Old Republic vs Rise of the Empire and beyond...

[Mamatried]

I am wonder how significant is the development in technology between the ages.
Looking over some of the ships, I wonder that other being somewhat undergunned, are they technologically inferior, and how much.

Hyperdrives can be swapped out, so can sublight drives.

Seems some of the hull design concepts were good enough to survive the ages...as hammerhead designs etc.

So would a ship like the harrower class destroyer be a threat if it found it self in the rebellion age or clone wars era.

[Zarn]

In WEG Star Wars (d6), there's little difference. There's no obsolescence rules, but there are some items that are archaic in design. One example is lightsabers with a power flexcord and either a backpack-style power source, or a large lunchbox-size power source in the belt. They do excellent damage, however. http://d6holocron.com/wiki/index.php?title=Archaic_Lightsaber

There's also the skill Archaic Starship Piloting, which sees occasional use. One example is the Delaya courier, http://d6holocron.com/wiki/index.php?title=Delaya_Courier_Ship . It has a nice Hull rating and a good Space rating even if it was originally used in the Old Republic. Another might be a Sith Interceptor, http://d6holocron.com/wiki/index.php?title=Sith_Interceptor

However, older ships usually have deplorable Hyperdrive multipliers, and are somewhat undergunned - as well as usually having a higher Crew compliment than newer ships. They're good enough that they're occasionally retrofitted rather than being sent right to the breakers, though.

In the Star Wars Saga book Starships of the Galaxy, four templates were included - the junker, archaic, prototype, and advanced ships. These were intended to be slapped on any ship, to represent a particularly bad or good (or old) or fully upgraded version of that class of ship.

For that system, an Archaic ship has only half its normal damage threshold against modern weapons, there's a 50% chance that shields may fail when stressed, weaponry can't score critical hits against nonarchaic vessels, and there's a to-hit penalty for an archaic vessel (to reflect the advances in baffling and so on that makes it difficult to track modern vessels).

In d6, there's various ways one might simulate this. One would be to let the archaic ship simply count as one class smaller when it comes to damage and damage resistance (while keeping to-hit as it is). This would be a fairly significant disadvantage - but wouldn't necessairly make archaic ships useless. You could also just introduce some blanket penalty (like 1D or 2D) to everything to represent old and decrepit systems.

[Mamatried]

how old is archaic? 100 Years? 500? 1000? more than one thousand years?
In the old republic some "designs" were kept in service for more than the above, like the hammerhead cruiser, served off and on over 1500 year timespan, naturally modified and the like to fit in the ages.

[Wajeb Deb Kaadeb]

The tech in the Old Republic stories, in the online game and in the comics and novels (even in D6 Star Wars through the Tales of the Jedi sourcebook) isn't that far off from that seen in ANH.

In my estimation, SW tech crawls, because the tech from 10,000 years ago isn't that much different from that shown in ANH.

[Mamatried]

[garhkal]

[MrNexx]

For reference, HK 47 was fluent in 6,000 forms of communication; C-3PO, four thousand years later, was fluent in 6,000,000.

However, I tend to say that things from any point in Republic History are still fairly intelligible to folks later in the timeline, but that the numbers get a bit better. The Ebon Hawk, the fastest ship in the Galaxy in 4000 BBY, is fairly slow by New Republic Standards. How much slower? No idea... and it's not going to be a clear line, and certainly not a single line that encompasses everything.
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[Dredwulf60]

The tech probably seems stagnant because the maximum ratings have been more or less reached. Any further increase has a diminishing return for the effort/ expense put into it.

In addition many of the traits will be at odds:

Like real world armored vehicles have the triangle: Firepower, Mobility and Protection. Usually you can increase one for a decrease in one or both of the other traits. To be able to increase one substantially WITHOUT affecting the others...that's where the cutting edge is and we get into the diminishing returns.

In essence, I imagine that the results on tech are not that much different than what we see with making characters in the RPG.

Every bit of tech has a number of parameters and a finite number of points to divide between them, with a minimum and a maximum and a number of discretionary points that get divided.

Going above the maximums is possible with a quickly increasing demand on time/effort/ cost, but the vast majority of Star wars tech items are going to fall within the parameters whether they were made 2 years ago or 2000 years ago.

You can have a really fast ship, but it is going to have some drawbacks in other areas for example....or it is going to be the equivalent of a 'high level character'.

Any other arrangement just falls apart when applied to the stagnant tech we see in Star Wars.

Just my rambling.

[Whill]

[RyanDarkstar]

Something I've always struggled with was resources. If spacefaring races have been mining and collecting minerals, fuels, etc. for tens of thousands of years, one would assume planets and asteroid belts within the Slice and Coreward would have been played out long before the Empire.

The only thing that would make any kind of sense for The Old Republic era would be galactic scale wars and/or plagues that severely crippled civilization for large amounts of time, such as what happened here with the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Black Death. I figure a couple of galactic catastrophes would help stagnate technology and resource gathering long enough that individual worlds would take centuries to struggle back to previous technology standards.
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[Pel]

[garhkal]

[CRMcNeill]

I'm not hugely into trying to bridge technological gaps, especially for something that like TOR that feels like they basically just swapped the original SWU with essentially the same tech level back 1,000 years or so. That might be appropriate for something like WH40K, where technological growth has stagnated and atrophied, but as of the classic era, new technological advancements do seem to be occurring in a variety of fields.

That being said, this reminds me of something I saw a very long time ago in my pre-Rancor Pit SWD6 fandom days. Essentially, it was a technological scale modifier, with +/- D modifiers based on whatever time era technology was from. So a ship from the Classic Era might be the baseline, at 0D/+0*, and a ship from the Clone Wars might be at -1D/-2*, while a ship from the TOR era would be a -4D/-8*, and so on and so forth.

*used to modify the ship's Space value.
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[Whill]

[MrNexx]

I tend to go with "Current tech is equivalent to OT era in R&E. Future tech is better than OT era. Ancient tech is inferior to stuff in the R&E"

So, if I'm playing a KOTOR game and need stats for the Ebon Hawk, I'm gonna crib the stats for the Millenium Falcon... because current tech is equal to the OT era material in R&E. If my group in the OT era runs across the Ebon Hawk, then the stats are going to be inferior to a YT-1300, because it is ancient tech, and therefore inferior.

It's horribly subjective, but it is convenient, and keeps numbers where they should be. Buff the numbers too much, and pilot becomes a lot less relevant. Drop the numbers too much, and the pilot becomes too influential... a good pilot has too much advantage.
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