Galactic Collision Scenario

[Batman]

Except the purpose of the Taris bombardment WASN'T to BDZ the planet, it was merely to make sure BASTILA DIED, nothing more.

[Thraxis]

By all reports, the effect was to "destroy Taris". I see no reason to argue the intent for the attack, since I very much doubt he would have any reason to pull any punches. The fact that he was specifically terminating a single individual does not change the fact that Taris was killed by Malak. If he didn't intend to spare anyone down there, he would have (given any common sense) pulled no punches so as to kill before the intended target could react.

[Batman]

By all reports, the effect was to "destroy Taris". I see no reason to argue the intent for the attack, since I very much doubt he would have any reason to pull any punches.

Fuel consumption, wear an tear on the guns...

The fact that he was specifically terminating a single individual does not change the fact that Taris was killed by Malak.

The fact is that the damage done to Taris is what we SEE done to Taris (massive urban destruction, on a rather local scale) and whatever post-KOTOR literature SAID was done to Taris.

If he didn't intend to spare anyone down there, he would have (given any common sense) pulled no punches so as to kill before the intended target could react.

He didn't intend to spare anyone down there IF THAT WAS REQUIRED TO GET BASTILA. I'm still waiting for your evidence that he would have been BETTER OFF with a BDZ level bombardment when it is REPEATEDLY stated throughout KOTOR that the Sith were still TRYING to win hearts and minds and and everyone BUT Malak considered nuking Taris an incredibly bad idea.

[Simon_Jester]

A quick rebuttal to add in for anyone who thinks SW tech hasn't changed much in the last 4000 years:
[Goes on to outline the Bombardment of Taris in contrast to the Base Delta Zero operation]
...
Yes, the burning of Taris was impressive, but it wouldn't seem to indicate a firepower capable of actually slagging the planets surface, unlike a uncommon, yet practiced, terror technique used by the Empire.

This is true. On the other hand, there are a number of alternate interpretations. For instance, no one is shocked by the level of firepower displayed by Malak in bombarding the planet, only his ruthlessness in exterminating the population of a major ecumenopolis world; Malak's capital ships may well not have been operating at maximum firepower.

Alternatively, Malak relies heavily on extremely ancient Rakatan ship designs; the ships may not be technologically up to the current Republic standard, being a threat because of their near-limitless numbers and not their individual firepower.

My basic problem with this argument is that even if capital ship guns weren't nearly as potent four thousand years ago as they are at the time of the movies, all the other features of Star Wars technology seem present. Hyperdrive takes days or weeks and not months or years to cross the galaxy; hand blasters still range from "Earthly slugthrower-equivalent" up through "can take out armored vehicles;" intelligent droids, even wisecracking droids, are fairly common. If capital ship ordnance is well behind what it becomes in the movie era, it seems to be more or less the only thing that is.

==========

What I take umbrage to is your claim that it will take a mere ~500 years to accomplish.

I pulled 500 ABY out of a hat, as a number "more than a generation, more even than a lifetime, but less than the five thousand years or so it takes for technology to change noticeably in Star Wars."

That's the flawed premise, isn't it? That the Star Wars science and technology only advanced at a slow pace throughout all its history, rather than the recent lul being some sort of transient (or permanent!) "End of Physics" problem.

Given the sheer immensity (I almost said enormity, but while contemplating a hundred millenia gives me the shudders I associate with enormity, you'd probably just assume I was using the word wrong) of the Star Wars history, having it grow with an inverse-millenia time constant would not be mutually exclusive with its reaching a present state. I'm sure that at some time in the past, Star Wars underwent rapid exponential growth in basic technology, but it hasn't done so any time documented in the source material. Nor is there any compelling reason to assume that they must have experienced exponential growth with a time constant of inverse decades for any extremely long period; they're advanced, vastly more so than any Star Trek power, but not as advanced as you'd expect from a civilization that had grown more advanced and capable by a factor of, say, e100 (~1040 or so) compared to a Star Trek-like origin state.

Moreover, even exponentially advancing societies that have to discover their own technology don't push ahead as fast as exponentially growing societies that don't; witness how Japan managed to make up centuries worth of technological stagnation in decades in time to be at least broadly on par with the West by the beginning of the 1900s.

Bull. First off, α and β have dimension of inverse time, so neither have values of decades, millenia or even seconds

Please excuse me. I used "decades" rather than "inverse decades" or "decades-1" purely because "decades" is less bloody awkward. My comments all remain valid if you substitute 1/α and 1/β for α and β. They also remain valid if you use β and α as time constants in the classically common format exp(t/t0) for exponential growth curves. This format has the advantage of producing much more intuitively useful time constants than, say, 0.043 years-1 would, which is why they use it for quantities like radioactive decay lifetimes (measured in s, not in s-1).

Talking about β and α in units of time and not inverse time was a careless desire to simplify for the sake of not having to make up new phrases such as "inverse millenium" on the spot, not innumeracy.
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Do you expect me to believe that the Star Wars sentients (and particularly SW humans) are intrinsically stupid or uncurious? No. Their technological development has periods of growth and leveling off. If the galaxy has spent 10,000 years in explosive knolwedge growth (or that much by equivalent measure) and β/α = .1, it will take the Federation 1000 years to catch up in knowledge; if it's 25,000 years, the Federation will catch up in 2500 years — a linear relationship.

Once you accept highly non-constant values for β, the entire model of explosive growth breaks down, and you are merely left with parity being achieved when exp(αt)=C,
where C is some constant we cannot readily calculate. You maintain that C is so large that for any reasonable value of α, t is measured in millenia. I maintain that this is only reasonable if we posit prolonged periods of exponential growth in Star Wars that had a time scale of decades or centuries... which are not in evidence anywhere in the published works. The "present" (as in everything in the last five thousand years) may be an anomaly in this respect, but I haven't seen any reason to suspect it's that great an anomaly. The time scale of Star Wars technical growth was surely decades or centuries at some point, but not for enough time to make C greater than exp(βT) would be for β ~= 0.001 years-1 or less, given the sheer size of T.
______

Your own historical references places that ratio β/α closer to .1 (decades over centuries).

Historical references tell us a lot more about α (the growth rate of a civilization which is trying hard to adopt advanced technology others already know how to build) than they do about β (the growth rate of a civilization the likes of which does not exist and, so far as we know, did not and never will exist). We have absolutely no idea how difficult or expensive the science underlying advanced technology in Star Wars would be, and thus no way of guessing how much time it took the powers of their galaxy to discover it in the first place... which would be a precondition for calculating β from first principles.

The difficult of adopting a new technology is not automatically a function of how difficult that technology was to discover, either. Thus, in real life the ratio β/α can vary wildly, with technologies only a few years more advanced than those already known being nearly impossible to duplicate in months, even by civilizations that managed to make up for centuries of lost time in decades... and vice versa.

The two values are not automatically related on each other, either, so the idea that the ratio β/α (or t/T) can be determined directly from historical cases (as 0.1 or anything else) is a red herring. At best, I maintain that α can be approximated from history; β cannot, since it applies to a fictional society. If α cannot be determined either, then we are both equally at sea and the discussion is pointless.
_______

So I'm fairly confident that the Trek invention of transporters was a case of "primitives got lucky," unlikely as that may be a priori.

You never see a primitive society with an advanced device, unless they didn't build it themselves. This argument is pure bullshit.

This is true in the physical sciences, at least in the modern era, which is the proper analogy. It is not strictly true in the biological sciences, where the field of possible technologies is large compared with our ability to search the field, but this would probably be inapplicable.

Despit this, Wyrm, the way you imply the syllogism "Star Wars is more advanced than Star Trek, only Star Trek and NOT Star Wars has transporters, therefore transporters must be a mark of primitivism, not advancement" strikes me as ridiculous in context. Primitive devices that become outmoded are normally replaced by devices which are more capable, not less. Transporters are more capable than their best Star Wars replacements in a number of roles. If a device's successor is not more capable than the original in a given niche, the original does not wind up being succeeded in that niche to begin with, any more than we would give up brass fittings simply because steel is "more advanced."

Although, now that you mention it, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that the transporter was not invented by the Star Trek powers, but was instead an (imperfectly) copied version of an alien artifact, one produced by a science more advanced than that known in either Star Wars or Star Trek.
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Contingent on there being enough transporters for them to be easily availible. If transporters don't have legitimate use, no smuggler is going to have one. Period.

Is the same not true of, say, hidden compartments under the deck of your ship? Criminals routinely use hardware that could get them in trouble if they were caught when they think it would make their job easier. Moreover, smuggling is big enough business in Star Wars to get devices made for its use... especially devices which are so primitive compared to Star Wars technology that even a bunch of ignorant clowns from a civilization spanning no more than a few dozen worlds can come up with them independently. Which transporters are.

First responders to a disaster scene might well be willing to take the risk of teleportation if it got them to an accident in seconds rather than minutes.

Contingent on the emergency equipment to be transported can be transported and still function when it arrives. It's also contingent on most races can physically survive the way ST transports things, or have no religious objection to it. Another possibility, since we know that transporters are known to cause mental disturbances in some humans (transporter psychosis), it may be a safety issue with some prevalent aliens. (This last possiblity may lead to a religeous objection — transporters swallow your soul!)

All this is true. However, all this has workarounds. Star Trek Transporters have handled a wide variety of materials, including intelligent androids, before; there is no obvious reason they could not handle such materials in Star Wars. And since the Star Wars galaxy already treats droids as if they were soulless property (and surprisingly cheap property, at that), why not beam medical droids to emergency sites? Droids are as low or lower than the lowest slave; who could possibly have religious objections to something like that? Even if they did, what are the odds that such religious objections would be honored in all parts of a relatively secular galactic civilization? For a relatively simple technology to be phased out throughout the galaxy for religious reasons in Warhammer 40000 I could believe; in Star Wars? Not so much.

It is possible to contrive an explanation for this, but it seems far more plausible that transporters are simply not known in Star Wars than that they are known to all, easy to make... and yet never used by mainstream society, to the point where we have never seen a transporter-like object that was not a Mysterious Alien Artifact. It would be like coming upon a civilization on Earth that had seen fit to abolish the use of the metal copper, or serrated blades, or two-wheeled axles.

[Thraxis]

no one is shocked by the level of firepower displayed by Malak in bombarding the planet, only his ruthlessness in exterminating the population of a major ecumenopolis world; Malak's capital ships may well not have been operating at maximum firepower.

I don't remember anyone being surprised at the amount of firepower for a BDZ either.

Alternatively, Malak relies heavily on extremely ancient Rakatan ship designs; the ships may not be technologically up to the current Republic standard, being a threat because of their near-limitless numbers and not their individual firepower.

Actually, this is incorrect. According to the Starwars.com databank, the Leviathan (the ship shown bombarding the planet) was the Republic's newest flagship, which defected to the Sith under the command of Carth's favorite Admiral, Saul Karath. It wasn't a Rakatan design at all.

My basic problem with this argument is that even if capital ship guns weren't nearly as potent four thousand years ago as they are at the time of the movies, all the other features of Star Wars technology seem present. Hyperdrive takes days or weeks and not months or years to cross the galaxy; hand blasters still range from "Earthly slugthrower-equivalent" up through "can take out armored vehicles;" intelligent droids, even wisecracking droids, are fairly common. If capital ship ordnance is well behind what it becomes in the movie era, it seems to be more or less the only thing that is.

