Death Star II were grunt workers responsible for putting pieces of metal where their bosses told them I would totally believe you -- even though in just the modern or even barely pre-atomic U.S. military, that kind of labor ratio would be fucking insane. Extrapolating that to the rest of the Star Wars universe (again, era is very important) it's not hard to imagine a feudal society where the vast majority of people in Empire space or the badlands get shuffled around in unskilled jobs as the Xizors and Hutts see fit. And let's not even get into the racial supremacy of the Empire. Heck, I can see a post-RotJ cold war where the rebels are able to hold economic and material parity with the Empire just by not having a business and social model that's utter shit.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 10:27 pm

Yeah, trust me, I've gone down the "Star Wars is the future" rabbit hole and the answer to that is that Star Wars is not at all the future. Droids are people or draft animals who eat batteries instead of food and that's it, full stop. They are not more efficient or less rebellious than organic laborers. Hypertech does not remove the need for assembly workers because reasons. Star Wars is the 1940s in space. Whatever economic system used in Star Wars should be transferable to an Indiana Jones-esque game with minimum fuss, because any attempt to actually apply the effects of hypertech to Star Wars in any arena but travel speed causes the setting to become unrecognizable almost immediately.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 11:04 pm

Eh, remember the Geonosian droid factory. I do not recall much in the way of physical labor in there. Likewise, there's the whole business with IG-88 and the automated factory planet in the EU.

That incident may explain why they don't like fully-autonomous droid labor so much. But they do use fairly high-tech assembly gear, so while there's less equipment per person than you might expect they do make a lot more stuff than modern eras.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 11:11 pm

You know, that matches up pretty well with what we've seen onscreen. So, if you're deferring to pre-Atomic Age economics and demographics for your Star Wars economy except when it explicitly contradicts what we've seen on screen, here would be the highlights:

The first big exception: I'm positive that only a fraction of a percent of the population would be working in agriculture. Even if we just focus on pre-Atomic Age agriculture the amount of people working in this industry has already been imploding; and yet I'm positing that Star Wars' is at least two orders of magnitude lower. Why? Because Tatooine and Coruscant and Cloud City exist, that's fucking why.
Despite there being droids being able to communicate with organics, the actual labor-saving that droids do is barely above that of non-droids and almost certainly is on an energy input-per-energy input basis much less, as macabre as that sounds. Hell, people think that clones that take several years to build are more efficient than droids. It might be better to think of droids as machines or programs instead of workers in their own right. Thus, the thought of R2D2 doing even the rudimentary parts of C3P0's job or vice-versa is comical -- amusing as the image of protocol droids in an Astromech pit might be.
Organized labor is practically non-existent within civilization's confines. Jedis can barely give a fuck about slavery and cloning, how do you think that they'd feel about worker rights? Anyone below job creator factory boss level you can completely ignore, because you can always just bring in a new set of clones/oppressed aliens/droids for the workers. Life on Coruscant for the plebes seriously looks like something between Brave New World and Judge Dredd. Shiny new toys like flying cars and deathsticks are a strict upper-middle-class privilege -- and that was during the pre-Empire days, to boot.
In another departure, actual warfare (contracting labor mechanics) is extremely mechanized, with battles revolving around a few superweapons with infantry almost entirely depreciated. According to the Star Wars wikia, the Death Star I's armament and demographics is seriously comparable to the current United States' military. I was expecting a Starfighter armament in the tens of thousands, but it's just in the thousands. But that makes sense, because the Empire is canonically able to curbstomp planetary forces with just a handful of AT's and ships -- assuming that they just don't bomb the fuck out of people they hate. We'll just pretend that the battle on Endor was non-canon, by the way.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Dec 25, 2014 11:51 pm

Query: I haven't read nor played much of the New Republic stuff, but, isn't it supposed to be pretty shiny and idealistic and shit with things like freedom of religion and droid rights and non-human parliament leaders and so-on? And they get their warfare advantage not by sheer numbers and industry but by a better social organization? Like, you're explicitly playing the Tau going up against the IoM except without any of that shitdark nonsense in it.

If so, would it even be possible to do a Star Wars-style Logistics and Dragons set in the New Republic era without completely upending the assumptions we've been making in this thread?

