Jedi Master Spock wrote: I always viewed the above entry as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the famous "Stormtrooper Effect."
The "Storm Trooper effect" happens to almost everyone though, and it seems like most blasters are as accurate as smoothbore weapons.
Jedi Master Spock wrote: The battle droids certainly do come off as flimsy as well. The Confederacy - and the Empire, subsequently - seem to have had the old Soviet philosophy when it comes to military equipment. Make a lot of it, make it impressive, make it cheap, and don't worry about expending troops.
There is cheap, and then there is absurdly flimsy.
The AAT is possibly the best design in Star Wars, but has surprisingly poor armor being brought down with small arms.
I'm inclined to think they are simply using the wrong alloys and things like that. It happens in the real world when the bean counters start deciding what is needed without consulting the engineers first, just look at the M-16.
Jedi Master Spock wrote: The Republic's Grand Army and the Rebel Alliance take a much more American approach - try to make the best individual war machines as you can, because manpower resources are expensive/scarce. The EU really goes into this when it talks about TIE fighters, but it probably applies to literally everything the Empire produces.
I'm not all that sure you are right about the clone army. It seems like the clone's equipment is just as bad as the CIS's. Look at the AT-TE for example, it has a smurfing huge shoot me glass cockpit on the front.
Jedi Master Spock wrote: Poor quality control and cut-rate engineering would go a long way to explain why Star Destroyers do so badly against smaller Rebel ships, why the Executor ended up getting completely destroyed by a single suicidal A-Wing through the bridge, and why the first Death Star was built with a "BLOW ME UP NOW!" button rather than with sensible failsafes.
Imperial Star Destroyers suffer from the old jack of all trades but master of none problem. An ISD was meant to be a carrier, a battleship, and a troop transport. You can name many flaws in the design, but you need to remember that many of the flaws are the result of having to carry out a wide range of missions with a single hull.
(It's rather odd that the so called "flaw" in Star Fleet ship design philosophy is why the ISD isn't as good as it could be.)
I view the Death Star 1's exhaust (blow me up now) port as a symptom of a much larger problem in Star Wars weapon design philosophy in that the engineers seem to purposely add obvious flaws to the designs often for seemingly no reason. I mean easily fixed flaws.