Lit Are Zabrak's near-humans or aliens?

Oh, yeah, I wasn't talking about sleeper ships for in-system colonisation, and I'm not even sure that it's taking them more than a few days to go between planets, which suggests they DO have faster than light travel, but it's not usable out of system for some reason (either because it's not fast enough or because of the ways the hyperspace lanes decay due to the gravity in the core).

But still, the ancient, uninterrupted weight of history I feel the comic attempts to bestow on the Tython civilisation and culture, is the sort of thing that needs longer than 500 years given they are, and always have been, a technologically advanced culture that records its history and knows how to preserve it. The #0 issue certainly gives the impression that life in the Tython system has been fairly static for long enough that any collective identification or memory of the time before is old enough to be mythic and irrelevant. 500 years is a long time, yes, long enough for new nationalities to spring up and old ones to be forgotten, but also a short enough timeframe that the notion of "what came before" is hardly lost - even on Earth with the primitive recording abilities of the past, 1500 is relatively recent history. I mean, we dug up a king who was older than that in a parking lot the other day! If they all left 500 years ago, why don't they know about the Infinite Empire?

I really think it destroys the atmosphere of the setting if suddenly you have to compact the history of their entire civilisation into a timeframe we're used to associating with the history of countries, and young ones at that.

The social and galactic isolation of these people is a really important part of the story.

So, uh, yeah. I still think ageing Mother Machine (whether alongside or independently of the Infinite Empire) is a more elegant solution.