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 1:13 am

The era I'm working in is actually well before KotOR and not long after the formation of the Republic. A group of mine is doing a Star Wars alternate history thing where we play out each era, with the group making changes to the course of events and thus creating an alternate timeline as we go along. We're about 2/3s of the way done with the formation of the Republic era and we're focusing on the Xim era next, with a modification to the timeline so that Xim's encounter with the Hutt Empire and contact with the Republic are coterminous. The exact state of the Republic (if it even exists) has not yet been decided for certain, but it's nearly guaranteed not to be anything like the Empire. The players aren't even remotely in favor of the one faction that advocates anything other than democracy, and they'd have to screw things up pretty hard to see that one faction win. A secondary goal of this system is to have it model different economic and social policies, but I want the system to be basically functional before I bother with anything that complicated.

Currently, in an ideal setup, 25% of the units are dedicated to farming. Now, some percentage of the population of those units will not actually be farmers, and I do not know what that percentage is. What I do know is that all of those ten million people in an agricultural community do not produce any other resources in significant enough quantities to be important to global trade, let alone galactic trade. In addition to those 25%, another 25% are in the power industry, and another 25% are, on a properly developed world, in the Electronics industry. That Electronics industry must be fed by a machines industry which takes up an additional 6.25% of your population, and a metal industry to feed that which is another 6.25%. That leaves 12.5% of your population free to work in entertainment, research, military, and medicine. This is an ideal scenario, however, and many planets face resource shortages that require them to dedicate more of their population to food or power, which in turn prevents them from developing a needy electronics industry.

Worlds can pass through five phases: Primitive, agricultural, industrial, commercial, and luxury. Each one opens up new industries (you need weapons, machines, and ships, an industrial product, to sustain a basic military, and you need electronics and medicine, commercial products, to get advanced and elite units) but also requires that you supply your citizens with more products or else they will become criminals. A sufficiently high crime roll (or a food shortage, regardless of the abundance of other goods the population wants) can lead to riots and revolution, which can halt production on a planet and cause total societal collapse. If that planet was vital to the sector's economy, and if the sector was in turn vital to the galactic economy, it can cause ripple effects that devastate the entire galaxy, so much so that after a certain amount of damage to the economy I actually give up tracking all the ripples, throw my hands up in the air, and say "everything is ashes and chaos now."

Coruscant sustains itself off of the Agricultural Circuit, a string of farming planets just to its galactic south which already canonically exists. Tattooine sustains itself by having 2/3s of its population be moisture farmers. Cloud City trades for food just like Coruscant, only they don't have to trade for nearly as much because their population isn't nearly as large.

The assumptions being made in this thread are absolutely useless for my purposes, not only because the Galactic Empire is not a thing (and may never be) but also because if I wanted a grimdark galactic hellscape space fantasy I would be playing 40k and not Star Wars. I want neither post-scarcity Star Trek utopias nor hopeless pitchblack Warhammer nightmares.

Also, to put things in perspective for scale: Coruscant in the Xim era has a population of 80 billion. This is a little less than one tenth of their population in the modern era. It also gives them enough spare population that, if only they could find the metal to make the weapons to arm them, they would have a standing army of somewhere around six hundred million soldiers. For the Galactic Empire, which controls not only a Coruscant with ten times that population but hundreds more worlds (and that's after I've pared things down to only worlds that are important to the logistics or the narrative, removing hundreds of thousands of unnamed worlds not marked on any map), throwing 2 million people at the Death Star isn't even close to an indication that infantry have become irrelevant.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 1:57 am

Well, the combined population of the crop worlds feeding Coruscant is very probably not 16 billion. While of course things have changed considerably, Star Wars has a fairly consistent kind of tech, and as of the Galactic Empire era they totally did have worlds covered pretty much entirely in cropland and largely worked by machinery, and as of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion those did mostly depend on droids. During the invasion some worlds did switch over to manual labor performed by refugees as part of an effort to appease the Vong (they use engineered lifeforms and consider machines in general and droids in particular blasphemous abominations for historical reasons) but there was every indication that the labor was generally performed primarily by droids.

That said, production of, say, Star Destroyers is totally done with the help of a bunch of guys who go around in vacuum suits with tools. I am not sure how much of the work those guys do and how much is done by droids those guys watch, however.

Overall, I would say that the number of people working agriculture is in general much lower, although of course the farming worlds have almost every member of their relatively small populations involved or supporting, while lots of people do industrial work and simply produce much more stuff than pre-atomic Earth.

