The Great Star Wars Logic Fault Problem, droids and cockpits

[jollyreaper]

Well, this is actually a logic fault in a lot of scifi but Star Wars is an excellent example of this. It's a failure of worldbuilding and very difficult to work around. It basically boils down to schizotech where a setting with FTL starfighters has them dogfighting with guns/lasers or where technical solutions that exist in the real world don't seem to exist in the fictional world.

We have droids in this setting that are intelligent, capable of speech, capable of all sorts of things. We have humans who fly starships. Well, if we have some humans dumber than droids and some droids smarter than humans, why do we never see a droid flying anything, from starship to speeder? If R2D2 is smart enough to repair broken equipment under fire, why can't a simple droid brain be put in charge of running the turrets on the falcon, technology we already have today?

You have an astromech droid talking to the Falcon's computer to find out what the problem is in Empire. That's the first indication that the Falcon even has a computer capable of talking. And if you think about it, why should it only be able to talk to an astromech? This is Star Wars. This isn't like my mechanic anthropomorphizing my car after hooking up his diagnostic tool. "Your car says it needs some adjustment. And you two never really talk anymore. It's lonely." The machines can think and have emotions. But for the Falcon to tell the owner anything, it has to talk to an astromech which itself doesn't have a 5 credit voicebox so it has to be translated by yet a third droid. Wait, I figured it out. Droids have unions! Motherfucker. It all makes sense now.

Now I can understand the design decisions that went into the way the original films were put together. We're watching a story about people, not robots. The droids are metal people but happen to take the role of the native sidekick from the old adventure films, the Tonto or slave manservant. And while it's certainly possible to make a movie about droids be interesting, see Wall-E, that's not what they were trying to do with Star Wars. But given the tech available, it doesn't make much sense. Imagine how useful it would be to have a sentient AI serving as copilot for the Falcon. Imagine how annoying combat was for Han and Chewie in their solo days when they could fly the ship or man one of the two turrets but not use both turrets at once unless they wanted to leave the ship unpiloted!

There was an earlier acrimonious thread about why R2D2 couldn't talk. It's obvious that he was meant to be a Harpo or Teller character, that's part of the charm and there's a long history of that sort of thing in film and literature. But at the same time, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense given the setting. The hard part of AI is making one that can think and hear human conversation and converse. R2 can already speak via text display. The only part missing is a speaker. There's probably a spare in Threepio, he speaks enough for any two droids. Borrow it. It's the same sort of silly oversight like with Batgirl. Ok, so you've got a world with superscience and alien gods and people can come back from the freakin' dead and she can't walk because the Joker shot her through the spine. Wait, what? And nobody can fix that?

[Imperial528]

The EU has plenty of examples of droids flying ships, IG-88 and 4-LOM, both droid bounty hunters who are seen in ESB, for example, have their own starships.

As for why the Falcon's computers couldn't control the turrets, I think that's up for speculation. I mean, we know it has three droid brains, and that they don't like each other. And given that in ESB C-3PO had to essentially talk them into cooperating, I do not think it would be wise to hand control of military-grade turrets to them.

Why R2-D2 can't speak is simple: Astromech droids were not designed to speak or be sentient, and just because they are capable of doing both (provided you forgo a few memory wipes), doesn't mean they're going to alter the design.

Of course, if we bring the prequels in, we have entire battle groups and fleets controlled at several levels by droids alone.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

At best, it's a specific case of a general problem; why a, wild ass guess here, Kardashev 2.6- 2.7 or thereabouts civilisation is even recognisable. Why are there people like twentieth- century Americans, doing twentieth- century American sort of things, that the viewers can relate to...and the question just answered itself, didn't it? So did the OP, in fact.

We're watching a story about people, not robots.

That basically is what it boils down to, and SW actually does a pretty decent job of non- human characters being important to the story (with the occasional collapse into lazy anthropomorphism)- it's certainly posible to do better in print especially if the author is appealing to hardcore sci-fi nuts, and many have, and there has been some decent TV done, but in film?

