system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] Does technology advance at any significant rate? It seems like the Ebon Hawk (4000 BBY) could compete with the Millenium Falcon. Maybe technology is near its peak, but only designs change based on contemporary needs?
gpt
The galaxy is a big place; like, seriously big. Absurdly huge, even. It takes a *long* time for technological innovation to spread over a space that size. Technology is constantly being advanced, but it isn't being distributed anywhere near fast enough to see much progression when the galaxy is examined as a whole. Imagine that a research lab develops, say, a new hyperdrive. It's 40% faster than the old ones, while using 30% less fuel. They put it through all the tests, and finally start to produce it. Well, of course they want to make money off of it, so they have their design patented so that other people can't produce it, and start building these drives. They're a small, system-level company, so they can only produce 5-6,000,000,000 a year. At that rate of production, it would take them *200 years* to outfit *just* the population of Coruscant. Of course, before 200 years have passed, another research lab will have produced a competing, comparable hyperdrive, better in some ways, and worse in others. They'll start doing the same thing. But even then, 1000 years later you'll still see the old type of hyperdrive being commonly produced on Rim Worlds, because the new ones haven't made it out that far yet, and they don't have the science facilities required to develop their own, so they just build the level that everyone knows and can make easily. The amount of production required to actually *standardize* a new development across the entire galaxy is just mind-boggling. If you look at the single most advanced tech item in the whole galaxy it's going to rise steadily, but if you look at the items in general use by everyday people, the change is significantly slower, just because the number of things that need to be built to get a majority of people using the new tech is just so staggeringly high, that even when the tech is there, most people aren't able to get it.