Can their still be a science revolution in Star Wars?

[Irish Wolf]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

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.