Mr. Oragahn wrote:I'll have to assume that in a way or another, they signed a deal at some point where they'd be able to leave their planets unmarked by the ignominious sight of food crops (eek!) and would outsource most of its production outside.
Truth said, even if we did see little of Naboo, one thing we didn't see is a single crop field.
There could have been a system like the UNESCO one, where plenty of things are labeled
World Heritage and then you couldn't do whatever you wanted with those elements. In exchange of that, the planets would get massive subventions. This, in exchange, may have allowed some planets to live of tourism and artistic activities, and repay the food manufacturing agriworlds with large amounts of money.
There has to be an economical logic to planets such as Naboo, Pantora and Rodia being incapable of growing their own food in due time because of a mere blockade.
These planets aren't like Japan.
That's true. I suppose it's also possible that Naboo is also Space Greece. In that it racked up a massive amount of debt to the Trade Federation due to lack of taxes or a large amount of tax evasion.
The other possibility being that the inhabitants of those planets, having found other worlds willing to produce food, relinquished their own power to do so to become fully hedonistic and therefore became dependent of outer-system sources of food.
That wouldn't surprise me for the Naboo. Even in a galaxy where you don't have to get your hands dirty when dumb droids can do the work for you. I guess they were so up their buttocks that they couldn't stomach the idea of having poor droids forced into slave lavour!
Wouldn't surprise me, considering the silly speech the pseudo-queen gave to R2 in TPM.
Check out Theed in AOTC: the space port has been extended and brought up, but you don't see a single field of crops around. When Anakin and Padmé arrive inside the city, you don't see a single droid. Heck, they have STAIRS! and you see R2 struggling to keep pace with them.
Hmmm, that would match the massive difference in how they're treated in most other parts of the series and to how they're treated on Naboo (like a sort of pet or even an actual person--where as they're seen as nothing more than tools in the rest of the galaxy). It would also help explain why no one really seems to give Padme much of a thought, but Organa (or whatever that Alderaan's senator's name was) however, seems to be taken a great deal more seriously, despite the fact that he's clearly in the same sort of camp as Naboo.
Perhaps, like Coruscant, they depend on outsourced food production?
Of course, we didn't see all of the planet and they may grow some of it under ecodomes.
Yes, I expect so.
There are stupid economical systems where you get subventions after paying taxes. The European Union for example is given money by the states, and then redistributes the money to many regional projects inside those states. Why it doesn't let the countries deal with their own projects on their own, directly, instead of wasting time and money in centralized fiscal bureaucracy, is beyond me.
Now, imagining something worse, and at the scale of the galaxy. LOL!
Eh, I can't really comment on the EU, since I have so little knowledge of its inner workings, but at least in the States, the reason why the Federal Government is important is that the States themselves only care about themselves and maybe their neighbors. No one in California gives two shits about South Carolina or Mississippi. What the Federal Government does is help redistribute wealth from the more wealthy states to the poorer states, as well as enforces laws that certain states would not care to follow, but everyone else wants to.
But that's just the thing, with the Republic, part of their purpose, at least implied, is that they are there to help redistribute wealth to colonies or worlds on hard times--but at every turn it seems that the Republic is simply not doing it. To the point that Rhodia actually thought to break away--come to think of it, does anyone else find it odd that the Rhodian senator has the authority to make deals with other governments? I mean, I get that they also sort of double as diplomats, but where does the senator get off making that sort of choice?
Oh well, maybe he was king for a week, like Padme was apparently an elected Queen. Because apparently George Lucas doesn't know how monarchies work.
They can even have their leader Nute Gunray dragged to the intergalactic court four times in a row and get bailed out every single time. Class.
At least he was arrested.
Remind me when we got info in this please? I'm lost.
Fuck me, I forget and there's like, two or three episodes that includes doing something stupid to afford more troops. Basically, Padme is trying to convince the Senate to spend money on food and supplies (ie, humanitarian aid) and less on the war (because she wants it to end--apparently she doesn't care which side), so she decides to look at how the poor are suffering. The people who need government aid just to survive.
And it turns out, that advice is pretty God damn close, because she turns to one of her younger aids and asks about her family's situation and it turns out, she's poor as fuck.
There are many powerful and huge corporations in the EU, plus a whole independent Corporate Sector that still owes a considerable tithe to the Galactic Empire every year.
This Corporate Sector, as I got it, largely employs biological beings, not droids. It's politically free in some way, and is capitalism gone full speed. That is, more violent than what the Trade Federation did, minus the whole socialism.
Wait, when were the Trade Federation socialists? :p
The only socialists were Naboo, Alderaan, and mostly a bunch of poor as fuck planets.
When everything goes right, this doesn't happen. But the Republic was bankrupt. Look at the US. Food stamps, queues. Is the US North Korea now?
If the GOP has its way, it will be. :/
It's rather ironic considering that southern states in rural areas have people who both use food stamps, but want to cut social programs.
Deputes get huge wages while whatever resembles proletariat suffers and eats shits. yet they find ways to spend millions on damned missiles and drones to kill people you've never heard of, supposedly a danger to world peace (don't laugh).
The Galactic Republic doesn't have to be any different, and I don't see the Galactic Empire being any better.
Well, there's a bit of a difference. First off, the US doesn't have entire states that are starving. It's also in the middle of a recession and we're seeing more slashes to the budget that hurt than helps. Finally, the US has been gearing back its war effort in the past few years and wanted to leave Iraq for some time before the recession--we just couldn't. Oh trust me, the US isn't perfect, but we're not to the point that our territories and states are suffering. Or even entire cities. And we're getting better. Slowly.
The Republic on the other hand, has entire planets where the people are so hungry or suffering so much that they're actually protesting for a massive change in government. Even as bad as the EU is doing right now, there aren't massive protests to leave the EU.
Huge and huger, especially considering the increase construction rate for the second battle station.
I don't know if you've read the first two pages of this thread but I think we did cover quite a couple relevant point on this question.
It's said in one of the EU guides (West End Games or the new ones) that the Empire forced the industry to use modules specifically designed to be used in anything, from a deployable prefab base to an ISD, and even perhaps other space stations and perhaps even Imperial bastions.
Then, by manipulating data with Imperial agents erasing traces, a significant amount of those modules could be rerouted towards the Death Star project.
The mass production of those modules would allow costs to be cut.
It's possible that all those star destroyers (ISDs and else), prefab bases and other stations and bastions were built solely to have a way to produce those modules without having them so blatantly diverted to some black project?
Obviously, designing space ships with the idea that they should be stuffed with modules you could use to pad any kind of superstructure is most likely not going to result into the best space ship design ever, and same goes for all the large ships produced for the Empire.
Let's remember that the modular padding inside the Death Stars could only represent a minuscule section, corresponding to the volume that wouldn't be occupied by pieces and systems exclusive to the Death Stars.
That padding would obviously be part of the battle stations' crusts and the space between the huge elements exclusive to the Death Stars.
That would make some sense, though I can't imagine that fixes the bulk of the construction costs. The parts of the Death Star--or at least its reactor, are probably not going to be easily done with modular components.
