Star Wars as a Nonsensical Failed State

Most technologies in the Star Wars universe that don’t have some capability of being used in war… well, they kinda just suck.

There are so many areas where it seems like average Star Wars tech should outdo itself given how advanced the military-grade technology is, but in practice it doesn’t appear to make much difference at all. Repair droids who aren’t astromechs—like the pit droid crews used in podracing—have nowhere near the sophistication of their battle-ready cousins. Communication devices like comlinks are often handheld for no good reason. (Armor helmets have built-in comms, it can’t be that hard, y’all.) There’s also the issue of the Death Star’s “stolen data tapes” (tapes, for Life Day’s sake), the plans that are so key to the Rebellion’s success. Which are somehow being kept at a facility where important Imperial schematics and documents are on record in a library tower that must be manually accessed by a claw machine, housed on a tape that looks like it would fit happily into a VCR.

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Even life-saving software doesn’t seem high on anyone’s lists. On both the Death Star and the Colossus platform in Resistance, people enter areas where trash is disposed—one of them a compactor, the other an incinerator—and find themselves nearly murdered by the apparatuses when they activate. This means that these trash disposers, which have entrance points to permit living beings in and out of them, have no software for the purpose of detecting certain types of life and powering down on detecting that presence. It would seem the most obvious type of software to have in area so casually dangerous…and yet there’s nothing whatsoever. The same goes for the big ol’ door in Jabba’s rancor pit—the idea that Luke Skywalker can just hit the control panel with the rock and a giant metal slab comes right down on the creature’s neck tells you a whole lot about a galaxy where sliding automatic doors are everywhere. This brand of negligence seems intolerable, the sort of oversight that high-powered executives would lose their jobs over, but no one is ever surprised when these things happen.

We know why they’re not surprised. It’s because these things are commonplace. Because you can expect to find hundreds of items to help you kill someone for the price of a couple lunches, but you can’t trust a door not to behead you.