Essential Guide to Technology

[Moff]

Galactic civilization exists because of technology. That may well be the single fact that no scholar in the galaxy can argue. For some, such as the Columi or the Bothans, technological progress was done on their own terms. Others, such as humans and others conquered by the Builders--also known as the Rakatans-- or those discovered by the Republic or Empire at primitive stages, had technological evolution thrust upon them. The sheer number of technologies that make modern existence possible is uncountable, so this supplement will focus only on the most fundamental.

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Droids
Modern civilization would not exist without the droid. From astromechs in Alliance fighters doing battlefield repairs and calculating hyperjumps to smelter droids that work in factories in ambient temperatures that would kill the hardiest organic in seconds, and protocol droids that help facilitate communications and put an end to hostilities, or even simple labor droids who make the megafreighters that carry galactic trade in their bottoms feasible, droids are as ubiquitous as computers and starships. Droids are primarily designed to perform tasks that are either too complex for organics, require precision and repeatability to a degree that is rare in organics, or are too dangerous for organics: surgical droids do not get tired and their manipulators do not shake no matter how delicate the procedure; nannydroids provide security and care for infants while having access to encyclopedic knowledge no organic parent could hope to contain; police droids are first through the breach in a dangerous situation.

Droids are grouped into five categories, called degrees:
First degree droids are equipped with high-level artificial intelligence processors and are mainly used the fields of mathematics, physical sciences, and medicine. Most first-degree droids are medical droids, as theoretician droids are generally little more than computers with the ability to think creatively to find solutions to their tasks.

Second-degree droids are programmed for engineering and technical applications. Vocabulators are not commonly equipped to second-degree droids: as they were intended to primarily interface with other droids of their type, the efficiency of binary communication is prioritized over the convenience of programmable language emulation. Astromechs, exploration droids, engineering droids, high-end maintenance droids, and environmental droids are all second degree.

Third-degree droids are intended for organic interface. Protocol droids are programmed for diplomatic relations, often doubling as translators to facilitate communications. Tutor droids have likely taught more sentients in history than organic teachers, at least in primary education. Nanny droids care for children, with some specially designed to handle and even nurse infants. Servant droids are widely programmable, providing the well-off-but-not-wealthy with maids, butlers, and chefs without the expenses of paid organic staff or the issues inherent to slave staff.

Fourth-degree droids are built for battle. This is one of the oldest classes of droid, with ancient Builder droids found in ruins that predate mainstream civilization's development of robotics. Standard battle droids are fourth-degree droids. Security droids are used by many groups due to the lack of organic manpower in the wake of the Alliance's liberation campaigns and the Imperial civil wars, though the Empire and Alliance themselves make sparing use of droids for these purposes. Gladiator droids are built to battle other droids--and in some unsavory places, organics--for entertainment purposes. Finally, assassin droids--though highly illegal--are grouped in with more legitimate combat units. Assassin droids are more an issue of programming, though a few purpose-built models do exist; however, proper assassination requires a degree of infiltration. For this reason, many assassin droids are repurposed protocol, surgical, or even astromech droids intended for single use against a specific target.

Fifth-degree droids are labor droids. There are general labor droids, which are adequate at simple tasks and can handle basic labor duties such as heavy-lifting and loading and off-loading cargo. Specialist labor units were focused on a single duty, often from the ground up. Simple reprogramming is not sufficient to adapt them to other duties. Finally, hazardous-service droids went where organics could not due to temperature, toxicity, hard vacuum, high radiation, or unbreathable atmosphere.

Most droid models are capable of learning over time. However, for all of the wondrous things droids can do, they are, ultimately, little more than computers with the ability to manipulate their environment. And as computers age and accumulate data, errors creep in and can corrupt programming. In droids, this can manifest in anything from personality quirks to physical tics to outright omnicidal mania. For this reason, as well as numerous droid rebellions, droids are generally mind-wiped every so often--depending on model--to avoid any potentially-dangerous glitches manifesting.

