RSS
If you ever need to make something kind of cool and interesting in your campaign, you can lean into real world situations and just make everything analogous to the details of that.
So, if you want to make a spaceship interesting, you can treat it like a submarine instead. If you want to make a magical flying carpet different, you can treat it like a hot-rod and give it fins, afterburners, and a steering wheel. If you want a cyberspace region to present an original challenge, skin it with the appearance of a busy city that you need to get across, complete with all those little annoyances that slow you down and get in your way.
Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)
Hahah, this really does look like a stereotypical submarine bridge, doesn't it? It's probably just to look visually interesting as a practical system wouldn't rely on personnel to sense incoming ships. Even if there was a non-reflective substance for radio waves, there would still be all sorts of other parts of the EM spectrum available like infrared radiation. At least, I don't think Star Wars ever did the completely invisible ship thing and all of the weirdness that would go along with that.
BB-8's hanging on pretty well for being zapped on the dome I have to say. I know it was definitely played differently in the comic, but I thought that most of R2-D2's problem in Episode VI was the electrical shock after getting hit and not the blaster hit itself. Maybe that was just due to a grounding problem. X-wings are obviously put together more robustly for the circuitry if eight different metal probes don't cause the electronics to immediately die. Han had to hotwire stuff to get it to activate the door, even if it was just closing another part of it.
Transcript
BB-8: Last gun is cleared! Bring on the bombers!
GM: Fulminatrix officer Suday Bascus peers through a periscope.
[SFX]: flip {Suday Bascus folds the handgrips up into the periscope shaft}
Suday Bascus: Captain... Resistance bombers approaching.
C-3PO: Why would they need a periscope?? Can’t they just look out the bridge windows?
Allan: Obviously they need an offset viewpoint.
GM: Uh, yeah, that.
Allan: Which means they’re doing visual triangulation.
Rey: To get range to the bombers. Yeah.
BB-8: Wouldn’t they just use radar?
Allan: They must need passive sensing because the bombers are non-reflective in the radio.
C-3PO: So we have good tech, but the First Order figured out a way around it.
Allan: By using periscopes. They’re cunning devils.
GM: Yeah. All that. Well done.