One could argue that this is much the same as today. We have had telephones and cameras since the early 20th century, and computers since the mid 20th century. Does this mean, though, that ENIAC is equal to my laptop, with over 200 GB of memory and 4 GB of RAM? Does that mean cell phones are equivalent to telegraphs? Just because technology *appears* similar doesn't mean that it is at all on par. For instance, the laptops of the early 90's look very much like my current laptop, and their function is much the same. My laptop, however, is capable of far more computing, tasks, etc. Similarly, it is hard to improve upon sentience to make something "more sentient" so the argument that we see sentient droids at both points is moot. What I would look at is the quality comparison of T3-M4 and R2-D2. Given we never see a proper graphical rendering of T3's full tool compliment, but his frame is awkward, stiff, and not nearly as flexible as R2's in terms of elevation control (not even including the incorporated jets shown later).

This very comparison is what I was driving at in my comparison of KotOR to a BDZ. Just because the technology looks the same on the surface doesn't mean that it truly is the same. The very point that batman pointed out of fuel consumption and the wear and tear on the guns themselves as a reason not to bring them to full power for bombardment supports this idea. Assuming that they *were* holding back for this reason, why would they hold back now as opposed to the Empire? Most likely due to improvements in fuel consumption, and sturdier tech that doesn't have to worry about wear and tear as much as predecessors.

Similarly, hyperdrives, shields, weapons, sublight propulsion, all of these can benefit from minitiaturization and energy efficiency without changing much in of themselves. For example, we currently have hand held cameras that make videos of the same quality as those of old action sets. Does this mean that the tech is the same? One is hand held, able to record digitally, whereas the other is tripod mounted, as far larger than a proverbial breadbox, and record straight to film. Also, modern cell phones and old cordless phones are of almost no comparison in technology, though their function is very similar in the eyes of cosmetics. One has a couple dozen foot range to broadcast a wireless signal to a receiver, whereas the other sends a couple dozen kilometer signal to reach a cell tower and be rellocated, possibly across the world. And to boot, the modern cell phones are SMALLER.

Finally, you also have multi-functionality. By combining multiple items into one, you decrease space and power consumptionby only having a single device actually operating. EG, a camera phone takes up less space than both a camera and a phone together, and requires only one battery for the two.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't remember anyone being surprised at the amount of firepower for a BDZ either.

I haven't read public reactions to Base Delta Zero operations. My point was that Malak's bombardment didn't necessarily represent anything close to a maximum-effort operation for the capital ships of the era, so it doesn't necessarily tell us as much as we'd like about how much firepower they had.

Actually, this is incorrect. According to the Starwars.com databank, the Leviathan (the ship shown bombarding the planet) was the Republic's newest flagship, which defected to the Sith under the command of Carth's favorite Admiral, Saul Karath. It wasn't a Rakatan design at all.

OK, point. Though in that case, why do I remember all the other Sith capital ships we see bearing a striking resemblance to Leviathan structurally?

My basic problem with this argument is that even if capital ship guns weren't nearly as potent four thousand years ago as they are at the time of the movies, all the other features of Star Wars technology seem present. Hyperdrive takes days or weeks and not months or years to cross the galaxy; hand blasters still range from "Earthly slugthrower-equivalent" up through "can take out armored vehicles;" intelligent droids, even wisecracking droids, are fairly common. If capital ship ordnance is well behind what it becomes in the movie era, it seems to be more or less the only thing that is.

One could argue that this is much the same as today. We have had telephones and cameras since the early 20th century, and computers since the mid 20th century. Does this mean, though, that ENIAC is equal to my laptop, with over 200 GB of memory and 4 GB of RAM? Does that mean cell phones are equivalent to telegraphs? Just because technology *appears* similar doesn't mean that it is at all on par. For instance, the laptops of the early 90's look very much like my current laptop, and their function is much the same. My laptop, however, is capable of far more computing, tasks, etc.

Yes, but in all those cases, the modern technology demonstrably does more than its older counterpart. It's not just that the technology is there, it's that we can point to the differences and say "this is better than that!" And I'm not sure we can really do that

What I would look at is the quality comparison of T3-M4 and R2-D2. Given we never see a proper graphical rendering of T3's full tool compliment, but his frame is awkward, stiff, and not nearly as flexible as R2's in terms of elevation control (not even including the incorporated jets shown later).

You'd think, though, that the frame design would be the easiest thing to manipulate. We could design something that moved like an R2 unit today; we just couldn't design a sentient computer brain to build into it. If T3 is less mobile than R2, that's indicative of an engineering failure by his creator (possibly because T3 was meant to interface with a poorly designed 'slot', whereas R2 interfaces with a more efficient cylindrical design?), not a fundamental technology that was unachievable in 4000 BBY. They have bipedal robots, for God's sake; compared to that building an R2 chassis is trivial.

This very comparison is what I was driving at in my comparison of KotOR to a BDZ. Just because the technology looks the same on the surface doesn't mean that it truly is the same. The very point that batman pointed out of fuel consumption and the wear and tear on the guns themselves as a reason not to bring them to full power for bombardment supports this idea. Assuming that they *were* holding back for this reason, why would they hold back now as opposed to the Empire? Most likely due to improvements in fuel consumption, and sturdier tech that doesn't have to worry about wear and tear as much as predecessors.

Yes, absolutely, and I'm sure there's some of that going on. But how much, given that the technologies in question are at least functional? T3-M4 is about the same size as R2-D2, and is considered fully functional as a repair and astromech droid, which places minimum constraints on his toolkit and abilities. He exhibits sentient behavior, though not over quite the same range as R2... much of which can be explained by T3 being new and R2 being an old, un-memory wiped droid.

Unless the definition of "astromech" has changed drastically over the years, that makes T3 broadly as capable as R2. Not perfectly so, but enough so that one could do most of the other's job. That doesn't make sense if computer technology has changed by orders of magnitude since then.

Likewise for blasters, hyperdrives, and medical technology. The look can be the same and conceal drastic changes in under the hood performance, sure. But there's a limit on how drastic the change in performance can be before it becomes utterly obvious that the equipment isn't performing as well as its more modern counterpart.

[Ritterin Sophia]

OK, point. Though in that case, why do I remember all the other Sith capital ships we see bearing a striking resemblance to Leviathan structurally?

Because the Star Forge was a giant replicator, seriously so long as it could siphon off energy from a sun and get the requisite energy it can keep pumping out copies.

My basic problem with this argument is that even if capital ship guns weren't nearly as potent four thousand years ago as they are at the time of the movies, all the other features of Star Wars technology seem present. Hyperdrive takes days or weeks and not months or years to cross the galaxy; hand blasters still range from "Earthly slugthrower-equivalent" up through "can take out armored vehicles;" intelligent droids, even wisecracking droids, are fairly common. If capital ship ordnance is well behind what it becomes in the movie era, it seems to be more or less the only thing that is.

What I would look at is the quality comparison of T3-M4 and R2-D2. Given we never see a proper graphical rendering of T3's full tool compliment, but his frame is awkward, stiff, and not nearly as flexible as R2's in terms of elevation control (not even including the incorporated jets shown later).

R2-D2's rockets are an after market upgrade, according to the splatbook for The Force Unleashed.

[Ritterin Sophia]

OK, point. Though in that case, why do I remember all the other Sith capital ships we see bearing a striking resemblance to Leviathan structurally?

Because the Star Forge was a giant replicator, seriously so long as it could siphon off energy from a sun and get the requisite energy it can keep pumping out copies.

What I would look at is the quality comparison of T3-M4 and R2-D2. Given we never see a proper graphical rendering of T3's full tool compliment, but his frame is awkward, stiff, and not nearly as flexible as R2's in terms of elevation control (not even including the incorporated jets shown later).

R2-D2's rockets are an after market upgrade, according to the splatbook for The Force Unleashed.

[Wyrm]

Given the sheer immensity (I almost said enormity, but while contemplating a hundred millenia gives me the shudders I associate with enormity, you'd probably just assume I was using the word wrong) of the Star Wars history, having it grow with an inverse-millenia time constant would not be mutually exclusive with its reaching a present state. I'm sure that at some time in the past, Star Wars underwent rapid exponential growth in basic technology, but it hasn't done so any time documented in the source material.

Given that the source material is very sketchy in the pre-Wars era, this should not be at all surprising.

Nor is there any compelling reason to assume that they must have experienced exponential growth with a time constant of inverse decades for any extremely long period;

No one has been claiming β's of inverse-decades.

they're advanced, vastly more so than any Star Trek power, but not as advanced as you'd expect from a civilization that had grown more advanced and capable by a factor of, say, e100 (~1040 or so) compared to a Star Trek-like origin state.

And how should such a civilization appear, praytell?

Moreover, even exponentially advancing societies that have to discover their own technology don't push ahead as fast as exponentially growing societies that don't; witness how Japan managed to make up centuries worth of technological stagnation in decades in time to be at least broadly on par with the West by the beginning of the 1900s.

We've been over this. Exponentially growing societies do have an easier time of it, but they do have to spend some time catching up.

Once you accept highly non-constant values for β, the entire model of explosive growth breaks down, and you are merely left with parity being achieved when exp(αt)=C,
where C is some constant we cannot readily calculate. You maintain that C is so large that for any reasonable value of α, t is measured in millenia. I maintain that this is only reasonable if we posit prolonged periods of exponential growth in Star Wars that had a time scale of decades or centuries... which are not in evidence anywhere in the published works.

There's hardly any evidence for the period under discussion at all. All we have is a C that cannot be calculated, and therefore, an αt that cannot be calculated, and thus, a t that cannot be calculated. How much scientific and engineering knowledge does the construction of fast hyperdrives, hypermatter reactors, turbolasers, and all the various masha-mash of Star Wars technology (World Devistators, ect) represent? How many times in SW history has the new technology left the old generation behind? These are questions you have no answer for, yet you insist on a short (~500 yr) timescale of adaption.

The "present" (as in everything in the last five thousand years) may be an anomaly in this respect, but I haven't seen any reason to suspect it's that great an anomaly. The time scale of Star Wars technical growth was surely decades or centuries at some point, but not for enough time to make C greater than exp(βT) would be for β ~= 0.001 years-1 or less, given the sheer size of T.

Then putting bounds on C should be relatively easy. Go do it, then come back.

Historical references tell us a lot more about α (the growth rate of a civilization which is trying hard to adopt advanced technology others already know how to build) than they do about β (the growth rate of a civilization the likes of which does not exist and, so far as we know, did not and never will exist).

We exist, dumbass, so we do have some basis for a value of β. I have never painted the ratio β/α as anything other than a back-of-the-envelope figure.

We have absolutely no idea how difficult or expensive the science underlying advanced technology in Star Wars would be, and thus no way of guessing how much time it took the powers of their galaxy to discover it in the first place... which would be a precondition for calculating β from first principles.

Which means that you have absolutely no basis for placing the β of the SW powers at any value, dumbass.

The difficult of adopting a new technology is not automatically a function of how difficult that technology was to discover, either. Thus, in real life the ratio β/α can vary wildly, with technologies only a few years more advanced than those already known being nearly impossible to duplicate in months, even by civilizations that managed to make up for centuries of lost time in decades... and vice versa.

Of course β/α varies with the technologies, hence my model "ignores a lot of relevant detail." But you have just about as much justification that β/α is particularly small as I have that it's closer to .1 — and my figure is based on your data. I choose a figure based on some data over a figure based on no data any day of the week.

The two values are not automatically related on each other, either, so the idea that the ratio β/α (or t/T) can be determined directly from historical cases (as 0.1 or anything else) is a red herring.

So you claim that historical precident is not relevant to a sci-fi setting, and as such, you're reduced to "the Federation can eventually catch up to the Empire's level, in less time than it took the Empire to achieve this technology level" which NO ONE has any problems with. This kind of makes our argument pointless.

This is true in the physical sciences, at least in the modern era, which is the proper analogy. It is not strictly true in the biological sciences, where the field of possible technologies is large compared with our ability to search the field, but this would probably be inapplicable.

Given that this was my response to the TRANSPORTER, a physical device, this is hardly a relevant point.