It is also worth noting that uploading new programming or heavily modifying base code in less advanced models can lead to similar issues. Famously, the B1 battle droids of the Trade Federation that later made up the bulk of Separatist ground troops were originally built to be run by Droid Control Ship. The onboard processors were pared down as much as possible; even movement commands were done by droid control computers. When the Invasion of Naboo was broken by downing the Droid Control Ship Vuutun Palaa, the Trade Federation hastily refitted its droids with more comprehensive code and some minor processor upgrades. However, the upgrades were not sufficient to handle the new programming leading to behavior that ranged from quirky through utterly bizarre to outright self-destructive from the Trade Federation's battle droids.

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Space Propulsion: Faster-than-Light Hyperdrive
There are many factors that contribute to the existence of a galactic civilization, but without argument, none match the existence of faster-than-light travel in importance. Without the ability to bypass special relativity, the spaces between stars are simply too vast to span. Indeed, many solar systems would have their outer reaches more remote than Wild Space is from the Core today. Every schoolchild knows that the speed of light in vacuum is the ultimate speed limit in real space, as found by the Columi over two million years ago. Any object with mass will gain mass as it approaches the speed of light, requiring more force and thus more energy to accelerate. These all increase asymptotically, going to the infinite at the speed of light.

Ironically, it was the depredations of the Rakata that brought the answer to the Galaxy. Their hyperdrive systems carried them across the stars during their brutal conquests; when the Infinite Empire fell, the peoples they subjugated quickly captured and reverse-engineered any technology the former masters left behind.

Early hyperdrive experiments were not safe, but showed that hyperspace freed one of the universal speed limit of 299,792,458 meters per second that bound all things in realspace. So even as sublight sleeper ships left Coruscant, the hyperdrive was being refined. Eventually, the designs mutated into hyperspace cannons that blasted ships into hyperspace. But the dream of mounting the equipment for passing into hyperspace within the hull of a ship continued to inspire and eventually birthed the modern hyperdrive.

However, while the process of transitioning into, flying through, and exiting hyperspace was theoretically safe, the practical use of the hyperdrive was considerably more dangerous. While objects using faster-than-light transit via hyperdrive are not in realspace, massive bodies in realspace cast "mass shadows" into hyperspace. Contacting one of these mass shadows in hyperspace will--at best--result in the vessel violently translating down to realspace. This is exacerbated by the relatively low gravity field needed to force this crash-translation: 1.09 meters per second squared, or approximately one planetary diameter out for a standard terrestrial planet. Assuming a ship survives contact and reversion to realspace, it must now contend with the fact that it is perilously close to a massive object, such as a planet or--worse yet--a star or even a black hole, likely at much less than orbital velocity and equally likely with insufficient time and control to generate a proper orbit.

This requires a jump to a destination take into account any gravitic hazards along the way. Unfortunately, this is complicated by the fact that the Galaxy we live in is not static. It is a dynamic, evolving, and rotating place, with stars, nebulae, black holes, and rogue bodies shifting position constantly. Starship computers are simply not up to the task of simulating the complex interactions of the every single celestial body in the Galaxy to generate real-time data on safe routes, and this was even more true twenty millennia ago. To provide safe travel between worlds, routes were marked with jump beacons, forming a kind of lighthouse network for ships to follow. These beacons were massive, floating supercomputers that refined and reevaluated their route. They were also prime targets during the many wars fought by the early Republic: destroy the beacons, destroy the route, and cripple the enemies' ability to deploy their forces.

But, just as the drive to mount a hyperdrive within the hull of a starship made the hyperspace cannon obsolete, a similar drive to make the navigational system self-contained eventually led to the development of the navicomputer. The pilot was now free of the tyranny of the beacons; so long as there was a known destination, the computer could take him there.

With the marriage of hyperdrive and navicomputer complete, hyperdrives progressed gradually over the years, propelling larger vessels to greater speeds and across greater ranges. Modern drives are completely pangalactic, though the routes are certainly not. One issue that seems fundamentally endemic to hyperdrive technology is the lack of maneuverability: vessels cannot alter course in hyperspace; therefore, all jumps are straight. To alter course, such as to account for a bend in a hyperlane, a vessel must exit hyperspace at the necessary point, maneuver onto the correct vector, and then reengage its hyperdrive. This does somewhat blunt the rather fantastic speeds of modern drives; with a Class 3 engine, a trip from Coruscant to Dantooine would take 57 hours. However, the actual distance between them is far less than the 129,000 lightyears a Class 3 drive can theoretically travel in that amount of time.

