Almost done.
Quick question I was pondering. I wanted to have an actual 'reason' for why Star Wars tech is, in many ways, so much more advanced than ME tech (plasma weapons are universal standard, non-mass-effecting antigravity and shield technology, non-mass-effecting warp drives, warp drives that are, while not as efficient as the Relays, still about ten thousand times better than anything Mass Effect has, ect). I didn't just want to go "because Star Wars is awesome." I wanted it to make sense.
I think I've got a reason for it, and I wanted to run it by you guys. I'd do this on SpaceBattles too, but I want the fic's resurrection over there to be a surprise.
My basic idea is like this: There is a bottleneck in technological advancement, and that bottleneck is defined as "how much one person, or even a group of people, can learn." As technology progresses exponentially, so too does the knowledge and expertise required to advance that technology further. Science, mathematics, biology, medicine, genetics, and engineering all progress forwards at geometric rates equivalent to the amount of information on the subjects, and there is, quite simply, a hard cap on how much an individual organic can learn about a subject in their lifetime. That is the bottleneck. Namely, what a single person can learn in a single lifetime and then accomplish with the time they have left over.
The way out of this bottleneck is using artificial intelligences. They can store millions of libraries of information and cite facts on-demand, crunch incredibly complex calculations in seconds, and, most importantly, think independently for themselves, allowing them to make suggestions and improvements on their own.
Or in other words, while VIs are useful for this, AIs are much, MUCH better at it, because they can actually think and assist in the innovation process, instead of just being libraries with voice-activated functions and a face.
So basically, the reason Star Wars technology is so much, for lack of a more sufficient term, better, is because Star Wars AI, the droid intelligences, are stable, durable, and not prone to wigging the hell out and deciding to shoot everything with a heat signature. Ultimately, the divergence between the two is caused by superior artificial intelligence software. From that, everything else springs. With 'droid' assistants who can pull triple duty as helpers, computers, and libraries on vast swaths of subjects, innovation was far easier, and far more universal, as opposed to being mostly restricted to a single species (the Asari) and the few genius outliers (Mordin, Okeer, Conrad, ect).
In Mass Effect, innovation in new technologies ultimately trickled out into diminishing returns, with the only significant advances coming from injections of 'new' Prothean technologies. With Star Wars, however, stable artificial intelligences allowed their technological progression to travel in more or less a straight line forwards for tens of thousands of years, ignoring the diminishing returns bottleneck that results from 'pure organic' researchers.
This is also my explanation for Maelon's insistence that, had the Krogan been civilized and not-genophaged, they would be in the midst of a cultural renaissance. He recognized the existence of the bottleneck, acknowledged that the Asari are not nearly as subject to it as everyone else (because they live for over a thousand years), and realized that Krogan can live just as long, if not longer, than the Asari can. Or in other words, the Krogan would be right beside the Asari in terms of knowledge, innovation, and technical prowess, because the Krogan, like the Asari, can casually devote several lifetimes to learning dozens of different interrelated disciplines. The only reason Mass Effect has gotten as far as it has is because the Salarians think faster than everyone else, and the few scientist Matriarchs in existence. If the Krogan as a civilized species were added to that, literally everyone would benefit. Hence the renaissance.
So basically, the big difference, the 'defining' difference, between Star Wars and Mass Effect, is that in Star Wars, the person who invented artificial intelligence avoided whatever nigh-universal thing it is that makes Mass Effect AI unstable psychopaths. Maybe they used a superior programming language, or maybe their software was just better suited for that sort of thing. Whatever the cause or reason, though, this is where it all stems from. The face of the revolution isn't space magic or a billion supergenius scientists who are 'just better' than those in Mass Effect. It's R2-D2 and C-3PO that made the difference.
Thoughts?