Despit this, Wyrm, the way you imply the syllogism "Star Wars is more advanced than Star Trek, only Star Trek and NOT Star Wars has transporters, therefore transporters must be a mark of primitivism, not advancement" strikes me as ridiculous in context.

Now you're fucking strawmanning. The ST-style transporter was invented multiple times in the Alpha Quadrant, so I find hard to believe that a civilization spanning the galaxy with as long a history as the SW powers would not stumble upon the same principle at least once.

Primitive devices that become outmoded are normally replaced by devices which are more capable, not less. Transporters are more capable than their best Star Wars replacements in a number of roles. If a device's successor is not more capable than the original in a given niche, the original does not wind up being succeeded in that niche to begin with, any more than we would give up brass fittings simply because steel is "more advanced."

Again, a strawman. Your talk that the transporters' niche should still be occupied by something assumes that the niche still exists. For some reason, it does not. For whatever reason, the niche disappeared, and with it, the transporter.

Although, now that you mention it, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that the transporter was not invented by the Star Trek powers, but was instead an (imperfectly) copied version of an alien artifact, one produced by a science more advanced than that known in either Star Wars or Star Trek.

I would. The transporter has all the signs of being invented multiple times, not invented once and copied to many other civilizations. Civilizations with no warp drive and hardly any contact with the Federation or other power have them. Furthermore, if they were imprefectly copied from a single source, why is it that they all have different visual effects? Sure, they're window dressing, but they show that each power's system has a different design philosophy, and they have greatly improved on the technology over a hundred years (such as biofilters). This board has already seen thorough discussions on how reverse engineering even designs on your own level of understanding is prohibitively difficult, and as such, if the transporter was really that advanced, then no one in the Milky Way would have been able to copy it, much less put their own special spin on it. No, ripping off from an advanced power's artifacts is not credible at all; they betray too much understanding of it.

Contingent on there being enough transporters for them to be easily availible. If transporters don't have legitimate use, no smuggler is going to have one. Period.

Is the same not true of, say, hidden compartments under the deck of your ship?

No. There are legitimate reasons to have a compartment that is not obvious, like not impinging on the aesthetics of the ship. I'm surprised you even brought this up.

Criminals routinely use hardware that could get them in trouble if they were caught when they think it would make their job easier.

Again, these items have legitimate use. Ready availibility in a galaxy requires mass-production, and hence, a company that is a stationary target for a government to shoot down and put the kibosh on new production. Some of these items may require permits and special permission or regulation for use, but that's true of just about any dangerous technology — that explains how getting caught with them at the wrong place and time can be hazardous to your health.

Sheesh, the way you talk, you'd think dynamite's only use is to make those cheesy cut-the-red-wire movie bombs.

Moreover, smuggling is big enough business in Star Wars to get devices made for its use... especially devices which are so primitive compared to Star Wars technology that even a bunch of ignorant clowns from a civilization spanning no more than a few dozen worlds can come up with them independently. Which transporters are.

Which implies that chances are good that the Star Wars galaxy has come up with the ST-style transporter independently, and has since dropped it, for some reason lost to history. It doesn't matter why, that is the fact. All you can do is explain the facts.

All this is true. However, all this has workarounds. Star Trek Transporters have handled a wide variety of materials, including intelligent androids, before; there is no obvious reason they could not handle such materials in Star Wars. And since the Star Wars galaxy already treats droids as if they were soulless property (and surprisingly cheap property, at that), why not beam medical droids to emergency sites? Droids are as low or lower than the lowest slave; who could possibly have religious objections to something like that? Even if they did, what are the odds that such religious objections would be honored in all parts of a relatively secular galactic civilization? For a relatively simple technology to be phased out throughout the galaxy for religious reasons in Warhammer 40000 I could believe; in Star Wars? Not so much.

It is possible to contrive an explanation for this, but it seems far more plausible that transporters are simply not known in Star Wars than that they are known to all, easy to make... and yet never used by mainstream society, to the point where we have never seen a transporter-like object that was not a Mysterious Alien Artifact. It would be like coming upon a civilization on Earth that had seen fit to abolish the use of the metal copper, or serrated blades, or two-wheeled axles.

You have a point that mere difficulties in transporting certain aliens or materials is not a great problem. However, I do recall another trouble ST-style transporters have, which isn't so easily worked around. Transporters seem to be affected by relatively weak EM fields, for instance on Turkana IV, where a transformer substation is able to effectively block transporters, yet unable to provide bright lighting for the entire colony (Legacy). The transporter is also unable to lock onto small devices tacked onto the warp core, and even near it, the device required Geordi's communicator to provide a fix. Or maybe it contained a transport jammer. (The High Ground)

Thing is, the more power you throw about, the more saturated your environment is with EM radiation. Even with high efficiencies and relatively little EM bleeding, with as much power the technologies of SW casually throw around it would be highly surprising if the environment isn't absolutely boiling over in EM radiation that would be harmless to humans, but totally screw up transport beams. Thus, the ST-style transporter technology is worthless even in civilian applications. This is a problem that gets worse as availible power increases, not better.

[Simon_Jester]

OK, point. Though in that case, why do I remember all the other Sith capital ships we see bearing a striking resemblance to Leviathan structurally?

Because the Star Forge was a giant replicator, seriously so long as it could siphon off energy from a sun and get the requisite energy it can keep pumping out copies.

And yet there are mumbles about the Republic having encountered ships of "unknown design;" I don't think the Star Forge is just churning out perfect copies of existing warships.
________

Given that the source material is very sketchy in the pre-Wars era, this [dearth of evidence for extended periods of rapid technological growth] should not be at all surprising.

No. It should not. So am I supposed to use the datapoints I do (technology was not drastically different in any across-the-board sense at 4000 BBY, but the state of the art in 25000 BBY is obsolete crap by any reasonable standard in 1 ABY)

they're advanced, vastly more so than any Star Trek power, but not as advanced as you'd expect from a civilization that had grown more advanced and capable by a factor of, say, e100 (~1040 or so) compared to a Star Trek-like origin state.

And how should such a civilization appear, praytell? Given the relative magnitude of energy manipulation, something that much more powerful than Star Trek would be about where Iain Banks' Culture is in terms of their control over matter and energy.

We've been over this. Exponentially growing societies do have an easier time of it, but they do have to spend some time catching up.

Yes, and that's what I've been saying. What we disagree about is not whether this takes time, but how much, with a disagreement of a factor of ten or so. I'm beginning to think that my conviction that it would take something in the high century range, as opposed to the millenium range, is not provable to your satisfaction; I'm not at all sure that your conviction that the opposite is true is provable to my satisfaction. And this doesn't seem to be one of those cases where there's an obvious null hypothesis* that both parties should accept in the absence of sufficient evidence, either, which leaves us at an impasse.

*If I claim there is a bear in my house, and you claim that there is not, and I cannot present evidence for a bear, I should accept the null hypothesis that there is no bear; "no bear" is the default state. But if I claim that something will take centuries and you claim it will take millenia, and neither of us can present a historical argument for one side of an important equation because the available historical references are hopelessly sketchy, neither "centuries" nor "millenia" is the default state.

I'd like there to be enough evidence to reconstruct a universally convincing growth curve for Star Wars, even if it decisively refuted my current argument, but I honestly don't think it's there.
_________

There's hardly any evidence for the period under discussion at all. All we have is a C that cannot be calculated, and therefore, an αt that cannot be calculated, and thus, a t that cannot be calculated. How much scientific and engineering knowledge does the construction of fast hyperdrives, hypermatter reactors, turbolasers, and all the various masha-mash of Star Wars technology (World Devistators, ect) represent? How many times in SW history has the new technology left the old generation behind? These are questions you have no answer for, yet you insist on a short (~500 yr) timescale of adaption.

500 years is only short relative to the amount of time it took to invent the technology from scratch; it is not short on the timescale of things like Five Year Plans, or even the rise and fall of powerful nations. You call the timescale I've tried to estimate "short" mostly because it is shorter than the number you've tried to estimate.

The "present" (as in everything in the last five thousand years) may be an anomaly in this respect, but I haven't seen any reason to suspect it's that great an anomaly. The time scale of Star Wars technical growth was surely decades or centuries at some point, but not for enough time to make C greater than exp(βT) would be for β ~= 0.001 years-1 or less, given the sheer size of T.

Then putting bounds on C should be relatively easy. Go do it, then come back.

The easy way to do it is to compare C to "c," a comparable constant indicating the technological advancement of Star Trek. There are a lot of ways to do this that produce wildly different results. Comparing demonstrated computer power produces very different results from comparing energy generation, which in turn produces very different results from comparing steel production. My natural inclination is to use energy generation, because historically that has been both strongly affected by and strongly effective on technological growth.

If so, the obvious thing to do is to compare energy generation on comparable mobile platforms: comparing a planet's worth of reactors to a fighter craft's worth would be ridiculous. We could compare, say, a Galaxy-class starship with a Dreadnaught-class "heavy cruiser;" both ships are of comparable size. the Dreadnaught puts out ~2E24 W by the best estimate I can find on short notice; the Galaxy... tricky. On the one hand they've got an antimatter reactor which (on this site) is rated in the 900 TW = 9E14 W. The antimatter plants are unstable, bleeding-edge technology in the early Galaxies, but the bugs seem to get hammered out over the following decade or two.

That gives us a differential of approximately nine orders of magnitude: C = 2E9 or about e21.5. If we normalize Star Trek's current power generation capacity at 1, they must increase their technical capability by a factor of e about 21.5 times order to reach the level seen in Star Wars. How long will each increase of a factor of e take? That depends on the value of α; in any event if the power generation estimate is valid, the Federation will need 21.5/α years to catch up to Star Wars technologically. Recall that α applies to societies which are consciously trying to upgrade their own technological capability to catch up with foreign powers, not societies which are forging ahead in unexplored territory or which are prone to bouts of complacency that stop them from investing in expensive basic research and infrastructure programs.

In a fantastic universe where all reverse engineering is trivial, 1/α is on the order of weeks or months (see Doc Smith's Galactic Patrol series for reference) in cases of maximum effort, which is absurd. In real life, 1/α is generally on the order of decades, if cases like Japan or Stalin's USSR are any indication. I do not know where to go for graphs of the electrical power output of Russia or Japan during the period; Stas Bush might know for Russia, and I've PMed him.

For the Trekkers to catch up in 500 years requires that 1/α = 23.5 years. If 1/α is 50 years then it takes over a millenium, if it is 10 years then it takes only 215 years to catch up.

All this assumes:
-Power generation from mobile platforms is a reasonable measure of the technical sophistication of Star Trek relative to Star Wars
-The Star Trek nations, or some of them, are smart enough to recognize that they're on the wrong end of a BIG technological gap, and are able to systematically attempt to close this gap.

I cannot reliably assess how good those assumptions are for purposes of constructing a model; if you disagree with (2) then this entire debate was pointless to begin with.
_________

Historical references tell us a lot more about α (the growth rate of a civilization which is trying hard to adopt advanced technology others already know how to build) than they do about β (the growth rate of a civilization the likes of which does not exist and, so far as we know, did not and never will exist).

We exist, dumbass, so we do have some basis for a value of β. I have never painted the ratio β/α as anything other than a back-of-the-envelope figure.

You've been basing your estimates of β on the industrial-era West, not on references to the setting you're trying to estimate β for. Apps you may recall, I think we do have a basis for the value of β, such that 1/β ~= 1000-4000 years. At this point, I can present my argument in terms of the analysis above:

Interstellar civilization in Star Wars has existed for 25000-100000 years, depending on your definition- hyperdrives have existed for a long time, but the technology of interstellar travel had to be reinvented more or less from scratch between 35000 and 25000 years ago. There are vague technobabble similarities between the tools used in the Galaxy Far Far Away in the days of Xim the Despot (25k BBY): heavy reliance on crystals and references to "subspace." We might argue that Xim's technology was on par with that used in Star Trek, in which case that figure of 21.5 factor-of-e technological increases since that time gives us 1/β ~= 1200 years. For 1/β to be much less than this would imply that Xim's ships were substantially weaker than Trek ships... which is hard to believe, since the Trekkers have only had FTL-capable civilizations for about 200 to 300 years.