This "faster-than-light, no left or right" approach means hyperspace travel is predictable. Those seeking to evade pursuit will usually jump away on a false vector, decant, change course, and jump again, perhaps repeating the process several times depending on the doggedness of pursuit and paranoia of the pursued before finally coming onto the desired vector. However, this adds greatly to transit times, making it a less-than-attractive option for those under time constraints.

Jumping into hyperspace is more difficult than exiting: while starships can safely decant as close as one diameter with a standard terrestrial planet (or wherever the 1.09 meter-per-second-squared radius around the body happens to be), transiting upward cannot be done in gravity fields more powerful than 0.058 meters-per-second-squared, or about six planetary diameters above the surface of a standard terrestrial planet. This egress limit is generally used to demarcate the inviolable sovereign space of a planet; jumping in closer is restricted to emergency cases and military vessels assigned to the planet. Many a freighter pilot has had a small calculation error and decanted between the one and six diameter lines, to be promptly greeted first by threat-acquisition scanners and weapon locks before a very terse comm message from local space control.

Both entering and exiting hyperspace produces a weak but very characteristic emission pulse of Cronau radiation. It is generally undetectable beyond 50,000 kilometers even for dreadnought-squadron-scale translations, but closer in, the pulse is a massive flare announcing the arrival or departure of a vessel or fleet to all watching. This fact helped save the famous Alliance base on Hoth from orbital bombardment when the Imperial fleet decanted at point-blank range of 15,000 kilometers above the surface. Had the Imperials dropped out of hyperspace further out, they likely would have appeared to be one of the many meteor showers that fouled the Alliance sensors until it was too late. Instead, the Alliance had time to erect their defensive shields and force the Empire into a grueling surface assault while they evacuated the planet.

Hyperdrive engines are rated by classes. The class ratings give the maximum speed of the drive in deep space, relative to each other. So, a Class Four engine is half as fast as a Class Two engine, and twice as fast as a Class Eight drive. During the Clone Wars, Class Three engines were the standard primary drive on military ships, with especially fast vessels using Class Two or better. In the modern era, Class One engines are considered top-shelf, with Class Two being more standard. Large freighters generally employ Class Three or Four drives. Backup hyperdrives generally start around Class Six to Twelve, with Class Eight and Ten drives being the most popular. Drives capable of performance above Class One are not common and get exponentially more expensive and dangerous as the speed increases. Many smuggling ships are modified to perform between Class 1 and Class 0.7 performance with a moderate success rate. Early-run Acclamator-class assault ships employed experimental Class 0.6 drives, but were heavily retrofitted when safety issues began costing the Republic entire divisions. Making 0.5 past lightspeed (which, coincidentally, requires a Class 0.5 hyperdrive) is often discussed in theoretical engineering and smuggling groups, however, only one vessel is known to have achieved the feat and survived: the Millennium Falcon. Hyperspatial turbulence at that velocity (approximately 120 million times the speed of light) will easily tear apart even the strongest of craft. It is believed--the Falcon's owner is reticent on the subject--that special modifications to the hyperdrive help "streamline" its hyperspace profile, reducing turbulence. The modifications involved involve as much trial as calculation, and to date, no major organization has been willing to risk lives, credits, or hulls tampering with otherwise stable hyperdrive technology.

