wraelk
11mo ago
The Empire or Republic only really seem to have symbolic control. They stick up a flag, but other than that, I don’t think they actually control much beyond the core worlds.
I don't know how much made this into Disney canon, but in Legends a lot of power was held by regional governors, the Moffs. Someone out far from the Core wouldn't necessarily know much about the Emperor, but there was a local Imperial force with a Star Destroyer or two and plenty of stormtroopers that would be their local taste of the Empire and generally had pretty strong control (albeit with a lot of corruption).
Tatooine just wasn't a planet the local Moff cared about at all, which is why Jabba had his palace in the awful desert planet instead of a paradise planet like Naboo or even one that was kind of similar to Nal Hutta.
wraelk
11mo ago
Huh, you're right, Jedi Starfighters are like half the area of an A-wing. That's wild, previously I would have said they were one of the larger starfighters in the series. Something about how the art and/or game cameras always show them up close, I guess?
Actually, something's off. Slave 1 is 21.5m x 21.3m x 7.8m= 3,572.01 m^3, a Jedi Starfighter is 8m x 3.92m x 1.44m= 45.1584 m^3. Now go look at the asteroid battle scene from Attack of the Clones: does the Slave 1 look nearly 80 times as big as the Jedi Starfighter?
Back to the broader point, I think this is inconsistent with Maiq's hypothesis: new military-grade hardware is coming out throughout the series and is apparently available enough that the Rebels can get their hands on it. We don't see the Rebels having to make do with Clone Wars tech (and even that would only be ~20 years old, the equivalent of someone using a F-22 Raptor from 2005 today): they're using some old fighters but also have fresh from the factory equipment regularly. And since the Rebels probably don't have special contracts with the military companies that are also selling to the Empire, that suggests that all you need to get a fresh-off-the-line ship is credits.
It does seem to support pusher_robot's hypothesis that they're having trouble making truly large jumps technologically: the new stuff and the old stuff are roughly equivalent in power level, it's just about optimizing how the same tools are used. That's how you end up with weird things like the B-Wing.
wraelk
11mo ago
Most of the starfighters used by the rebels are relatively new: the B-Wing first saw combat 4 years before the Battle of Yavin, the X-Wing appears to have been less than 10 years old at that point as well, although there's no clear answer on when it was developed. Apparently originally pitched to the Imperials rather than the Republic though, so that's a cap on how old it can be.
It does seem like they have trouble making paradigm-shifting advances though: the Y-Wing is Clone Wars era and while it has problems, it's perfectly capable of performing on the same level as more modern fighters, it's not like we saw anyone complaining about getting assigned a Y-Wing instead of an X-Wing for the Death Star run.
Some weird regressions too: I initially thought Obi-Wan's hyperdrive ring in Attack of the Clones was something that got improved upon for the Imperial era, but the N-1 starfighters in Phantom Menace had integrated hyperdrives, so that was just a deliberate design choice.
How close to done is this? I'm seeing epilogues in the latest chapters, so I'm hoping it's finishing up?
I've got a few web serials on my plate and the thing I've learned most is that it sucks to hit the wall of "most recent update" or worse "last updated 3 years ago", and I've realized I'm way happier if I just let them finish or not-finish the story before I commit my time.
I should look into... someone in the SSC diaspora had a cool story about "what if the person who became Superman was just kind of awful but took over the world anyway", I really enjoyed that but then hit the "most recent update" wall. It has to have been a few years at this point, maybe they're done. It's a shame I forgot the name.
Yeah, but at least the TIEs have a reasonable case for skipping the hyperdrive: they're designed to be cheap and fast (which is why they don't have shields either), and they're always operating from a planetary base or capital ship because the Empire intends to have those everywhere it's going to be conducting operations.
Why the Jedi Starfighter doesn't have one (or rather, why they chose a non-hyperdrive-equipped fighter for the Jedi) is a mystery though: the Jedi typically go in very small numbers to out-of-the-way locations, and seem to have a pretty sizable budget. Agility and speed is clearly a benefit with Jedi precognition, but... what happens if your foe destroys your hyperdrive ring and now you're stuck in a middle-of-nowhere system? The answer's clearly "carve your way through the enemy base, steal their ship, and leave", but it's hard to imagine that you want that to be the plan.
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