Alternatively, we might go clear back into the deep past, 100000 years or more (if Wookiepedia is to be believed, the Star Wars galaxy first discovered FTL travel around two million years ago!), where we get values of 1/β of 4000 years or greater.
________

Despit this, Wyrm, the way you imply the syllogism "Star Wars is more advanced than Star Trek, only Star Trek and NOT Star Wars has transporters, therefore transporters must be a mark of primitivism, not advancement" strikes me as ridiculous in context.

Now you're fucking strawmanning. The ST-style transporter was invented multiple times in the Alpha Quadrant, so I find hard to believe that a civilization spanning the galaxy with as long a history as the SW powers would not stumble upon the same principle at least once.

Yes. Which leaves us with a strange conclusion: Star Wars has invented transporters and discarded them. Why? There are reasons not to use them for everything the way Star Trek does, but that doesn't mean they should be used for nothing on technologically advanced worlds, to the point where no one even seems to remember that they ever existed.

Again, a strawman. Your talk that the transporters' niche should still be occupied by something assumes that the niche still exists. For some reason, it does not. For whatever reason, the niche disappeared, and with it, the transporter.

But the niche of transporters is "moving things in a hurry." How does the demand for moving things in a hurry disappear?

No. There are legitimate reasons to have a compartment that is not obvious, like not impinging on the aesthetics of the ship. I'm surprised you even brought this up.

Are there not reasons to have a teleporter aboard ship, such as abandoning a damaged ship in orbit in a hurry? Medical evacuation of someone sick or injured, in situations where minutes count? Picking up valuable cargoes or replacement parts without having to land?

Hidden compartments have excuses for existing, but so do transporters; both are obviously useful to any cargo transporter who is concerned with speed... which includes smugglers. If having hidden compartments is legal, why shouldn't transporters be similarly legal?

For that matter, if transporters are illegal because of their uses in covert operations and criminal activities... I'd expect the military to have them, at least for special operations purposes.
________

Moreover, smuggling is big enough business in Star Wars to get devices made for its use... especially devices which are so primitive compared to Star Wars technology that even a bunch of ignorant clowns from a civilization spanning no more than a few dozen worlds can come up with them independently. Which transporters are.

Which implies that chances are good that the Star Wars galaxy has come up with the ST-style transporter independently, and has since dropped it, for some reason lost to history. It doesn't matter why, that is the fact. All you can do is explain the facts.

But if it were so easy to invent, it should have been invented over and over- you can't suppress something orders of magnitude easier to build than other things which exist on a routine basis. It would be like trying to to suppress the invention of nails or armchairs.

Thing is, the more power you throw about, the more saturated your environment is with EM radiation. Even with high efficiencies and relatively little EM bleeding, with as much power the technologies of SW casually throw around it would be highly surprising if the environment isn't absolutely boiling over in EM radiation that would be harmless to humans, but totally screw up transport beams. Thus, the ST-style transporter technology is worthless even in civilian applications. This is a problem that gets worse as availible power increases, not better.

This is plausible, but I'm a bit concerned about the question of how high you can crank up ambient EM power without health consequences. Trekkers still use transporters on civilized worlds where there should be a great deal of static and wireless traffic already. And aboard starships with terawatt-range power generation capacity; it seems odd that Star Wars would have people routinely living in environments that threw around more energy than that, because I'm not sure what they'd do with all the power.

[Ritterin Sophia]

And yet there are mumbles about the Republic having encountered ships of "unknown design;" I don't think the Star Forge is just churning out perfect copies of existing warships.

You have a quote? "Ships of Unknown Design" is rather vague, for all we know they're talking about the Sith Interceptors.

[Thraxis]

My point was that Malak's bombardment didn't necessarily represent anything close to a maximum-effort operation for the capital ships of the era, so it doesn't necessarily tell us as much as we'd like about how much firepower they had.

And do we know that a BDZ is necessarily at maximum output? Unless you show me evidence that it is significantly less than maximum, the very fact that, in a similar operation, the effort that a sith willing to massacre his own soldiers is willing to use compared to a routine operation is quite telling. What reasons would Malak have for holding any punches? If you're going for PR, you don't nuke a world-spanning city. If anything, leaving no survivors would allow the spin doctors more room to claim that the civilians were revolting on a large scale, or some similar sweep-it-under-the-rug bullshit. If anything, he would want to pull punches for reasons of fuel or wear and tear, which would be a technical matter. It may not be all about firepower, but it damns the technology of 4k ABY, and that is my entire point.

OK, point. Though in that case, why do I remember all the other Sith capital ships we see bearing a striking resemblance to Leviathan structurally?

As General Schatten pointed out, the star forge is a giant replicator. We have seen in Trek (using a little cross reference) that replicators can easily be programmed to build new stuff. Especially since most Rakatan technology requires its pilots to be force sensitive (something well known in the EU), it would make sense to mass produce ships that normal officers and soldiers could use, rather than only dark jedi.

And as Schatten once again points out, the "unknown designs" could easily be the sith interceptors, given that they rely less on the kind of technology that would require force senstivity.

You'd think, though, that the frame design would be the easiest thing to manipulate. We could design something that moved like an R2 unit today; we just couldn't design a sentient computer brain to build into it. If T3 is less mobile than R2, that's indicative of an engineering failure by his creator (possibly because T3 was meant to interface with a poorly designed 'slot', whereas R2 interfaces with a more efficient cylindrical design?), not a fundamental technology that was unachievable in 4000 BBY. They have bipedal robots, for God's sake; compared to that building an R2 chassis is trivial.

I'll concede this point. Before leaving droids entirely, though, there is one thing to note: approximately 25 ABY (during the Yuzhan Vong invasion), the New Republic creates a droid with self-healing alloys as a critical part of its structure, and with simple wrist blasters (B-2 SBD style) that has scaling power levels capable of taking out a starfighter. These clearly are in excess of the technology available during the KotOR era. (and if you try to rebuttal using the Clone Wars, the Separatists usually were concerned more with price than getting maximum efficiency, otherwise they would have had more shielded fighters, and deployed droidekas in great numbers rather than B-1 sucks-balls battle droids).

Yes, absolutely, and I'm sure there's some of that going on. But how much, given that the technologies in question are at least functional? T3-M4 is about the same size as R2-D2, and is considered fully functional as a repair and astromech droid, which places minimum constraints on his toolkit and abilities. He exhibits sentient behavior, though not over quite the same range as R2... much of which can be explained by T3 being new and R2 being an old, un-memory wiped droid.

Unless the definition of "astromech" has changed drastically over the years, that makes T3 broadly as capable as R2. Not perfectly so, but enough so that one could do most of the other's job. That doesn't make sense if computer technology has changed by orders of magnitude since then.

Likewise for blasters, hyperdrives, and medical technology. The look can be the same and conceal drastic changes in under the hood performance, sure. But there's a limit on how drastic the change in performance can be before it becomes utterly obvious that the equipment isn't performing as well as its more modern counterpart.

And this is one point where I disagree. Sure, there is a limit to internal space, but as tools miniaturize, you are able to fit more into the same frame. This doesn't necessarily proclude the possibility that the droids are similar in constuction, but there is also no evidence to say the capabilities haven't increased.

Further, how can you use droids to analyze computer technology? Sentient is sentient, you can't make something sentient *more* sentient. Personality and sentience are two radically different things. Further, anyone in the computer industry knows that computer security is a constant battle. Slicers (hackers, SW lingo) and computer companies are constantly fighting to keep ahead of each other. As such, the droids who can slice a computer would, by necessity be far more capable in order to make the same effect after a few decades, let alone 4 millenia. After 4 millenia the requirements in programming would have increased, dare I say it, by orders of magnitude? Further, the true roots of computer technology come down to memory and RAM. Neither of these things would be at all noticeable from the outside of the technology, observing an old early 90's laptop and mine (as mentioned before) would not see much difference (except the addition of color). Both are used to make word documents, able to see the internet (dialup and an ethernet cable wouldn't be too cosmetically different), and both have games. Does this mean that the computer with memory measured in MB (or was it KB?) is at all equal to my 250+ GB memory, 4 GB RAM laptop on the same tech level? Just because capabilities increase does not mean they will be used differently.

This applies equally to blasters, shields, power generation, engines, everything. As weapons increase in power, so do the defenses to block them. You can't learn anything from watching ship-to-ship encounters with blasters and shields, because as BOTH increase, the effect will remain similar. Further, why do you think personal energy shields are prevalent in KotOR and not in the more modern SW? It's because eventually blasters got MORE POWERFUL than the shields could handle! Personal shields are still around as of the GCW (as shown by Kyle Katarn), but in order to be powerful enough to block blasters, they eat through power packs like crazy. Further, just because ships move at similar accelerations relative to each other doesn't mean the speed as a whole isn't increasing.

Further, how much do we actually see medical technology? We've seen some aspects of it in the original movies and in the EU, but tell me, what basis do you have to talk about medical tech from 4000 years ago? I mean, that's a topic that can't even really be broached from either direction, since we don't see it much. Sure, we hear of the wonders of Kolto, but we never see how amazing it actually is in the past. And if we don't see it, we can't say "it doesn't look better, therefore it isn't better" as you've been implying.

[Simon_Jester]

And yet there are mumbles about the Republic having encountered ships of "unknown design;" I don't think the Star Forge is just churning out perfect copies of existing warships.

You have a quote? "Ships of Unknown Design" is rather vague, for all we know they're talking about the Sith Interceptors.

I'm afraid I'd have to play through the game again to dig it up. Maybe I'm wrong.

I'll concede that I can't prove that the fleets produced by the Star Forge aren't just replicated copies of whatever the Sith had on hand when they captured the thing in the first place, but I'm still dubious of the idea that they are.

And do we know that a BDZ is necessarily at maximum output? Unless you show me evidence that it is significantly less than maximum, the very fact that, in a similar operation, the effort that a sith willing to massacre his own soldiers is willing to use compared to a routine operation is quite telling. What reasons would Malak have for holding any punches? If you're going for PR, you don't nuke a world-spanning city. If anything, leaving no survivors would allow the spin doctors more room to claim that the civilians were revolting on a large scale, or some similar sweep-it-under-the-rug bullshit. If anything, he would want to pull punches for reasons of fuel or wear and tear, which would be a technical matter. It may not be all about firepower, but it damns the technology of 4k ABY, and that is my entire point.

Another possibility is incomplete transfer of orders: Saul Karath had serious second thoughts about the operation, and cut content from the game indicates that he detached shuttles to evacuate as many of the Sith occupation troops as possible. He may have been intentionally blowing up buildings with megaton-range strikes rather than dialing the guns up into higher energy ranges that would kill troops far from the impact points.

And then there's the possibility that after Malak finds out that a fast light freighter got away using the Sith governor's evacuation codes, he might very well say in his raspy mechanical voice something along the lines of "Bastila has escaped. Start preparing the fleet for a siege of Dantooine, that's where she'll run to." He's bombing Taris to kill Bastila specifically, not purely for the sake of destroying Taris.

OK, point. Though in that case, why do I remember all the other Sith capital ships we see bearing a striking resemblance to Leviathan structurally?

As General Schatten pointed out, the star forge is a giant replicator. We have seen in Trek (using a little cross reference) that replicators can easily be programmed to build new stuff. Especially since most Rakatan technology requires its pilots to be force sensitive (something well known in the EU), it would make sense to mass produce ships that normal officers and soldiers could use, rather than only dark jedi.

