I absolutely love Star Wars - I saw the first movie four times in the theatre back in 1977/78 as a kid.

But let's be clear: Star Wars is "cowboys and indians in space." (Yes, that's a dated and culturally inappropriate comparison - it is also perfectly appropriate for the era.)

Technology has never played a significant part in it - light sabres are magic swords, FTL travel is a well-worn convenient trope that 'just happens' (unless it doesn't). Droids are servants.

Basically, tech has never been a core aspect of the SW world, mostly because the show has never been science fiction.

Star Wars is a nice movie but it's a pretty mediocre SF. They mix very low and very high technology in mostly absurd ways. You have FTL and lasers but robots are mostly shit, AI is very basic and its use weirdly limited, warfare looks pretty much like today, only in space. I know they did it like this because of cinematography but as a SF it's just not that good. So I really wouldn't bother trying to rationalize the tech. It's mostly like this because "it looked nice".

Scientists doing shit in the future?

I get the impression in the Star Wars universe that technological advances have slowed to a near halt. All of the tech is really old, and very little has changed for quite some time. A brand new X-wing or lightsaber or landspeeder isn't all that different from one that was built 50 or even 100s of years ago. That's one of the reasons why stuff in Star Wars looks so used - as tech doesn't go obsolete, stuff ends up staying in service until it's completely worn out and every bit of life has been squeezed from it.

That's why you don't really see where the technology comes from - the big innovators, discoveries, etc. are long in the past. Though we do get to occasionally see factories and manufacturing facilities where things are being built.

It's fantasy, part of the fun is the mystery of this strange looking technology and how old, used, and dirty it is. Makes you wonder, what kind of history did this object see?

Relevant aside: I just learned Lucas renamed Star Wars to Star Wars: Episode IV in 1981, before knowing he'd help make the three prequel films. It was just a stylistic choice, to make Star Wars feel like just a small piece of a larger epic.

Once you explain the mystery of the technology away, or the mystery of the rest of the saga, some of that magic disappears.

The Star Wars universe is full of trillions of sapient, dextrous beings, humans* or otherwise. Just because the inventors don't (necessarily) show up on screen doesn't mean they don't exist.

If you want a "too simplified as to be almost certainly wrong" answer: E.T.

His species are canonically native to the Star Wars galaxy but we don't see them most of the time in the SW lore. Let's assume they're the ones who invented it all. Easy.

I mean, the one we got a movie about didn't seem all that bright, but he managed to build a communicator array out of a Speak-n-Spell, so they must have something going for them.

I don't think I understand the question. People invented it?

By the time of the movies humans have had hyperspace travel for something like 20,000 years. Seems it stands to reason the trillions of sentient lifeforms working and communicating during that time would create some cool shit

In the Lord of the Rings, what is the explanation for swords and other metal goods?

At some point in the past, the arts of smelting, smithing, casting were discovered, refined over the centuries, different races and cultures advanced them in different ways, and eventually led to swords, mithril shirts, magic rings, etc.

Same thing with star wars, in-universe they have tens of thousands of years of history, I think canonically the old Republic was founded 25-or-so thousand years ago, if you go back that far in real earth human history and you're pretty much at the point where a handful of weird wolves are starting to get comfortable enough with humans to let us start domesticating them.

And at that point in the star wars timeline, space travel and other advanced technology is already pretty well-established, so there's probably at least that long again of incremental technological advancements leading up to that point.

Basically they just got a massive head-start on us

As far as how and where the technology is made, we get little glimpses of it here and there, droid factories on Geonosis, corelian shipyards, various mechanics, scrapyards, tinkerers, etc.

But that's all just kind of backdrop. Star wars is a space opera adventure thing, not a mockumentary about the history of lightsabers and hyperspace drives, or a how-its-made for blaster pistols and gonk droids. It wouldn't make sense for most star wars media to really go into depth about that kind of stuff and probably would piss people off if they did (not that most star wars fans don't exist in a perpetual state of being angry at star wars about something anyway)

You wouldn't go into a Fast and Furious movie expecting a whole history and mechanics lesson on automobiles, the movies are focusing on a handful of people who (race cars? Fight terrorists with cars? I really don't know I've actually never seen any of them) there's a whole in-universe world around them where all of those things happened/are happening out of sight and out of mind but it's not directly relevant to the plot so it gets kind of glossed over, you can just assume most of the history and engineering stuff has been handled by people somewhere off-screen at some point in time.

Same with star wars, there's untold trillions or more people scattered across millions of inhabited planets working dead-end jobs making widgets that have built on millennia of science and technology, but the stories focus on a handful of freedom fighters, smugglers, soldiers, warrior monks, etc. who mostly just use those things and probably don't have much more idea how their hyperdrive works than you do about the alternator in your car.

A few years ago I'd have jokes about data ports being the same fitting as power sockets, but USB-C has ruined that

Some of their technology is vastly ahead of ours, other technologies are way behind. The behind stuff is far more interesting. Comms in Star Wars is weird and anachronistic with other tech in the show. Getting clear signals for comms seems nearly impossible.

I also get a giggle out of tech used in the show only to drive plot: like how protagonists can scan ships for life forms but protagonists also only power down ships to evade the eye of a passing baddy ship.

It's been around for tens of thousands of years, getting added to, modified and improved upon, by every culture that uses it.

Same place any technology comes from I suppose.

Didn't one of the new movies have a whole thing about the mil-industrial complex?

Unless otherwise specified, my assumption is that laborers working for oligarchs made the tech

And how do they know which button to press?