Darths & Droids VI: Thread title will appear here when received

[VoxRationis]

Technology in Star Wars seems to be regressing rather than progressing. The prequels were higher technology than the original trilogy, and things like the Old Republic were even higher technology. So I figure the trend continued and people make these ugly bomber things because they forgot how to build better designs like the B-Wing and Y-Wing.

I wouldn't say that's consistently true. After all, BB-series astromechs pack the same kind of utility the R-series had into a much smaller package. Star Destroyers pretty consistently get larger and more powerful over the years in the main continuous sequence of years we see covered. The Leviathan, the enormous foreboding ship we fear in KotOR, is something like a twentieth of the volume of a standard Imperial-class Star Destroyer (600 meters long versus 1600). The sequel trilogy shows sporadic developments of one capability or another. I'd say that though there is less technological innovation than one would expect over decades in an industrialized society spanning hundreds of planets, things aren't exactly decaying a la 40K. There are also some moments in this very film, and I'll be vague so as not to spoil anything, where people examine weapons and vehicles from the Rebellion era and unambiguously refer to them as undesirable to use.

The issue that the bombers have, I think, stems from a desire to sort of hyper-stylize the Resistance by exaggerating aesthetic cues. Since a lot of Rebellion/Resistance stuff is based on imagery of the Allies in WWII, they wanted to throw in a scene with vertical-drop bomb bays, ignoring the fact that such things don't really make sense in space combat.*

Edit: I think we have to discount the idea that there is a serious Watsonian explanation for why the bombers are like this, for spoiler reasons that I will enclose below:

Spoiler

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I see these suggestions that the bombers are, in fact, repurposed minelayers or anti-surface bombers. I think the minelayer explanation makes more sense because the Resistance would have little reason to invest any resources in a vehicle that only carpet-bombs surface targets with gravity bombs. Nonetheless, I think we can't credit the movie for thinking like this because no one ever mentions it. Poe gets in trouble for pressing the attack with the bombers, even though it was absolutely the right thing to do. They would never get a better opportunity to use them because the bomber design is so terrible that even in an optimal use case (a single capital ship, outside the range of its fellows' supporting fire, has had its surface cannons disabled and has delayed launching its fighters, preventing them from establishing a screen far enough in advance of the ship), they suffer 100% casualties and very nearly fail the mission. If the idea was that these "bombers" were non-combat vehicles being used outside of their intended purpose, likely at Poe's urging, a) blaming Poe would make more sense, and b) Leia or someone else would mention it: "That minelayer squadron could have kept a First Order flotilla stuck in port for a month if you hadn't rammed them headfirst into the enemy." But such a thing is never said, and every character seems to agree that this frontal attack on capital ships is what the bombers are supposed to be doing, but that this wasn't the time to be doing it. I can only conclude that the writers prioritized getting the cinematic shots they wanted (of rank on rank of bombs plunging out of the open belly of a spacecraft) over actually thinking whether the spacecraft in those shots made sense.

*Or at least not the space combat shown in Star Wars. In a Niven-esque setting, you could easily have a weapon system wherein such bomb bays have a very light, underpowered mass driver that just sort of nudges the bombs out on a small vector perpendicular to the line of travel, with the idea that since they're being launched from a ship traveling at relativistic velocities, the bombs will, from the target's perspective, make a beeline forward. But that's not how they work here.