PeliusAnar
Well-known member
You do not need Bacta. There are other forms of medicine. The idea that a single planet can provide it to millions of worlds in a galaxy is hard to believe anyways.
You do not need Tibanna gas. There's other types of weapons technology available, canonically, and those gas giants are scattered throughout the galaxy anyways.
Cortosis and Kyber are both insanely niche items, they literally only matter if you're a Jedi/Sith/similar or trying to fight them.
All of these are nice things to have, but the problems of scale in trying to have a nation the size of a galaxy create far more pressure and problems than having any of these things would relieve.
Again, it is not human nature to be so unified and harmonius on a macroscale. It just does not work.
It is about supply chain efficiency. We see it occurring today with the food supply due to Covid. Food processing plants that cater to super markets are completely different than food processing plants that cater to restaurants. Another example is rare earth metals, sure there are a lot of locations that have them, but 90%+ of the production is in China. The market is only so elastic and their is a profitability to streamline one's production process as much as possible. On Geonosis we see the droid factories, but having them switch over to another droid is not simple. Unlike Star Trek, things have to be made piece by piece.
Let's take weapons tech. Switching over your hand guns is probably fairly quick, depending on the volume. But then you have to swap out all your ship weapons and the weapon storages in said ships. Also the controls that monitor said weapons and training to use said weapons. The scale gets a lot worse at that level. Then scale that across all your ships. While it isn't human nature to be harmonious on a macroscale, it is in a corporations interest to be harmonious on a macroscale.
'I am sure.' That's nothing but an assertion, and it completely ignores the costs of shipping a low-value high-bulk good like food, as well as the sheer size of worlds and populations, and how rapidly you can cause mass starvation if there's disruption to a massively inter-dependent food trade system.
There isn't just a world of difference between 'growing potatoes in Idaho and shipping them to Texas,' there's literal worlds. You're making massive assumptions about how things could or would work, then completely hand-waving away the equally-massive logistical and technical difficulties in making that happen, as well as the consequences if those things fail.
It's one thing to have some specialized worlds that are very dependent on food imports. It's another thing to try to have the majority of worlds dependent on food imports. And this is one industry you're trying to make claims about that is vastly more complex than you understand.
There are at least two worlds dependent on imports, Coruscant and Nar Shadda. Coruscant Food Supply.
Orbital traffic encloses the planet like electrons around a nucleus, delivering food and supplies, ambassadors and tourists.
Palaeontologists believe most of Coruscant was already paved over by the time interstellar flight became common. Such rampant overpopulation forced the inhabitants to develop the first atmosphere scrubbers, hydroponic farms, delivery pipelines, and recycling plants.
Well that is how Star Wars is. Thrawn's blockade of the planet in legends probably killed a couple billion poor people easily now that I really think about it. But in Star Wars that kind of number means nothing and unless they are a Force User or closely tied to one, the setting pretty much glosses over them. There are complete agri-worlds in the galaxy, that is where unchosen young Jedi get sent to. So we can say their supply chain is partly force powered, though I do agree that such a supply chain is insane.
Hyperlanes area thing in Star Wars. My analogy might be a bit off, but hyperlanes are a thing in Legends and Cannon. I agree with you 100 quintillion percent, that the writers don't understand the supply chain. I would argue that there are 10-1000x more supply and trade ships that they didn't include in the background scenes to save on their budget.You're actually wrong about this. You have truckers on 'back' country roads all the time. Not all of them, certainly, but quite a number, and they do so because while it is slower, it is more direct and saves them time. It's not about the tolls, it's about the time saved.
Also, quoting the last couple of Star Wars movies does your argument no credibility, since they were blatantly written by people who are actively ignorant of how things like trade and logistics really work.
I'm not sure what your point here is?
Some corporations are quite powerful, yes. The problem with the prequel trilogy and the Trade Federation isn't that the Trade Federation has militarized, it's the absolutely farcical notion that the Republic could exist without a standing military in the first place. A nation without a military exists purely on the sufferance of other nations.
It is the sole super power and has Jedi that have been putting on band-aids for a thousand years. After the Sith were wiped out, there was no need to have a large military and everyone was pretty fed up of the intense fighting. There can also be an argument made that the line of Sith encouraged the military to draw down and have the Jedi take center stage. A single Jedi master can easily take out a capital ship, just by flying to it through all the turbo lasers and then lightsabering their way to the bridge.
The idea that the entire planet had jack-all for military is also silly. The idea that the Republic didn't have a standing military capable of smacking the Trade Federation down is even sillier.
To clarify, the people writing this stuff didn't know anything about the subject matter. Naboo (not counting the Gungans) is a human civilization. No planet-wide human civilization would be capable of existing without a military for any meaningful duration, that's not how human societies work.