Now that is an interesting argument. Good point...

I'll concede this point. Before leaving droids entirely, though, there is one thing to note: approximately 25 ABY (during the Yuzhan Vong invasion), the New Republic creates a droid with self-healing alloys as a critical part of its structure, and with simple wrist blasters (B-2 SBD style) that has scaling power levels capable of taking out a starfighter. These clearly are in excess of the technology available during the KotOR era. (and if you try to rebuttal using the Clone Wars, the Separatists usually were concerned more with price than getting maximum efficiency, otherwise they would have had more shielded fighters, and deployed droidekas in great numbers rather than B-1 sucks-balls battle droids).

Hmm. I don't know whether self-healing alloys were or were not a feature of KotOR, only that I have not seen them used. I can't prove that self-healing alloys were present.

The selectable-yield blasters are... I don't know how to say. The blasters described in the game are so heavily influenced by gameplay mechanics (which are non-canon) that it's very hard to say what is gameplay mechanic and what isn't. Some of the heavier heavy weapons in the game are described as being in the same general range as starfighter-grade laser cannons, and they're only a few factors of e bulkier than what you'd need to give a Republic battledroid arm blasters. Of course, those are old starfighter cannons, and may not be up to the firepower of Galactic Civil War designs.

If I'd read the comics, I would be in a better position to talk about this subject, I'm afraid.

And this is one point where I disagree. Sure, there is a limit to internal space, but as tools miniaturize, you are able to fit more into the same frame. This doesn't necessarily proclude the possibility that the droids are similar in constuction, but there is also no evidence to say the capabilities haven't increased.

No, but also no evidence that they have- it's a toss-up. And this is another one of those cases where there is no null hypothesis: there is no reason to assume in the absence of proof that Star Wars technology has improved by several orders of magnitude since 4000 BBY, aside from the historically and scientifically naive "technology always advances rapidly!" and no reason to assume in the absence of proof that it hasn't. Everything depends on analysis of what the tech actually was in that era, and the available information isn't as good as I'd like. I worked off the appearances in the game, because that's what I had to work with.
________

Further, how can you use droids to analyze computer technology? Sentient is sentient, you can't make something sentient *more* sentient.

Size is an indicator; if computer hardware has improved drastically then it should be possible to build smaller sentient droids. Likewise, droids that are familiar with six million forms of communication rather than six thousand are probably a sign that someone cranked up data storage density.

Personality and sentience are two radically different things. Further, anyone in the computer industry knows that computer security is a constant battle. Slicers and computer companies are constantly fighting to keep ahead of each other. As such, the droids who can slice a computer would, by necessity be far more capable in order to make the same effect after a few decades, let alone 4 millenia. After 4 millenia the requirements in programming would have increased, dare I say it, by orders of magnitude?

All this relies heavily on Moore's Law or a version of it. Yes, computer security is a constant battle, and both sides will do their damnedest to escalate it, but if the underlying hardware isn't improving rapidly then there are limits on how fast you can increase the capability of the software. And I'm not seeing any evidence that the hardware is improving rapidly.

This applies equally to blasters, shields, power generation, engines, everything. As weapons increase in power, so do the defenses to block them. You can't learn anything from watching ship-to-ship encounters with blasters and shields, because as BOTH increase, the effect will remain similar. Further, why do you think personal energy shields are prevalent in KotOR and not in the more modern SW? It's because eventually blasters got MORE POWERFUL than the shields could handle! Personal shields are still around as of the GCW (as shown by Kyle Katarn), but in order to be powerful enough to block blasters, they eat through power packs like crazy...

Frankly, given that they don't last very long before going down, I think "eat through power packs like crazy" is a fairly good description of the personal shields of 4000 BBY, too.

For that matter, even in the movie era, some people are still using light blasters that don't do all that much more damage than 20th century firearms, as is eminently sensible: for certain applications you don't want a weapon that blasts fist-sized craters in steel plate with every shot.

Further, just because ships move at similar accelerations relative to each other doesn't mean the speed as a whole isn't increasing.

True, but hyperdrives, at least haven't changed much. The games have a galaxy-hopping plot, travelling between worlds that are canonically far apart from one another; if it were taking months or years instead of days or weeks to get between them, the plot would be very different.

Further, how much do we actually see medical technology? We've seen some aspects of it in the original movies and in the EU, but tell me, what basis do you have to talk about medical tech from 4000 years ago? I mean, that's a topic that can't even really be broached from either direction, since we don't see it much. Sure, we hear of the wonders of Kolto, but we never see how amazing it actually is in the past. And if we don't see it, we can't say "it doesn't look better, therefore it isn't better" as you've been implying.

Kolto is strongly implied to be functionally comparable to bacta; people use it as a one-size-cures-all remedy for injuries bacta, and it can be used to sustain even people who have been seriously injured, like bacta. It almost certainly isn't as good as bacta, because bacta ultimately replaced it, but if it weren't at least within shouting distance it wouldn't work at all. It might be one order of magnitude less effective, but not several, because that would place it down in the same range as remedies we already have, and which would already be common knowledge.

[Thraxis]

Another possibility is incomplete transfer of orders: Saul Karath had serious second thoughts about the operation, and cut content from the game indicates that he detached shuttles to evacuate as many of the Sith occupation troops as possible. He may have been intentionally blowing up buildings with megaton-range strikes rather than dialing the guns up into higher energy ranges that would kill troops far from the impact points.

This is actually an interesting conjecture. I hadn't thought about that, but then again, I hadn't heard that he had gone over Malak's head like that.

And then there's the possibility that after Malak finds out that a fast light freighter got away using the Sith governor's evacuation codes, he might very well say in his raspy mechanical voice something along the lines of "Bastila has escaped. Start preparing the fleet for a siege of Dantooine, that's where she'll run to." He's bombing Taris to kill Bastila specifically, not purely for the sake of destroying Taris.

This, however, would not say anything about the shots fired before the Ebon Hawk escaped. Further, I doubt that Malak (unless he actually sensed Bastila aboard) would make the assumption she got away. More specifically, he may assume she got away, but would likely finish razing Taris just to *make sure* she wouldn't be simply overlooked on the surface.

Hmm. I don't know whether self-healing alloys were or were not a feature of KotOR, only that I have not seen them used. I can't prove that self-healing alloys were present.

Self healing alloys were new even by New Republic standards, invented since the Empire fractured at the Battle of Endor.

The selectable-yield blasters are... I don't know how to say. The blasters described in the game are so heavily influenced by gameplay mechanics (which are non-canon) that it's very hard to say what is gameplay mechanic and what isn't. Some of the heavier heavy weapons in the game are described as being in the same general range as starfighter-grade laser cannons, and they're only a few factors of e bulkier than what you'd need to give a Republic battledroid arm blasters. Of course, those are old starfighter cannons, and may not be up to the firepower of Galactic Civil War designs.

I don't mean just what can be lugged by hand, I mean fully integrated into the wrist of the droid. Both wrists. Keep in mind how futile the Stormies were when they fired against the fleeing Millenium Falcon in Ep V. Imagine weapons smaller than that packing enough power to actually do something to the Falcon. Afterall, the only weapon they could bring that could actually threaten the Falcon was a full E-Web repeating blaster, which required a sizeable generator to power it, and a tripod mount for stability. Imagine that kind of power mounted into the wrist of a 2 meter tall, humanoid frame (and a skeletal looking one at that). This would speak a great deal of the miniaturization of the technology as well as the power.

This doesn't necessarily proclude the possibility that the droids are similar in constuction, but there is also no evidence to say the capabilities haven't increased.

No, but also no evidence that they have- it's a toss-up. And this is another one of those cases where there is no null hypothesis: there is no reason to assume in the absence of proof that Star Wars technology has improved by several orders of magnitude since 4000 BBY, aside from the historically and scientifically naive "technology always advances rapidly!" and no reason to assume in the absence of proof that it hasn't.

That's actually what I was meaning by the underlined section, sorry if that wasn't clear.

Size is an indicator; if computer hardware has improved drastically then it should be possible to build smaller sentient droids. Likewise, droids that are familiar with six million forms of communication rather than six thousand are probably a sign that someone cranked up data storage density.

Your comment about the communication storage strengthens what I'm saying, thank you. As for the size of the droids, in the EU there is a droid constructed that is a fully functioning protocol unit that can fit in the palm of your hand. I can't remember its name, since the book it came from is currently a few thousand miles from my current abode >.< but I'll try to get info for you off the databank.

Frankly, given that they don't last very long before going down, I think "eat through power packs like crazy" is a fairly good description of the personal shields of 4000 BBY, too.

The difference, is that they made a big enough difference, and were cost effective enough, to have caused a "resurgence is melee weapons" as is described and shown in KotOR. You don't see anyone putting on a shield and going for a vibrosword in the modern SW because it isn't practical. The reason for this, most likely, would be prohibitive cost of production or maintenance. 4000 BBY, however, they appear to be disposable, like some kind of 5 use cameras. This suggests that the market and production is wide and easy enough respectively to manage mass production. As such, their disappearance as a whole would have to have some reason, since life-or-death defenses don't go out of style like fashion. They must have somehow become obsolete. Whether it was a case of our bombers we can no longer make parts for, or that they simply couldn't hold up to the newer blasters, either way, they went out of fashion because of tech increase.

For that matter, even in the movie era, some people are still using light blasters that don't do all that much more damage than 20th century firearms, as is eminently sensible: for certain applications you don't want a weapon that blasts fist-sized craters in steel plate with every shot.

Exactly, just like US air marshals use bullets with very low penetration power so that they can be used while on a plane without risking the plane itself. This does nothing more dissuade the increase in technology than it does to support it, since, as you said, it's what makes sense. Further, the fact that the heavier blasters exist mostly because they're the "only blasters strong enough to punch through stormie armor" suggests that these blasters, while nice for casual self-defense, are not military grade by far.

True, but hyperdrives, at least haven't changed much. The games have a galaxy-hopping plot, travelling between worlds that are canonically far apart from one another; if it were taking months or years instead of days or weeks to get between them, the plot would be very different.

However, you fail to take into consideration a few things. First, we don't actually know how long the travel takes in either movies or the games, since travel is usually glossed over. As such, for all we know, it takes over a day to reach another point in the galaxy 4000 years ago, whereas a modern ship may do it in a couple hours. We don't know, so you can't use the time taken as any more evidence than I can. Further, you fail to consider miniaturization and energy consumption. Neither of those is readily visible, but both are highly important in considering the increases in technology. Again, we run into the issue of this not being visible, but that would mean that the evidence isn't available, not that it necessarily supports the view of very little technological improvement.

Kolto is strongly implied to be functionally comparable to bacta; people use it as a one-size-cures-all remedy for injuries bacta, and it can be used to sustain even people who have been seriously injured, like bacta. It almost certainly isn't as good as bacta, because bacta ultimately replaced it, but if it weren't at least within shouting distance it wouldn't work at all. It might be one order of magnitude less effective, but not several, because that would place it down in the same range as remedies we already have, and which would already be common knowledge.

Again, we *hear* what it does, but we never actually see what it is capable of. And that goes for bacta as well. Though keep in mind, bacta isn't produced by technology, it's harvested, so that is arguably not even medical technology, unlike bacta which was *invented* by the Vratix on the planet Thyferra. Further, medicine is not a single-source cure. Bacta and Kolto is all well and good, but what about technology outside these? One discussion of note: cybernetics. If you couldn't tell by my avatar, I'm a big fan of Gen. Grievous. His cybernetic replacements of his entire body were groundbreaking. In almost every source on Grievous you read, you will find that Grievous' cybernetic body was an experiment used to perfect the process for what was eventually done to Vader. Not only that, but try to find examples of extensive cybernetics in KotOR. Bao-dur made his own hand, a sort of mechanical prodigy. Malak had a vocabulator stitched to him, but probably had to drink liquid food through a tube because they couldn't rebuild him a jaw. Any other cyborgs you can think of? Because I can't. Yet, by the time of the clone wars, a droid was designed specifically to make clones function again by replacing lost limbs with cybernetics, routinely. Overall, cybernetics alone seems to have come a LONG way during those 4k years.

