Nanodroids

Nanotech just entered the canon with the latest TCW, "Sabotage". At the Jedi Temple, a civilian foreman over all gunship weapons was an expert in nanoweaponry and was murdered via ingestion of a large number of volatile nanodroids which were used to explode him while he was at work.

Frankly, the use of the nanotech wasn't really necessary to the episode, but it was there and now I'm trying to figure out if there's anything in Star Wars that would require or would have benefitted from this knowledge previously. And for the life of me right now, I can't think of anything.

I mean, I suppose we could insert them in different places . . . the Death Watch ropes that coil around the target could be related, and assorted grappling devices might bond via nanotech rather than magnets. But, as I think I've probably said before, Star Wars seemed to make no use of nanotech at all previously, and certainly nothing like nanites or nanoprobes. Put simply, we haven't had much Star Wars that required any microscopic explanations, especially in the weaponry department. Even medically, bacta always struck me as more biotech than nanotech.

I suppose we could ponder this in the context of modern Russian thermobaric devices that make use of nanoparticles for enhancement of explosions, but that's rather different than nanodroids.

Notable, though, is that the searching for additional nanodroids in the Temple seemed to be a unique event, and the scans for it involved special equipment never before observed. Ahsoka carried around a tricorder-like pair of devices when scanning, for instance, which I don't think we've seen before (but which did have impressive scanning capabilities). Thus, to my mind, there is no current reason to assume that nanotech has been hiding in every scene, because otherwise one would think that related equipment and scanning would be very much more standard.

In any case, time will tell if we see more evidence of nanoscale devices in Star Wars. For myself, though, the macro-scale of things seems to be more the norm.