Star Wars is a nice movie but it’s a pretty mediocre SF. They mix very low and very high technology in mostly absurd ways. You have FTL and lasers but robots are mostly shit, AI is very basic and its use weirdly limited, warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space. I know they did it like this because of cinematography but as a SF it’s just not that good. So I really wouldn’t bother trying to rationalize the tech. It’s mostly like this because “it looked nice”.
warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space
not even that. Star wars warfare looks like what someone from the boomer generation thought warfare looked like in WW2. But really it’s what movie warfare from WW2 looked like, because showing actual war would confuse and bore people. lucas was enamored with serials.
I meant “today” in SF sense, like current century vs some time 1000 years from now :) Of course your right, the battle scenes were inspired by WW2 movies.
My favorite SF warfare descriptions come from Banks. Battleships firing at each other from light years away or hiding inside suns, everything controlled by AI, microsecond long battles. Absolutely not adaptable to screen.
banks / culture series offers a lot of fascinating insights. but yeah, hard to adapt for movie audiences… similar to the constraints of storytelling and level of nerdistry you can cram into a film frame… I felt the same way about Tom Clancy’s mil-fantasy level of intense inspection about the hardware and users motivations… but he rarely went full silly like Dale Brown with the execution, but very little of clancy’s obsession with detail gets into the films made from his IP.
thinking about these tropes has led me to think I need to make some games exploring them heh
In one part, two characters are speaking over “radio” comms using code talk - presumably in case there are any Empire operatives listening in. And prior to that they kept missing each other because they weren’t at their radios at the same time. Derp!
So you’ve got hyperspace travel and laser guns, but no data encryption, or text messaging. Alright then.
Except of course, they do have those things when the plot calls for it, and that’s another reason to consider it fantasy. In most sci-fi the rules stay pretty consistent, but in fantasy it’s flexible.
so re: encryption - if you can muddle your messages meaning and transmit in unencrypted mode, that convo can hide in the huge volume of calls happening all the time.
once you go through the trouble of encrypting it and running it through spectrum hopping and other security methods, you’re simply pointing two REALLY BIG FUCKING ARROWS at the convo participants that say “THESE GUYS HAVE SECRETS THAT SHOULD BE REVEALED WITH BRUTAL METHODS”, your encrypting the messages actually draws attention.
Star Wars is a nice movie but it’s a pretty mediocre SF. They mix very low and very high technology in mostly absurd ways. You have FTL and lasers but robots are mostly shit, AI is very basic and its use weirdly limited, warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space. I know they did it like this because of cinematography but as a SF it’s just not that good. So I really wouldn’t bother trying to rationalize the tech. It’s mostly like this because “it looked nice”.
not even that. Star wars warfare looks like what someone from the boomer generation thought warfare looked like in WW2. But really it’s what movie warfare from WW2 looked like, because showing actual war would confuse and bore people. lucas was enamored with serials.
I meant “today” in SF sense, like current century vs some time 1000 years from now :) Of course your right, the battle scenes were inspired by WW2 movies.
My favorite SF warfare descriptions come from Banks. Battleships firing at each other from light years away or hiding inside suns, everything controlled by AI, microsecond long battles. Absolutely not adaptable to screen.
banks / culture series offers a lot of fascinating insights. but yeah, hard to adapt for movie audiences… similar to the constraints of storytelling and level of nerdistry you can cram into a film frame… I felt the same way about Tom Clancy’s mil-fantasy level of intense inspection about the hardware and users motivations… but he rarely went full silly like Dale Brown with the execution, but very little of clancy’s obsession with detail gets into the films made from his IP.
thinking about these tropes has led me to think I need to make some games exploring them heh
Yeah, Star Wars isn’t science fiction at all. It’s fantasy.
We have just come to associate spaceships with science fiction. But in Star Wars there isn’t the least bit of science behind the technology.
Even Andor is true to that formula.
In one part, two characters are speaking over “radio” comms using code talk - presumably in case there are any Empire operatives listening in. And prior to that they kept missing each other because they weren’t at their radios at the same time. Derp!
So you’ve got hyperspace travel and laser guns, but no data encryption, or text messaging. Alright then.
Except of course, they do have those things when the plot calls for it, and that’s another reason to consider it fantasy. In most sci-fi the rules stay pretty consistent, but in fantasy it’s flexible.
so re: encryption - if you can muddle your messages meaning and transmit in unencrypted mode, that convo can hide in the huge volume of calls happening all the time.
once you go through the trouble of encrypting it and running it through spectrum hopping and other security methods, you’re simply pointing two REALLY BIG FUCKING ARROWS at the convo participants that say “THESE GUYS HAVE SECRETS THAT SHOULD BE REVEALED WITH BRUTAL METHODS”, your encrypting the messages actually draws attention.