I know I'm supposed to care about the characters, but for me the single question that sticks in my mind about _The Force Awakens_ is: what weird political-bureaucratic equilibrium forces the Empire to spend most of its budget on a single huge easily destroyed superweapon.
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky
If you extrapolate the trend in DoD procurement over the past 80 years for several hundred more, it's not implausible.
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Replying to @paulg
That makes it all the more fascinating to ask exactly how it could play out in a future-historically realistic way. The current DoD doesn't build a single huge $10-trillion-dollar F-35000 Death Cloud, so what needs to change further for the trend to continue further?
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Replying to @ESYudkowsky
The trend has always been toward buying smaller numbers of more expensive planes. Eventually you end up with one plane(t) that's the whole budget.
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Replying to @paulg @ESYudkowsky
There is a long cycle of armies getting smaller and more professional, then an abrupt swing to large and low skilled, at least in the West
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Yes. I believe this was when the Swiss showed that, with sufficient discipline, pikemen can defeat mounted knights.
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