Star Wars is a nice movie but it’s a pretty mediocre SF. They mix very low and very high technology in mostly absurd ways. You have FTL and lasers but robots are mostly shit, AI is very basic and its use weirdly limited, warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space. I know they did it like this because of cinematography but as a SF it’s just not that good. So I really wouldn’t bother trying to rationalize the tech. It’s mostly like this because “it looked nice”.
warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space
not even that. Star wars warfare looks like what someone from the boomer generation thought warfare looked like in WW2. But really it’s what movie warfare from WW2 looked like, because showing actual war would confuse and bore people. lucas was enamored with serials.
I meant “today” in SF sense, like current century vs some time 1000 years from now :) Of course your right, the battle scenes were inspired by WW2 movies.
My favorite SF warfare descriptions come from Banks. Battleships firing at each other from light years away or hiding inside suns, everything controlled by AI, microsecond long battles. Absolutely not adaptable to screen.
banks / culture series offers a lot of fascinating insights. but yeah, hard to adapt for movie audiences… similar to the constraints of storytelling and level of nerdistry you can cram into a film frame… I felt the same way about Tom Clancy’s mil-fantasy level of intense inspection about the hardware and users motivations… but he rarely went full silly like Dale Brown with the execution, but very little of clancy’s obsession with detail gets into the films made from his IP.
thinking about these tropes has led me to think I need to make some games exploring them heh
Star Wars is a nice movie but it’s a pretty mediocre SF. They mix very low and very high technology in mostly absurd ways. You have FTL and lasers but robots are mostly shit, AI is very basic and its use weirdly limited, warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space. I know they did it like this because of cinematography but as a SF it’s just not that good. So I really wouldn’t bother trying to rationalize the tech. It’s mostly like this because “it looked nice”.
not even that. Star wars warfare looks like what someone from the boomer generation thought warfare looked like in WW2. But really it’s what movie warfare from WW2 looked like, because showing actual war would confuse and bore people. lucas was enamored with serials.
I meant “today” in SF sense, like current century vs some time 1000 years from now :) Of course your right, the battle scenes were inspired by WW2 movies.
My favorite SF warfare descriptions come from Banks. Battleships firing at each other from light years away or hiding inside suns, everything controlled by AI, microsecond long battles. Absolutely not adaptable to screen.
banks / culture series offers a lot of fascinating insights. but yeah, hard to adapt for movie audiences… similar to the constraints of storytelling and level of nerdistry you can cram into a film frame… I felt the same way about Tom Clancy’s mil-fantasy level of intense inspection about the hardware and users motivations… but he rarely went full silly like Dale Brown with the execution, but very little of clancy’s obsession with detail gets into the films made from his IP.
thinking about these tropes has led me to think I need to make some games exploring them heh