The Sith Galactic Empire dominates thousands of worlds; for reference, it has about a 90% overlap with the future Galactic Republic. The nascent Hutt Empire is currently just a smuggling network run by strong-willed Hutts (still based on Varl; they won’t conquer Nal Hutta for 10,000 years) who are able to keep their secrets from Sith.
While the galaxy itself contains four hundred billion stars, the lack of availability of hyperspace routes to most stars allows an entire civilization to span the galactic disc without actually consisting of more than thousands of inhabited planets. (There are speculations that entire parallel galaxy-spanning civilizations could exist, separated by a lack of hyperspace routes between them. Certainly, some may have been started by slowboats leaving from Coruscant.) There are only 30,000 known systems (from the inner core to the outer rim) on the best hyperspace route maps; most of them lack habitable planets. (I’m aware of the estimates of twelve million and ignoring them.) The Sith Empire consists of about 5000 planets, of which around 3500 are agricultural worlds, about 1000 are marginal but exploitable, and about 500 are significantly industrialized (a few of which are ecumenopoleis). The Sith species numbered as many as two billion while they were conquering the galaxy; their numbers have since dwindled to the hundreds of millions.
The Sith language is mostly spoken by Sith among themselves; they consider Basic to be the language of slaves.
Sith are highly competitive. Their ancestral species were pack hunters, like wolves, with a strict hierarchy of dominance. As sentients, they have to work their way up the hierarchy. The social contracts are:
All Non-Sith must have a lord. They’re divided into:
Movement between these ranks is at the whim of the lord. Since a lord’s superior can poach from a minion’s slaves at will, minions are usually proactive about making gifts of particularly useful vassals— it’s better to at least curry some favor that way. Vassals can bribe their own lord to become a gift, or bribe their lord’s lord to poach them; the higher-ranked your lord, the less likely you are to encounter trouble when traveling.
Anyone can become a lord by assassinating the previous one, but there may be an immediate scuffle as contenders test the strength of the new lord— killing a lord doesn’t immediately give you the access codes to the orbital defenses and the loyalty of their armies, but killing the lord and then killing or humiliating any of his lieutenants who turn up in the first couple of months to try out for the job will usually win confirmation. The most important act is showing up to present tribute to your new overlord, who may direct one of your vassals to kill you if they think you can’t do the job and don’t want to wait around to see how badly you’ll mismanage your demesne.
Lords are not required to accept challenges from all comers, but a lord who can’t win a duel against someone of the next rank down or the obvious leader of the group that just neutralized their retinue will be seen as weak and will get a lot more challengers. This severely annoys the Hutts, who prefer to rise in rank by their ruthless organizational ability and lethal subtlety instead of their swift combat skills.
Sith, vassals, and serfs can own slaves. Darth can hold noble titles; most Sith are too proud to acknowledge a Darth as their lord, so they either challenge them or find a way out of service.
The positions of slave, serf, and vassal have a loose correlation with social class, but it is possible to find rich slaves who are particularly valuable to their masters, and dirt-poor vassals working as hard as they can not to be plucked out of slums and demoted to slaves.
People from the lower classes usually have well-honed reflexes to drop flat or dive for cover when guns come out or they hear blaster fire; they dart nervously across streets because they’re used to people not stopping. They have probably never met an organic doctor, and have only ever been treated (if at all) by a medical droid provided by their employer to make sure they’re able to work. Medical droids handling slaves are usually programmed to euthanize untreatable (or even overly costly) conditions on the spot; those handling serfs are usually somewhat better. If they have conditions that the medical droids can’t handle, they scrimp and save for a specialist or go to people without formal training, who may be quacks or may be honestly trying to figure things out by reading the manual. (There are no prescription-controlled drugs, though there may be a de facto system of that if drug manufacturers are bribed not to sell to amateur doctors who are cutting into someone else’s business. Of course, that creates incentives for smugglers...)
People from the middle classes get medical care from high-quality droids who have organic supervision, and have reliable access to specialists, though they may have to wait.
People from the upper classes find that being rich is very expensive because you have to defend your assets from people who would seek to part you from them. They usually pay for a good deal in direct defenses or for insurance to dissuade others. They usually get medical care from an organic doctor who has an excellent medical droid as an assistant. They can bid for the attention of specialists, who may reschedule their patients if someone comes in waving more cred.
