The ever new universe

Today watching the Star Wars the clone war cartoon series I noticed something that really annoyed me. The ever new universe, what I mean is that the new enemies or species encountered never seem to be using Starship, weapon or architecture we have seen before in the universe.  While that might make sense in universe where the characters are always at the edge of their known space and encountering species we have never seen before, it really breaks down in Star Wars.

The galactic republic is supposed to have existed for some 20 000 years, it’s culture and law been respected all over the galaxies. While it is understandable that the variety of starship and architecture we could encounter in a galaxy is way beyond what we could see in a tvserie, it also stand to reason that better design would be more prevalent (or at least design with better marketing teams). And there will be probably some form of standardization over large market, particularly if some group try to join one of the major faction (in the clone war era we are talking Separatist and Republic) either there will have ship that are on part with both, or they will ask for ship to improve their fleet to be on part with both (so as to not get overwhelmed in battle) leading to a standardization of ship.

Now that not the only mater, according to the expended universe Star Wars, some ship are supposed to be very common like the YT-1300 (the base hull for the Millennium falcon) yet how many do we see in the movies and tv series?

Now do not think I’m saying that Star Trek is better, far from it. It had the opportunity with Enterprise of showing first contact with many iconic race of the Star Trek universe. Instead we got new species of the week that was never heard from before even if they brought incredible technology to the federation (holodeck anyone?). I guess what I’m trying to say is: writer innovation is great, but get a feel for the universe first and showing things we’ve seen before might actually be a great think to produce a sense of internal consistency in your universe.