It's so weird how many sci-fi stories will have technology that is hundreds, thousands, even ten thousands of years old and still just works, whereas in real life, it is a challenge to find 30+ year old technology that is still in an operable state
Even stranger, sci-fi settings where ancient technology just never becomes obsolete.
Battletech has a ton of centuries-old designs that are still totally viable. Star Wars has the hammerhead corvette which has remained in active service for more than three thousand years. The thing should have crumbled to dust by that point!
If you ignore consumer tech, and look at for example ships, you'll find they remain in active service for decades, and get replaced mostly for reasons other than "stopped working".
One thing I find weird about Star Wars is in fact that they seem to change ship designs so fast. Between the prequels and original trilogy in particular, things shouldn't have changed so much. The empire may have pushed in a particular direction more aggressively, but realistically the...
@schratze ... rebels should be re-using so much more from republic times than they do, if only for financial and regulatory reasons. Just look at how F-16s are still in use.
@hazelnot@jens yeah but even so, they refit and improve the F-16 every other year. I'm not sure how comparable a modern F-16 is to an unchanged one from the original production run
@schratze@hazelnot I agree! The slightly reshaped X-Wings from the newer films make perfect sense to me, for example! But the 20 different variations of TIE-Fighter less so.
The difference between the Fighter, Bomber and Interceptor is reasonably well established, and a newer variation of each seems sensible. But I don't see much of a reason for the huge proliferation.
And don't get me started on imperial shuttles. Yes, the three wings with two folding up is iconic. But shuttles are boring.
@schratze@hazelnot I really don't see how every scene in every film gets a unique design for a boring transport craft for which there is little incentive for innovation. I'm pretty sure the interiors get redesigns every decade or so, and it's fair for a particular villain to order a customized version.
It might not be about innovation. The galaxy is a huge place, with lots of planets building completely different ships, and on that scale, there's always room for a custom design for a specific situation, because that situation is probably relevant to dozens of planets.
Is everything built at Corellia? They've certainly got a very wide range of designs, including some incremental improvements, like YT-1300 -> YT-2400, but I don't think it's stated anywhere that there's a hard limit on the number of planets making their own ships. Naboo clearly has its own ships, Mon Cala does. I suspect there's tons of planets with their own ship building industry.
Ina galaxy of hundreds of worlds that seems very little. The wiki page also states that "a shipyard" where ships can be repaired or constructed exists in many places, but we might be talking about something akin to the facilities at Mos Eisley.
Add comment