The basic rule of the Sith Empire is that the victor of conflict is respected; the survival of the strongest is paramount. The only thing that passes for law is the will of your overlord, and the only crime is thwarting the will over your overlord. This means that there is an open market in most vices, as long as they don’t threaten your overlord’s power base; the only difficulty is the taxation of them by the overlords, and criminals are usually smugglers and tax evaders. (Excessively addictive drugs that have a negative impact in performance are often banned because overlords dislike their labor pool being disrupted. Similarly, it may be difficult to get that weapons dealer to sell to you if he’s under threat from people who don’t want the competition.)
Since Sith are in the habit of killing minions who fail them in
important tasks, it is common for overseers to bring the heads of
underlings who fail them in order to attempt to keep their own. The
vibrasword is a very common melee arm because it’s good for
taking heads. (This also discourages the screw up to make your
overseer look bad
tactic for promotion.)
The only safeguard against corruption is the system. Someone who is failing in their responsibilities to their overlord may be killed by their master; someone failing in responsibilities to their minions may prompt them to organize against them and take them down.
Challenges go all the way up. Strong emperors may rule for a century, living off the life force of the strongest slaves. When they are challenged, though, the battles can wreck entire planets— preferentially the ones with the industrial bases that supply the opposition. Even failed challenges can leave power vacuums that lead to squabbles that can ruin civilizations.
Vengeance and reprisals can go on for generations if someone leaves their opponent standing, so absolute victory is highly desirable. Your opponent should be rendered dead, enslaved, or your apprentice.
The Sith titles of nobility are the origin of the use in the Old Republic of feudal titles for democratic positions. The titles are only hereditary when a parent takes a child as apprentice and the child succeeds them normally; this is perhaps the plurality case, but not even the majority.
Nearly three centuries after the Corellian invention of hyperdrive, the Sith emerged into the galaxy with basic Corellian-based hyperdrive and Coruscant-based blaster technologies (with backpacks hooked up to the rifle-like actuating module), and were easily able to enslave nearby worlds in the Outer Rim area known as Sith space— and the Power. They conquered the Dashade and the humans of Ossus and Courkrus. Very few people were able to resist what the Power, and they were able to multiply their forces at an unprecedented rate.
The Sith Galactic Empire was proclaimed when the Sith Lord Haymakh established himself on the ecumenopolis Coruscant, calling it the Throne World.
The Sith Galactic Empire has existed for 5214 years. It is much larger than the Rakatan Infinite Empire because they are more willing to have their human vassals go out scouting hyperspace routes. (Though given the failure rate of hyperspace scouting, the ships that don’t come back aren’t a surprise. Some planets may be hiding out from the empire by keeping their hyperspace routes secret.)
People are allowed to form associations for any reason they desire as long as their lord’s requirements are met. The only thing that holds an association to its promises are other organizations of equal or greater power. Military units are known to subcontract; they are usually allowed to take side jobs to stay in practice as long as they’re always ready to serve their lord.
A lord’s military will usually keep a basic level of order, but citizens usually want a bit more protection against theft and violence. They usually form groups that provide protection; street gangs have made their way up to large-scale protection associations. If they grow corrupt, the only thing that keeps them honest is other such groups. This can even be the local military outfit or a bank.
Supermarkets are an artifact of the pre-droid age. If you’re in the lower classes, you go to a warehouse and ask the stock-droid for the items you want; if you’re middle-class, you tell your household droid about the inventory you want to maintain and it handles delivery; and if you’re upper class, your butler droid anticipates what you need and makes sure it’s on hand.
The Bounty Network is a popular 24-hour channel, something like CNN meets America’s Most Wanted meets the Lotto. In addition to accepting postings of bounties, the Bounty Network also allows people to post counter-bounties, which will be set as prizes on any person who sets a bounty on someone. You have to outbid your target by 50% in order to remain anonymous. They are often willing to subsidize their own distribution through the subspace relays. Bounties generally decrease over time if someone isn’t topping them up, as the cost of publicity for them eats into the value of the bounty itself. Bounties can be bought out if none of the original posters of the bounty are still verifiably alive. There are standing bounties of &credit;100,000 for any journalist from Galactic Business Intelligence and &credit;150,000 for any bounty hunter who has ever pursued a journalist from Galactic Business Intelligence.
The show Survive! is a specialty. They put out a limited-duration bounty on a person who agrees to be accompanied by camera droids for the duration of the bounty. If the target survives until the bounty lapses, they collect it.
