Yea I wonder if that was ever addressed? I don’t remember the movies much and I never read the books but Vader must have seen, like, security footage or something and been like hey wait a fucking a second.
Level I - burn kittens and watch them suffer
Level II - build a space weapon so massive it blows up planets
Level III - micromanage your minions and review security footage
Let's touch base on this at a later date and see if we can really drill down and get our ducks in a row. I don't have the bandwidth right now, so we'll circle back now that it's on my radar.
Surely there must have been at least a few kittens (or their Star Wars equivalent) on Alderaan... I feel like that would make Level I a subset of Level II by definition.
There are plenty of 3P and R2 series robots running around. There's no reason to believe he thought he knew them.
Further, there's a comic where he sees C-3PO's blasted body and has a flashback. So even though they didn't share the screen, Vader did share a moment.
My actual biggest issue is that Vader stood in front of Leia and didn't seem to have any idea that she could use the force or that she was his daughter.
Except she couldn't. She was Force sensitive, but had no training and couldn't "use" the Force. And he had no idea he had children until after ANH. If he felt any connection at all to Leia he could have easily dismissed it as knowing Bail during the Clone Wars and that her family connection to Bail.
My actual biggest issue is that Mara Jade isn't canon
I don't think they have security cameras. You see characters just walking through the halls and you see them running away from soldiers easily hiding behind corners. They don't even have security near their power sources or jails.
I know they can record videos and holograms. Maybe it's against culture. Maybe they are just idiots. Maybe the story could not move forward if security was competent.
We've seen droids are valuable, worth reprogramming, and last an incredibly long time. I guess they are better used elsewhere? Yet uncle Owen, a simple moisture farmer, can afford multiple of them seemingly on a whim.
Also the main place we are talking about there not being enough cameras is warships which lack space. I don't think battleships have anything like that today. Why doesn't the fully constructed Death Star in A New Hope have a fully monitored camera system? No idea. Perhaps Galen Erso managed to include that major oversight in his design. Along with the many other problems with the first Death Star like the vent shaft that destroys the whole thing.
One thing about Star Wars that is similar to westerns the film genre, but almost reversed, is that the universe is always in constant decline. Things are always worse than the generation before. So holding onto last generation's tech is a benefit.
Where in a typical western it's about the new generation replacing the old, the new tech replacing the old. A new railroad is replacing the horse. Star Wars exists in a place where weapons and armor can last generations.