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Space Propulsion: Sublight Drive
In theory, any mechanism that utilizes the Second Law of Motion (force equals mass multiplied by acceleration) can be used to propel an object in space. However, this is not practical for organic spaceflight over intrasystem distances. Using burn/cruise cycles, visits to orbiting moons can take days (one way), and nearby planets could only be reached within a few years during comparatively miniscule ideal transfer windows. Even with intrasystem hyperdrives (which can be rendered nonfunctional when reaching the innermost planets by the gravity well of the sun), the ability to maneuver around a planet employing strictly mechanical physics is severely hampered. As the ancient Columi theorist Qonst Syolqobsk discovered, the ability for a ship to change its velocity—and thus maneuver into different orbits—is a function of engine thrust, fuel consumption, and quantity of fuel relative to the mass of the craft. Chemical rockets lack the efficiency to permit space-going vessels anything beyond the most basic of maneuvering ability, and even then, great planning of trajectories is required beforehand to ensure sufficient fuel is carried. Fission rockets are more efficient, but suffer from heavy engine mass and limited scalability. Atomic pulse propulsion is costly, dangerous, and worse than useless for ships near inhabited planets with even rudimentary electronic technology. Electrical thrusters (small, primitive version of modern ion drives) are highly efficient in fuel consumption, but offer limited thrust and massive power draws, exacerbated by the primitive power technologies that existed when they were considered viable drive options.

Fortunately for galactic civilization, modern sublight propulsion has evolved beyond such things. Modern ion drives are widely scalable, have ultrarelativistic exhaust velocities, and can offer very high thrust. Like their ancient ancestors, electrical thrusters, they do consume large quantities of power, but modern power supplies are up to meeting the challenge. Larger engines feature in-line reactors which, in addition to further energizing the propellants, contribute some power to the acceleration and focusing coils, vectoring plates, and other components which somewhat reduces the draw the sublight propulsion system must put upon the main power plant. Nevertheless, ion drives are just as constrained by the laws of astrodynamics as chemical and atomically-boosted drive systems. Though much more efficient (to match the performance of a very efficient chemical rocket with ninety percent of its mass being fuel, a standard ion drive vessel would require 3.7 milligrams of propellant to each kilogram of overall vessel mass), the sheer scale of space and velocity changes required for unassisted maneuvers would render most modern spacecraft designs completely untenable.

That is where a starship's antigravity drives come into play. All spacegoing craft, from the smallest drone fighter to the Death Stars themselves carry repulsorlift engines. At roughly six planetary diameters (or, more accurately, wherever the 5.8 centimeter-per-second-per-second limit is) the antigravity systems of a vessel can engage the gravity well. This has completely revolutionized starship maneuvering and space combat. Ships are no longer subject to the tyranny of gravity, and the laws of reality alter from complex equations governing rotational motion and elliptical orbits to simple and intuitive position and velocity determinations. So long as a vessel's repulsorlifts are in operation, it can use gravitic interactions, internal reaction wheels, and applied thrust to maneuver in all three spatial dimensions in a manner not unlike an aircraft. Without the repulsor drives, even a maneuver as simple as a banked turn would range from monumentally difficult and taxing to outright impossible.

A ship with its ion drives shot away will drift, dead in space, provided its repulsors are active. Outside the antigrav range of the orbiting body, such a vessel will go into a high orbit, which--depending on its speed--could be parabolic (and thus it will impact the body after falling toward it), elliptical, or hyperbolic. Position along these orbits can be easily calculated by hand; modern targeting computers make this situation a veritable death sentence.

Repulsorlifts are very difficult to damage in action. Once engaged, they draw very little power to maintain their antigravity fields, and truly total power losses on starships (without the ship itself being destroyed) are so rare as to be freak events, despite what military drama holos may show. Ionic attacks can lead to repulsor shutdown in starships, but that's due to interference with the controls and power supplies more than direct damage to the drive system itself. Space-going vessels simply have too much mass and charge capacity to suffer catastrophic damage to their antigravity systems; however, the same is not true for the smaller, less robust systems aboard ground vehicles and smaller transports. This allows engine loss within the gravity well to be survivable, at least from a trajectory perspective. Gravitic interactions essentially brake the space craft relative to the gravity well's center of mass. A ship can even stably hold position in the lower exosphere in this condition.

