Dang, the time cube dude was right all along

have practical empirical knowledge of the rest of the sensory world too.

Oho, that’s a pretty bold statement of belief for someone who can’t prove they’re not a brain in a vat!

More seriously though, there are tons of things that have conflicting evidence or are simply too big or complex to have enough evidence to have definitive proof for, yet we still have to make decisions about them. Like believing that X vs Y is a better governing system (eg democracy vs republic). Or what about questions that aren’t related to proof, like defining and living by ethical standards? Yet most people still find value in “moral” things, and believe that people should do “good” instead of “bad”.

At least one polygraph works, but it’s a sentient machine with an evil plan to destroy the world.

https://youtu.be/pOlcRFwEmc0

I’m less familiar with old Trek (TOS), so maybe it’s an unfair comparison, but the slapstick elements of percussive maintenance in SW seem wildly less serious than the types of repairs happening in say TNG. I can’t think of a time Geordi had an mechanical problem he couldn’t figure out and smacked it to get it working again.

It’s one thing to not understand your car alternator when you can call a tow truck, and quite another when you’re traveling light years in interplanetary space. Plus we do see things getting fixed, but it’s never in detail. In Star Trek you get plausible technobabble: “We can’t go to warp because all the relays are blown on the nacelles, and it’ll take at least 4 hours to replace them.” In SW you get “We can’t go to light speed for some undefined reason. Let’s watch Chewie moan angrily while smacking something with a wrench, then R2 shoves something in a hole and gets blown across the room via electric shock. And now the hyperdrive works.”

I think I read somewhere that during the filming for the original trilogy scenes they read Chewie’s lines in English so the actors would know what they were reacting to. Not sure if it was the same for R2

I use ravelry for my very very occasional project and I had no idea you could get banned from there