Galactic soap operas are popular, and often the way that people get their news from outside their own star system. Medbase One (a hospital drama, though considerably upscale because of the use of droids to treat the poor) has been running for 800 years, the high-life The Towers of Coruscant for nearly as long, and the more middle-class Hard Bargains on the Hydian Way, depicting the fortunes of a clan of interstellar merchants, is quite popular. The plot devices used there are just as fantastic, relative to actual possibility, as those of modern ones, so cross-species brain transplants and teleport beams sometimes figure as plot twists. Advertising is directly integrated into the shows and often is important to a plotline.
There are also lifestyle channels with shows like
The Algae Gourmet, Creative
Krill Cuisine with Delinia Slarg, and You Kill It,
I’ll Cook It!, starring Raneth Alavai the blaster-wielding chef who is
rumored to be a retired bounty hunter. The tagline
of Tarc Rivas: Master Miser, Now that’s worth
the credits!
is repeated across the galaxy, often to exasperated sighs.
Game shows are also a hit, such as the quiz show Inquisition and the endurance show Does Anybody Really Eat That?, where contestants attempt to consume cuisine beloved of radically different species.
Schools are almost entirely vocational, with some more general education for the upper middle classes, and personal tutors for the upper classes. Universal literacy and numeracy are only a dream on almost all worlds.
Research universities do exist, but each department is always sponsored by a corporation that gets a veto on whether any breakthroughs are published. Technological development is slowed by the lack of sharing outside a corporation’s umbrella, though espionage keeps things from stagnating entirely. Fame during a scientist’s lifetime usually comes from a public abduction, indicating that someone was valuable enough to acquire.
Galactic culture has largely moved on from the information
society
that occurs when a civilization first puts together an
information network. Only specialized desk workers sit down at
computers; the equivalent in a regular household is a small remote
droid that can query information networks for you when you ask it
questions.
All people carry a Talisman, which carries all their personal data, including their private encryption key they use to authenticate themselves. The Talisman may be integrated into a device like a wrist comlink, or be embedded in a bracelet or ring, or implanted between the metacarpals of the hand. Talismans are designed to be highly tamper-proof, and their backups are usually kept under heavy security (such as insured storage in a bank vault, with lots of fancy biometrics to verify that you are indeed the right person). The Talisman communicates with other devices, usually by radio frequency communication or modulating your body’s electric field. Unless you have an astonishingly large collection of data, it holds your address book, your entire library of text and music and video, your health and financial records: all your information is always with you whenever you need it— as long as you provide the authentication to access it. (Usually, your hearplugs have immediate access to your music collection, any datapad you pick up has access to the novel you’re currently reading, you need to perform trivial authentication to do playbacks on an available viewer, but you need to perform detailed procedures to sign legal documents or perform financial transactions.)
The most important thing your Talisman carries is your Sigil, which has the following information:
signingdocuments is done with this key, people refer to signing with your Sigil.
Your Sigil is used to identify you in all walks of life, from legal documents to electronic mail to comm calls. Your Talisman’s address book contains Sigils from every person you know and every institution you deal with, usually transferred via radio frequency communication or by the merging of bodily electric fields during a handshake. Even the most uncivilized pirates and gangs put a great deal of effort into making sure their Sigil is one to be feared, and carefully guard their private keys to make sure no one can trade on their reputation.
Wrist comlinks are much like cellphones, and most cities have the infrastructure to support large numbers of them; they usually work from voice commands and seldom have much in the way of a user interface. Headphones and headsets are an anachronism; most people wear hearplugs instead. Many people keep personal droid assistants to serve as the equivalent of a sentient iPhone. Most inhabited planets have a cluster of microsats in low orbit that provide GPS signals and communication uplinks. (And the first thing anyone does on attacking a planet is blow them all away with blasters or railguns.) Communications service providers charge more for higher quality of service and fewer injections of advertisements into your datastream.
Virtual reality (usually with haptic gloves and rarely with full suits) is most often used in simulations needed for professional use by architects, engineers, and scientists. Augmented reality is used in professional work, and most people really don’t want it following them home; they’d much rather ask their PDA to give them the information they want than wander around goggling at luminous overlays. Wearing an augmented-reality datavisor in public is normal for someone at work, but wearing it in a social situation is seen as somewhat rude: it implies distance and lack of attention. Augmented-reality contact lenses are available but expensive.
There is an interstellar equivalent of the Internet that makes
use of FTL communication
over subspace, but the bandwidth
is comparatively low; it’s mostly used for banking, news,
entertainment, and mail, and each link in the packet-switched network
has to be at a distance of less than six and a half light-years from
the next. Real-time connectivity outside a single solar system is
prohibitively expensive.
