5 minutes ago, Ghostofman said:

To be fair, by the time we actually saw the Clone Wars that kind of stuff was more well known... Otherwise I totally agree, "Clone Wars" does sound cooler than "Shake n bake baby wars"

Well sure, but the canon of what the setting was, was already established at that point "The Clone Wars." And we all know how inflexible Star Wars fans are about people trying to change things, so trying to retcon it to "The Zygote Conflicts" just wouldn't fly.

Personally I see no reason that technology doesn't exist somewhere in Star Wars. Just because it doesn't get screen time in a film or tv show, doesn't mean it isn't out there. Also, if you're trying to slap a coating of "realism" onto it (which I don't recommend), the tech for cloning could simply be the more widely distributed tech. That after the Republic employed it on such a large scale from the Kaminoians, they were able to "go public" with their tech, on a large scale, and offer their services to other species a lot more easily. And that while the zygote tech might exist, perhaps they have a cultural aversion to doing it. Maybe to them, the idea of just "making someone from nothing" is ethically and morally repugnant. That it's much better to have a "soul" for lack of a better term, to use as a template, perhaps because thousands of years ago, one of their attempts at zygote tech, failed terribly, and became an example of "what not to do."

Who knows? It's all fictional, and most of it entirely left unstated because it has zero bearing on the context of the film being shown, and is quite literally just background setting. It ultimately doesn't matter, and there is no right answer, because it's never been a question that anyone, other than overly obsessed fans, has bothered to flesh out.

Which is the best scenario!! Because it means the GM can come up with whatever they want, and they don't have to punch the "Well Actually" guy in the nose for interrupting the gaming table to pull out his correction phallus and flop it down on the table for everyone to applaud.

2 minutes ago, KungFuFerret said:

Well sure, but the canon of what the setting was, was already established at that point "The Clone Wars." And we all know how inflexible Star Wars fans are about people trying to change things, so trying to retcon it to "The Zygote Conflicts" just wouldn't fly.

Personally I see no reason that technology doesn't exist somewhere in Star Wars. Just because it doesn't get screen time in a film or tv show, doesn't mean it isn't out there. Also, if you're trying to slap a coating of "realism" onto it (which I don't recommend), the tech for cloning could simply be the more widely distributed tech. That after the Republic employed it on such a large scale from the Kaminoians, they were able to "go public" with their tech, on a large scale, and offer their services to other species a lot more easily. And that while the zygote tech might exist, perhaps they have a cultural aversion to doing it. Maybe to them, the idea of just "making someone from nothing" is ethically and morally repugnant. That it's much better to have a "soul" for lack of a better term, to use as a template, perhaps because thousands of years ago, one of their attempts at zygote tech, failed terribly, and became an example of "what not to do."

Who knows? It's all fictional, and most of it entirely left unstated because it has zero bearing on the context of the film being shown, and is quite literally just background setting. It ultimately doesn't matter, and there is no right answer, because it's never been a question that anyone, other than overly obsessed fans, has bothered to flesh out.

Which is the best scenario!! Because it means the GM can come up with whatever they want, and they don't have to punch the "Well Actually" guy in the nose for interrupting the gaming table to pull out his correction phallus and flop it down on the table for everyone to applaud.

Within Legends, the Empire kept a tight hold of Kamino and its cloning facilities, especially after rogue Kaminoans tried to stage an uprising using their own Fett clones. Canonically, the Empire decommissioned the facilities after the Clone Wars. Cloning tech is powerful, and potentially dangerous, stuff, so it makes a lot of sense that the Empire wouldn't want people getting a hold of it and home-growing their own armies to stage a rebellion.

50 minutes ago, A7T said:

Within Legends, the Empire kept a tight hold of Kamino and its cloning facilities, especially after rogue Kaminoans tried to stage an uprising using their own Fett clones. Canonically, the Empire decommissioned the facilities after the Clone Wars. Cloning tech is powerful, and potentially dangerous, stuff, so it makes a lot of sense that the Empire wouldn't want people getting a hold of it and home-growing their own armies to stage a rebellion.

Thank Mr. Well Actually

Personally I don't really care what Legends/EU says, as personally I consider that stuff on par with fan fiction, that just happened to get published. And given how contradictory it is, it's all apocryphal as far as I'm concerned. Plus I'm certainly not going to let something as pointless as canon interfere with a cool story idea I might have regarding cloning, or a player who has a clone PC idea that isn't a Kiwi Bounty Hunter. Plus, Legends isn't canon anymore anyway (except when it is), so it doesn't matter.

Just doing my job, you have a good rest of you day. I just got a call about some fan fictioners I need to jump down the throat of on the other side of town, so I need to slip.

7 hours ago, JRRP said:

Most of these questions can be answered by looking at the in-universe economics.

Star Wars has an economy that is very heavily shifted to benefit those who already control most of the resources in the galaxy. It is the antithesis of the Star Trek model - nothing has been devoted to figure out how to remove the scarcity economy because the people who would fund such things have never seen the benefit from it.

The Empire wants people to be poor. The Trade Federation wanted people to need the horridly expensive goods delivered by huge droid-run starships. The Republic basically fractured because they tried to levy taxes on the mega-wealthy.

Every example in the OP starts from a place of assuming the galaxy has no scarcity or would want to eliminate scarcity, and in Star Wars that assumption runs counter to the setting. If the answer to any technological question would result in it lessening or eliminating poverty, it will never exist in Star Wars.

Lucas was surprisingly prescient with all this. Lobbying and bureaucracy degrade central government to uselessness, whilst megacorporations exploit the periphery for the benefit of the wealthy core. Then when the outlying regions finally rise up in response to the government's inaction, their rebellion is quickly co-opted by the very same megacorporations who triggered it, who see it as an opportunity to destroy the very last regulations that hold them back.

On 10/9/2019 at 7:38 AM, Donovan Morningfire said:

Star Wars was written first and foremost as a fairy tale set in space, and such follows the same general pattern of fairy tales, in that things don't necessarily have to make sense or have rational/logical explanations. But since Star Wars is set in space, there are folks that presume that the setting must by default be far more advanced than our own. Granted, that might be true for settings that lean much harder on the science part of science fiction (classic example being Star Trek), but Star Wars at its best has never leaned heard on the science and instead is comfortable being a space opera full of adventure and heroics, with anything science-based or futuristic just being there to provide backdrop.

Exactly. I did my graduate work on premodern folkloric texts, and they work this way across cultures. The things we would demand of prestige television and contemporary literary fiction (and apparently science fiction, which I don't read) are not emphasized in the sort of texts that ultimately form the basis of things like Star Wars. You're bringing the wrong expectations to the table. If you want nuanced character development and background rooted in sound science, you will not find it here (or in classical Japanese urban legends for that matter), and you should not expect to.