Age And The Republic

It may be a symptom of getting old, but as the years go on I find myself siding more and more with Palpatine's Galactic Empire. I'm not talking about the politics of destroying planets or shooting force-lightning from my fingertips, but rather about the more mundane tasks that coincide with my own specialty of logistics and supply economics.

Consider the Galactic Starfleet for example. We're told that Palpatine only hired humans because he was speciesist, but was that really the case? It's certainly what the Alliance propogandists would have us believe, but from a logistical standpoint I don't believe that it was. Say you're building a Star Destroyer at the Kuat Drive Yards. What sort of toilets would you install? It's a pretty fair bet that different races are going to need different shapes and sizes of pan. And the waste itself: what happens if some race's output is highly alkaline while other's is highly acidic? A septic tank explosion in mid-space is going to put a crimp in everyone's day. On an Imperial ship however you don't even need female toilets, unless Ysanne Isard, Mara Jade or Admiral Daala are aboard of course, but even then they could make do easily enough. It would be easy enough to say that you could crew each individual ship with a different species, but what would that do to your manpower flexibility?

And uniforms! I'm not even going to start on the impossibility of trying to fit an Ithorian's head into a Stormtrooper helmet. Can you imagine the quartermaster's store in the New Republic? It's be about as big as the warehouse from Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and that'd just be for the hats.

Mind you, the Alliance can put about all of the propoganda it likes about the Empire's predilection for humans, but how many aliens are there in Rogue Squadron? Sweet fanny adams, that's how many. In fact in the entire Rebel Alliance I can spot three non-humans: Admiral Ackbar, Chewbacca and the little Sullustian chap with the wrinkly face who co-piloted with Lando Calrissian. Bothans were mentioned, but they generally seemed to be employed as the espionage equivalent of cannon fodder.