Hutch wrote:Too early for me to do any thinking, so I'll simply mention my stance on certain sagas that I read/view:
The Honorverse understands and respects physics, except where the power of plot drives it, and even then the 'fiddly-bits" usually try to fit into the known universe.
Star Trek uses the word physics quite a lot, but doesn't really seem to understand what it really means.
Star Wars tell physics to take a flying leap and does whatever they damn well please.
Know that's not an answer to your OP, but I got up at 4am and I'm grumpy...
Nah. If you work a bit on it, it´s actually quite possible to come up with potential scientific ways of getting the SW stuff to work. Not to the same degree or with current tech, but in theory or on a different scale.
Hyperdrives? Easy. We just don´t have any tech today or on the near horizon that can do what we need to do to make it work(but there´s nothing in theory preventing that tech in the future).
Shielding tech? The theory already exists even from some very serious people. So far, it´s just so ridiculously expensive in energy that it would never be worth it. To shield a single tank against current tank guns, you would need the power from the greater part of one of the more modern continents(and at that point, electrical armour is soooo much better), but there´s no reason to believe that efficiency cannot be improved.
Lightsabers? Gimme unlimited resources and a few hundred years to work out the best way to do it, and i´ll build them.
Their "laser weapons"? Actually, those already make rather excellent sense for anyone who remembers where someone calls them "plasmalasers"(although whether that is part of the official canon or not is another question of course).
Anything can be done, if it can´t be done, it will take a few days longer to do.
Honorverse isn´t so much "more inline with physics" as it is far more expressive about telling how it works and link it known physics, while SW more often than not get 10 lines of "technobabble" by someone who isn´t really very serious about it(with some exceptions).
Once you start looking at "what happens" and "CAN this be replicated in any way?" instead of trying to do things according to the mostly useless techbabble, there´s usually ways to achieve most of it.