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What can a scientist in my Star Wars fan fic be looking to create?

M

Maximum7

Location
New York
Im trying to write a story about a scientist who is working on something in the era of the New Republic. He does not believe in the Force. I just need something for him to be researching. It really isn't that important to the story; it just has to sound cool and scientific. Also it can't have already been done in Legends or Canon. I want a fresh idea.

It cannot be

- A time machine

-A teleporter

-A matter replicator

-A singularity Weapon

- Any type of droid

-Anything to do with holograms

-A food synthesizer

- Anything to do with the Force or Midi-chlorians

- A shrink ray

-A freeze ray

-pico and femtotechnology

-A Dyson sphere or any type of megastructure.

-Liquid metal armor or a nanomorph

In canon, during the Empire, scientists were researching methods to control droids, lasers that can punch through deflector shields and ship scale disintigrators. These ideas are therefore taken.
 
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I feel like the obvious answer is "better hyperdrives." (Yes that technically counts as time machine + teleportation but I think it obeys the spirit of your request).

Because hyperdrives are a fundamental transport tech, it's evergreen -- of course everyone is always trying to make them better, almost regardless of ideology.

And because of the military connotations, you can go with the angle that as a field of research hyperdrives were tightly controlled and classified during the Imperial Era, so now during the New Republic, when it's been liberalized, basically, there's been a big surge of interest and new people getting into it, and a lot of change.

And because it's fundamental Physics, it means that all the biology-stuff of The Force and midichlorians are totally outside this guy's wheelhouse, he can disbelieve in the Force without really losing any credibility to the reader because he doesn't really have any grounds to believe one way or the other, except he's basically, not superstitious.
 
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  • Improved personal shielding (Droideka) for lightsaber combat?
  • Preductive combat and non-combat wetware
  • Scaled down planet-killer weapon to be mounted on a Destroyer
 
Hyperspace ramming technology.

If he can crack the mathematical and technological challenges that make it so infeasible to deliberately intersect the path of a hyper-accelerated vessel and a target of less than stellar size and mass, why, he'll revolutionize space warfare.

The next time some jerk builds a Death Star or a Genocide Nebula or whatever, POW! lightspeed cruiser to the face. No fuss, no muss, no youthful farm boys spouting superstitious nonsense.
 
Telecom networking, and telepresence. I don't think the SW universe has anything resembling the internet. They instantaneous comms , AI, holographic data storage yet not many instances of them being used in combination to my memory.
 
Ionized turbolasers. Essentially an upscaled version of the DC series of blasters, which ionized the plasma, keeping it just as deadly to organics, but making it even more deadly to machines. This would make it that you could replace the ion cannons on a ship with more turbolasers for greater firepower, or make a smaller ship with 30 ionized turbolasers that is just as powerful as a larger ship with 30 turbolasers and 30 ion cannons.
 
Fire control computers. Seriously, warships in Star Wars use manually or at most computer assisted targeting systems for most weapons. This is due to overly simplistic FCC tech and droid AI quirks limiting the effectiveness of automated fire control, so improving that would be a massive advantage.
 
Better nav computers to go with the better hyperdrives someone else is already working on.
 
The long term effects of maternal chronic stress during pregnancy among Twi'leks caused by increased discrimination by Imperial authorities, and the impact this has on the lifespan, education chances, and criminality of their children.

Oh, sorry, do the social sciences not count? Even though this study would likely help more people - and be more representative of what scientists actually do - than the latest wonderweapon that tries to break the setting.
 
EarthScorpion said:
The long term effects of maternal chronic stress during pregnancy among Twi'leks caused by increased discrimination by Imperial authorities, and the impact this has on the lifespan, education chances, and criminality of their children.

Oh, sorry, do the social sciences not count? Even though this study would likely help more people - and be more representative of what scientists actually do - than the latest wonderweapon that tries to break the setting.
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Social sciences do count but I prefer something fantastical (but not gamechanging) in the fields of chemistry and physics
 
mulazer said:
Telecom networking, and telepresence. I don't think the SW universe has anything resembling the internet. They instantaneous comms , AI, holographic data storage yet not many instances of them being used in combination to my memory.
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They do have an equivalent to the internet, it's called the HoloNet.

EDIT: Come to think of it, we saw the Jedi Council using holographic teleconferencing in the prequels, so I'm not sure why you thought it wasn't a thing.
 
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If you want to break the setting develop some real reliable automatic targeting system, so you don't waste 99% of your ammunition even in extremely close quarters fights. Specially space-fights were a decent program should be able to get 99% hit rate on targets beyond human eye sight.

If you want slightly less gamebreaking idea: develop space habitats. Colonizing and/or terraforming (barely) habitable planets is a stupid idea when space stations can give you more living space for a fraction of the cost, and be entirely self-sufficient so long as they are "close" to a star. Meaning you can be living anywhere and the only arguable limitation is hyperlanes proximity.

For a more amusing idea: invisible lightsaber. Apparently they can be of basically any color, can you make it colorless ?
 
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The Narrator said:
Better yet, a synthetic replacement for the tibanna gas used to power the blasters so they don't have to rely on massive gas giant mining operations like Cloud City run by the (pro-Imperial) Mining Guild.
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Yeah a lot of people on other forums have suggested synthetic tibanna gas. Don't want to use it. It would bankrupt the mining colony.
 
Does anybody have any other ideas? I'm trying to look for something that was never researched until the era of the New Republic like kyber crystals weren't until the Empire used them for a superlaser and even then, they had been used in weapons formation in the past. I'm looking for something that presumably hasn't been thought of in the 25,000 years of time where almost everything has already been done.
 
Issue with entirely original ideas is that we have absolutely no way to know if they'd fit in the setting's technological tree.
For example teleportation, replicators (either star trek or gate variant), psionic (cyber)enhancements, personal shields, ect...
Star Wars is ridiculously far from hard sci-fi, it's actually closer to fantasy than sci-fi, most of what little tech is in there is mostly handwaved, so knowing was is possible and what isn't is ...hard.

Actually could he study the midichlorians themselves ?

Last idea would be to study light sabers. if you can bend the light "tube" of it you can make virtually indestructible constructs. hell, with clever thinking you could make an armor of light sabers that's protect your whole body a part from a few articulations.
 
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I mean

A lot of these suggestions are very much Applied Sciences, looking at how to make incremental gains in technology, at how to improve tech that is useful.

So why not just have it be pure research, basic science? Yeah there might be war-implications, but maybe you've got somebody researching Warp Physics just because they're like "that's interesting", and they don't really give a damn about whether hyperdrives get better or not, they're just like, curious about Warp Space or whatever.

Conversely, if it's midichlorians or whatever,
maybe a field biologist who is familiar with the Force as a phenomenon, but doesn't... actually care? Like some botanist that is like "yes, the Force, there are several animals that can use that, but I don't care because I study plants"; like that.

If it's New Republic Era, then for biology in particular, you might be able to leverage the idea that it's after Palpatine (a Sith) was actively suppressing research, and after the Republic-era Jedi were kind of... science had to agree with literal religious orthodoxy, like that, maybe? Or conversely like a dude that wants to, like, grind up midichlorians and sequence their DNA, and that's something both the Jedi and the Sith would have considered heretical, but they're all gone so w/e.
 
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