Naboo was very clearly an idealized 'peaceful and enlightened' civlization, with a romatnicized conception of how it was run and ruled. They have an 'elected monarch,' in an attempt to appeal to the nostalgia for the 'good king' and the 'representative statesman' both at the same time.
If you want to go down the road of fantasy-humans not being like real humans, but instead less evil, more enlightened, less war-like and sinful, then you can have whatever kind of government you want.
That's not a story that real people can relate to as anything more than wish-fulfillment fantasy though. Part of what made the original Star Wars so iconic, and so much of the original Expanded Universe material at that, was because it was a tale both of struggle against external evil (The Empire), and internal evil, Luke trying not to fall to the Dark Side, Vader turning away from it, Han Solo choosing to come back and risk his life even after he'd gotten paid, etc, etc.
The original trilogy also did a very good job of not going into fine detail about the size or scale of the conflict. The Empire is bigger and more powerful than the Rebel Alliance, with large fleets and large numbers of expendable forces. The Rebel Alliance tries to fight in a way to preserve their people while still dealing effective blows, because that's how the good guys fight, treating life as precious as they can in war.
The Prequels had almost entirely lost that. The only character you really see struggling with that, is Anakin, and the way it's written is really shitty.
Again I agree with you, but we are left to pick up the pieces where the writers tossed them. I would argue the Jedi taking the primary role, seen as they were sent in to deal with the blockage and went straight for the bridge (still don't get why they ran away, but whatever). I would say they spent all their money on social programs, architecture, and Padme's wardrobe. There just wasn't anything left for a sizable military after all those dresses.
I disagree on this. If you have a charismatic enough leader, you can keep expanding until they reach someone stronger or said leader dies. Then you get Jedi putting band-aids on everything, and the war weariness of the general population. I mean after 24 crusades, a couple genocidal wars with the Sith, and any body would get tired.No, this is not 'the scale of the problem if everything fractures to the system level,' this is the reason that you can't have a monolithic galactic civilization in the first place.
There are too many conflicting interests, too many different people that want to seize power, just too many conflicting factors period.
Feasibly speaking, you wouldn't have everything devolve down to single-system polities, but once things move past hundreds or a few thousand systems, a nation will be too busy trying to not fly apart from all the internal stresses to keep expanding. I'd expect most systems to be part of nations that range from the dozens to low hundreds of systems in total, with some much smaller, and some larger.
No, the issue is not communication and travel time. The British Empire held together for generations in the age of sail, when it could literally take months for word to reach London from a given colony. The British Empire fell apart after WWII, when air travel and radio existed, and thus you could send a message across the world in minutes, and move people and equipment around the world in a couple of days. To be clear, the British Empire endured when communication and travel took weeks and months, and collapsed when that took minutes and hours.
The issue is that every local area has conflicting interests and priorities, and as your nation scales up in size, you have more and more conflicting interests fighting within it. Further, as the scale of a nation becomes more difficult for people to conceptualize an identity around, the people will more and more often build their identity over something more local. You can fight this to a degree, but that only goes so far.
This is Mandalore in a nutshell. The Core systems have fought so many times in the past, they are basically warred out. The rim systems don't have the infrastructure to support a large conflict. So things just dragged on. There just aren't any large capital shipyards in the outer rim that can compete with the core. Also you have to figure that human average life span is doubled and other species are long lived. So the time scales also becomes bigger.
I would also agree with you. But I would say those internal stresses are not large enough to overcome the barrier that is galactic trade and remain purely at a System level, which no one cares about in Star Wars. Or it becomes serious enough Jedi are sent in with a beat stick. The threat of Jedi was probably a strong deterrent. Also the Republic did have internal strife, looking at you Pius Dea crusades. The winner just kept calling themselves the Republic and took on the legacy of its predesscors.You're completely leaving out that wars can also lead to divisions. The Roman Empire gradually accumulated territory, then it collapsed. So did the Persian Empire. So did the Mongol Empire. So did the British Empire, the German Empire, the French Empire, etc.
If you just completely leave out the decline part of the cycle of nations and civilizations rising and falling, of course you'll end up with an eventual conglomeration into a unified super-state.
But that's not how history actually works out. Things do not naturally move towards hegemony without limit, they naturally move towards hegemony until the internal stresses overcome the strength of the hegemony. Then they start to fall apart.
I'm going to cut back on the spaghetti-post responses after this. It eats a lot of time.
And again, all of this is so long as you're using a human psychology. If you want to have some alien race that is more suited to being a cultural monolith and accepting authoritarian structures, it could work with that. A large human population could tear it apart though.
Thanks for responding, I really enjoyed your post.