Also, I don't think the last three phases work as phases. Kuat, Duros, Fondor, and suchlike are very firmly industrial worlds and produce vast quantities of the most advanced military gear, whereas I genuinely cannot remember any physical object described as being made on Courscant. They do have giant droids that make skyscrapers and presumably have some local production capacity, but not enough for export. I'd say make phase 2 "resource" (it might be all about the mining and import food) and then have phase 3 fork into those three categories.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 2:12 am

name_here wrote:Well, the combined population of the crop worlds feeding Coruscant is very probably not 16 billion.

There's eighteen of them, so 16 billion is a lowball estimate. The Ag Circuit could trivially sustain a population of 30-40 billion.

While of course things have changed considerably, Star Wars has a fairly consistent kind of tech, and as of the Galactic Empire era they totally did have worlds covered pretty much entirely in cropland and largely worked by machinery, and as of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion those did mostly depend on droids.

Ah. Here we see the problem. Which is that you're relying on the EU, which consistently tried to turn Star Wars into sci-fi. And failed. Massive droid farms is something that's way out of place in a universe where the Death Star faced labor shortages. The EU is poorly thought out and internally contradictory, and very often tries to turn Star Wars into something it was never meant to be. Ignore all of its implications on tech levels. I care about exactly two things: The movies and the BioWare games. I could possibly be persuaded to also care about the Thrawn trilogy.

Also, I don't think the last three phases work as phases. Kuat, Duros, Fondor, and suchlike are very firmly industrial worlds and produce vast quantities of the most advanced military gear, whereas I genuinely cannot remember any physical object described as being made on Courscant.

You're getting hung up on semantics. The Kuat sector has a bunch of commercial worlds whose 12.5% spare population produces machines, electronics, weapons, medicine, and especially ships, everything you need to churn out elite units. Kuat being a commercial world doesn't mean that all of its citizens do have all of food, power, and electronics, it only means that they expect to have all of that, and even if they do have all of that it doesn't mean they have very large apartments.

EDIT: Also, as an addendum, many, many writers are stupid and believe that being mean to people magically makes them more productive workers. Any of this that has wormed its way into any part of the Star Wars universe, no matter how popular or well-known, is absolutely being chucked right out the window. If you want to churn out the most advanced weapons in the galaxy, you need to have a healthy middle class with a strong university system that churns out the brightest engineers in the galaxy. If you are an industrial world with no middle class to speak of, you also have no engineers, and therefore the best you can do is produce lots and lots of ships, weapons, and machines, with which to trade for the medicine and electronics you will require to produce advanced and elite units. More likely, industrial worlds take advantage of the fact that fully 50% of their population can be dedicated to something other than sustaining their own internal economy in order to produce absurdly massive amounts of basic guard/marine units.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 2:33 am

I will point out that the movies also contain the Geonosian Droid Factory, and while the precise force-based capacity to generate fleets is lost technology the Bioware games contain the Star Forge. Also, agricultural worlds are highly likely to have very low populations because they are kind of supposed to have a huge amount of cropland.

Also, if you have a kind of world called "industrial" and Kuat (the planet) does not count, you should definitely change your naming convention.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 3:03 am

The demand-based productivity track leads to some pretty silly terminology - in particular you're labeling worlds by what they consume rather than what they produce, which is just Wrong. When you say "industrial world", I (and probably everyone else) expect that to mean a world with lots of industrial production. If you must label worlds by demand, go with some kind of development rating system that's just numbers, because your shipyards are getting called industrial no matter what.

Your agricultural and power requirements seem pretty high. I'd expect agriculture to be more like 10% of your allocatable productivity if it's being done in fertile regions. Power is something I'd probably just roll into other industries - it takes more power to run a welder than a computer, and how much of it you need depends a lot on what everyone else is doing.

Also, you're making an assumption that the designers, the manufacturers, and the troops have to live in the same place, which is not at all true. They don't even have to live on the same planet. Kuat can go ahead and be a Dickensian hellhole of weapons factories, while the advanced designs come from white picket fence suburbs on Correllia. It's a galactic economy, and there's plenty of room for specialization.