[Vympel]

We have droids in this setting that are intelligent, capable of speech, capable of all sorts of things. We have humans who fly starships. Well, if we have some humans dumber than droids and some droids smarter than humans, why do we never see a droid flying anything, from starship to speeder?

In TCW, Magnaguards fly starfighters. And Vulture Droids and Tri-Fighters speak for themselves.

You have an astromech droid talking to the Falcon's computer to find out what the problem is in Empire.

That was C3P0, not R2. The only reason C3P0 needed R2 was because Han's computer was somehow weird, and spoke in a "peculiar dialect", but C3P0 still understood it. It is very strange however.

[Bounty]

why do we never see a droid flying anything, from starship to speeder?

R2-D2 parked Luke's X-wing in TESB, near the end of the evacuation.

But yeah, they don't really fly anything, and I don't think that's all that strange. People like machines that can make their life easier, they don't like machines that make decisions for them. An autopilot on the Falcon while it's in hyperspace? No problemo. A droid brain at the trigger for her guns? Problemo.

Heck, as early as the first movie we saw a lot of resentment and distrust towards droids. Considering that there appears to be a very real problem with them going wonky and developing quirks over time, I'm not at all surprised most people wouldn't feel comfortable giving them unfettered access to ships and weapons.

The idea gets more strained when it comes to military hardware, especially since large guns on eg the Death Star rely on the MkI eyeball and a group of guys manually moving turrets. But the basic principle may still stand.

[jollyreaper]

At best, it's a specific case of a general problem; why a, wild ass guess here, Kardashev 2.6- 2.7 or thereabouts civilisation is even recognisable. Why are there people like twentieth- century Americans, doing twentieth- century American sort of things, that the viewers can relate to...and the question just answered itself, didn't it? So did the OP, in fact.

The problem, as far as I see it, is "because the story requires it" is a terrible explanation. A murder mystery needs a murderer, can't have one without the other, but the murderer needs some kind of human motive. You can't just have the butler kill the man and when he's found out he sighs and says "Author intervention. I couldn't help myself." We know the author made him do it but the whole point is that he should have motivation for it so that the illusion we are observing real people is maintained.

You get that same problem with character immortality. "They can't die; we wouldn't have a story then." Yes, we all know that, a limitation of the medium. But authors stretch that to the point of incredulity with characters surviving all sorts of things that they by rights shouldn't due to that convention.

But back to your point, yes, it would be extremely difficult to depict plausible highly advanced civilizations. But it does become very awkward to do scifi and have it just be like a modern setting but IN SPAAACE! The best stabs at depicting the high Kardashev civilizations usually involves a point of view from the baseline humans who were left behind at the borders. Doyle needed to give Holmes a Watson to be the "us" character. Holmes came by so much by intuition that he wouldn't have even thought to explain it to anyone unless asked. Without a Watson, a Holmes story would become tediously difficult to write.

That's the hardest part for a writer, to depict an environment completely alien to our own existence and yet allow us to identify with the people within. At lest as far as human societies go on this planet, even the most alien have basic shared needs. The Westerner shocked and horrified by the cultured brutality of feudal Japan could at least recognize the shared human needs for food, shelter, sex, companionship, etc, even while recoiling from things like ritual suicide. You take a culture that engages in mass sacrifice like the meso-americans and you can still find points of commonality. They're humans, not lesser-evolved apes. Same species. But you go out to trans-human stuff with godtech, they probably will be a different species by all standards.

[jollyreaper]

Of course, if we bring the prequels in, we have entire battle groups and fleets controlled at several levels by droids alone.

I ignore the prequels. Droid armies can be scary; look at skynet. And they managed to screw even that up. But it does make you wonder where the droid armies are now. Banned like poison gas? Cultural horror at it? They don't say. But if there is horror at that sort of thing, how do you explain assassin droids tolerated by galactic society? There's the bounty hunter droid you mentioned -- I'd forgotten about him -- and also the probe droids from Empire that were capable of killing. Schizotech, inconsistent standards.

