Something I'd love to see in SW

It could be in Rebels or it could be in one of the movies or spinoffs... anyway:

A world at roughly our present level of technology.

Almost all the planets we've seen, no matter how backwater, have some form of contact with the galactic community at large. About the only society that didn't was the Ewoks... And in fact in RoTJ we basically saw the end of that, as the alliance made first contact with them.

But there must be countless pre-starfaring planetary civs out there at all levels of development, and with which no galactic concerns have yet made overt contact. Up to and including ones like ours - post industrial, information technology societies, with primitive space tech (e.g. We today have the ISS, had a brief lunar exploration from 1969 - 1972, have exploratory probes throughout the solar system and thousands of sats in Earth orbit).

Such societies could remain blind to the galactic community as long as they depended on basic EM radio for communications, having no ability to receive subspace and hyperwave s-thread transmissions. For example, a program like SETI would yield nothing because the galactic community has progressed beyond the primitive speed-of-light EM comms that said program looks for.

There's a couple of ways this could be handled... Either as an undercover op where some group had to insert among said society, while keeping their status as an offworlder secret, or as a contact situation, in which we bear witness to that society becoming aware of the wider galactic community and the existence of "aliens" (from their POV) for the first time.

Well, I guess such an ep / arc might need a careful hand to avoid it becoming too Star Trekky in look and feel, but I think it could be done all right.

 

Could be a really cool story arc. I've always been intrigued with "first contact" stories and while it is dealt with in Star Trek quite a bit, there's very little of it in Star Wars. (My favorite example being the Iktotchi first contact story...)

 

I would have enjoyed a Star Wars show with SOME resemblance to Star Trek: Enterprise.

In Enterprise the show starts with humans working alongside Vulcans (that humans don't fully trust) to make a ship for Earth that will allow humans to explore space. And then over time they run into familiar races like the Klingons and Romulans. And by the end of the show Archer (captain of the Enterprise) organizes an assembly of many races like the Vulcans and Andorians to found the Federation.

I wouldn't want a Star Wars tale about humans exploring the galaxy. The property is Star WARS, and should stay true to that. But I think a show set before the Republic ever forms, perhaps following the politicians and soldiers on Coruscant (before it becomes a bustling capital for a political entity that does not yet exist) would be something I could get behind. Instead of being a war of Sith Empire vs. Republic, it would be pre-Republic with all several hostile political entities like the Hutts, perhaps the remnants of the Rakata, etc.

The show would then follow the formation of the Republic as Coruscant invades or engages in diplomacy with neighboring systems, shows how familiar species interacted with each other when they first crossed paths, how the empires were toppled and a rag tag band of cooperating star systems then banded together to found a Republic. And could also include the very early Jedi Order before it was affiliated with the Republic and any kind of philosophical conflicts that took place within the order as well as Republic-Jedi relations in those very early days.

 

You couldn't really do a whole SW show in the style of ST because the settings are fundamentally different.

ST presents a galaxy with a lot of young "startup" starfaring species striking out, exploring, building their empires and unions and federations... Most societies are still heavily centered around one species, and around the home planet (almost all named humans in ST were born on Earth for example, only a few were born on colony worlds).

SW presents a very old, very mature galaxy-wide society. The exploring has all been done. The old empires and all that did their consolidation millenia ago. They have now for the most part joined together into a single galaxy spanning republic. Developing civilizations could in some cases reach about our level and remain isolated, but if they went much further - like sending high c-fractional nuclear-pulse driven or fusion-driven ships to nearby systems and building up a primitive multi-system presence, (i.e. like where humans were at in Avatar) chances of them contacting the galaxy at large go up dramatically. If they're lucky, their first contact won't be with the Hutts...

Star Trek presents a galaxy at a different level of overall development. The Milky Way of ST is what the GFFA of SW might have been like, 30,000 - 50,000 years before the movie era.

This is even hinted at in EU canon, where it mentions early interstellar exploration in the time before hyperdrives were invented, in ships using a more primitive form of FTL called a dimensional drive. The description of how that works is that it distorts spacetime ahead and aft the ship and permits it to skate across the universe at FTL speeds in realspace. The kicker for sci-fi fans in the know is that this is pretty much exactly what a ST warp drive (an alcubierre drive) does. Ergo the unstated implication is that the dimensional drive was an alcubierre drive. Presumably the name dimensional drive is a retrospective name from the "modern" SW era, indicating that this device permitted FTL within the normal dimension, rather than shifting the vessel into an overlying dimension like a hyperdrive does. Here's the wook's article on dimensional drives.

 

Gah! Ninja'd!

