We drove down to Bayou La Batre to visit my folks, in the face of tropical storm Arlene. Friday night, we went to ROTS and there were only two other people in the theater.

Saturday, the weather people started to use the "H" word so we left town. Dammit, I drove through half of Alabama in the driving rain for no reason; we'd have been safer just staying in BLB as it blew over.

Now, about ROTS. Finally, after I actually stopped wanting to see it, I get to see it. It has some of the flaws of the other prequels: too many times where the CGI characters steal the scene by being more lifelike than the human actors. And this can't be the fault of the actors, since the same actors don't suck when they are in other movies, only in Star Wars movies.

For the 3 people out there who actually waited longer than me to see this movie,

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The movie opens with the most intricate space fighter sequence in Star Wars or any other movie. Anakin and Obi-Wan unfortunately seem bored or at most slightly annoyed by what is happening to them, though, so I can only assume that the action we are witnessing is mundane by clone wars standards.

You seriously expect me to believe that out of all the Jedi in the galaxy, only Yoda is strong enough in the Force to be able to sense that his clone troopers is about to shoot him in the back? What good is the Force if it doesn't give you more spider sense than that?

Exactly what percentage of the Republic's military forces only came into existence for the clone wars? We know that "the army" of clone troopers was created at that time, but did they have a "navy" before that? And what percentage of the non-Jedi forces were clones, anyway? All of them? This obviously changes by the time of the classic films, since the stormtrooper voices heard in them do not sound like Temura Morrison. Really what I'm asking is, at what point did the officers start dressing like Nazis?

The star fighters used by the Republic forces appear to be the common ancestor of both the X-Wing and the TIE fighter. Nice touch.

Still, considering how little technological advancement there is in general in the Star Wars universe, I think the hardware of the Clone Wars and that of the Civil Wars (or whatever Lucas currently calls the conflict depicted in the original trilogy) should have been nearly identical.

I agree with your technology assesment completely. Such things probably aren't "canon", but I've seen more than one source that said that the Rebels flew X-wings because they were outdated technology, and pretty much the best stuff they could readily get their hands on. The "common ancestor of both ships" thing was, as you said, a very nice touch, but IMO the army of the Republic really, really, REALLY should have been flying X-wings, and they should have been doing it in Episode II.

At least one (also extra-canonical) source I've seen put forward the theory that the X-Wing and it's ilk had never been used by the Old Republic, but came from the planetary defence forces of the individual systems involved in the rebellion. Just like Naboo had its own ship designs seen nowhere else, Alderan or someplace had their own little fleet of X-Wings.

That would mean the pseudo-X-Wings shown in ep 3 were not really direct ancestors but more like cousins, probably manufactured by the same company that also sold X-Wings. Maybe the Republic/Empire could pay top dollar and get better models.

That doesn't explain the origins of the TIE fighter, though. The larger vessels such as "Star Destroyers" and even shuttle craft appeared to have been in use in the Clone Wars, why did the TIE take so long to evolve?

If the Clone Wars didn't spur the development of the TIE, what did? Did the Empire specifically invent it to fight the rebels? In what way was it any sort of an improvement over it's predecessors, considering that the Jedi fighters appeared to be capable of lightspeed and the TIE, as we all know, was not?

And it's obvious that the basic TIE fighter was nearing the end of it's useful life by the battle of Yavin, since Vader had his own special tricked out model and they soon after introduced the interceptor.

What doesn't help here is that the movies give so little clue about how long had the rebellion actually been a shooting war before the start of the OT. The package of a Bail Organa action figure I looked at, at Toys-R-Us, made it seem like the rebellion started pretty soon after ep 3, but that isn't backed up by anything in the movies AFAIK.