So if this was the only planet Spice was found on why was this not the most heavily fortified, guarded, and modernized...

So if this was the only planet Spice was found on why was this not the most heavily fortified, guarded, and modernized? Despite giant desert death worms why didn't an intergalactic empire not overhaul Arrakis?

>>/tv/

The books explain this. Try reading them.

The short answer is because of political reasons.

>I only watched a movie: the post

If you overhaul Arrakis, either the death worms stop you, or they die and no more spice.

Why?

Their natural environment is big fucking patches of arid sand.

They have that already.

Modernizing Arrakis would not improve output of Spice.

Now exporting worms to planets with a Sahara desert equivalent would have been a less bad idea from a purely production standpoint.

But then it would completely upset the social structure of the empire.

Three factions matter here, the Spacing Guild, The Emperor, and the Great Houses.

The Guild has a monopoly on space travel, but require the spice, which they must purchase as they don't have the ability to seize the whole thing by force. So they do their best to keep whoever controls arrakis weak so they can continue trading with the fremen for a secret supply of the spice.

The Emperor can't seize control of Arrakis without being destroyed by the Great Houses, and can only award stewardship of Arrakis to whoever he favors.

The Great Houses are always infighting, and only one can control Arrakis at a time, but cannot build a sufficient force without angering the Emperor, who has the troops to destroy any one great house easily, and can't afford the rates charged by the guild to do as they please.

So no one has a vested interest in developing Arrakis, and would all rather keep it politically unstable for personal gain.

The Guild wouldn't allow ANYTHING that put the spice at risk. Even with all the power Paul had, them bending to his threat to permanently end production is what allowed his rule.

They say in the books that they tried to transplant the worms but they don't do well outside their natural habitat.

If that was the only planet Spice was found on, how did they get to the planet in the first place?

According to the prequels (which were dogshit) they got there by an uncalculated fold, although they did have bog-standard slow FTL before that which allowed them to reach Arrakis.

I distinctly remember it being illegal to take them off-planet.

Which is why everyone tried to do it.

It's not that they don't do well outside of their natural habitat, it's that the worms are the reason that Arrakis is a horrible desert. Whenever they tried to transplant them, they took them to other arid worlds where they died. The trick was to take the young to wetter worlds, but that wasn't done, in some part because the only guy who really understood the worm biology was in with the Fremen and didn't want to share the info.

The spice isn't directly necessary for FTL. Melange boosts mental abilities, especially nascent prescient mental abilities. While the main books don't directly go into it, it's very heavily implied that once upon a time, the society had computers (Thinking machines) to do that kind of stuff, and only later got rid of them during the Butlerian Jihad; which is when you start seeing these attempts to make mutants to take up the roles that computers used to do. Both the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild date to the end of the conflict, not before.

Also the first navigator. The Oracle of Time, because of course the setting of Dune needs a marysue with all the most cliche marysue attributes. It was her all along, behind everything and holtzman was a thief and a liar.

I'm ignoring all the Kevin Anderson and Brian Herbert crap. Sticking to just the original books, the easiest explanation is that Arrakis was discovered when they still had thinking machines, they got rid of the thinking machines, and the spice was already something people were using by that point. The end.

Because of the Guild. They've seen (or rather - couldn't see) the risks it would take so they've played it safe to the point where they've got the wall.
The whole empire hinged on precognition of the Guild. They couldn't do anything that could upset it.

Free my nigga Holtzman, he dindu nuffin

God-Emperor>Dune>Children>Messiah>Chapterhouse>Heretics
>opinions

Of all the various explanations for the Butlerian Jihad, my favorite is the one in the encyclopedia. Even if it didn't have the image that basically sums up Dune's themes.

Read the books.

TL;DR the books: Because the Guild didn't want any particular house or the Emperor getting too much of a stranglehold on the Spice because of exactly what happens in Dune. Read the goddamn book.