Star Wars

[Rakuen Growlithe]

I just finished rewatching all six Star Wars films (spaced over a couple of weeks actually) and I have a question or two. Everyone has to love R2D2. He fixes the queen's ship in episode 1, reads and controls the Death Star's systems in episode 4, carries light sabres, unlocks stuff, talks to ships, shocks things etc. etc.

First, why is nothing encrypted in Star Wars? A simple astro droid can control the most powerful battle station just by plugging into a random port?

And secondly, the movies take place over about 35 years. How is it that a normal astro droid doesn't become completely outdated over that time? For comparison the Windows OS is only 28 years old.

[Leeward]

Well first off we can safely assume that in the far future we have developed the perfect, penultimate form of software that never gets outdated or has compatibility issues, which would explain why the droids never go obsolete. Secondly, the Death Star probably didn't have encryption on its intranet because they assumed a massive armed vessel such as the freaking Death Star isn't very likely to be overrun or infiltrated by rebels from the inside before getting destroyed. Whoops.

[Obsidian]

Star wars is pretty old now (The originals anyways) and Im sure they didn't really have the same knowledge or access to information about things like encryption and computers and such as we do today also the target audience probably didn't have a clue either so even if they did know they didn't care, prob rather just keep the story simple and easy to follow.

I suppose in the future the advancement of technology becomes slower after certain point as opposed to speeding up, but I could only guess as to why ;D (Maybe lack of inspiration, everyone is lazy, everything has been invented already or everyone would rather be a jedi)

Warhammer universe had the background story that the human race entered a Dark Age because of how much knowledge was lost in their civil war(planets dying losing their libraries and such) an though they have access to some high tech stuff they don't fully understand how all of it works. Maybe star wars is similar in the sense that they lost knowledge of some stuff along the way

Otherwise i wouldn't overthink a Sci-Plot from the 70's ;D

[Rakuen Growlithe]

I can accept the argument that we'd discovered so much there wasn't that much we could improve. The security, not so much.

I'm sure they've spoken about secure transmissions, so local encryption shouldn't be much of a jump. The target audience also didn't have a clue about the force, jedis, interplanetary travel and the like. However encryption is far from a new invention. Alchemists were notorious for using codes and ciphers to encrypt their notes so that no one else could read them. This was also at a time when WWII must have been reasonably fresh in everyone's minds, along with the breaking of the German Enigma code that was used to encrypt military communications.

[Obsidian]

its funny to think about but yeah it doesn't make sense but like i said Im sure it was just an oversight on the producers part.

They should make a Everything wrong with for star wars, that would be super long

[Sev]

What? Was my comment deleted?

It very much is a joke that technology never progresses in the Star Wars universe. In the Old Republic (4000 BBY), there are still cloaking devices and neural implants. What makes this even stranger is the fact that primitive versions of, say, lightsabers are described, but once they reached their recognizable form they never advanced beyond that point (other than a few variants like staff sabers and light whips coming into existence, perhaps).

[Rakuen Growlithe]

No comments have been deleted. You might have forgotten to submit the post.

[Sev]

That's possible.

But really, it is quite farcial that T3-M4 from KoTOR has the same degree of functionality as R2-D2, and, unlike Artoo, he actually has offensive weaponry, and neat gadgets like cryo rays.

And he looks so much cooler.


And I'm not even going to bring HK-47 into this, 'cause he's just in a class of his own.

[CourteousCastellan]

I imagine it's just so that he can be an easy deus ex machina to advance the plot with little effort for the writers.

To be fair though, the story is meant to take place in the past and it's about human-looking-yet-not-actually-human people. Perhaps these pseudo-humans are just particularly dense and never invented any kind of encryption nor updated their technologies.

[Sev]

So we're seriously supposed to believe that they have access to hyperdrives, cloaking devices, and lightsabers, but that they don't even have the ability to implement at least basic encryption?

Not freaking likely.

[Obsidian]

Lol and what about the million other things that don't really conform to science in the star wars universe ;D?

[Leeward]

Yeah, like the fact that sound can't propagate in the vacuum of space, for example.

[Sev]

And that is why Star Wars is considered to be a space opera rather than science fiction.