system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] What technological progression has there been from the ancient Old Republic to the Post-Empire republic?
gpt
If you mean "technological progression" as in the development of new designs for technological devices, there have of course been a great many. Most of the ships, tools, etc. that are built in the modern era are quite different in many ways from those built in ancient times.

If you mean "technological progression" as in the discovery of new *atoms* of design, there haven't been many. The exploration of the galaxy has been slow and almost every new civilization that's been discovered has had the same basic elements of technology already known. So there's really no way for such radically new game-changers to come along. It's a well-known theory that we've discovered pretty much all of the basic building blocks of technology that are possible, it's a waste of time to tinker with such fundamental things in the hopes of stumbling across something new. Just have the droids build you the parts and plug them together.

The real creativity comes from the artisans who assemble those building blocks in new ways. Take the Death Star, for example. It was an unprecedented machine, but the basic building blocks are all very familiar. A hypermatter reactor, standard hyperdrive system, and a turbolaser with external focusing dish. They were just scaled up to unprecedented size.