For elite units, there's a lot of factors going into that. Of course you need to give the troops food, medicine, electronics and the very latest in weapons technology, but that doesn't mean that's the baseline where they come from. I don't think Star Wars plays with that too much, even in the EU, but you could potentially recruit from Coruscant gangsters or even savages from hell worlds, as long as you can train them up as riflemen. Your ships' officers, fighter pilots, tank commanders and such will need to be from sophisticated backgrounds, but I don't think that applies to the grunts. Heck, it might even be cheaper to recruit from the less developed planets because their definition of "luxury" is cheaper.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 3:22 am

I gather that Kuat is pretty classy, though I haven't read much of the EU that really visits the shipyard worlds, and most of the industrial work is in orbital foundries because of course capital ships aren't necessarily capable of entering and leaving atmospheres. That's definitely how Fondor does things. Then there's Duro, which is kind of the opposite; the planet eventually became (it's still alright during the Xim era) a near-uninhabitable hellscape of toxic smog that requires sealed domes and environmental suits because they had lots of factories and lax environmental standards, but the orbital cities are pretty nice. Most of the actual production is done up there, with automated systems handling the stuff that gets done planetside because horrible choking death.

Yes, Star Wars technology can support large populations and massive production without severe pollution issues. Duro just didn't.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 3:43 am

The demand-based productivity track leads to some pretty silly terminology - in particular you're labeling worlds by what they consume rather than what they produce, which is just Wrong.

No, I introduced the label in that order because I wasn't expecting to explain the whole system (and in fact still have not), but in fact the label represents both what the people want to consume and what they are able to produce. Since the increase in demand is very expensive to deal with one way or another, it is unlikely that anyone will spend the time and money to upgrade themselves to commercial, invest in the electronics needed to satisfy the new expectations of their population or in the law enforcement to subdue them, and then do nothing but continue to produce industrial-grade products. While it is technically possible for a commercial world to export nothing but industrial products, it's a bizarre enough result that I'm not super worried about it.

Your agricultural and power requirements seem pretty high. I'd expect agriculture to be more like 10% of your allocatable productivity if it's being done in fertile regions.

25% of population units in rural areas is actually a Hell of a lowball according to my design goal, being closer to the modern number than the 1940 number I'm shooting for.

zeruslord wrote:Kuat can go ahead and be a Dickensian hellhole of weapons factories, while the advanced designs come from white picket fence suburbs on Correllia. It's a galactic economy, and there's plenty of room for specialization.

Yes - this would be represented by Kuat being an industrial world that produces weapons, ships, and machines, while Corellia supplies electronics and medicine to clones grown on Kamino, who go on to become your elite troops. This is not a perfect representation of what happens but it works fine as an abstraction. I'm open to more precise systems if you have one to propose, but have no intention of developing it myself, because what I have now functions just fine for my purposes.

For elite units, there's a lot of factors going into that. Of course you need to give the troops food, medicine, electronics and the very latest in weapons technology, but that doesn't mean that's the baseline where they come from. I don't think Star Wars plays with that too much, even in the EU, but you could potentially recruit from Coruscant gangsters or even savages from hell worlds, as long as you can train them up as riflemen. Your ships' officers, fighter pilots, tank commanders and such will need to be from sophisticated backgrounds, but I don't think that applies to the grunts. Heck, it might even be cheaper to recruit from the less developed planets because their definition of "luxury" is cheaper.

This is how it works already. The world that produces the weapons, ships, medicine, and electronics necessary to creating an elite unit does not have to be the one who supplies the actual population who becomes that elite unit. If you don't need food, agricultural worlds can still be useful as a great source of spare population because they're low need which means 66-75% of their population is available to be used as military units, which is probably more than you can supply anyway.

EDIT: Also, while I'm not opposed to discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the system in general, it really would be nice if someone would actually solve the problem I came here with. I need to know how much of these 10 million people need to be paid directly by the company that wants what they're manufacturing, and how many of them will be barbers and garbage truck drivers who find employment serving the needs of the population.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 4:03 am

Back up. You are saying that it is most likely planets which produce Imperial Star Destroyers will be unable to produce electronics.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 4:21 am

name_here wrote:Back up. You are saying that it is most likely planets which produce Imperial Star Destroyers will be unable to produce electronics.

No. An Imperial Star Destroyer is not "ships" it is presumably an elite marine unit, which means it requires population, weapons, ships, medicine, and electronics. Although it is possible that Kuat does not actually produce the electronics used to make it, but rather imports them. Even in that case, Kuat is not literally incapable of producing any electronics, just not enough to matter at the level of abstraction the logistics game runs on.

