Think of it this way: how much did technology really change between the bronze age, to the Renaissance? Not a lot, honestly, as least so far as most people's day-to-day life was concerned. A horse and cart, is a horse and cart. A starship is a starship.
I imagine it was kind of like that; there's ups and downs, golden ages and dark ages, peaks of evolution, valleys of dissolution. Some individual worlds go ultra-technological (like Umbara, Kamino, or Alderaan), some remain forever wilderness worlds, others become ecumenopoli (Coruscant, Hosnian Prime, Nar Shadaa, Taris), and some of those eventually fall into degradation (Taris, Nar Shadaa, parts of Coruscant). Twenty five millenia is ample time for many ups and down. Many things discovered, lost, re-discovered, lost again and this time for good.
However I imagine most of the galaxy just hovers somewhere around the middle. Most people's daily needs are taken care of, so the only pressure to advance is from local economics. That only seems like an alien concept to us because we're living though the most dramatic age of technological advancement in all of human history. This isn't how it's always been, nor is it sustainable forever. At a certain point, things must plateau.
Also worth keeping in mind is that the *starting* point of all of this is the establishment of an interstellar Republic, and an order of laser sword wielding knights. I mean how much more primitive could it have credibly been back then? It's not like they would have been making spaceships out of hewn timber and flint. Indeed, I suspect when it's depicted, they'll go the route of having that era be a semi-mythical golden age (Atlantis, Numenor, you get the picture.)
Sentient droids don't seem comparatively more advanced than mastering hyperspace travel; indeed you'd expect the former to come *much* sooner than the latter. If I were writing the background lore on this kind of thing; I'd say that the invention and wide adoption of droids came out of the era before hyperspace travel, when sleeper ship were used to cross the interstellar void. I can see droids being used to crew said ships, overseeing both the journey and the wellbeing of the passengers in stasis; much more reliable than heading on a trajectory, setting a timer, and hoping for the best.
Lucas even showed in the PT that the Imperial era wasn't more technologically advanced than the Republic, it was just more heavily industrialised. Everything was crude, cheap, and mass produced, rather than elegant, sophisticated and hand crafted as it had been before. Even the Death Star isn't some grand new invention; it's just taking existing technology and applying it on a massive scale. Indeed, we know from the unfinished TCW arcs that there used to be a bunch of kyber powered super-weapons kicking around, and from what we saw of the one on Malachor; the Death Star was a crude, overblown, pale imitation. So this cycle has clearly repeated many times, and through it all, there's likely been droids.
That Huyang was made back then isn't the remarkable part; it's that he *survived* all through those ages. But then he's just one droid. For all we know he was originally just one of a thousand identical droids made my the ancient Jedi, and he's the only one left. Though, I'm sure he's hardly the only ancient droid still knocking around the galaxy.
No doubt making a "vworp-vworp" noise as it appeared.
Last edited:
