I dunno. Those folks on Coruscant toppled that statue of Palpatine awfully fast (another reason to hate the special editions). I’m not sure anybody in that galaxy is up to the task of running a children’s tea party, much less a galaxy spanning bureaucracy.
That’s probably true, and I’m sure the Empire didn’t build all that bureaucracy itself - much of it would have been held over from the Republic.
But when the Republic became the Empire it did do as a whole (other than the rebelling worlds) - when the Empire fell they didn’t just declare a new Republic, right? Things kinda fell apart? I think, I’ve only seen one of the new Star wars sequels.
Which is fine for the rebel worlds, who appear to be mostly frontier worlds with low populations; less so for highly interdependent worlds in the Empire’s core.
Yes. This is even in the first movie when the Imperials are sitting around a conference table. The Emperor formally dissolves the Senate (indicating it was still there - Lucas isn’t that creative, the Empire was more or less Rome). When asked how the local populations would be controlled, Moff Tarkin says the regional governors would assume control, presumably taking the oversight role over the local bureaucracy.
Yes New Republic. Which JJ Abrams promptly blew up (literally, with a more bigger BETTER Death Star) in the first of the new sequels set a couple decades later.
HOLY SHIT now the First Order makes sense. After the Empire falls there’s mass starvation on highly populated core worlds, martial law is declared, the First Order is formed, and then they go conquer frontier worlds to feed their ecumenopolii.
You’re starting to sound like a Musk fanboy.
JJ Abrams isn’t nearly that smart. He’s about lens flares and leaving lots of maguffins around to turn into plot points later, when he needs them for later seasons or movies.
Oh, ok, so they were briefly united.
On the one hand the Roman Empire never went back to being a Republic, it just fell apart. On the other hand, the French flip flopped from Republic to Monarchy and back quite a few times. So I guess there’s precedent both ways.
Ha! Fair enough. I’ve only seen the first of the new mainline Star Wars trilogy, and thought it was a pretty lame retread of the original story so I didn’t watch the followups.
I liked Rogue One, and that’s basically it for new Star Wars content I’ve seen.
In the 19th Century, France acquired some property under Bonaparte, but they were not able to retain most of it, so they were not exactly an empire for more than a few years. A pretty different thing from Rome.
Except for the vast areas they conquered in Africa etc. You don’t have to call the guy in charge Emperor to have an empire. France had an empire long after either Napoleon snuffed it.
<rant>
Nothing makes me think “bad sci fi” than a setting where there’s casual space travel and sapient androids, but the base of the economy is still vast fields of grain worked by poor peasant farmers who are beaten down by decadent urban elites. That’s just a sci-fi writer trying to put fairy tales from the 1500s into space.
<\rant>
The Star Trek series, for one, did basically that. It was little more than familiar contemporary culture pasted onto space, with some familiar historical culture added in here and there for S&Gs.
Yeah - that’s why I like The Expanse. The base of the economy is asteroid and comet miners, and the breadbasket of the solar system is an outer world that’s domed over where everything grows hydroponically.
Did someone mention quadrotriticale?
I could get behind the Empire as harsh but necessary authoritarians, if it wasn’t for the whole Alderaan thing. That was a dick move.
It was just an accident. Governor Tarkin gave an order to tase Alderaan but because of his accent (he was not a native speaker of Galactic Basic, instead his mother tongue was an obscure dialect of an Outer Rim Seswennan dialect) it was mistranslated as “destroy”, and the weapon operator was too terrified of being Force-choked by Lord Vader to repeat the order back. This is why it is critically important to have good comms discipline to avoid such confusion under the pressure of real operations.
Stranger
A situtation made more confusing by Alderaan’s last formal radio transmission to the Death Star, “Don’t tase me, bro!”
The guy in charge of analyzing radio traffic took that to be a thinly-veiled challenge to escalate, a la “If you want to stop me, you gotta kill me!” instead of the plea for mercy we assume it was.
Interesting, his home planet of Eriadu is populated with both humans and Rodians, and Greedo demonstrated that Rodians aren’t necessarily fluent in Basic.
I haven’t watched that show, but I’m hoping that at most the asteroid miners control an army of drones from the comfort of a spaceship rather than getting down and dirty with it. “Slaves working in the mines” is another great sci-fi complaint of mine.
If you have an evil empire, it has to have a dumping ground for the vast collection of undesirables the Empire isn’t wanting to simply vaporize. Once you’re keeping them alive, you may as well get some real work out of them. The less pleasant the better.