(The HoloNet does
not yet exist.)
Sneakernet over
hyperspace is the best way to move lots of data around, particularly since
people expect a great deal more data than in our own era— full-spectrum
holography isn’t compact. The conventional wisdom of the day
paraphrases Andrew Tanenbaum: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a light
freighter full of data cores hurtling through hyperspace.
History has seen some very bad things happen in societies that embraced extropianism and transhumanism; the societies that managed to avoid these calamities have already exited the galactic stage, some even leaving behind the occasional welcome mat like Shalgrazai that continues to filter out such people from the galaxy. Overly enthusiastic use of genetic and cybernetic enhancement are viewed with suspicion, as is the creation of hyperintelligent droids. While nanoscale materials are in wide use, the disasters that have been created from molecular nanotechnology were spectacular enough that the local military starts checking on their stores of light-sail fabric and formulating plans to turn a planetary surface to lava if they have good reason to believe there’s been a release of self-replicating nanobots. Even a demonstration of tame utility fog is unconvincing after the destruction of civilization on Virello.
There is a continual tension between innovation and caution. Over-reliance on information technology creates risk that a saboteur could corrupt the systems. This is why battleships always have a bridge on the surface of a ship with heavy transparisteel windows: the possibility of having a camera view of the battle disrupted at a critical moment is too daunting.
Wireless spectrum isn’t regulated; it’s dominated and
defended by service providers, and often has protocols that bid for
allocations (with bids that range from millicredits to threats of
violence; it’s rare to see escalation go all the way to bombing
transceiver stations, but it happens— usually as a result of
inexperienced commanders issuing bad orders to inexperienced droids).
Bandwidth can drop drastically if a military unit moves into the area
and begins hogging spectrum with get off this frequency or eat a
mortar round
packet headers. Most applications use spread spectrum
and frequency hopping techniques to deal with interference. Optical
frequencies are also used, with the transceivers often integrated into
lamps and other light sources.
Widespread information technology often leads to a phenomenon known as distributed ghettoization, where an insular, culturally homogeneous group maintains its identity and often even xenophobic attitudes in an otherwise cosmopolitan society. They are able to associate only with their fellows, access only their own media, and be aloof from everyone else even when bumping into representatives of a thousand different cultures on the street.
The existence of recorded media has slowed the pace of language development, and most people can easily understand speech recorded a thousand years ago, save for slang and euphemisms.
Galaxy-spanning recorded media have been around for five thousand years, and for many more thousands of years on the older worlds like Coruscant. Disasters have wiped out many archives, but quite a lot has passed through format changes over the years. One source of competition for people creating new media is the past; it’s possible to purchase datastores that will supply what is, to you, new and interesting for decades.
The ways to compete with this are to be trendy, topical, or to go to extremes. One of the more common occurrences is the equivalent of soap operas; many people get their galactic news from the reactions of characters in their long-running shows. Several shows have been running for centuries; MedBase One has been running for 800 years.
The most commonly spoken language in the galaxy is Basic, a
consequence of the head start
that Humans
had. Huttese is
the second most common, owing to the economic power of the Hutts.
Among spacers,
Durese is heard
as often as Basic.
Iconic is a universal written
language
with no defined pronunciation. It is
a logographic
script (comparable
to Chinese
characters) but designed for information-age usage; the script
owes more
to dingbats,
traffic signs,
and emoji
than
to calligraphy.
It is commonly generated by speaking to a computer, though there are
also input methods that allow you to type in your favorite language’s
phonetic alphabet or make shorthand scrawls that evoke a particular
glyph. Iconic’s primary use is navigation signs in spaceports and
starships— knowing even a few dozen glyphs is useful— but it has
accumulated thousands of glyphs for varying circumstances and can be
used as a written language. The ordering of the glyphs can require a
bit of puzzling when they’re written out by people whose native
languages use different syntaxes; a dialect
called Contract Iconic has a formal
grouping notation that makes it less natural to read but absolutely
clear when you need to write out a logical proposition.
When writing in Iconic, a person’s name is usually given as their Sigil, with an adjacent phonetic script in small print (like Japanese furigana) as a guide.