[Simon_Jester]

You have an astromech droid talking to the Falcon's computer to find out what the problem is in Empire. That's the first indication that the Falcon even has a computer capable of talking. And if you think about it, why should it only be able to talk to an astromech? This is Star Wars. This isn't like my mechanic anthropomorphizing my car after hooking up his diagnostic tool. "Your car says it needs some adjustment. And you two never really talk anymore. It's lonely." The machines can think and have emotions. But for the Falcon to tell the owner anything, it has to talk to an astromech which itself doesn't have a 5 credit voicebox so it has to be translated by yet a third droid. Wait, I figured it out. Droids have unions! Motherfucker. It all makes sense now.

One possibility is translation conventions- the Falcon's computer has no social programming whatsoever, and when R2-D2 "talks" to the Falcon he's actually scanning over umpty-bigabyte diagnostic files to figure out what went wrong.

The terms the robots use to describe what's happening to human beings may imply a human conversation, but that doesn't mean anything a human would recognize as a conversation is taking place.

But back to your point, yes, it would be extremely difficult to depict plausible highly advanced civilizations. But it does become very awkward to do scifi and have it just be like a modern setting but IN SPAAACE! The best stabs at depicting the high Kardashev civilizations usually involves a point of view from the baseline humans who were left behind at the borders.

Of course, this is an area where stories date themselves. Star Wars (the original trilogy, certainly) was written before the modern idea of the Singularity took over the nerd-community's idea of how the future was going to look. Go back to 1940 and it's obvious why no one expected the future to be populated by unrecognizable transhumans; no imaginable means of creating such a thing existed! Even then there were stories about the fear of replacement by robots or superhuman individuals, but they didn't dominate the discussion the way they do today.

Fast forward to 1970 and the same is still essentially true. There's the idea that computers and robots will play a prominent role in the future, but the popular image of what a computer *is* limits people's views of how big a deal that is. Computers are boxes that do math, and robots are either mindless drones on an assembly line or some kind of imaginary self-willed thing that's like a big metal man.

Today, it's become much more popular to write stories about societies ruled by AI deities or whatever, where the role of humans is anywhere from marginal to zero, and perhaps that's a more accurate picture of how the future looks... but it's hardly surprising that we don't see the concept of such a thing happening in something that was done in the late 1970s.

I ignore the prequels. Droid armies can be scary; look at skynet. And they managed to screw even that up. But it does make you wonder where the droid armies are now. Banned like poison gas? Cultural horror at it? They don't say. But if there is horror at that sort of thing, how do you explain assassin droids tolerated by galactic society? There's the bounty hunter droid you mentioned -- I'd forgotten about him -- and also the probe droids from Empire that were capable of killing. Schizotech, inconsistent standards.

The robot bounty hunter may be fairly close to a criminal himself just for existing: a fair chunk of the galactic population would melt him down for scrap if they could, while the authorities tolerate him because he's good at hunting people down and killing them on their behalf.

If there's cultural horror of robot armies, it probably comes in more at the level where droids become capable of planetary takeovers and organized military operations. An automated gun turret or a handheld blaster bolted on something functionally equivalent to a Predator drone, those aren't going to upset the galactic balance of power and supplant humanity. An army of robots might.

[Bounty]

before the modern idea of the Singularity took over the nerd-community's idea of how the future was going to look

... ruining much of SF in the process.

[Uraniun235]

Well, this is actually a logic fault in a lot of scifi but Star Wars is an excellent example of this. It's a failure of worldbuilding and very difficult to work around.

You're severely overthinking the story. I guarantee that if you went back in time to 1976 and presented George Lucas with a perfectly composed letter explaining how his setting is illogical and doesn't really make sense, he would shrug and say "cool" and do the same thing. It's not really a "great star wars logic fault" because it's inherent to the entire space opera concept. Not all fiction, even fiction set in the far future (or a long time ago in a galaxy far away) needs to strive for maximum realism.

