A highly specific aspect of ‘Star Wars’ singled out as the franchise’s most unrealistic element

It’s probably best not to overthink Star Wars tech. The nuts and bolts were figured out by George Lucas in the 1970s, meaning that while ships can leap around the galaxy using their hyperdrive, they don’t have everyday modern tech like the internet, mobile phones, and so on. The best material leans into that fact, with Andor going so far as to limit the prop design team to materials that A New Hope designers would have had available to them in the mid-70s.

But, one fan has called out a particularly unusual wrinkle when it comes to the space battles:

It is of course worth pointing out that Lucas specifically based the Star Wars interstellar dogfighting on World War II movies, with the rough cut of A New Hope using old footage to fill in the scenes ILM hadn’t yet completed. This WW2 legacy can be seen as recently as The Last Jedi‘s opening bombing run scene, which doesn’t make much sense for space combat, but works as a mirror to those old favorites.

Replies to the thread agree:

Another points out that mapping tech from this fantasy world onto the present day doesn’t make sense:

This “used future” is a big part of why Star Wars feels so distinct:

But there are some forms of auto-targeting:

And can we get a “no prize” for this justification:

We’re of the opinion that if you started updating Star Wars tech to more closely mirror the modern world, you’d quickly lose a lot of the magic that makes this franchise what it is. Things don’t need to be realistic in a galaxy far, far away, and we love the anachronistic 1970s tech meets advanced space travel feel.