Because different cultures use varying systems of measurement, Iconic
has a deliberately fuzzy set of references that can be used to convey
a rough meaning: with one set of glyphs for dawn
, noon
,
dusk
, and midnight
and another for precisely
,
roughly
, shortly before
, shortly after
, a
while before
, and a while after
, they can convey concepts
like late morning
(a while before noon) and early evening
(shortly after dusk) well enough for party invitations. Precise times
are usually given in adjacent local script, much like names are with
Sigils. The same goes for distances (a quick walk
, a while
driving
, a day’s flight
), and weights (with different glyphs
indicating heaviness and bulkiness). These are generally calibrated
to the humanoid norms of the galaxy.
The Sith approach to life has its effect on police forces as well.
Sith Lords will often send in troops to impose order if a situation
degenerated to war zone
for very long.
Lighting is a good guide to the economics of an area. In dirt-poor neighborhoods, public lighting is an advertisement: it comes from advertising billboards and from businesses looking for customers. Lower-class neighborhoods usually provide lighting around residential buildings as well, and one can usually expect to have a well-lit journey from public transit stations to homes. Middle-class areas tend to be run by an overall property manager or maintenance authority that provides uniform lighting throughout. Upper-class areas tend to eschew sidewalks and lighting; if you aren’t flitting in on your personal swoop, you don’t belong there!
Most public restrooms are credit-operated, though some will simply bombard you with advertisements while you’re in the stall.
In well-off neighborhoods in megalopoleis and ecumenopoleis, a common architectural style is walkways soaring through the air, without handrails and sometimes even without visible means of support other than the endpoints of the walkway. The look is very elegant, but is vertigo-inducing to people who aren’t used to the style. The walkways don’t fall down because they’re made from expensive composite materials, and the pedestrians don’t fall off because of discreetly concealed sensors and force field generators that can catch a person falling off the walkway.
Traffic control in most places is usually nonexistent. It’s like India, but in three dimensions, and a greater likelihood of freeway shootings. Wealthy individuals ride in large vehicles with power plants and deflector shields normally found on starfighters. Lesser vehicles are either optimized for speed and maneuverability or stability and durability.
It is common for vehicles to have a droid control interface. A level 2 droid intelligence can handle delivery-truck work, but those can sacrifice speed for safety; a level 3 intelligence is usually needed to be able to handle dense traffic. Vehicle control is a common add-on for PDAs.
Travel between star systems is via carefully mapped hyperspace routes. Running into an uncharted brown dwarf, clump of dark matter, or hyperspatial anomaly can wreck your hyperdrive completely and possibly even destroy your ship. Hyperspace scouts are well-paid, but have a high mortality rate.
People who don’t want to provide their own preparations for emergencies generally purchase insurance that provides a bounty for local providers to arrive in time to fix the problem.
Civilizations fall. A lot. Often because they were pushed. And they leave lots of useful remains. Archæoscientists are good at digging up ancient equipment from ruins and either getting it working or extracting the basic science of their operation for conveyance to scientists and engineers.
In an era where the strongest must rule
is the basis of
civilization, the bounty hunter isn’t just a mercenary. Putting out a
bounty on someone who needs to be brought to justice is often the only
available form of justice, and some bounty hunters only take contracts for
doing what they think is right. A justiciar is a
bounty hunter who is paid to investigate a situation and come up with the best
solution; the job involves detective work as well as combat. The Chatos Academy produce the most famous
justiciars, called Paladins.
Bounties aren’t always placed on people; they’re also used as incentives to deal with nuisance wildlife. In such cases, one need only bring in a specified trophy (teeth, ears, etc.) from the creature so specified. People who specialize in this are called trophy hunters.
People in control of an area may grant exclusive hunting rights to a particular target, for a given time, to a single hunter or team; sometimes as a favor, sometimes at auction.
The enforcer of a lord’s will. They’re comparable to police, but they enforce will of a Sith Lord directly, functioning as judge, jury, and executioner on the spot; the only checks on their behavior are their combat ability and fear of displeasing their lord. Jails only exist as temporary holding for people who are being remanded to higher authority for decisions, and long-term holding for people who might prove useful but can’t be permitted freedom. Low-level enforcers wear armor and face shields, much like enlisted soldiers; higher ranking ones demonstrate their individuality and merely display prominent badges of office.
The Sith provide no support for the notion of intellectual property rights; if you don’t like someone duplicating your invention, you can pay for the assassins yourself. Espionage engineers are experts in absconding with important technical secrets; some operate by getting themselves hired, while others partner with a break-in specialist to get in, identify the crucial things to steal, and get out.