I spent so long writing that post in an open window and checking stuff elsewhere that I missed TaradosGon's post. I see he's touched on some of the same stuff I did.

Yeah. You could do a kinda quasi ST type show, but only if it was set thousands of years back, before the formation of the Republic, before the Rakatan empire.

 

Before the dark times. Before the Empire.

 

I'm not saying that they are exploring. The Rakata was a massive Empire in which most of the other races were slaves to it. Now those slaves break away, form their own governments and have to interact with each other.

E.G. instead of Wookiees and humans both being slaves, they now have their own governments and get to dictate how they interact with each other, which can be either amicable or not.

I am explicitly saying that I do NOT want the show to be about exploration. I don't want Enterprise with a coat of Star Wars paint on it. I would merely be interested to see a Star Wars show like Enterprise only up to the extent of showing disorganized governments of familiar races coming together and forming the Republic by the end of the show. While at the beginning of the show they might all distrust one another and have a hard time coordinating.

It would also be an opportunity to show the Republic in a different light. When you look at a nation like the United States, it has a dark side in its early days, e.g. treatment of the natives, slavery, opposition to civil rights, etc. That doesn't mean that the nation today hasn't made changes for the better.

Rather than showing the Republic as a bunch of good guys coming together, it could be a bunch of flawed groups that mistrust each other and do bad things that they eventually learn to overcome.

Just throwing random ideas out there now, but one thing I think could be interesting would be a war between the Jedi and Republic (or Republic precursor, or a Republic constituent) when they first begin dealing with each other. Or maybe the early Republic constituents were liberated slaves from the Rakata Empire that in turn now keep slaves of their own. Maybe humans become free but then just turn around and enslave the wookiees, but liberate them by the end of the show as they begin to learn that this is wrong. Perhaps the Jedi wage a war (armed with ineffective lightsaber precursors) against the Republic to free the slaves and get their butts kicked. Perhaps this then ties into the PT in that the Jedi are not going to intervene in the affairs of a foreign power (like Tatooine), having learned the lesson that being aggressive, even to accomplish something good, can horribly backfire. Maybe the lightsaber wasn't always the Jedi weapon and it was only invented to defend themselves from aggressive outsiders that did not trust them. Maybe the Jedi fighting valiantly in defense of the Wookiees leads to the Wookiees historically looking upon the Jedi with nothing but the utmost respect, etc.

I'm just making these up on the spot. They're not all going to be gems. But IMO there is a lot that could be done with such a show and a lot of interesting relations between different species and political entities that could make for extremely entertaining content vs. another show about good rebels/Republic vs. evil Empire. It could be semi-good Jedi vs. gray Republic vs. evil Hutts vs. evil Rakata Remnant vs. any number of other political entities at various places on the morality spectrum.

EDIT: And I in turn didn't see Valkyrus' post before posting this

 

Great topic, Valkyrus!

The current level of a civilization, characterized by the Kardashev scale, is one of my favorite topics in science fiction. When comparing the Star Trek and the Star Wars universes, you can fairly cleanly identify ST's Federation as a Type II civilization, having colonized the stars but not the entire galaxy itself, whereas SW's GFFA has a Type III civilization where much of the galaxy has been mapped and numerous hyperlane routes exist to connect various species and cultures together to form a single, nearly all-encompassing, galactic civilization. SW basically presents us with a vision of a galaxy that has been gradually colonized over thousands of years, whereas ST, as TaradosGon mentioned, shows a relatively young spacefaring civilization in humanity, just getting set to explore outside the solar system after the discovery of the warp drive.

As to the actual topic about discovering lower-end civilizations---basically Type I civilizations or below, much like ourselves---I personally think this would be something great to explore as well. Hopefully there will be a plot thread in Rebels dedicated to the Empire explore more uncharted regions of space, i.e. attempting to expand into Wild Space, or even the Unknown Regions, for example. We know that Palpatine did open up Wild Space to extensive exploration during his reign, and it would make sense to use this as an opportunity for the Empire to stumble across new and more primitive civilizations, of which they may choose to subjugate and exploit for additional resources. One clear difference between the Empire and ST's Federation is that the former most certainly won't be following the Prime Directive. Also, this could be a logical place to introduce a younger Grand Admiral Thrawn, who spent much of the Galactic Civil War exploring the Unknown Regions in the name of the Empire (note that the Chiss Ascendancy was a part of these regions, and maintained relations with the Empire).

