Adding entirely too much science to the Star Wars universe

When I run a game, I need to understand the underpinnings of the world. In fantasy, that means a consistent set of metaphysics underlying the magic system; in science fiction, that means figuring out the deviations from our known laws of physics. My gamer group has plenty of math/science types who are just the sort to ask lots of cogent “what happens if someone does this?” questions. So I did a lot of reading in the Star Wars source material, and boiled it down to five major phenomena:

Exotic elements

Exotic elements are to Star Wars as exotic subatomic particles are to Star Trek. It’s convenient to have all that unobtanium to play with, as a world-builder, but it needs some work to systematize it.

I hypothesize the notion of Population 0 stars, a generation younger than our own Sun (which is a Population I star), which forge a chunk of dark matter onto atomic nuclei, creating elements that “shadow” the Periodic Table we know. Thus, Tibanna is shadow-hydrogen, Quadranium is shadow-iron, and Aurodium is shadow-gold.

Force fields

I imagine force fields as “vigorous lying to the Pauli exclusion principle”, with force field emitters sending out a cloud of electrons that form up into a simply shaped configuration. This phenomenon underlies deflector shields and holds the plasma in blaster bolts together. The three-dimensional images ubiquitous in the world are light scattering off modulated, evansecent force fields.

Since the system of force field and force field emitters together obey Newton’s Third Law, that means that a force field “cushion” can support a vehicle. I retcon repulsorlift as referring to this, and speeder as referring to any vehicle using one. (Landspeeders merely use them for support; airspeeders shape the cushion into an airfoil.) This explains why landspeeders aren’t the flip of a switch away from taking to the skies.

Antigravity

There’s also a need for antigravity to explain inertial compensators. I retcon swoop to refer to vehicles that use antigravity to hover far above the ground.

The underlying technology requires a particle accelerator big enough to create small black holes, and technology to capture them and shove matter down their throats before they evaporate. Once one is captured, the black hole is spun up until it becomes a naked singularity. Charged particles shot into the singularity emerge as charged “gravitational knots” of varying topologies, which can be manipulating using electromagnetic fields.

This technology makes the Alcubierre drive possible— vastly slower than hyperdrive, but enough to explain the settling of the Tion Cluster in the canonical timeline.

Etheric rudders

The etheric rudder explains the “banked turns in space” absurdity in the Star Wars films. Etheric rudders interact with a gravity well, require that a space battle adopt an up-down orientation, and dump kinetic energy as gravity waves.

Machine sentience

The closest that Star Wars gets to superintelligent machines is G0-T0, and you never see anything like a sentient starship or a Mind from the Culture. For that universe, I assume that the Embodied Embedded Cognition hypothesis is correct and machines need bodies to become sentient.

If all droids are conscious, the Star Wars galaxy has a massive problem with slavery (and the Republic with hypocrisy), and that every memory flush is murder. I made things a bit more complicated in my game and ruled that, fresh off the assembly line, droids are not conscious, but that consciousness can arise when they have to resolve conflicting motivations.

Hyperdrive and the Force

Canonically, hyperdrive was reverse-engineered from Rakata technology, which relied on the Force. Hyperwave and hyperspace are not fully understood, with numerous competing theories about how they work. In practice, one has to be a planetary diameter away from a solid world in order to be able to access hyperspace, which means that any HoloNet relay is in orbit, using lightspeed communications to the ground.