[Connor MacLeod]

I don't see why "because its THE FUTURE" (said in that deep impressive sounding voice you're supposed to use when talking about THE FUTURE!) automatically means human stupidity, biases, and suchnot automatically become irrelevant. human pilot over droid pilots is more than likely either a choice or a bias (to feel more in control, to validate a sense of self-superiority, whatever.) Possibly prejudice stemming from the use of Droid armies in the Clone Wars. It need not be any more complicated than that.

[Sarevok]

Luke was manually aiming the guns like a B-17 turret ?

I thought he was looking at CGI image and designating targets. He was not even looking at an image but icons representing targeted spacecraft moving against a grid pattern. It almost seems like... I dunno computer controlled guns with a human operator at the back end like how radar guided AAA operates. So how does that equal ww2 style manualy aimed guns ? Why ? Because he was using an actual physical console to control a weapon system instead of a star trek lcd touch screen ?

[Junghalli]

But back to your point, yes, it would be extremely difficult to depict plausible highly advanced civilizations. But it does become very awkward to do scifi and have it just be like a modern setting but IN SPAAACE!

I have sympathy for this perspective, as I personally am sick and tired of SF that's basically the present or the past in space with the serial numbers filed off. I read SF to have my mind and imagination stimulated, and an alien setting does that far better than WWII but in space, with lasers.

On the other hand I don't at all blame SF writers for not wanting to touch a world with ubiquitous advanced robotics. Generally speaking stuff like robotics will tend to reduce drama because that's exactly what it's designed to do in RL: you want robots that you can send into dangerous situations so the humans can do dangerous stuff from a place of relative safety with only the robot at risk. The problem there is that is actively counterproductive to drama. Now, I'm not saying that you can't write drama in a world where everything remotely hazardous is handled by robots - but it's harder. So I don't at all blame SF authors who'd prefer to leave that can of worms closed.

Personally I think Star Wars would be a more consistent universe without droids - humans do everything because they don't have human-level AI, rather than they do have it but for some unknown (in the movies, anyway) reason apparently don't use it to anywhere near its full logical potential. But it's really not something that bothers me. The Star Wars universe pretty clearly runs a lot more on the rule of cool than realism.

[Marcus Aurelius]

We see the gunners on the star destroyers and death star operting in mostly the same fashion.

The second paragraph gives one reason why. I'm sure a second, maybe even bigger, reason is seeing them spin around in there with the gun certainly made the scene more dynamic and exciting than "weee point and click lol".

Yeah. I thought it was common knowledge the Star Wars space combat scenes were basically "WW2 in spaaace". Everything has a very close resemblance to pure gun era aerial combat. Sure, there are some computer assisted targeting systems thrown in for the looks, but in reality they don't do much. Is this a bad thing? No, if you want to make a space adventure film for the kids and teens. The adults would in most cases prefer a WW1 or WW2 air combat movie, though, perhaps with a little bit of actual tragedy of war thrown in. Although as Michael Bay showed, you can easily fuck up that as well.

[Stark]

Why does being an adult mean you'd prefer a WW2 air combat movie over a scifi movie with WW2 styled combat? That's like saying adults would prefer a martial arts movie to Gundam.

[Sinewmire]

We have droids in this setting that are intelligent, capable of speech, capable of all sorts of things. We have humans who fly starships. Well, if we have some humans dumber than droids and some droids smarter than humans, why do we never see a droid flying anything, from starship to speeder? If R2D2 is smart enough to repair broken equipment under fire, why can't a simple droid brain be put in charge of running the turrets on the falcon, technology we already have today?

The obvious answer is also in A New Hope, when C3P0 and R2D2 aren't allowed into the cantina. Discrimination. People don't like the idea of droids being so much in control, not on such an obvious level.

[jollyreaper]

The terms the robots use to describe what's happening to human beings may imply a human conversation, but that doesn't mean anything a human would recognize as a conversation is taking place.

That's very possible but why not put a talking computer inside the Falcon? Talking cars were all the rage in the 80's but people soon realized it was a stupid novelty rather than anything useful. "The door is ajar." Nice. A simple bong could have told me that. Very annoying. It soon went away. But if the car could actually say something useful, well now! That's a far better thing. The speech navigation devices are really showing their value there, telling you useful things about what's coming up. That's what a talking car should be doing.

