Scientific advancement in the Star Wars galaxy?

[GM_Champion]

I agree that Star Wars is "Future-themed Swashbuckling Adventure."

 

However re: The Long Night, see Traveller RPG (and since we have Traveller HERO with an excellent timeline, buy and use that) for at least one conception of how you could end up with that situation.

 

Even within a single nation on Earth, compare a New York, Shanghai, Accra, or London to how citizens live just 50 miles away in the burbs or a small town.

 

See also modern-day nations taking/recovering land from their neighbors in sometimes perpetual back and forths - lots of infrastructure lost in conflict zones - over in Somalia, unofficial split-off Somaliland was doing fairly well, but Somalia itself is still dealing with Warlord conflicts.

 

And this is all on Earth.

 

Make Earth the size of a Galaxy, or perhaps small inter-stellar region, making each Earth nation its own planet, with some devastated by conflict and others with sufficient space navies to build ever forward, and yes,something Asimov-like can happen, such as where a librarian, scared, shoots his laser at a peaceful intruder, who happens to have a personal force shield with a power source the size of a walnut, to no effect, and the librarian is flabbergasted as such tech is nearly Mythic in the period following the fall of Trantor, the 40 billion population administrative capital of the former human empire.

 

Come to think of it, Third Imperium is Marc Miller's take on Asimov, with the addition of catman and dogman aliens along with human-alikes (Vilani) 🙂

 

In conclusion, while Star Wars is sloppy about its tech and history, if every world does not have its own starship production industry, then high tech variance or stagnation could occur.

 

(See also Firefly, which spent all but one episode on Frontier Worlds, but one ep did a heist on a rich Hi-Tech world, and that was night and day to the rest of the season.)