LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Hmmm, I think with your comparison, the Death Star is something only a galactic level government can build. There really isn't an equivalent to modern day. Star Destroyers/Capital Ships are like tanks to today's world. Someone can build a couple hundred tanks in secret if they have enough money.
The Clone Wars was more about controlling key planets rather than a system by system take over. With hyperspace lanes, there are super efficient space highways in Star Wars. Controlling these lanes, key manufacturing planets, and key resource planets was the extent of the conflict. 2 million clones means less than one clone per inhabited system even at the low end of size estimates for Star Wars.
It is honestly hard to say. I suspect that a lot of low level jobs are fairly automated with droids or computer systems. These systems operate more through inertia most likely than anything else. Coruscant itself is very interesting since you literally have super rich people living on top of super poor people. The class divide doesn't get any more real than here. I would suspect a very tiered system and people having 'connects' at least in the middle class. The lower class is just screwed over in the under city. How to fix that......well no idea. Coruscant is just as bad but different than the galaxy as a whole.
The issue is how many corresponding systems said trade has to pass through first. If Corellia decided to tax all shipments through its sector by 0.5% for space traffic control, that is going to be a lot of credits and impact millions of systems in terms of end costs. If every system did this....it gets insane. A good example of this not working are how US States functioned before the US as a whole came to be.
They are a corporation since they are the only entities that can ship enough goods at the galactic level. This is where a lot of problems come into play, since they have a lot of really large ships that need protection, and freedom to travel. Trade is needed since things like Bacta, droids, ships, tibana gas, hyper matter refineries, and various other items are only produced on certain worlds. Sure places can go it alone or a small group of systems, but they are inferior to the abilities and costs of large corporations. It is both a nation state AND a corporation, the Trade Federation had a senate seat as a point of reference.
Even if a government controlled 10 systems, that is not enough to counter a mega-corp. You need 100+ minimum, and even then the trade network, credits coming in from other systems, will allow them to field a larger force than any comparative sized government.
The issue is that with the size of Star Wars and the 3D nature, it is more like WW1 on steroids than WW2. If each group of systems is allowed to independently align foreign policy, the sheer diplomatic and spying costs would be astronomical. This would force larger blocs to form for protection, with the cycle continually repeating until the galaxy was destroyed or a single bloc triumphed. Unlike planetary warfare, there are no galaxy ending weapons like nuclear weapons to create a stalemate. Any super weapons needs an incredible amount of capital investment, so any government with 10%+ control of the galaxy could reasonably build one, but would drain their economy and leave themselves open. This is why the eventual state of the galaxy would be a single polity, since there is no threat of complete annihilation. Sure the Sith got genocided, but their vast Empire still remained and the Republic gobbled it up, systems and all.
1. You're quoting logistically impossible factors to try to claim that small-scale nations wouldn't be functional. Bad writing isn't a justification for impossible governmental systems. Economy of scale can give you advantages in hypermatter production, but that doesn't make fundamentally unstable governments needed to give crushing advantages to a handful of systems in the galaxy the ability to exist in the first place.
2. Regarding trade, Space is very big and mostly empty. It's extremely easy to just not go through systems that try to charge you for trying to ship through their territory. If most states try to stick high prices on shipping through their territory, this will incentivize other states to charge much smaller amounts, thus getting them some income, or none at all, and get some income from being a refueling hub since it doesn't tack extra costs on for ships to stop there to refuel/resupply. Frankly, you trying to cite tax and space traffic control makes it clear that you do not have a very good understanding of how space works, at least in this regard.
3. Your cited example about the Trade Federation holding a senate seat supports my point, not opposes it. It's a nation run like a corporation, and the problems there are inter-nation problems, not 'our corporation in your territory' problems.
4. You can always just not trade with a corporation, and that will prevent them from doing nasty things to your economy from the inside. If they're a corporate state and threaten war, well, wars are examples of things that regular nations have to deal with all the time. Much stronger nations fight much weaker nations regularly as well, there's plenty of examples throughout history.
5. Space being 3 dimensional in no way changes any of the fundamental problems involved with trying to form a unified super-state. In real life, a land-locked nation only particularly needs to worry about its neighbors. A coastal nation needs to worry about any nation with a powerful navy, especially if it's a primarily coastal nation, like Chile or Denmark. Space being 3-dimensional has somewhat similar effects.
It is not human nature to peacefully default to gradually-coalescing super-national identities and cultures that come closer and closer together, conglomerating into unitary states. There are literally zero examples of that ever happening in human history; the closest it's ever come would perhaps be Australia, which is to this day mostly empty space, and the British colonists mostly left the Aborigines to keep doing things as they pleased, while the colonists took (and still take) up small enough amounts of space relative to the continent as a whole, that it's not a real conflict or issue.
If the Star Wars galaxy is sufficiently dominated by drastically non-human psychology, then the whole thing is either an exercise in futility, or author fiat, whichever you prefer.