A Brief Discussion of Star Wars Prequel Designs

Recently, I was perusing a message board where the practicality of science fiction vehicle designs was a common subject.

The discussion became mildly inflammatory (well, mildly by the standards of that particular message board, which is prone to a level of viciousness and trollishness that would make the average message board look pretty polite and civil), and the discussion turned to Star Wars prequel vehicle designs, at which point an individual declared that there would never be terrible designs like this in a certain freeware game that was being discussed and which that individual was working on. (I'm keeping things vague for the sake of being polite; I'm not calling anybody out, and the discussion was well over a year ago by now-it's just that I was just now reading through the really long thread that the message was posted in.)

"This," the "NR-N99 Persuader-class droid enforcer," is a quirky droid tank design which was slated to appear in AOTC, but was cut until Revenge of the Sith. What's important is that it is a bizarre, impractical design. It has a single massive tank tread complemented by what you might call "training treads" (i.e. they somewhat resemble bicycle training wheels) and a set of guns that can only be pointed forward.

It might not be clear from that description, but such a vehicle would have severe difficulties on a dynamic battlefield. Only able to engage targets in front of it and unable to turn, at least with any due speed (the same message board had several posters remark on how it might be able to turn, which earned a response from the poster who had brought the tank up along the lines of "stop talking forever, you people I am casting aspersions at"), the Persuader would become useless if it was pointed the right way.

The point that was trying to be made is that the prequel designs were naturally "inferior" to those of the original trilogy. I myself must respectfully disagree.

Certainly, the design in question is ineffective as a flexible military vehicle. However, it perfectly proves a point that I suspect was intentional: In the prequels, the inhabitants of the Star Wars galaxy in general were terrible at fighting wars.

What do I mean by this?

Well, when it is said that there were a thousand years of peace in the Old Republic, they meant it. We're not talking the few decades of uneasy "peace" that we've seen in the decades since World War II, which have had significant fighting in every one of those decades somewhere. We're talking a near-total lack of large-scale armed conflict. For one thousand years.

For comparison, on Earth one thousand years ago, there was no such thing as internal combustion engines, it was impossible to sail across an ocean, and many people still thought that the Earth was flat and that there were real dragons.

For the Old Republic of the prequels, war was a myth. A legend. Something vague and mysterious you related to your children.

The only military vehicles that anyone in the Old Republic had ever seen were either primarily ceremonial or were literally museum pieces.

Thus, the Separatists (who, by the way, created most of the "bad" designs) had to re-invent warfare from the ground up.

If these people had ever seen battle tanks, it was in a museum. They looked at them and probably thought to themselves, "Hm, those big guns look useful. But what if there were little guys? They'd have a hard time shooting a bunch of little guys. Let's put a bunch of extra guns on there to shoot little guys. Then, let's add some fireball-shooting things or something. That'd be great." A corporate board meeting later, they had a tank that looked like this.

It was stated in one of the Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections books that the combat tanks formed "battle lines," and thus had little armor in back. They were applying the equivalent of eighteenth-century warfare to tanks. I suppose they could have made worse choices, but I'm hard-pressed to decide what those might be. (Granted, the only previous conflicts were probably with test targets, and if nobody's shooting back, the battle line is actually a pretty great idea...)

My point is, these vehicles were designed primarily by dimwitted, cost-conscious bureaucratic corporate lapdogs, not by combat engineers. They didn't know better.

The only reason we know what's practical and useful in terms of design is because it's been demonstrated so elegantly to us by our own endless conflicts. The cultures of the Old Republic didn't have that. (Although that makes one wonder about the comparative efficacy of Republic military equipment... Eh, who knows?)

-Signing off.