Re: retrograde technologies?

Darin Sunley (umsunley@cc.umanitoba.ca)
Sat, 29 May 1999 08:41:48 -0500

Spike Jones wrote:

> The latest Star Wars episode made me wonder: can technology
> go backwards? They seemed to imply technology was going
> violently aft.

What precisely in the movie are you referring to? The only clear incident of technology that might have disappeared in the movie is the neato-keen droid space fighters. I couldn't see that their performance was sufficiently worse then the human controlled fighters in Star Wars to justify switching. All of the other technology in the movie seemed to perform sufficiently "retro" relative to the tech in the later movies. For example in Return of the Jedi they get the performace of those "pods" in speeder bikes that noticeably DON'T have to have Rolls-Royce jet engines strapped to the front :)

Darin Sunley