[Simon_Jester]

This is actually an interesting conjecture. I hadn't thought about that, but then again, I hadn't heard that he had gone over Malak's head like that.

He was so distressed about the idea that he actually raised the issue with Malak. This is closely equivalent to protesting to Darth Vader that he's just ordered you to commit a war crime. Of course, Karath is predictably smacked down and does it anyway, but still.

So the idea that Karath would go... I'd call it under Malak's head is plausible to me. Malak isn't much of a tactician, so he may not realize exactly what's being pulled on him. And, once again, he doesn't give a crap about the planet one way or the other- he neither wants to preserve it nor wants to destroy it. He just wants to kill Bastila. Smashing skyscrapers in the areas she's likely to be in with megaton shots as fast as possible might be nearly as effective as pulverizing the surface with gigaton or teraton shots for that purpose. After all, they can tell approximately where she must be just by knowing which parts of the ecumenopolis the Republic escape pods crashed into.

This, however, would not say anything about the shots fired before the Ebon Hawk escaped. Further, I doubt that Malak (unless he actually sensed Bastila aboard) would make the assumption she got away. More specifically, he may assume she got away, but would likely finish razing Taris just to *make sure* she wouldn't be simply overlooked on the surface.

True, though I wouldn't put it past Malak to sense Bastila's escape. There are precedents for that sort of thing, and Malak was quite strong in the Force. This ties into my earlier speculation: at first Karath used relatively low-power shots while still trying to evacuate his own troops, and Malak didn't actively interfere... then after the Ebon Hawk escaped Malak sensed that Bastila had gotten away and ceased fire. This may also help to explain the survival of the bounty hunter Calo Nord, who lost a fight against Revan in the hanger the Ebon Hawk took off from. When a freighter escaped the planet using the governor's launch codes, Malak immediately ordered his ship(s) to stop bombarding that area and send down a search team to sweep the area, look for survivors, and confirm that Bastila was on that ship.
_______

Hmm. I don't know whether self-healing alloys were or were not a feature of KotOR, only that I have not seen them used. I can't prove that self-healing alloys were present.

Self healing alloys were new even by New Republic standards, invented since the Empire fractured at the Battle of Endor.

OK. You see, I did not know that; my EU knowledge is not stellar and has large gaps in it. However, I would like to point out that I don't contend that technical stasis was absolute between 4000 BBY and 25 ABY, only that it was like the differences between, say, 1990 and 1960. There were differences, but the differences were not so great that people from one era would be completely lost at sea in the other. Small potatoes compared to, say, Information Age/Iron Age (or Star Wars/Star Trek) technological gaps.
_______

I don't mean just what can be lugged by hand, I mean fully integrated into the wrist of the droid. Both wrists. Keep in mind how futile the Stormies were when they fired against the fleeing Millenium Falcon in Ep V. Imagine weapons smaller than that packing enough power to actually do something to the Falcon. Afterall, the only weapon they could bring that could actually threaten the Falcon was a full E-Web repeating blaster, which required a sizeable generator to power it, and a tripod mount for stability. Imagine that kind of power mounted into the wrist of a 2 meter tall, humanoid frame (and a skeletal looking one at that). This would speak a great deal of the miniaturization of the technology as well as the power.

Yes, it does, although that may partly be a cost and maintenance issue; were these droids at all cheap? Moreover, as another question: was any of the power supply not built into the wrists? Did the blaster equipment extend back into the forearm?

Finally, the heavy blasters of 4000 BBY were surely not anywhere near as capable as those super-wrist blasters (perhaps inspired by the ones on the CIS super battle droid), but they were comparable to E-Webs, at least in terms of being credible antifighter weapons. You can assume whatever you like about the firepower those fighters were designed to withstand, but to me that strongly implies that at least the top of the line 4000 BBY blasters were roughly equivalent to common movie-era blasters of equivalent size and mass.

That would reflect technological change, yes, but not more than an order of magnitude or so's worth.
________

Your comment about the communication storage strengthens what I'm saying, thank you. As for the size of the droids, in the EU there is a droid constructed that is a fully functioning protocol unit that can fit in the palm of your hand. I can't remember its name, since the book it came from is currently a few thousand miles from my current abode >.< but I'll try to get info for you off the databank.

You were asking how we could gauge computer technology from sentient droids when the droids don't get "more" sentient. I know how to do that, but my impression is that reasonably common level movie era droids simply aren't vastly more capable than reasonably common level 4000 BBY droids. That Palmtop protocol "droid": how much memory does it have?

At a guess, you're talking about M-TD, the miniaturized protocol droid. M-TD speaks six languages to C-3PO's six million, which strongly suggests that his capabilities are vastly inferior. If nothing else, a great deal of data storage capability was removed in order to pare down the hardware into a smaller package. This does prove that the CPU of a sentient or near-sentient* droid can fit in a palm-sized unit by the movie era, but it doesn't tell us much else. And since we don't know the size of CPUs in 4000 BBY, we're still kind of stuck.

*Side note: Privately, I have long suspected that C-3PO isn't quite sentient as we understand the term, but is merely a very clever expert system specializing in communications (which allows him to fake Turing Tests better than a being of equal general intelligence but with lesser communication algorithms could). But that's just me, and it's probably anticanonical. Even so, though, you probably could program an expert system translator that projected the illusion of personality well enough to fool people who weren't professional cyberneticists... which would greatly reduce the demand on the CPU that has to fit into your mini-"droid."
________

The difference, is that they made a big enough difference, and were cost effective enough, to have caused a "resurgence is melee weapons" as is described and shown in KotOR. You don't see anyone putting on a shield and going for a vibrosword in the modern SW because it isn't practical. The reason for this, most likely, would be prohibitive cost of production or maintenance. 4000 BBY, however, they appear to be disposable, like some kind of 5 use cameras. This suggests that the market and production is wide and easy enough respectively to manage mass production. As such, their disappearance as a whole would have to have some reason, since life-or-death defenses don't go out of style like fashion. They must have somehow become obsolete. Whether it was a case of our bombers we can no longer make parts for, or that they simply couldn't hold up to the newer blasters, either way, they went out of fashion because of tech increase.

Indeed; I am inclined to agree. But the magnitude of technical increase need not have been all that impressive to make personal shield units uneconomical, and for this to happen you need nonuniform technological progress: advances in hand blaster firepower that are not matched by corresponding advances in miniature shield generators.

Alternatively, the secret might have involved some sort of more subtle 'trick' that made the blasters more effective at penetrating light shielding without making them drastically more energetic, depending on whether Star Wars shields can be finessed at all. That kind of thing can often be as much an engineering solution as an advance in basic scientific knowledge- something that would have been built years ago if anyone had thought of it.
________

True, but hyperdrives, at least haven't changed much. The games have a galaxy-hopping plot, travelling between worlds that are canonically far apart from one another; if it were taking months or years instead of days or weeks to get between them, the plot would be very different.

However, you fail to take into consideration a few things. First, we don't actually know how long the travel takes in either movies or the games, since travel is usually glossed over. As such, for all we know, it takes over a day to reach another point in the galaxy 4000 years ago, whereas a modern ship may do it in a couple hours. We don't know, so you can't use the time taken as any more evidence than I can.

No. On the other hand, my estimates of the rate of technological change in Star Wars are fully compatible with a shift of one, perhaps as much as two orders of magnitude between 4000 BBY and the movie era. Ships being ten times faster strikes me as plausible, though a bit of a stretch unless we use the fastest possible times for long range travel in the movie era as a representative sample of what all long range trips take.

Again, we *hear* what it does, but we never actually see what it is capable of. And that goes for bacta as well. Though keep in mind, bacta isn't produced by technology, it's harvested, so that is arguably not even medical technology, unlike bacta which was *invented* by the Vratix on the planet Thyferra. Further, medicine is not a single-source cure. Bacta and Kolto is all well and good, but what about technology outside these? One discussion of note: cybernetics. If you couldn't tell by my avatar, I'm a big fan of Gen. Grievous. His cybernetic replacements of his entire body were groundbreaking. In almost every source on Grievous you read, you will find that Grievous' cybernetic body was an experiment used to perfect the process for what was eventually done to Vader. Not only that, but try to find examples of extensive cybernetics in KotOR. Bao-dur made his own hand, a sort of mechanical prodigy. Malak had a vocabulator stitched to him, but probably had to drink liquid food through a tube because they couldn't rebuild him a jaw. Any other cyborgs you can think of? Because I can't. Yet, by the time of the clone wars, a droid was designed specifically to make clones function again by replacing lost limbs with cybernetics, routinely. Overall, cybernetics alone seems to have come a LONG way during those 4k years.

Yes. This is an issue I'd had a few flickering thoughts about. Drastic advances in cybernetics do seem indicated. On the other hand, the computer capability had been there for millenia; the only thing that seems to have been missing was the nerve-hardware interface. I'm not sure how great a breakthrough that was in and of itself. Large, yes, with farreaching consequences. Huge? Not necessarily.

[Thraxis]

After all, they can tell approximately where she must be just by knowing which parts of the ecumenopolis the Republic escape pods crashed into.

Canon at least partially differs with you there. In the cutscene showing the bombardment of Taris, the shots are seen covering a several hundred (thousand?) square mile radius. I make this assessment by the fact that the firepower was being directed all across a city that looked to be approximately similar is size to at least the US, at least relative to the planet, that is.

True, though I wouldn't put it past Malak to sense Bastila's escape. There are precedents for that sort of thing, and Malak was quite strong in the Force. This ties into my earlier speculation: at first Karath used relatively low-power shots while still trying to evacuate his own troops, and Malak didn't actively interfere... then after the Ebon Hawk escaped Malak sensed that Bastila had gotten away and ceased fire. This may also help to explain the survival of the bounty hunter Calo Nord, who lost a fight against Revan in the hanger the Ebon Hawk took off from. When a freighter escaped the planet using the governor's launch codes, Malak immediately ordered his ship(s) to stop bombarding that area and send down a search team to sweep the area, look for survivors, and confirm that Bastila was on that ship.

I think Malak is thorough enough in his vengeance to continue bombarding the planet after he's even sense her leave, even if *just to make sure*.

-------

I do have a new thought to interject here, in support of your argument for Karath in this case. I recently did some more research on the Leviathan and found out that its primary armament was in quad laser cannons. It did also sport point defense weaponry, turbolasers, and perhaps even missiles, but then weapon that existed in the highest numbers were quad laser cannons. Further, the appearance of the weapons bombarding Taris could fit the description of a "quad laser". As such, it's possible that Karath ordered only the quads to fire (which would canonically be in the megaton range, given time scaling, low megaton or even high kiloton range would be likely, which would put it at the observed power level). Without the turbos, we wouldn't see any GT/TT range blasts (assuming the TL's are that powerful 4k BBY). Overall, the observations would fit with this theory.

However, I would like to point out that I don't contend that technical stasis was absolute between 4000 BBY and 25 ABY, only that it was like the differences between, say, 1990 and 1960. There were differences, but the differences were not so great that people from one era would be completely lost at sea in the other. Small potatoes compared to, say, Information Age/Iron Age (or Star Wars/Star Trek) technological gaps.

