: It seems to me that the Pfhor lacked the kind of market forces and military
: rivalries that otherwise fuel innovation and increases in
: efficiency/productivity. Most of their tech was raided or jury-rigged and
: if what you've been doing has been successful for several centuries why
: change it all up? Perhaps the Pfhor understood their slaves' capabilities
: only enough to exploit them, but not enough to replicate them through
: technological means.
What forces pushed the Pfhor into space travel then? That's hard and takes a lot of innovation and if human efforts in that direction are anything to judge by, ends up making heavy use of robotics in the process and then once you have those robotics there's no point in having meat bags do anything when the robots can do it all better, including making more robots. And one way or another, the Pfhor somehow or another DO have good-enough robots, and once you've got them why keep the meat bags around?
It would be one thing if the Pfhor were just kind of... living in the self-sustaining ruins of some other civilization's empire. Like if all their ships were scavenged ships, and all their machines were scavenged machines, and what few robots they had were what they had and they couldn't make any more. If they were just a hermit crab species living in some other dead species' shell of a civilization, incapable of making their own. But they seem at least capable of replicating things they find, even if they can't invent them themselves, so by the time they've stolen robotics technology and are able to replicate it (which appears to be the case), the whole idea of slavery just becomes redundant.