Fast forward to 1970 and the same is still essentially true. There's the idea that computers and robots will play a prominent role in the future, but the popular image of what a computer *is* limits people's views of how big a deal that is. Computers are boxes that do math, and robots are either mindless drones on an assembly line or some kind of imaginary self-willed thing that's like a big metal man.

Today, it's become much more popular to write stories about societies ruled by AI deities or whatever, where the role of humans is anywhere from marginal to zero, and perhaps that's a more accurate picture of how the future looks... but it's hardly surprising that we don't see the concept of such a thing happening in something that was done in the late 1970s.
[/quote]

Yes, but not exactly. I'd have to check the dates on some of the stories but I know there were examples of god-like aliens in the original Star Trek and certainly in other examples that show drew upon. But the assumption there was that humans becoming godlike beings would be millions of years in our future, long after we had FTL space travel, certainly not before we'd even left our solar system!

I think Frank Herbert did a brilliant job of side-stepping this problem with Dune. Oh, yes, thinking machines are quite possible in his universe and they really could have made humans obsolete. The whole Butlerian Jihad was in response to that. Now there's a religious injunction against creating a machine mind in the likeness of the human mind. The human is thrust back to the pinnacle of civilized development and, given the nature of warfare between the Laandsrad houses, a well-trained fighting man is as important to the houses as a division of tanks is to a 20th century superpower. Too expensive to ship armies anywhere and so a relative handful of fighters could be enough to secure any house's position on a planet. To contest that would be to break out the family atomics.

If there's cultural horror of robot armies, it probably comes in more at the level where droids become capable of planetary takeovers and organized military operations. An automated gun turret or a handheld blaster bolted on something functionally equivalent to a Predator drone, those aren't going to upset the galactic balance of power and supplant humanity. An army of robots might.

It's really a repeat of a problem seen often in human history, foreign legions. The Roman emperors liked to draw their praetorians from the provinces because these were people with no friends in Rome, less likely to be drawn into conspiracies against his person, and know that their survival depends on his patronage so they'd better be extra careful in guarding him. And if troops are to be used against the civilian population, better they be foreign instead of fellow countrymen. But even a foreign barbarian might balk at the wanton slaughter of innocents. Robots don't care.

There's such fertile ground for terror here it boggles my mind that Lucas had to turn them into metal-skinned Ewoks.

[jollyreaper]

Well, this is actually a logic fault in a lot of scifi but Star Wars is an excellent example of this. It's a failure of worldbuilding and very difficult to work around.

You're severely overthinking the story. I guarantee that if you went back in time to 1976 and presented George Lucas with a perfectly composed letter explaining how his setting is illogical and doesn't really make sense, he would shrug and say "cool" and do the same thing. It's not really a "great star wars logic fault" because it's inherent to the entire space opera concept. Not all fiction, even fiction set in the far future (or a long time ago in a galaxy far away) needs to strive for maximum realism.

I understand what you're saying but where do you draw the line for standards? The common defense of bad movies from Hollywood is "It's supposed to be a big, dumb, fun action movie for the summer. It's not supposed to be Citizen Kane." Who said it should be? But shouldn't we expect a bit of fun to be given care and craftsmanship just like Oscar bait movies?

And as I already said, Star Wars was just used as an example of the trope. We're all nerds here so we presumably care about getting the fussy little details right.

[jollyreaper]

before the modern idea of the Singularity took over the nerd-community's idea of how the future was going to look

... ruining much of SF in the process.

It certainly makes things more difficult. I've read some very good singularity-inspired works. I like the skull-work put into the Culture series but could never really get into the stories told there, didn't grab me.

