Fireside Friday, May 10, 2024

Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I’ll have my ‘On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon’ up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, it is a fireside, and I thought, since it was just recently May the Fourth, we might talk some Star Wars (and history). So this is going to be a bit silly this week.

For this week’s musing, over the last week, as part of my May the Fourth celebration (and some enforced post-semester relaxation), I went and built the Lego Star Destroyer my better half bought for me (about a year ago – the space for building it got consumed by other things in the intervening time). This is not the very old (2002) Star Destroyer kit, nor the very newest (2024) kit, but the finely aged (2019) ‘Ultimate Collector’ set, coming in at a massive 4,700 pieces. It was fun to build and there’s actually a lot of kind of neat engineering and design that clearly went in to making it work. With so many pieces, the set is so heavy that it needs a whole reinforcing frame (also made of legos) to hold it together internally.

But that got me thinking about Star Destroyers (not the first time) and Star Wars, so I figured I’d muse a bit at you both about the odd place of Star Destroyers in imperial military doctrine and also the nature of the Old Republic and the Empire as polities.

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