A computer engineer from 1960 wouldn't understand the first thing about computers nowadays. He would probably look at my laptop and say, "Where's the vacuum tubes?" It isn't the common people who are always affected by radical technological increases, it's the people who build the stuff. Just because it doesn't look the same on the outside, and just because it doesn't affect how it's used, doesn't mean that it hasn't changed significantly from an engineering or technological standpoint.
_______

At a guess, you're talking about M-TD, the miniaturized protocol droid. M-TD speaks six languages to C-3PO's six million, which strongly suggests that his capabilities are vastly inferior.

Ah, thanks for finding the source. Ok, so he wasn't so *fully* functional, my bad.

*Side note: Privately, I have long suspected that C-3PO isn't quite sentient as we understand the term, but is merely a very clever expert system specializing in communications (which allows him to fake Turing Tests better than a being of equal general intelligence but with lesser communication algorithms could). But that's just me, and it's probably anticanonical. Even so, though, you probably could program an expert system translator that projected the illusion of personality well enough to fool people who weren't professional cyberneticists... which would greatly reduce the demand on the CPU that has to fit into your mini-"droid."

I do have to disagree here, though. Who in their right mind would program a spaz? I'll just let that sink in. Further, psychologists have, for decades, looked at our psyche and cognition as a breakdown of various physiological processes and reactions to results. I would argue that if you are *able* to fool sentience tests, likely there is sentience there. Although this is, really, a moot point. So I suggest we don't continue with this one.

Alternatively, the secret might have involved some sort of more subtle 'trick' that made the blasters more effective at penetrating light shielding without making them drastically more energetic, depending on whether Star Wars shields can be finessed at all. That kind of thing can often be as much an engineering solution as an advance in basic scientific knowledge- something that would have been built years ago if anyone had thought of it.

Technology is an advance in engineering. Science lays the groundwork for engineers on how things work, but technology and engineering are the SAME THING. For example, our knowledge of electricity, magnetism, and circuits haven't increased much in the last 20 years or so, but our technology in the field of computers has accelerated rapidly. (and yes, it hasn't just advanced, it has accelerated) Computers haven't increased much in science but in technology and engineering the field has been rapidly growing. Saying that there may not be much advancement between blasters because they may have only been engineered differently is like saying that there may not be much difference between a musket and a .50 caliber semi-automatic sniper rifle with a range of over a mile, because they both rely on the same scientific principles, and are only different in engineering.

No. On the other hand, my estimates of the rate of technological change in Star Wars are fully compatible with a shift of one, perhaps as much as two orders of magnitude between 4000 BBY and the movie era. Ships being ten times faster strikes me as plausible, though a bit of a stretch unless we use the fastest possible times for long range travel in the movie era as a representative sample of what all long range trips take.

I disagree that we can use it for any basis of comparison. For all we know, the KotOR era took days to do what a modern SW ship could do in hours. We simply do not have evidence to fully argue in either direction.

Yes. This is an issue I'd had a few flickering thoughts about. Drastic advances in cybernetics do seem indicated. On the other hand, the computer capability had been there for millenia; the only thing that seems to have been missing was the nerve-hardware interface. I'm not sure how great a breakthrough that was in and of itself. Large, yes, with farreaching consequences. Huge? Not necessarily.

Do you know how nerves function? Nerves are a largely chemical system that, when properly stimulated by chemicals, release an electric pulse down themselves which stimulates a chemical release on the other end, which then may or may not trigger a similar response in the next neuron, depending on what other chemicals have been released by other neurons. The idea that they can just hook up an arm to the old one's place and have it function properly with as much (or at least almost as much) dexterity while attaching directly to existing neurons, even to the extent of feeling pain is HUGE. YOU may not see that as huge, but believe me, it is an INCREDIBLE break through. Nerves aren't just some wire that you can hook up another wire to, they are MUCH more complicated that that.

[Ghost Rider]

A simple look at technological jumps that do exist in canon?

Obi-Wan's starfighter versus the X-Wing. And think about the background behind Obi-Wan's craft, the resources his particular faction has versus the X-Wing.

[bz249]

Technology is an advance in engineering. Science lays the groundwork for engineers on how things work, but technology and engineering are the SAME THING. For example, our knowledge of electricity, magnetism, and circuits haven't increased much in the last 20 years or so, but our technology in the field of computers has accelerated rapidly. (and yes, it hasn't just advanced, it has accelerated) Computers haven't increased much in science but in technology and engineering the field has been rapidly growing. Saying that there may not be much advancement between blasters because they may have only been engineered differently is like saying that there may not be much difference between a musket and a .50 caliber semi-automatic sniper rifle with a range of over a mile, because they both rely on the same scientific principles, and are only different in engineering.

Although its just naming convention but our scientific knowledge of electricity, magnetism and circuits increased a lot in the last 25 years... the 250GB hard drive would have been inaccesible using the principles of 1986. One can argue that spin dependent scattering of electrons is merely an engineering trick, but a certain committee decided that it is a rather relevant discovery in physics (a fundamental science). Also high temperature superconductivity (a vastly different thing than metallic superconductivity described by the BCS model) and its possible theory of that happened in that timeframe (and resulted in another of the same award... oh and it is not the peace one which could be given for promises and expectations, only hard evidence is accepted ).

[Thraxis]

Ghost, please enlighten us. I'm thinking about it, and I really don't see the analogue. I assume you're referring to the Delta-7 shown in Ep. II rather than the Actis Interceptor shown in Ep. III.

--Hyperdrive> Sure, the Delta-7 doesn't have an integrated hyperdrive, but fighters which precede it (such as the Naboo Starfighter) do.
--Ship Function> The Delta-7 was designed as an interceptor, not as a space superiority fighter (like the x-wing). As such, the Delta-7 is far faster and more maneuverable than the x-wing (capable of more than 2000 g acceleration in space in excess of the x-wing*), whereas its firepower is far less than the more heavily armed and heavily shielded x-wing.
--Makers> Both Kuat Drive Yards (makers of the Delta-7) and Incom Corporation (makers of the T-65 X-wing) are both major corporations when they make the respective ships. In fact, the x-wing is what causes the empire to take over Incom, but not before Incom takes the entire run to the Alliance.
--Shields> We visually see the shields around an x-wing doing almost nothing against TIE laser cannons, whereas Obi-Wan's Delta-7 soaks up a tremendous amount of punishment from Jango's Slave I in the Geonosian asteroid field. This is most likely a red herring given the weapons Jango was softening his shields with are labeled "blaster cannons" rather than the more powerful laser cannons in every source I've seen, and that TIE's were renowned for having high-powered laser cannons, but this evidence still does not help the argument of increased technology.

So please, enlighten us on how it proves it, Ghost. (Not meaning to be sarcastic here, just I am curious on your thoughts)

*numbers come from the New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels


bz> Ok, so maybe there have been more scientific advances, but technology is a feat of engineering. There must always be some kind of science to back up engineering, but my point is that saying that "tech didn't increase because it was only a feat of engineering" is like saying "the grass didn't grow because it only increased in mass and physical dimensions".

[Wyrm]

Given that the source material is very sketchy in the pre-Wars era, this [dearth of evidence for extended periods of rapid technological growth] should not be at all surprising.

No. It should not. So am I supposed to use the datapoints I do (technology was not drastically different in any across-the-board sense at 4000 BBY, but the state of the art in 25000 BBY is obsolete crap by any reasonable standard in 1 ABY)

We've been watching ourselves for the last few hundred years. We know the current knowledge growth is exponential because research papers are being published at an exponential rate. We're generating shitloads of data every day, one terabyte per day from all of the radio astronomy done on earth. One isolated field of science is generating more data than the number of books ever written can contain.

The SW galaxy? Not so much.

Given the relative magnitude of energy manipulation, something that much more powerful than Star Trek would be about where Iain Banks' Culture is in terms of their control over matter and energy.

Bullshit. You're assuming that a power on the same scale of the Culture is even possible in the shared SW/ST universe, and that an ever-increasing knowledge of how the world works implies that we'll automatically be able to bend nature to our will much more easily. Nature will allow only what it will allow. If the SW powers are near the limit of what nature will allow, there is no way it can get more powerful even if it were omniscient.

Again, how should such a civilization appear? No appealing to another author's bullshit this time.

I'm beginning to think that my conviction that it would take something in the high century range, as opposed to the millenium range, is not provable to your satisfaction;

Gee, you think?

I'm not at all sure that your conviction that the opposite is true is provable to my satisfaction.

Not surprising, as I know I can't prove that it will take millennia to my satisfaction, let alone yours. All I've been doing is knocking down your arguments and showing that your position has just as much foundation.

And this doesn't seem to be one of those cases where there's an obvious null hypothesis* that both parties should accept in the absence of sufficient evidence, either, which leaves us at an impasse.

The null hypothesis is a frequentistic notion that fails utterly in these kinds of problems. We should not be surprised that it does so here.

I'd like there to be enough evidence to reconstruct a universally convincing growth curve for Star Wars, even if it decisively refuted my current argument, but I honestly don't think it's there.

Good boy.
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There's hardly any evidence for the period under discussion at all. All we have is a C that cannot be calculated, and therefore, an αt that cannot be calculated, and thus, a t that cannot be calculated. How much scientific and engineering knowledge does the construction of fast hyperdrives, hypermatter reactors, turbolasers, and all the various masha-mash of Star Wars technology (World Devistators, ect) represent? How many times in SW history has the new technology left the old generation behind? These are questions you have no answer for, yet you insist on a short (~500 yr) timescale of adaption.

500 years is only short relative to the amount of time it took to invent the technology from scratch; it is not short on the timescale of things like Five Year Plans, or even the rise and fall of powerful nations. You call the timescale I've tried to estimate "short" mostly because it is shorter than the number you've tried to estimate.

That's your entire argument, isn't it? "Long for a human, short for a stable stellar civillization." What the fuck?! That's not convincing at all!

Your figure is based on nothing but, "DURR!! IT FEELZ RITE!! 6m9"

Then putting bounds on C should be relatively easy. Go do it, then come back.

The easy way to do it is to compare C to "c," a comparable constant indicating the technological advancement of Star Trek. There are a lot of ways to do this that produce wildly different results. Comparing demonstrated computer power produces very different results from comparing energy generation, which in turn produces very different results from comparing steel production. My natural inclination is to use energy generation, because historically that has been both strongly affected by and strongly effective on technological growth.

If so, the obvious thing to do is to compare energy generation on comparable mobile platforms: comparing a planet's worth of reactors to a fighter craft's worth would be ridiculous. We could compare, say, a Galaxy-class starship with a Dreadnaught-class "heavy cruiser;" both ships are of comparable size. the Dreadnaught puts out ~2E24 W by the best estimate I can find on short notice; the Galaxy... tricky. On the one hand they've got an antimatter reactor which (on this site) is rated in the 900 TW = 9E14 W. The antimatter plants are unstable, bleeding-edge technology in the early Galaxies, but the bugs seem to get hammered out over the following decade or two.

That gives us a differential of approximately nine orders of magnitude: C = 2E9 or about e21.5. If we normalize Star Trek's current power generation capacity at 1, they must increase their technical capability by a factor of e about 21.5 times order to reach the level seen in Star Wars.

Can you say 'non sequitor'? Yes, the powers differ by nine orders of magnitude, but how the hell do you get from there to the level of knowledge the two technologies represent differ nine orders of magnitude? You have not convinced me that a one joule difference in power production really represents a one knowledge unit difference (in some suitable measure of knowledge) in understanding of power production, and quite frankly I don't see how you can believe it either.

How long will each increase of a factor of e take? That depends on the value of α; in any event if the power generation estimate is valid, the Federation will need 21.5/α years to catch up to Star Wars technologically. Recall that α applies to societies which are consciously trying to upgrade their own technological capability to catch up with foreign powers, not societies which are forging ahead in unexplored territory or which are prone to bouts of complacency that stop them from investing in expensive basic research and infrastructure programs.

I introduced α to the discussion, you idiot. I haven't forgotten what it means.

