Do you have to be beyond smart to be an engineer in the Star Wars galaxy?

[Maximum7]

I could never be an engineer here on Earth. I’m too dumb. My math skills and spatial intelligence suck.

I wonder. If I lived in the Star Wars galaxy, would it even be harder to be an engineer since everything is so much more advanced? I imagine engineering schools in the Star Ward galaxy only have the brightest minds passing and getting certified.

I also don’t even know what the students would work on in class. Here on Earth, my engineer friend worked on a basic combustion engine. I guess they’d work on a TIE in Star Wars??

 

[jedishrfu]

This of course is not really answerable. However, consider how an advanced civilization might design their gear perhaps in a componentized way meaning you might not be able to fix any component but you could diagnose the problem and replace the component salvaged from some other device.

We do that here and now with pluggable integrated circuits. Its allowed folks to custom build their own computer system without understanding the internals of a CPU. Similarly, we can choose the OS and install it without understanding how the OS works only knowing that it will work with the CPU we have...

Our cars are componentized allowing amateur mechanics to replace some parts without understanding all that goes into making them.

In the engineering world, people specialize it chip design or circuit design. Chip design often uses dictionaries of smaller components that were designed by other engineers so instead of designing a shift register from scratch, they select it for their design and the computer ten processes the design into the masks needed to make the chip.

 

[Rive]

Do you have to be beyond smart to be an engineer in Star Wars galaxy?

You still has hope: the engineers and scientists of a typical imaginary universe are usually not famous about being smart, but about being mad or villain

you don't have to be mad to work here but it helps

 

[DEvens]

You can get an approximate answer by asking the equivalent question from the point of view of somebody in the year 1900 looking at 2019's technology. Do you have to be beyond smart to be an engineer in 2019?

The answer is no. And there is a very good reason. You may think engineering is about technology and gadgets and doing keen things like building robotic arms for the space shuttle. But those are "extras" so to speak.

The main thing about engineering is managing complexity.

Computer CPUs were mentioned by jedishrfu. When a computer chip gets into the 10's of thousands of transistors on a chip, no single mind is going to be able to comprehend the entire thing all at once. The way that this is managed includes a variety of methods. Some examples are modules, repeating structures, object orientation, and abstraction. You define the component to have an interface. The interface has to satisfy various requirements to fit with the other components. You build the interior of the component, a much smaller and simpler problem, to satisfy the interface, and possibly such things as size and heat load. Then you build the larger system with the standardized components. Even there, you do it hierarchically. The memory is in this zone, the I/O devices over here, the arithmetic unit over there, and so on.

The same kind of things operate in any complicated engineering task. Nobody can hold every detail of the construction of a 100 story building in their head all at once. (Or extremely few people, anyway. Maybe there are a few such people, but I have never met one.) So you get things like a standard floor that gets repeated. And on a standard floor there are standard rooms, hallways, walls, windows, etc. Each of these is divided into components, possibly divided again. Until you get to a simple enough thing that you can hold it all in your mind at once. Then you define how it interacts with other components, and provide methods to test if these interactions are correct.

For example, you build a test wall according to spec. Then you load it up with the weight it should feel in the building and see if it supports it. And you load the connections between the wall and the floor to see if that holds. And so on.

So no, you don't have to be super-duper mutant smart to be an engineer in an advanced tech situation. But the tech has to be designed in specific ways to make it manageable for people who are only a little above average.

 

[Vanadium 50]

They would, however, have to be smarter than the two mopes who didn't fire on the droids' escape pod at the beginning of the first movie.

 

[Janus]

They would, however, have to be smarter than the two mopes who didn't fire on the droids' escape pod at the beginning of the first movie.

Maybe, maybe not. How do we know that their superior wasn't the type of bean-counter that would have upbraided them for "wasting" a shot on a unmanned escape pod, and that this factored into their decision?

 

[jedishrfu]

I rather think they would get sacked for their hesitation like the Soviet defense folks who failed to fire on an encroaching aircraft during fleet exercises in 1983 which resulted in shooting down KAL 007 later on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
a byproduct this tragedy was the release of GPS positioning technology for worldwide civilian use.