Are there any convincing arguments for how a future won't head towards even a weak singularity? It would seem that by the time we have proper FTL starships, they'd very likely be completely autonomous like the Culture ships and unaugmented humans completely unnecessary. The only way around that would be to imagine some sort of astounding tech breakthrough that gives us FTL travel that otherwise uses today's technology. There's been some scifi that plays around with that idea like cheap antigravity that just needs a little electricity to operate. So you build nice, heavy, spaceworthy hulls on Earth, fire up the antigravs, and do your 1G acceleration all the way to Mars. A little handwaving of the gravity warping gives you a warp drive and now 2010 tech lets you go to Alpha Centauri. All of the other tech is otherwise exactly what we have now so a starship's bridge would be exactly like any other high-tech vessel's control room. But hard SF fans will likely find this as annoying as singularity wank.

[jollyreaper]

It was explicitly modeled on a B-17: http://www.starwars.com/community/event ... tml?page=7

And the cockpit is based on the B-29.

[Bakustra]

Well, this is actually a logic fault in a lot of scifi but Star Wars is an excellent example of this. It's a failure of worldbuilding and very difficult to work around.

You're severely overthinking the story. I guarantee that if you went back in time to 1976 and presented George Lucas with a perfectly composed letter explaining how his setting is illogical and doesn't really make sense, he would shrug and say "cool" and do the same thing. It's not really a "great star wars logic fault" because it's inherent to the entire space opera concept. Not all fiction, even fiction set in the far future (or a long time ago in a galaxy far away) needs to strive for maximum realism.

I understand what you're saying but where do you draw the line for standards? The common defense of bad movies from Hollywood is "It's supposed to be a big, dumb, fun action movie for the summer. It's not supposed to be Citizen Kane." Who said it should be? But shouldn't we expect a bit of fun to be given care and craftsmanship just like Oscar bait movies?

And as I already said, Star Wars was just used as an example of the trope. We're all nerds here so we presumably care about getting the fussy little details right.

The distance between Citizen Kane and what you're proposing is immense. You're proposing sticking to a narrow view of science fiction, that prescribed by Singularitarians, and forcing all other sci-fi into this mold. Citizen Kane holds its acclaim because of its use of cinematography, symbolism, and all the other parts of cinematic artistry to create an excellent movie with depth. It does not have its acclaim as an in-depth simulation of the times that William Randolph Hearst lived through. Such is a commendable quality in film, but even there it sticks to the past, which is known. The future is not.

A sci-fi version of Citizen Kane would get most of its depth from its use of the futuristic milieu to examine the human condition, and its use of all the parts of film to achieve that end. It would not get it from its "realistic" depiction of cyborg furries or the other brainchildren of Singularitarians.

From a broader perspective, Singularitarian views conflict with the essence of Star Wars. Star Wars is space opera, a genre that focuses on grandiose conflicts, harsh moral differentiation, and most importantly, the actions of individuals. Removing individuals from warfare and conflict would severely damage that. If Luke does not destroy the Death Star, and instead it is a machine without personality, where is the hero? Oh, it looks like Star Wars just fell apart! While it's not any more ignorant of the foundation of Star Wars than a lot of EU, we really don't need more awful EU.

Finally, I reject your idea that "getting the fussy details right" means adhering to a specific set of ideas about the future. There is merit to be found in parts of the ideas of Singularitarians (perhaps a Marxist or postcolonial look at how they would turn out, which would profitable from the rage induced alone). There is also merit in space opera, and in a Gernsbackian view of a utopian future, and a dystopian corporatist future, and views stranger still.

before the modern idea of the Singularity took over the nerd-community's idea of how the future was going to look

... ruining much of SF in the process.

It certainly makes things more difficult. I've read some very good singularity-inspired works. I like the skull-work put into the Culture series but could never really get into the stories told there, didn't grab me.

Are there any convincing arguments for how a future won't head towards even a weak singularity? It would seem that by the time we have proper FTL starships, they'd very likely be completely autonomous like the Culture ships and unaugmented humans completely unnecessary. The only way around that would be to imagine some sort of astounding tech breakthrough that gives us FTL travel that otherwise uses today's technology. There's been some scifi that plays around with that idea like cheap antigravity that just needs a little electricity to operate. So you build nice, heavy, spaceworthy hulls on Earth, fire up the antigravs, and do your 1G acceleration all the way to Mars. A little handwaving of the gravity warping gives you a warp drive and now 2010 tech lets you go to Alpha Centauri. All of the other tech is otherwise exactly what we have now so a starship's bridge would be exactly like any other high-tech vessel's control room. But hard SF fans will likely find this as annoying as singularity wank.