Another sci-fi franchise I'd like to note exploring these themes of discovery is the videogame series Mass Effect, which incorporates many elements of Trek and Wars as well as other popular sci-fi franchises. Mass Effect has a relatively young spacefaring humanity begin exploration of the galaxy while interacting with (and often butting heads with) other more entrenched spacefaring races. While the united races' main focus is to avoid contact with more primitive civilizations until they had discovered the mass relays linking their system with the galaxy at large, much like ST, there are a few plot threads that explore attempts to uplift less advanced species in order to exploit them (i.e. the salarians' uplift of the krogan and some members of the yahg), which end up having repercussions. We could see the Empire perhaps searching for a powerfully built race like the Wookiees, Talz, Gamorreans, etc. to exploit as manual or slave labor in constructing their war machines. This could potentially open up many interesting story ideas.

It's a big galaxy after all, so it would make sense for civilizations to exist that haven't yet been discovered by the Republic or the Empire. And that way we don't have to go way back to the time of the Rakata and their Infinite Empire, or the rise of humanity and their colonization of the GFFA.

 

I agree with Circular_Logic that the Empire most certainly would not have an equivalent to the Prime Directive. I could see that going either in the direction of the Empire "uplifting" and exploiting these civilizations, or just ignoring them because they are of no concern. Such a story of finding some Earth-like planet with no knowledge of life off world feels very un-Star Wars like. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but probably would work better as a standalone - an interesting temporary detour from the familiar view of the Star Wars universe.

 

I agree, I would love to see Star Wars' take on a post-industrial society like our own. However, I operate under the assumption that the GFFA has no Prime Directive, and therefor any sentient race that gets contacted by a spacefaring race gets hooked up with all the technological goodies one would desire, until the process begets itself and the Galactic community starts to feel very small, void of any sentient races left to be discovered. A pretty protracted assumption of course. In addition, the idea of first contact is very much at home in Star Trek, but not so much in the Wars. Interesting to see? could be, but not likely.

 

How about the Zhell-Taung conflicts?

 

I have never heard of these. I looked at the article on Wookieepedia, and from the sound of it, my ideal show would take place after these conflicts.I think it would be neat to have a show where in the series finale the show culminates with the declaration of the Republic, in much the same way that Enterprise ended with the formation of the Federation. The various seasons of the show would then chronicle the various wars, treaties, inter-system relations, etc. that helped lay the ground work for the Republic. Alternatively, I wouldn't mind a show that begins with the Republic already founded, but not yet a GALACTIC Republic. It could merely be a political entity holding a chunk of the galaxy and having to deal with various Empires and factions each holding their own slice of the galaxy.

The biggest thing that both would have in common is that instead of having two opposing factions (Sith vs. Jedi, Republic vs. CIS, Rebels vs. Empire) it would be about more than two factions all warring against one another, and how the Republic (or pre-Republic entity) ends up conquering or annexing these factions.

 

The Solar Republic?

 

In response to the OP, sounds interesting, could be a good plot for a spin-off set "a really long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".

Could also work sometime during Episodes 1-9, just have it be a planet in the unknown region of the galaxy.

 

"A longer time ago in a galaxy farther, farther, away..."

 

So basically, the story of Earth discovering that there's more going on than our own affairs. Sounds cool.

 

Pretty much.

It would be a cool little surreality trip to suddenly be presented with a world in which people drive around the roads in automobiles, fly from country to country in airplanes and helicopters, watch TV, browse something just like the internet etc. etc. Militarily, weaponry is what you'd expect - slugthrowers everywhere, tanks, planes, bombs, aircraft carriers, submarines... everything that's more or less familiar to us. But right smack in the Star Wars galaxy. They have no idea about the great galaxy spanning community that exists that they aren't part of.

And then they get their "Contact" moment...

This discussion make me think actually... a somewhat related thing that would be cool to do would be to explore the deep pre-starfaring history of one of the known SW species. The Twi'Leks, the Zabraks, the Rodians, the Togruta, whatever... but way back in their historical eras.

It wouldn't be something for Rebels, nor for the Empire-era spinoff movies. But future SW spinoff productions, movies, games, books or comics set in the GFFA could tackle such stuff. The era scope there is mind bogglingly massive - everything from cavemen up through Greco-Roman level cultures, through medieval cultures, Renaisance type stuff... age of sail, Napoleonic armies, industrial revolutions... 20th century style advancement and world wars, the discovery of atomic energy (and weaponry), the first halting steps into space on chemically fueled rockets. But using one of the well-known and recognized SW alien races. This is their history. This is their ancient past, before they became part of the galactic community as they are today. It would be a real kick to get a look at the histories of major SW peoples like that.

For added "ooh" factor, some character or characters turning up in those ancient times could in fact be a remote ancestor of some character or characters from "modern" SW era (aka the normal SW era, the movie era and its adjacent decades).