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Old 09-28-2019, 09:29 AM   #11
Irish Wolf
 
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

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Originally Posted by David Johnston2 View Post
Well yeah. I wrote off KOTOR as a parallel universe long before the books were definitely excluded as having happened in movie continuity and the video games were always lower level than the books. The only way to fit KOTOR into the same universe would be to assume that interstellar civilization collapsed into a Long Night so drastic that they had to reinvent their tech from scratch and still hadn't achieved the same heights.
Oddly, that explanation is kind of implied in the KotOR backstory - the Rakatan invented hyperspace drive and blasters and all that, fell into worship of the Dark Side, and self-destructed (and also ruined some other technological races along the way - the Tusken had just started with interstellar flight when the Rakatan found them, they were enslaved, rebelled, and in retaliation the Rakatan bombed their homeworld until it became the Tatooine we all know today. That's why the Tusken are so insular and xenophobic). Thousands of years later, the first Jedi emerged, rediscovered Rakatan technology, and began the very first Galactic Republic, but every few thousand years a new generation discovers the ancient Sith holocrons, gets all goth about things, creates a new Sith Empire, they fight the Jedi for a while, civilization collapses, the survivors rebuild. Wash, rinse, repeat. The vast majority of the galactic civilizations in the time of KotOR regarded the whole thing as a Jedi Civil War, between two branches of a religion that outsiders didn't really care about.

I think that might be where some of the inspiration for TLJ came from, too. Because the only way to break the cycle would seem to be to stop the Jedi Order from just rebuilding itself using old records, becoming so hidebound that they refuse to learn anything new (as with the librarian in Ep 2 who utterly refused to believe that a planet not listed in the indices could possibly exist), and leading to a world that the young rebel against by rediscovering Sith philosophies. To bring balance to the Force, both the Jedi and the Sith have to end, else it just remains circling around in the same old circle forever.
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Old 09-28-2019, 10:43 AM   #12
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

Also, the time before the 1000 BBY, when Darth Bane created the Rule of Two (referenced in Clone Wars) is called "the Republic Dark Age". According to many sources, during the 2000 years prior to this time, a Jedi sat as Chancellor and the Jedi Order basically ran most of the planets in the Republic; because of the near-constant warfare with the Sith, the Republic basically collapsed and had to be rebuilt - which the Jedi helpfully did, presumably the way they wanted it. And it was still fresh in the minds of Yoda's master when our favorite 900 year old grand master was still a youngling, and who better to ensure the Republic remains the way the Jedi want it than a member of a species where 900 is the average lifespan (the only other species with as long a life cycle are the Hutts). As far as Yoda was concerned, the Republic Dark Age was still "in living memory". Lucas's own timeline had the Sith emerging roughly 2000 BBY, at the start of this Dark Age, with Jedi Master turned Sith Lord Darth Ruin , first of the Lost Twenty (20 Jedi Masters who sat on the Council then left the Order), whose number also included Lord Kaan (leader of the Sith during the time Darth Bane rose to power) and Count Dooku (most recent of the Lost Jedi). The EU timeline has them emerging about 5000 BBY following a Third Great Schism.

And the Revenge of the Sith novelization had him lamenting this fact after his duel with Palpatine. "The Jedi did not change, because I did not allow them to." "The Sith were preparing to fight the new war, while I was preparing the Jedi to fight the old war." And other similar passages.


Getting back to the OP: Star Wars is a TL10^ or TL11^ SafeTech/Emergent Superscience setting. The weaponry is TL11, the superscience is TL11^, and everything else is either TL10 or TL11 but lacking widespread/ubiquitous nanotech. They have self-aware robots who can come with Partial Amnesia after memory wipes, and TL9 bionic prostheses built with TL10/11 materials, but they don't have stuff like swarmwear clothes, brain uploading to droid chassis (General Grievous still had his Kaleesh brain and many of his biological organs despite being 90% metal), matter transporters (except for ancient Rakata, Gree, or Iokath artifacts that baffle the scientists who looked at them circa 3650 BBY), and replicators. Also, other than droid brains they have a miniaturization problem, in that they really don't have miniaturization, going for a "bigger is better" mindframe most of the time. They have cloning, but apparently in the movies they don't have fast-growth cloning chambers able to turn a fetus into an adult in days.

Still, if you want to kick off a scientific revolution in Star Wars, be prepared to face backlash from ultra-orthodox sword-wielding mystics (not to mention pushback from the GM and your fellow players!) and to have it stop looking and feeling like Star Wars. If this is what you want, good luck. If you want a science revolution and still feel like Star Wars.... Not sure how to help with that.
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Old 09-30-2019, 08:14 AM   #13
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Default Re: Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

Probably not that relevant to overall SW canon, but there was a bit in "Han Solo And The Lost Legacy":

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