For the Trekkers to catch up in 500 years requires that 1/α = 23.5 years. If 1/α is 50 years then it takes over a millenium, if it is 10 years then it takes only 215 years to catch up.

You realize that 1/α = 23.5 years and 1/α is 50 years differ by less than a third of an order of magnitude, do you not? That means your 500 year figure is very sensitive to the details of the problem, and as such there is little difference between the aquisition taking a "short" time and a "long" time, as I've suspected.

All this assumes:
-Power generation from mobile platforms is a reasonable measure of the technical sophistication of Star Trek relative to Star Wars
-The Star Trek nations, or some of them, are smart enough to recognize that they're on the wrong end of a BIG technological gap, and are able to systematically attempt to close this gap.

I cannot reliably assess how good those assumptions are for purposes of constructing a model; if you disagree with (2) then this entire debate was pointless to begin with.

Why did you assume that I wouldn't? It's assumption (1) that I have misgivings about, as you've left a very important detail out of it:
-That the power generation capacity of a plant is a linear measure of the technical and scientific knowledge it represents.

Thus, not simply a "reasonable measure" of the technical sophistication in a coloquial sense, but a particular kind of measure of that technical sophistication, where the power output directly scales to the knowledge required to create it. Your scenario depends on this kind assumption in order to work, and you have not done nearly enough to justify it.
_________

You've been basing your estimates of β on the industrial-era West, not on references to the setting you're trying to estimate β for. Apps you may recall, I think we do have a basis for the value of β, such that 1/β ~= 1000-4000 years. At this point, I can present my argument in terms of the analysis above:

<snippy>

Alternatively, we might go clear back into the deep past, 100000 years or more (if Wookiepedia is to be believed, the Star Wars galaxy first discovered FTL travel around two million years ago!), where we get values of 1/β of 4000 years or greater.

Your analysis of β not only inherits all of the problems of your analysis of α, but additional ones:

• You assume that an "end of physics" problem is not in effect. Maybe the SW galaxy is the absolute pinacle of what ST/SW phyisics allows, in which case nobody is going to get more power no matter how much knowledge is gained. (Again, the Culture doesn't exist in the SW/ST universe, so any appeal to them instantly invalidates your argument.)
• You assume that SW science has not experienced busts in knowledge, where knowledge was lost to the wider galaxy, necessitating their rediscovery. This almost certainly has happened several times. The Columi went into seclusion after finding the galaxy inhabited by primitives, and as such their knowledge can be considered for pratical purposes lost to the galaxy. Same with the Infinite Empire.

As such, I do not accept this analysis of β. The β for the industrial-era West is fuzzy but well-founded. The SW galaxy's β... not so much.
________

Yes. Which leaves us with a strange conclusion: Star Wars has invented transporters and discarded them. Why? There are reasons not to use them for everything the way Star Trek does, but that doesn't mean they should be used for nothing on technologically advanced worlds, to the point where no one even seems to remember that they ever existed.

That it's a strange conclusion does not obviate it in favor for an even stranger conclusion: that a device that is so simple that it has been invented multiple times by creatures barely three meals away from total savagry, comparatively, would elude all of the SW races for much of an extended history. We already have a plausible answer: EM pollution, which is not nearly a problem to living matter as it is to a transporter, as well as other kinds of technological pollution.

Again, a strawman. Your talk that the transporters' niche should still be occupied by something assumes that the niche still exists. For some reason, it does not. For whatever reason, the niche disappeared, and with it, the transporter.

But the niche of transporters is "moving things in a hurry." How does the demand for moving things in a hurry disappear?

You oversimplify this niche, dearheart, in such a way that it appears wider than it actually is. The transporter is only useful where its advantages in that use outweigh the disadvantages. A transporter is relatively short range, only about a planetary diameter or so. It has a limited payload per transport. It takes about 5 seconds to complete the transport, and has a duty cycle of just over one and a half minutes, if the TM is to be believed. However, the way the feddies use the transporter indicates that there is a limit to how many transports they can use per hour, so this limitation is credible. Transport can be sensed by Federation sensors, which means that Imperial sensors can pick it up too. It also can't transport through shields and relatively minor interference effects (probably the most crippling limitation).

This last limitation restricts transporter use to underdeveloped worlds that are unlikely to have the luxury of having things 'right this minute' anyway... unless they're addicted to it.

The limited range means that you can only use them in spitting distance with their target, as such it restricts their use to planetary only, as a ship can reach orbit within ten seconds and probably exceed the transporters' range within fifteen — and this is for an obsolete piece of junk (the Falcon). And the ability for SW ships to move about a system is staggering. Shelling out for a higher speed transport will do more to decrease transport time than transporting would.

The limited payload per transport cycle coupled with the very limited duty cycle means that throughput is lousy. It's only useful if you have maybe a transport or two worth of cargo to transport, before a moderately-sized transport vehicle exceeds the capacity.

Finally, their detectibility, coupled with their limited legitimate uses otherwise means that ships using transportation are going to look suspicious as hell. That will limit their covert uses, including their uses by pirates or covert ops.

Are there not reasons to have a teleporter aboard ship, such as abandoning a damaged ship in orbit in a hurry?

Pointless unless you have somewhere to abandon ship to, and a transporter doesn't provide that. Escape pods are superior in every way.

Medical evacuation of someone sick or injured, in situations where minutes count?

This is probably the only serious suggestion, provided they work in such a scenario.

Picking up valuable cargoes or replacement parts without having to land?

Given that landing takes a few seconds anyway, what's the big hurry?

Hidden compartments have excuses for existing, but so do transporters; both are obviously useful to any cargo transporter who is concerned with speed... which includes smugglers. If having hidden compartments is legal, why shouldn't transporters be similarly legal?

The point was having enough legitimate uses to mass produce. Once they're mass produced, then they're fair game for pirates to use... at their peril.

For that matter, if transporters are illegal because of their uses in covert operations and criminal activities... I'd expect the military to have them, at least for special operations purposes.

Their ease of detection and the fragility of the process would tend to preclude that.
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Which implies that chances are good that the Star Wars galaxy has come up with the ST-style transporter independently, and has since dropped it, for some reason lost to history. It doesn't matter why, that is the fact. All you can do is explain the facts.

But if it were so easy to invent, it should have been invented over and over- you can't suppress something orders of magnitude easier to build than other things which exist on a routine basis.

They're easy enough to invent that it's been done multiple times by many species in a relative eyeblink of time relative to the history of the SW galaxy. They're easy to invent, period.

It would be like trying to to suppress the invention of nails or armchairs.

Iron nails and stuffed wooden armchairs have a use. Nobody invents glass nails or cardboard armchairs, because they... don't have use.

Thing is, the more power you throw about, the more saturated your environment is with EM radiation. Even with high efficiencies and relatively little EM bleeding, with as much power the technologies of SW casually throw around it would be highly surprising if the environment isn't absolutely boiling over in EM radiation that would be harmless to humans, but totally screw up transport beams. Thus, the ST-style transporter technology is worthless even in civilian applications. This is a problem that gets worse as availible power increases, not better.

This is plausible, but I'm a bit concerned about the question of how high you can crank up ambient EM power without health consequences.

It may be the limiting factor on their power generation technology.

Trekkers still use transporters on civilized worlds where there should be a great deal of static and wireless traffic already. And aboard starships with terawatt-range power generation capacity; it seems odd that Star Wars would have people routinely living in environments that threw around more energy than that, because I'm not sure what they'd do with all the power.

Why do you think that a human can't comfortably live in a place with much more EM pollution than we do currently? Are you one of those idiots who think that we're bathed in cancer-causing EM radiation from all the wireless and electrical power emissions? I assure you that the evidence of hazard at current levels is flimsy at best, and any anecdotal evidence that nearby power lines is best explained by the chemicals involved with the technology and incidentals — take a wiff of a transformer box sometime. WHOO! It's volitizing something. It's not about the actual power of the plant, but how much EM bleed is allowed by the Imperial equivalent of the FCC and EPA. And we know humans can live in places, for an extended periods of time, where EM will disrupt transporters.

[Thraxis]

Just adding some comments of my own to Wyrm's post:

--The Infinite Empire
It has actually been suggested that the Infinite Empire is where the first hyperspace technology came from, but in support of the whole debate here, it took centuries to understand it well enough to duplicate the technology well enough to make "hyperspace cannons" which could basically shoot a ship through hyperspace, and it wasn't for a least several centuries or millennia that the hyperdrive was refined *back* into ship-portable devices. And this is an example of reverse engineering on the SW side, after having seen what their enslavers could do with it.

--Transporters
Even if we ignore the EM radiation, it's well known that funny ore, even dense substances can block transporters. It has been theorized by the great Mike Wong that transporters might not even work through SW hulls, let alone through their shields (discussed during the putting-down of transporters as all-powerful weapons). If this reasoning is sound, it may be that transporters can't get through the hulls of SW ships, which would mean that putting a transporter in a ship would be useless since all you would be able to do is transport something within a room, maybe within your ship at most. Now THAT is a dead niche.

--Nails and Armchairs
LOLZ. I can't believe that you actually went there, Jester. I hope you understand why this rebuttal is so funny.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm going to get back to you on all this, but not soon; I expect to be painfully busy for the next few days.

[bz249]

Why did you assume that I wouldn't? It's assumption (1) that I have misgivings about, as you've left a very important detail out of it:
-That the power generation capacity of a plant is a linear measure of the technical and scientific knowledge it represents.

Thus, not simply a "reasonable measure" of the technical sophistication in a coloquial sense, but a particular kind of measure of that technical sophistication, where the power output directly scales to the knowledge required to create it. Your scenario depends on this kind assumption in order to work, and you have not done nearly enough to justify it.

In some sort of defense of Simon... power output is an accepted as measure of technological progress, the Kardashev-system of civilizations is based on power output. Though it can be misleading sometimes.

Germany primary energy consumption was 371 Million tons of oil equivalent in 1979, while it is only 309 Million tons of oil equivalent in 2008, I would say current day Germany is not 20% less developped than it was in 1979.

http://www.bp.com/productlanding.do?cat ... Id=7044622

[Wyrm]

--Transporters
Even if we ignore the EM radiation, it's well known that funny ore, even dense substances can block transporters. It has been theorized by the great Mike Wong that transporters might not even work through SW hulls, let alone through their shields (discussed during the putting-down of transporters as all-powerful weapons). If this reasoning is sound, it may be that transporters can't get through the hulls of SW ships, which would mean that putting a transporter in a ship would be useless since all you would be able to do is transport something within a room, maybe within your ship at most. Now THAT is a dead niche.

I had not thought of that angle. It's even deadlier to the widespread use of the technology. Structures like those found on Coruscant require much high-strength material, which will likely play havok with the transport process. Even using transporters as an emergency evacuation would require massive retooling of the infrastructure to add this additional channel, and thus prohibitively expensive — and if the structure is damaged in this emergency, all bets are off.

There's also other kinds of exotic technological pollution that the SW societies generate, such as the bleed off from all of those repulsorlifts. We know that the process is easily scrambled by various agents that do not otherwise harm living tissue.

=======

In some sort of defense of Simon... power output is an accepted as measure of technological progress, the Kardashev-system of civilizations is based on power output.

True, but I acknowledge that freely. The problem is that Simon is equating power generation capacity with the knowledge it takes to create it. Precisely equating it, up to some constant of proportionality. They do not necessarily share such a linear relation, however his analysis of α and β requires this to work.

[Batman]

Err-I'm not sure why transporter inability to beam through dense substances necessarily figures into situations where the Wars side WANTS transporters to work (say, civilian short range transportation).Simply put the transporter beam emitter/receiver OUTSIDE the hull.
Won't do beans about all the stray emissions that are likely to fuck up the transportation process ANYWAY but that one PARTICULAR problem can be worked around.