AU timeline (for my main AU series) for the Clone Wars - Part Five
Continued from a fourth post, over here, https://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/262420.html which was continued from third post, here https://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/249748.html which was continued from the second post, over here https://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/249398.html and from the first post, here https://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/249242.html since apparently I talked so much that LJ couldn’t fit everything in a single post or even just two or three or four posts!
Orson is supposed to somehow supervise several large onworld and deep space construction projects before the war starts (plus, he has enough influence to get Galen a visiting professorship at the Institute of Applied Science on Coruscant and, by the time he goes to rescue the Erso family from Vallt, he has already earned the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Also, there’s that comment in Catalyst about Regalia Station being one of his, in that he was “chief of the design and construction teams,” just prior to him actually offering to make Has Obitt a “list of which” of Orson’s works to visit, the next time the smuggler is on Coruscant, indicating that he’s also been personally designing several of these projects, as well as heading the efforts to get them built. No matter what Lyra may think or tell herself about him, Orson is pretty obviously a genius of some sort, or there’s no way he could have possibly accomplished all of this prior to being first recruited into the Special Weapons Group and then eventually turning thirty years of age, which doesn’t happen until the year after the war has started, given the war starts in 22 BBY and, again, Orson is supposed to have been born in 51 BBY), so to me it makes more sense if Galen is the one who pursues multiple fields of study in his time with the Futures Program (before eventually settling on crystallography and energy enrichment, after multiple years of study in which he essentially just migrates from the Futures Program to Coruscant’s Institute of Applied Science), based on his various interests, to keep from getting bored, while Orson has as his goal an engineering/architectural degree pretty much from the get-go and doesn’t deviate much from that path at all while enrolled in the Futures Program. That way, Galen can logically still be enrolled in the Futures Program long enough for his studies to overlap with Orson’s studies sufficiently for them to actually form a friendship meaningful enough for it to make sense that Orson would be willing to pull strings, to get Galen a prestigious (and likely also cushy) job at Coruscant’s Institute of Applied Science, prior to Galen’s marriage to Lyra and his decision to try to avoid the entire issue of military/government research in a Republic at war by taking a job with the supposedly neutral Zerpen Industries on Vallt, and would immediately think of Galen (and no one else) as the obvious solution to the problem of the main weapon for the deep-space mobile battle station project.
(One way or another, Lyra is going to die before the war ends, rather than in some convoluted version of the insanely futile gesture of defiance against Orson’s - and, thus, the Empire’s - hold over her husband, years later, that actually happens in canon. I will freely admit I am not at all a fan of the character of Lyra Erso, as she is presented in canon and Legends materials, such as Catalyst, and frankly I see no reason at all to let the back-stabbing two-faced little hypocrite live even as long as Palpatine/Sidious, if I don’t have to.)
I swear to gods, if Galen weren’t consistently written/portrayed as all but autistic, I would be seriously worried about the age differences (someone who, by the loose canon dating, could’ve been twenty or older befriending a fifteen-year-old genius who’s only just joined the Futures Program, even though he’s on a path that wouldn’t seem to overlap with any of Galen’s areas of study and therefore wouldn’t have any apparent impetus to meet, much less interact with each other, and later undeniably benefitting both monetarily and career-wise from that relationship - since Orson is the one who gets Galen the job with Coruscant’s Institute of Applied Science - only to eventually and rather abruptly marry a woman [with, let’s face it, both a much lower IQ and much, much less education than Galen has clearly had] who could’ve been nine years or more younger than he is would otherwise almost certainly come off as a predator).
Orson is supposed to somehow supervise several large onworld and deep space construction projects before the war starts (plus, he has enough influence to get Galen a visiting professorship at the Institute of Applied Science on Coruscant and, by the time he goes to rescue the Erso family from Vallt, he has already earned the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Also, there’s that comment in Catalyst about Regalia Station being one of his, in that he was “chief of the design and construction teams,” just prior to him actually offering to make Has Obitt a “list of which” of Orson’s works to visit, the next time the smuggler is on Coruscant, indicating that he’s also been personally designing several of these projects, as well as heading the efforts to get them built. No matter what Lyra may think or tell herself about him, Orson is pretty obviously a genius of some sort, or there’s no way he could have possibly accomplished all of this prior to being first recruited into the Special Weapons Group and then eventually turning thirty years of age, which doesn’t happen until the year after the war has started, given the war starts in 22 BBY and, again, Orson is supposed to have been born in 51 BBY), so to me it makes more sense if Galen is the one who pursues multiple fields of study in his time with the Futures Program (before eventually settling on crystallography and energy enrichment, after multiple years of study in which he essentially just migrates from the Futures Program to Coruscant’s Institute of Applied Science), based on his various interests, to keep from getting bored, while Orson has as his goal an engineering/architectural degree pretty much from the get-go and doesn’t deviate much from that path at all while enrolled in the Futures Program. That way, Galen can logically still be enrolled in the Futures Program long enough for his studies to overlap with Orson’s studies sufficiently for them to actually form a friendship meaningful enough for it to make sense that Orson would be willing to pull strings, to get Galen a prestigious (and likely also cushy) job at Coruscant’s Institute of Applied Science, prior to Galen’s marriage to Lyra and his decision to try to avoid the entire issue of military/government research in a Republic at war by taking a job with the supposedly neutral Zerpen Industries on Vallt, and would immediately think of Galen (and no one else) as the obvious solution to the problem of the main weapon for the deep-space mobile battle station project.
(One way or another, Lyra is going to die before the war ends, rather than in some convoluted version of the insanely futile gesture of defiance against Orson’s - and, thus, the Empire’s - hold over her husband, years later, that actually happens in canon. I will freely admit I am not at all a fan of the character of Lyra Erso, as she is presented in canon and Legends materials, such as Catalyst, and frankly I see no reason at all to let the back-stabbing two-faced little hypocrite live even as long as Palpatine/Sidious, if I don’t have to.)
I swear to gods, if Galen weren’t consistently written/portrayed as all but autistic, I would be seriously worried about the age differences (someone who, by the loose canon dating, could’ve been twenty or older befriending a fifteen-year-old genius who’s only just joined the Futures Program, even though he’s on a path that wouldn’t seem to overlap with any of Galen’s areas of study and therefore wouldn’t have any apparent impetus to meet, much less interact with each other, and later undeniably benefitting both monetarily and career-wise from that relationship - since Orson is the one who gets Galen the job with Coruscant’s Institute of Applied Science - only to eventually and rather abruptly marry a woman [with, let’s face it, both a much lower IQ and much, much less education than Galen has clearly had] who could’ve been nine years or more younger than he is would otherwise almost certainly come off as a predator).