There is no formal difference between a gang and a corporation, a mob boss and chief executive, or a worker and a gangster. Some gangs are relatively benevolent and operate with the support of the local populace; some are less than pleasant and operate by inspiring fear in the local populace.
The closest thing to a standards organization in the galaxy. Imperial Auditors are agents of the Emperor, and they poke their noses into everything verifying the value of transactions and that the Emperor is getting his cut. In addition to their normal duties, they have enough flexible time to make their services available to audit transactions between other groups, attesting that transfers of value are not being adulterated. Their only loyalty is to the Emperor, so you can’t be sure that one of them isn’t on the take to subvert a transaction, so people usually hire three to provide secret ballots; whenever there is a disagreement, everyone brings out their own verifiers and the auditor who is on the take usually finds their name to be mud in this lucrative side profession. (The Emperor takes a dim view of anyone interfering in his personal property, so they don’t often get shot for deceit.) They are usually accompanied by bodyguards and analysis droids.
Most folks get their news from advertising-supported holochannels, which send out their reporters to cover events that are getting around via word of mouth. Their first loyalty is to their bottom line, so it is rare that any of them say a word to make their advertisers look bad or risk retaliation from their local Sith Lord.
There are intelligence channels whose bottom line lies in providing factual information, and they don’t come cheap. The most common ones are centered on events that will have repercussions on the galactic economy, followed by ones centered on events that have repercussions on individual well-being. Subscribing to them involves purchasing a small, heavily secured information retrieval device that can perform active downloads, decode encrypted broadcasts, and extract steganographic information hidden in other media. The device then outputs text, audio, video, or holo that carries its own subtle fingerprinting. If you rebroadcast the output and the channel finds out, your device simply stops working, just as if you’d failed to pay for your subscription. (Their fingerprinting seems to be very thorough indeed— the newsanchors on the intelligence channels are always edited so the real being can’t be matched up, and people comparing notes will often find completely different species of being using completely different mannerisms reporting the same story, using subtly different turns of phrase, in addition to radical differences in the subtle background noise.)
Intelligence journalists are like a combination of detective, journalist, and spy, and they’re fairly well paid. They tend to operate in cell networks, and seldom visit the few (heavily fortified) buildings that are publicly associated with the channel.
Your local Sith Lord will call out the military to keep the peace if the amount of chaos in his demesne is interfering with productivity. Below that, it’s all up to self-regulation. Some places will wind up with gangs running protection rackets; some will bribe the military to keep the peace; sometimes the gangs will turn legitimate. In the worst areas, where gangs feud over turf, a local hero will step up to discourage people from letting violence spill over into the local populace, providing vigilante justice and subsisting on the loot from the people they take down and largesse from grateful neighbors. These people often metamorphose into gang leaders whose gang develops popular support.
Another variant of the Local Hero is the Public Service Assassin, somewhat of a Robin Hood figure who kills off local thugs until more sensible ones rise to the top.
All that technology out there needs maintenance. Repulsorlifts, droids, engines... Most things are designed to last for hundreds or thousands of years with regular maintenance, and that’s where these folk come in.
It isn’t just a day job; it’s a hobby. People who keep their eyes open can make a fair bit of coinage passing on useful data to the right people. Sith Lords are always interested in the resource allocations and troop movements of their neighbors.
Crafting carbon- or silicon-based bacteria or viruses to perform chemical synthesis, bioremediation, or virufacture.
Galactic franchises are much like franchise operations in modern-day society, but more likely to kill a manager who fails to uphold their quality standards.
Smoky): much like Fleegle; faster, cheaper, more likely to be burned.
The Sith love competition, and promote it in all walks of society. Organized sports are very popular: arena battles, swoop racing, hoverboard racing, speederbike racing, grav skate racing, repulsor skiing, shockball (similar to soccer, though hands can be used; the ball emits increasingly powerful electric shocks when grasped for more than a quarter of a second, and full martial combat is permitted on the field, particularly to deal with the macho guys who carry the ball even as it’s zotting them). People love to see competitions going over lethal-hazard courses to win prizes.
The favorite sports for Sith are blood sports: hunts and arena battles. Hunts can occur in urban or wilderness environments, and a person on the run from a hunt usually causes everyone around them to scatter lest they be hit by stray weapons fire. Sith disdain tracking implants and use the Power to locate their victims, but their imitators are quite happy to rely on technology instead.
The Wookieepedia list
of phrases and slang is handy.
A great one from KOTOR 2 was Now we’re off that dejarik board of a planet, I say we burn sky until we see lines.
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