Lore / story behind ship designs being centuries old?

[CapuchinSeven]

It's odd really.

I get the impression that somebody at FDev intends that the galaxy be a sort of "Mad Max", post-apocalyptic, fallout style environment and that would explain why ship design reached a pinnacle and then never progressed any further.
However, I also get the impression that this isn't an officially-endorsed paradigm and that's how come we've ended-up with superpowers and corporate entities co-existing with drug-empires and outright lawlessness.

I kind of wonder if nobody at FDev ever bothered to call a meeting and lay all this stuff out to ensure there was "clarity of vision" across the board.

Or, perhaps it's a case of the FDev developers wanting to quietly do something which might not exactly comply with David Braben's vision of what the game's supposed to be?

The Elite galaxy has always been a weird one, technology seems to have stagnated in some areas but not in others, technology was pushed back at one point by apocalyptic war and a high number of people in it seem to be psychotic.

 

[S3B4ST13N]

Greetings commanders,

Can anyone explain to me the lore surrounding the age of the ship designs in Elite? The Sidewinder is comparatively new, being used since 2982, only 320 years ago. An Anaconda was first used in 2856, some 450 years before the current date of 3302. The Python is even older, first used in 2700, over 600 years ago!

I can't quite picture a society where no technological advances have been made in 600 years that wouldn't make any hull design entirely obsolete? It would be like us outfitting the Santa Maria with a nuclear powerplant, cruise missiles and a Bofors 120mm auto-cannon.

Same logic as to how an interstellar civilisation's economy can somehow manage to not collapse in upon itself when a station one system over relies on it's customer-base to transport market data.
One would have thought that a thousand years into the future; society would have figured out how to send an e-mail to another station; but no.. Postman Pat it is.

 

[Pennacchi]

The Elite galaxy has very flat ship design S-curves. Simples.

TBH, the ship structure age is about contemporary tech x 10; 40 years is not terribly old for most modern aircraft, but the relative performance of a design from late '70s and now is orders of magnitude. Probably the same story with a Cobra Mk III.

Still, be nice to see both some new-old (Krait) and new-new