Batman wrote:keen320 wrote:Not exactly. While I realize you're exaggerating, the Rebel Alliance is a bit more advanced than Iraqi Insurgents.And no matter how powerful Star Wars tech may be compared to Trek tech, it doesn't make the Federation like a bunch of Cro-Magnons.
Actually, technology wise, yes it does.
Thing is, Star Trek societies are full of people who are capable of functioning in technological society. It's not as if the average user of technology in Star Wars is ten times smarter than someone from Star Trek.
The tools (and tools to make the tools, and tools to make the tools to make the tools, and so on) in Star Wars may be vastly more sophisticated, but their
use requires very few skills that someone from the Federation would not already understand or be able to readily learn. They're not cavemen who panic when a TV screen starts talking to them, they know how to pull the trigger on a personal energy weapon, and so on.
So the fact that they're not going to be setting up factory complexes to compete with people from the Galaxy Far Far Away is economically relevant, but not a factor that prevents them from being sucked into a larger war as one small part of it.
Put this way: if the Rebels find a random backwater planet that offers them a million recruits, even technologically unsophisticated recruits, they're liable to accept. They might just hand the guys the blaster-equivalent of Saturday Night specials and send them off on forlorn hope missions to make trouble, but they'll accept the offer.
What does it matter which galaxy the planet is located in, so long as they can get to it? You can still train them to
use Star Wars hardware, regardless of whether the planet has the industrial base to make the stuff. Star Wars hardware simply isn't that hard to use, just as we see people in backwaters that could never make a car and can barely manage automatic weapons piling troops into technicals and sending them off a-raiding.
More like the Professor on Gilligan's Island making stuff out of bamboo. It may be pathetic by comparison, but it's still difficult to manufacture, and just as difficult, if not more so, to operate, repair and maintain.
Um-no. Anything you can make out of unrefined natural resources without the need for anything but hand tools if that is INFINITELY more easy to repair, operate and maintain than even bronze age stuff, nevermind 'Trek leave alone Wars tech levels (possibly excepting the 'operate' on the bronze age level as the Professor will have inferior materials but superior knowledge).
You're missing something. "Difficulty" here is measured in terms of intellectual effort, not machining tolerances.
What you can build in Star Trek is mostly very limited compared to Star Wars.
How much personal competence is required, not so much. You still need people who would be smart and capable in Star Wars to do difficult jobs in Star Trek: do not mistake crude useless technology for crude useless people.
Batman wrote:Star Wars stuff is probably easier to use than Trek stuff is, it does mostly the same basic stuff, it just does everything better. And it's increased capabilities would make it easier to use than what they're used to.
Because of-what, exactly? Why would a 200GT MTL be inherently easier to use than a, say, 1.05GW phaser?
Because either way, the damn thing has to be usable by gun crews who were trained on so and so many hours' notice. The tools change between the settings far more than the men do.
The Rebellion has a background of accepting people with little or nothing on their resumé- Luke's in particular was practically
blank when they gave him an X-Wing and trusted him with proton torpedoes for the Death Star run; he may have been a magical prodigy but they didn't have much evidence of it at the time. So I wouldn't be surprised to find Feddies turning up in the Rebel ranks, just as I wouldn't be surprised to see members of random alien species doing the same. Not unless we drop an ironclad language barrier over the Star Wars setting, which you can
do as a declaration of Plot, but are under no obligation to do.
They won't make any real strategic difference, mind; they'd just be different names and faces on a roster. But they'd show up.
Purple wrote:Let us say that the translator works perfectly.
Now, let us also assume that technology is as easy to use as you say. After all, how hard can it be to point a blaster at someone and pull the trigger right?
Well, there we meat the first problem. You see, it might not be too hard to train someone to shoot a blaster or pilot a star fighter to some reliability. But once you get to the more complex tasks you will be out of luck. Starfleet engineers who have spent their entire lives studding technology will find them self as the tech equivalent of script kiddies. They will have to learn completely new electronics, computer science, materials science hell even completely new physics. And this is not something you can make up for easily.
[/quote]No, it's not.
But remember, Star Wars fleets take people with minimal technical background and turn them into crewmen for starships in a matter of years; if they didn't they wouldn't be able to crew their ships. You can increase the sophistication of the technology a thousandfold, but you can't increase the number of training hours needed to learn to use it a thousandfold.
That imposes a limit on just how hard it will be for whatever scattering of enthusiastic young Feddies sign up under the rebel phoenix to contribute. If they were as useless as so many cavemen, how could enthusiastic young farmboys of the same basic personality and intelligence, from worlds nearly as primitive, learn the same?
So, again, you'd see a scattering of random Feddies among the rebel ranks. Nothing much would change as a consequence; it would be a singularly unremarkable aspect to a war with far more interesting features.