However, should the repulsor drives be lost somehow in the gravity well, the situation may be dire. If accompanied by the loss of sublight propulsion systems, a ship is not likely to have sufficient momentum to establish a stable orbit. But in the unlikely case of repulsorlifts going offline with sublight drives being fully-functional, a ship can be saved by falling back on classical physics. A hard, prograde engine burn can quickly raise an orbit's apoapsis to safe levels, while burns along the radial and normal vectors can allow for fine-tuning. However, as these orbits are governed by basic physical laws, a starship's trajectory is very predictable. In battle, this maneuver is just as hazardous as loss of drive function outside the gravity well, for the same reasons.

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Shield Technology
The shield defenses of modern starships and vehicles trace their roots back to radiation and micrometeoroid shields of ancient spaceships, plying the vast reaches between stars. Energy shields were highly efficient at turning back stellar radiation, while offering lighter weight (for the same protection granted by thick armor) and thus greater speed and maneuverability, but at the cost of increased maintenance and power draw. It was quickly discovered that this defense against the constant yet slow assault of charged particles and high-energy photons could also, temporarily, hold off the sharp, intense bursts of energy weapons of the day.

However, energy shields were of no use against physical impactors, natural or otherwise. This led to the development of particle shields, which repel or disintegrate matter on contact (depending on strength of the shield and velocity of the impactor). Particle shields also bolster tensor fields in supplying a starship's structural integrity.

Even with the underpinnings of modern combat shields established, shields as a defense in battle remained the domain of the largest ships in the fleet. Shields are extremely power-hungry, and while modern power generators allow for shield technology to be widely scalable, shields of the day were relegated to defense against radiation storms and accidental collisions as recently as the Eighth Millennium BrS. But as the technology became more advanced and efficient, and power generation technology improved, shielding ceased being the domain of massive ships of the line and could be fitted to smaller vessels and eventually ground vehicles, and even encase individual soldiers in a protective cocoon of energy. Personal deflector shields of the Mandalorian War era, with the exception very rare and very expensive experimental prototype units, had to be optimized to protect against either energetic or kinetic attacks. The preference for using energy shielding resulted in melee weaponry becoming standard issue again in an era of pangalactic starships and relatively modern technology. However, long-term studies done after the wars found even the modest shielding units produced damaging levels of radiation that manifested in serious health problems in countless veterans, mercenaries, and other users of the energy shield units.

In the modern era, shields can encase small moons or large swathes of a planet with a single unit, or be fitted to infantry-scale battle droids. Even personal ray shield generators for organics are appearing again, with new designs that do not leak large quantities of dangerous radiation.

The modern deflector shield on a starship or fighter combines both ray and particle screens into a single defensive barrier that protects equally well against kinetic impacts, explosions, and directed-energy beams while in space. This makes weapons that specifically target one aspect of the shield over the other ineffective, as the shield generator will automatically correct the imbalance and reroute power to the targeted shield. However, shields as a whole are weak against ion cannon discharges, which directly interferes with the generator itself. This is not to say that ion blasts can simply pass through shields, but their nature produces sharp, localized disruptions that expand across the shield surface, much like a stone cast into a body of water will splash and then produce smaller ripples. These ripples are absorbed by the deflector shield generator, interfering with its systems and causing rather more disruption to the shield than an equally-energetic blaster shot might.

Particle shields have additional restrictions. They must lowered when a large craft is launching smaller vessels. Additionally, exhaust ports and waste heat vents--as shown by the first Death Star--cannot be covered by particle shielding, as doing so would trap the heat, waste, or other emission to be eliminated. Particle shields also suffer from reduced ability in atmosphere. Firstly, many craft employ their particle shields to streamline and improve their aerodynamic profile. This alters the geometry of the shield from one ideal for deflecting attacks. Secondly, even when streamlined, there is still a notable amount of atmospheric friction to contend with. These effects add up to making atmospheric projectile weapons more effective at penetrating shield defenses (although not capable of ignoring shield defenses), especially when power reserves and shield power are limited. Finally, particle shields are not generally used for personal shielding as they are highly dangerous to the user: with form-fitting fields, any sudden movement may cause the user to make contact with their own shield before it shifts geometry (there is always a brief lag due to the unit needing to detect movement and then realign the field's contours) which would cause severe injury; secondly, encapsulating particle shields can literally cook the user with trapped waste heat if left on too long. Planar surface particle shields avoid the heat hazard, but can only be projected in a particular direction, leaving the user unprotected from other angles.

