Nothing much changes in 3000 years?

[Revvion]

While i sometimes wished they strayed a bit more from the movies. For example is it just me or did droids not evolve(get more advanced) at all, except that maybe the protocol droids know more languages in the movies. But still its understandable.

 

And of course:

Of course, through all this? No one...Absolutely no one has decided to fix the blue hologram flickering thingy.

[DarthMarcin]

And for thousands years Jedi deflect blaster shots.

Everytime I think about it, I imagine Trinity with her good old Beretta pointing at stupid Jedi, saying: "Deflect this!"

[AbsolutGrndZero]

The thing is, the Star Wars galaxy the idea is that the technology has stagnated. Blasters, ships, hyperspace they got it all. What else is there but doomsday stuff? 3000 years later.. We still got blasters, ships, hyperspace.. What else is there but doomsday stuff?

 

That's why nothing is different... a blaster is a blaster.. what you want a hand-held blaster with the power of the Death Star? Shoot the planet at your feet and blow it up?

 

The story is in the war between Republic and Empire in making doomsday weapons because that's all that's left... blasters kill people, what more can they do? Ships enter hyperspace and travel nearly instantaneously... what more can they do?

[LizardSF]

ancient egypt's first pharaoh ruled around 3,000 BCE. the last (cleopatra vii) died around 30 bce. not much changed in those 3,000 years.

 

so what's your point op?

 

I think I have a new point: Whoever is teaching history these days is doing a crappy job, if you think nothing changed between 3000 BCE and 30 BCE. Even in Egypt.

 

During that time, the gods changed. The architecture changed. The technology changed. The borders of the kingdom changed. Powers rose. Powers fell. While it's impossible to know without sound recordings, it is almost certain that an Egyptian of 30 BCE would not be able to talk to an Egyptian of 3000 BCE, even if they believed they were speaking the same language.

 

The idea that the world was this stagnant, dead, place until about the 1500s is one of the cherished myths of the modern West, but it takes about a month of studying history to realize how untrue it was. Change was much SLOWER then, true, but hardly non-existent, and the closer you look, the more change you see.

[LizardSF]

In 3000 years Alderaan will go from lush green forests to an asteroid field being orbited by a moon...wait that's no moon.

 

Mad props to you.

[LizardSF]

I have always thought that the stagnation was due to the pervasive nature of the Force. The mere presence of it has affected the entirety of the galaxy. It has brought about the Sith and the Jedi who both have tried to shape the fate of the galaxy in their own images.

 

The many galactic wars have all been somehow connected to Force users (both Sith and Jedi), with the galaxy being nothing more than a social experiment gone awry.

 

discuss....

 

That's actually a very interesting concept. The Force basically traps the galaxy in specific patterns of culture and behavior, allowing minor variants but ultimately repeating itself constantly.

[gendestus]

Here's my complaint...

 

The KOTOR games... while they certainly had similarities to the movies... did have a different feel and presentation (especially the first one).

 

When videos and trailers started popping out for this game... It seemed like they had abandoned a lot of that KOTOR identity in an attempt to become something more people could identify with. Hell... I remember watching the first trailer (Return) and hearing the smuggler say lines (in part) from Han... and how the armor of Republic troopers resembled clone troopers from the movies. Then you throw in the Empire's badge thing on its officers (those red/blue square things) and Star Destroyer like crafts... and the game just seems to lose that 3000 year spread.

 

So yeah... I understand your complaint, and share in a portion of it...

 

Does it really disrupt my desire to play and experience the game?, eh... not really... not for the time being.

 

I do however wish they had not gone with so many obvious parallels to the movies though... I mean... looking at the Jedi Temple getting a craft flown into it... would have easily allowed them to make it look like whatever they wanted to... getting destroyed then and rebuilt later to how we see it in the movies. ... But oh well.

 

As for all the stuff about technology changes and wars and the loss of progress etc etc etc... Bypass jumping all the mental hurdles to justify things to yourself and just call it what it is and figure out if you like it or not. Just two cents nobody wants...

 

my take on the empire badge thing and the clone trooper armor is that Emporer Palpatine was recreating the sith empire and adopted a modernized sith logo and the republic holds on to it's military's uniform visual aesthetics much like the Marines today.

[Aesri]

I've posted on this issue in other threads, and it surprises me how often the simple explanation for this phenomena is missed by so many.

 

It's called a technological plateau.

 

The advance of technology (I'm talking invention, not merely innovation of an already extant idea. IE; commercially viable flying cars for wide public consumption as opposed to merely a spiffy new ground car model with wicked new extras) is driven by need. If a society has a particular need met, unless/until the need for a different approach or supplanting need is introduced societies will by nature use what works.

 

In the Star Wars universe, they've had interstellar travel for +20,000 years. Hyperdrive works. Systems tied to it (navigation, etc) changed dramatically but the basic mechanics of FTL-flight in SW has pretty much been the same for all that time. Why? It works.

 

Flying cars. Blasters. Droids. Computers. All of it. It's all a matter of shades of innovation that technology has developed for most of galactic history. The ships got better, but their overall qualities (shields, guns, etc) aren't dramatically different from their predecessors aside from innovation...that being the quality of said things or complexity of said things or robustness of said things.

 

American Natives used bows and arrows quite successfully for centuries until the adoption of an advanced technological tool...the gun...was forced on them by the introduction of said tool into the competition for land/food/etc by European powers. They NEEDED the guns, as the bows just couldn't compete. However, notice that the gun hasn't, in it's fundamental mechanical properties much since the Chinese played with them way back. Yes, they're far more advanced....but it's not a totally different type of weapon. A mechanical reaction chemical trigger ignites a propellant that launches a physical projectile at the target. Improvements to that are all over the place, but with all things considered equal, put a .38 cal pistol and a flintlock in front of someone from a few hundred years back and they're not really going to take all that long figuring out that "point-pull trigger-bang-target hit/miss" is the expected outcome and they'll adapt.

 

Now, put a flintlock and a Microwave Laser Emitter in front of the same ancestor and he'll look at them both, pick up the flintlock and if you USE the MLE in front of him he'll be pointing the pistol at your head screaming "WITCH!".

 

Technology doesn't appear to change or advance much in SW because it hasn't NEEDED to in most ways for at least 5-6,000 years, their time. Things are innovated, but no invention is required in most every avenue of technological need. Sure, it does happen, but at their advanced level they simply don't have the same need that we might; so comparisons to Earth-style technological advancement don't jibe. It's a totally different animal when you're discussing a galactic spanning civilization with thousands of advanced species and technological sources/requirements/realities.

[eimi]

My only real problem with the setting of the game right now is the ships. Either the Imperial ships should look less advanced than they do, I mean seriously their dreadnought looks like it could easily tango with a Star Destroyer, or the Republic's ships should not have been designed to mimic the Rebel Alliances. The Republic fleet looks so ragtag and ragged compared to the Imperial one. It is no wonder they lost if the were trying to throw what look like weaponized merchant ships against that war machine...

[Aesri]

My only real problem with the setting of the game right now is the ships. Either the Imperial ships should look less advanced than they do, I mean seriously their dreadnought looks like it could easily tango with a Star Destroyer, or the Republic's ships should not have been designed to mimic the Rebel Alliances. The Republic fleet looks so ragtag and ragged compared to the Imperial one. It is no wonder they lost if the were trying to throw what look like weaponized merchant ships against that war machine...

 

Well the Harrower-class Dreadnought is actually more on the scale of the Venator-class Star Destroyer (granted it's classed as a "star destroyer" but Dreadnaught-class vessels have been, by and large, the largest of a given navy's war vessels in the Star Wars timeline. Considering that, what I said in my other post still stands.

 

The Harrower and Venator class vessels are of similar size/mass but note that one is classed as a "dreadnaught" and the other a 'destroyer". That's a fairly big difference when you take into account that the Harrower-class vessels are the Sith Empire's top ship-of-the-line thus far; the vessels tasked with the heaviest duty in their invasion of the galaxy at large. However, the Venator is shown multiple times to be effective at destroyer/escort duties but it's outclassed by the vessels of it's day that are classified as "dreadnaughts".

 

That's exactly what I was addressing. Innovation improved on design, function and ability, even size to great extent, but overall when we see them we're presented with "big ships vs. big ships" with no scale to measure what the meaningful differences are until the EU material opens that up to us. That material shows that a front line dreadnaught from TOR and a frontline dreadnaught from say, 1 ABY, are VERY different vessels. Compare a Harrower-class Dreadnaught to an Executor-class Dreadnaught and the difference is striking. Innovation...great huge gobs of it, but nothing that screams "HEY, THIS IS COMPLETELY NEW"...as what we would see if a new need were to require true invention.

 

The Venator-class was around 1100+ meters long. The Victory-class Star Destroyer (another design from precisely the same time period) was 900 meters long but was designed for a different role than the Venator-class. The Imperator-class (from the OT) was 1.6km long and was a far beefier step-up from the Victory with it's own set of give/take when it came to ability and desired function. The Executor-class Dreadnaught is a whopping 19k long...but it's full of innovation on tech that's been around and will BE around for however long that technology continues to serve the needs as effectively as it has for the last several thousand years.

 

The Republic navel vessels; the Hammerhead-class Cruiser, Interdictor-class Cruisers, Centurion-class battlecruiser, and Invincible-class Heavy Dreadnaughts, were no lightweights. While the Republic Navy had been designed and built for peacekeeping and in hurried response to internal strife, the Sith Empire's Naval forces had been specifically building for a war of attritioln for millenia. They had numbers and had specifically fielded fleets designed for one thing, to raze the Republic in entirety.

 

What keeps that from happening? Say yay for the non-technological affluent impact of the Force on the weaving of destiny.

[krisslanza]

I love your posts Aesri.

 

I'm going to get lost looking up starship specs now...