We will almost certainly never have FTL. That's less probable than a space fighter or human-operated spaceships- at least those are possible. It's also unlikely that the Singularity (as opposed to a hypothetical technological singularity, which is much different) will occur as prophesized by Vinge and Yudkowsky either.

[Simon_Jester]

That's very possible but why not put a talking computer inside the Falcon? Talking cars were all the rage in the 80's but people soon realized it was a stupid novelty rather than anything useful. "The door is ajar." Nice. A simple bong could have told me that. Very annoying. It soon went away. But if the car could actually say something useful, well now! That's a far better thing. The speech navigation devices are really showing their value there, telling you useful things about what's coming up. That's what a talking car should be doing.

A good thought. On the other hand, it may well be that given what a hodge-podge the Falcon is, there is a talking computer to diagnose failures... only it speaks some ungodly alien dialect because it was designed by the Planet of the Isolations Computer Geeks. Or something.

The Falcon is not an exemplar of good ergonomics and user-friendly design; she's a temperamental, bleeding edge ship that's been packed full of systems of increasing density. As ECR described her, by comparison to another ship...

Tetrarch wasn’t the Falcon, at the far end of a vicious circle of adaptation; more speed to do illegally lucrative things, that made enemies needing weaponry to fight them off, that attracted official protection needing armour plate to survive, that slowed the ship down needing more powerful engines - Tetrarch was effective, but first-order.

Essentially, every part of her has been refitted with an eye to performance, and systems integration has suffered badly.

I think Frank Herbert did a brilliant job of side-stepping this problem with Dune. Oh, yes, thinking machines are quite possible in his universe and they really could have made humans obsolete. The whole Butlerian Jihad was in response to that. Now there's a religious injunction against creating a machine mind in the likeness of the human mind. The human is thrust back to the pinnacle of civilized development and, given the nature of warfare between the Laandsrad houses, a well-trained fighting man is as important to the houses as a division of tanks is to a 20th century superpower. Too expensive to ship armies anywhere and so a relative handful of fighters could be enough to secure any house's position on a planet. To contest that would be to break out the family atomics.

True. Of course, it raises awkward questions of its own, but it at least solves the first-order questions by replacing them with the first.

[Bakustra]

Dune isn't really a good counter-example though, because the society was built up so that Paul could win and Herbert could make his larger points about resource dependence. Star Wars is similarly set up, and just because Herbert dedicated about 50 pages total of a 600+ page novel to the handwaves of his setting doesn't mean that Dune is better than Star Wars- just that he paced his novel to allow plenty of exposition. Star Wars could not throw in massive amounts of exposition without losing the thread of the movie, just like Indiana Jones couldn't stop and spend 20 minutes on a philosophical discussion between Sallah and Indy about the ethics of exhuming the Ark or the question of whether only a Levite can touch it.

[PeZook]

And if you look at the picture there, or watch the movie, it is pretty clear that he physically spins with the gun, looking through it for kills. There was a computer thing assisting, but it certainly wasn't doing the bulk of the work.

What, you mean just like in any number of modern anti-air vehicles (or tanks for that matter)? Holy crap it must mean they're all manually aimed because the gunner spins with the turret!

Hint: The guns also swivel around wildly out of synch with the chairs, while Luke and Han only watch the computer displays when shooting and scanning for targets.

EDIT: They also had WIRES ON THEIR HEADSETS OMG FAILURE OF WORLDBUILDING!

[Shroom Man 777]

The only failure of worldbuilding in Star Wars was that they didn't depict space combat being done by naked oily spacemen wrestling in space, and that they used fighters instead of space-faring Pegasus horsies being wielded by Jake Sully to harpoon the clear glass canopies of stupid posthuman singularitarian AI fighters.

Science fiction shouldn't be about the modern setting, but taken into space.

Science fiction should be about prehistoric settings taken into space.