Due to the prevalence of energy weapons on the modern battlefield, ray shields are a viable defense for soldiers, special operatives, and mercenaries. Though they will not stop a kinetic strike, ray shields can discourage unarmed assault on the user: unprotected organic matter passing through a ray shield boundary can suffer severe thermal damage. However, droids and melee weapons do not need to be concerned about painful transition events, while fully-armored organics can cross the threshold with moderate discomfort with a rapid entry or nothing more severe than a slight tingling with approached with care.

While starships, fighters, and infantrymen took to shielding easily, the arena of shielded ground vehicles has been a more difficult road. Long-duration, fully-encapsulating particle shields cannot be used by ground vehicles of any type, and to fit tracked, wheeled, and walker vehicles with terrain-sensitive enclosures is both expensive and requires fragile detection and realignment systems: poor qualities for a mass produced assault vehicle. Forgoing the terrain sensing for fixed geometry (such as a hemispherical barrier) guarantees frequent ground contact with the shield and terrain, and rapid burnout of the generator as the shield attempts to burn its way through every stone, insect mound, and variation in the terrain. Nevertheless, full deflector shields are often fitted to repulsorcraft, which do not need to worry about terrain strikes as part of normal operation. Fixed shields can also afford full particle and ray protection, as the geometry can be adjusted for the terrain ahead of time. Even attempts to "burrow" under the shield perimeter at the surface with explosives or high-power blaster fire are easily thwarted, though a true subterranean tunnel could bypass a surface shield. Additionally, fixed theater defenses preclude the operation of low-ceiling repulsorlift vehicles within their volume, and vehicles outside of the perimeter attempting to penetrate the shield will almost certainly short-circuit and burnout their drive systems.

Ray shields have the ability to open "gun ports" or "shutters" in their perimeter to allow starships, shielded vehicles, droids, and surface weapons under a planetary shield to engage an enemy. The shields aboard starships and vehicles are generally not strong enough to interfere with onboard sensors, and so mounted weapons can be used with shields at full strength. However, the energy needed to operate a planetary shield does produce sufficient bleed-off to restrict communications to a handful of open frequencies and also blocks sensors above and below the shield. Due to this double-blind nature, a surface weapon must have sufficient time to search, acquire, lock, and fire... which also gives an alert attacker time to detect the opening (as scanners will be able to detect what lies under the shield in a localized position) and fire through the gun port. Additionally, planetary shield openings require more time to open and close due to the greater scale of the shield, and every additional shot taken by the surface emplacement lengthens the period of vulnerability to return fire.

"Shutters" are openings made in planetary particle shields. Particle shields are much more difficult to generate for bodies with atmospheres, with a thicker atmosphere making shielding exponentially more taxing. Unlike ray shields, economies of scale work in favor of opening portholes in particle shields: starships and starfighters must fully deactivate their kinetic defenses to fire projectiles or engage in small craft launch/landing operations. Though these periods of vulnerability never have a base cycle time longer than five seconds--and are generally much shorter, especially for starfighters--it is still a time-frame that can be exploited by an attacker in the right place at the right time. And, of course, if the actual release or recovery period is longer than five seconds, it should go without saying that the particle shield must remain offline for a greater period of time. But since planetary grids can be shuttered, the area of vulnerability can be greatly reduced at the cost of a longer period of vulnerability. While space-to-surface transit can be abbreviated with careful traffic control, surface-to-space flight requires an opening for most of the ascent for proper navigation and safe transit due to fluctuations in the shield surface. For this reason, surface-to-space missile weapons are not generally favored: time of flight is simply too long, with a correspondingly and unacceptably lengthy period of vulnerability.

[Moff]

Computers and Scanners
The great technological requirement needed to span the galaxy means complex sensing and control systems.

It is a common misconception that the general crewing of certain systems is due to a lack of computer control and sensors to give them input. The reality is the opposite: computers, sensors, and electronic countermeasures wage a brutal digital war in the background, without any organic intervention.