If all you're going to do is stare slackjawed at efforts to abstract things, may I recommend you never again touch any conversation about modeling any kind of economics in a tabletop game ever? Yes, an awful lot of things are going to be oversimplified. This is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that we are modeling the interactions between an amount of people so enormous that the numbers used to describe them sound made up.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 4:45 am

An Imperial Star Destroyer is in fact a ship, originally designed and largely produced by Kuat Drive Yards. Now, the crews and ground troops are usually drawn from elsewhere, but the hyperdrives, turbolaser batteries, and other ship components are made in Kuati factories. Because this is Star Wars and ships run on electronics. There's abstraction and then there's dumb. Declaring that planets which can produce meaningful quantities of hyper-capable starships cannot produce meaningful quantities of consumer electronics because it's too technically complicated for their workforce instead of because they have chosen to dedicate their workforce to ships instead falls solidly into the latter category.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 5:04 am

I've run this system by an awful lot of people. You are the first one who hasn't been able to grasp that the "ships" resource does not literally refer to every single ship that can possibly be produced, and that certain ships will in fact have to have weapons or advanced electronics attached to them before they are complete. You are also the first one to assume that the electronics that go into any kind of starship must necessarily be as advanced and difficult to manufacture as consumer electronics. What you are complaining about is not any kind of actual inconsistency, but that the magical Star Wars hypertech in my system doesn't work exactly the same as you pictured magical Star Wars hypertech working. But Star Wars tech is magic and the only thing that it has to conform to is what we see in the source material, and since the source material is contradictory the only thing I care about is the popular and well-known source material. In none of that does anyone declare that the electronics in trendy datapads are no more difficult to engineer or produce than what's in the Millenium Falcon.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 12:51 pm

Chamomile wrote:You are the first one who hasn't been able to grasp that the "ships" resource does not literally refer to every single ship that can possibly be produced, and that certain ships will in fact have to have weapons or advanced electronics attached to them before they are complete. You are also the first one to assume that the electronics that go into any kind of starship must necessarily be as advanced and difficult to manufacture as consumer electronics.

As far as I can recall, every ship of any size in Star Wars is full of wires. Even little things like X-Wings are full of wires. When a panel opens up in the Millennium Falcon, it's full of wires. When they plug R2D2 into an X-Wing, it's full of wires. The idea that space ships in Star Wars aren't basically the most advanced and complicated electronics in the setting is totally insane to me, and nothing you've said on this point makes any sense.

-Username17

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 1:38 pm

Chamomile wrote:The EU is poorly thought out and internally contradictory, and very often tries to turn Star Wars into something it was never meant to be. Ignore all of its implications on tech levels. I care about exactly two things: The movies and the BioWare games. I could possibly be persuaded to also care about the Thrawn trilogy.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 2:48 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
Chamomile wrote:You are the first one who hasn't been able to grasp that the "ships" resource does not literally refer to every single ship that can possibly be produced, and that certain ships will in fact have to have weapons or advanced electronics attached to them before they are complete. You are also the first one to assume that the electronics that go into any kind of starship must necessarily be as advanced and difficult to manufacture as consumer electronics.
As far as I can recall, every ship of any size in Star Wars is full of wires. Even little things like X-Wings are full of wires. When a panel opens up in the Millennium Falcon, it's full of wires. When they plug R2D2 into an X-Wing, it's full of wires. The idea that space ships in Star Wars aren't basically the most advanced and complicated electronics in the setting is totally insane to me, and nothing you've said on this point makes any sense.

-Username17

Nah. They have panels full of wires like a house has panels full of wires, or a car has panels full of wires. That doesn't make them especially advanced.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 4:52 pm

I feel pretty confident in stating that you don't generally beat navicomps and hyperdrives for complicated. The wiring itself may not be super complicated, but the stuff it connects is. The Falcon is outdated, but I am highly dubious it is less complex than top-of-the-line datapads from when it was new.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Fri Dec 26, 2014 5:45 pm

Kaelik wrote:
Chamomile wrote:The EU is poorly thought out and internally contradictory, and very often tries to turn Star Wars into something it was never meant to be. Ignore all of its implications on tech levels. I care about exactly two things: The movies and the BioWare games. I could possibly be persuaded to also care about the Thrawn trilogy.

HA*63

Am not get it. Are you object to specific choice of which bits of the EU to ignore ("all of it except Bioware and maybe Thrawn") or to the very idea of ignoring large swathes of the EU (spoilers, Disney are doing exactly that).