Star wars ship design somehow got between the stereotype shape of the franchise and the history gap of the star wars story.

I laugh when I realize the Ebon Hawk is the "Newer" design 😅

Another point about droids is that we get new ones with every new Star Wars show, regardless of the time period.  So it wasn’t like they made a massive jump between the originals and the sequels, that was just Disney giving us new droids.

Fantastic video. A good example of design logistics and tech upgrading. You see this all the time in the car industry.

The other problem with cloaking shields is that the crew could not see out either. It was a double- blind effect.

Honestly part of it might well be thousands of years of peace. Like it or not, few things drive technology as much as being at war or preparing for one.

As I see it, it’s very similar to the history of many other weapons. We’re so used to technology advancing quickly but that’s a relatively new phenomenon. Before the Industrial Revolution was the battle of Trafalgar….a battle fought with wooden warships same way it had been fought for centuries upon centuries with only small incremental changes. If you look at a warship from the 11th century…..the differences are quite small. The general shape is largely the same with maybe instead of gun decks for the cannons you have holes for oars which date back to an older warship type which again doesn’t look that different. By contrast in the last 200 years, which sounds like a long time but in the history of warfare is quite small. We’ve had the wooden warships retired replaced with the last one HMS defiance being retired and dismantled in 1931(that shows how relatively recent the change was) but we went from ships armed to the brim with cannons and similar weapons to aircraft carriers being the main ship type at around the same time as HMS Defiance became firewood.

Another example is tanks they’ve only been around on the battlefield as a viable tactic for nearly 110 years, but the shape of them has largely gone unchanged with the template that tank builders would copy being the Renault FT, while scale has changed along with what goes into the tank the shape is largely the same. And on top of that most ships, tanks and planes service lives for a design is measured in decades. The B52 stratofortress is older than some of our grandparents(with it entering service in 1952).

On top of that there are some tools and weapons that except for slight changes in appearance have gone unchanged for thousands of years. The modern combat knife is the descendant of the ancient daggers Ancient Greeks would have carried and while material and shape has changed ever so slightly(mostly to not violate treaties, for example a triangle shaped blade is completely illegal…since it’s harder to sew an injury caused by one) but the basic shape has remained the same.

With Star Wars ships the shape not changing makes sense, even if you look at modern warships the basic shape is the same as more ancient vessels because if the design works stick with it. Also if a new shape of warship was done then for a force like the rebellion is workable because beggars can’t be choosers. However think about the docks where star destroyers have to land for repairs, if the shape was changed dramatically they’d have to change the landing areas for them dramatically, tools would also have to change, techniques of building would have to change. Basically it’s too much of a ball ache to change a design on the scale of a 4 mile long ship.

In the RPGs, it takes a couple of months to jump from one end of the galaxy to the other, even with a Class 1 drive.
-And the drives do seem to "advance" very randomly: From 50 BBY or so to the New Order timeline, Class 4 to Class 1 drives arrive helter-skelter, neither "sorted" to price nor time. You find Class 3 or 4 drives in freighters competing with Class 2 drives.
I find that infuriating, from a player/GM standpoint, as it makes upgrading from a junk ship to a hot rod less linear and understandable. :)
You have good points about droid development and the reluctance to build truly intelligent autonomous droids, from humanoid to starship size: After the Clone Wars/Trade Federation wars, biologicals had a strong distrust of droids carrying weapons! The Empire forbade all but limited (Grade 4B) bodyguard droids, and weren't quick to employ them in their own ranks.

One thing worth mentioning, is the fact that in both Legends and Canon continuity, the Republic had been at peace for upward of 4000 years (give or take). In that time, the Republic itself had divested itself of the need for a military and fleet  (At least anything bigger than a corvette).   So, there really wasn't a reason to develop new large warship designs.  When war returned to the galaxy, the republic had a lot of "catch up" to do, and as such it only makes sense that they'd fall back on older (though updated) designs.

Sometimes a design just works.  Look at the B52, it is still in service today more than 70 years after it was introduced.  It's was closer to the Wright brothers first flight than it is to today.  The US Air Force has been flying it as their main strategic bomber for more than half of the time that airplanes have existed.

it cost lots of credits to build new vessels.  Just keep the old chassis and put your new stuff inside.

Old Republic ships didn’t have shields? I mean,, the Old Republic had PEOPLE-sized personal energy shields. Which is how the game justified so many edged weapons, vibroblades, and prolonged blaster fights.
Fair to say the tech advanced to the point where a personal shield couldn’t withstand “modern” blasters and the shield systems of your average galactic civil war era Star Destroyer or Mon Cal cruiser were powerful enough to have fended off the entire combined Sith and Republic fleets of the Old Republic era indefinitely. But usually once any technology has been miniaturized it already has larger counterparts.

Using the argument of this segment, neither the Mon Calamari or Kuat really addressed adversary fighters with point-defense batteries.  Why?  Considering small ships were the most numerous and affordable.

They didn't have coffee.... ☕👍😁

Technology has hard limits once you hit that limit there is literally no where else to go.
We have not hit that limit yet but scientists can see where the limits are and are working really hard to try to see where things could be changed to work around of the hard limits of the natural world.

uploaded 57 min ago, wow I am early.

I do have a truck older than myself winning races and shows ! It's my Ford F-100 with a K-Code 390 four barrel Holley !

Hyperdrives are fast enough for interstellar travel . For intergalactic travel it may not be fast enough but there is no pressing need to go there since there is still much to explore in their own galaxy.

It was clearly possible to advance droid technology. The Clone Wars era Separatists clearly had major advances in this area with droid crews, and droid star fighters.

It's not too hard to imagine how far it could have gone.

Reminds me of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in the way that it barely changed over nearly 70 years except or computer technology.