[Gatac]

My point is, "hard" and "soft" are already defined along completely other lines than yours.

Let me put it this way:

"Set a course for Altair 3, maximum warp!" is soft sci-fi. "Thruster package 3, fire ten seconds" is hard sci-fi.

It doesn't matter if, within the setting, the technology is well-understood. It's about whether it uses real-world science or has to invent stuff. In this respect, Star Wars is not "hard" in any way; I'm not even sure it's Sci-Fi rather than space opera or science fantasy. In the Expanded Universe, Star Wars picks up way more technical details, but in the movies themselves? Forget about it. They hardly explain anything, and they don't have to.

2001 is, aside from the intelligent story, justly famous for the realistic portrayel of spaceflight (albeit advanced). There are no faster-than-light drives, part of the spaceships rotates to generate the illusion of gravity, everything else is in a microgravity environment. It doesn't get everything right, but it tries damn hard. Trek goes its own way and makes up nice-sounding new words to cover. Star Wars doesn't even try.

As for your categories, I think we can put that into "static" and "dynamic". Star Wars, as a setting, is incredibly stagnant in technology. I'm not saying this is bad, but on the whole, most "new" stuff is merely refining and repurposing, not making whole new inventions. The Death Star was a massive logistical and Engineering archievement, but it didn't have any advanced supertech. By contrast, Trek treats science as a completely open frontier - new technologies are discovered all the time or learned from alien species. In fact, the sheer amount of new species is staggering, and even if it doesn't work out, things are changing. Trek has seen so many new and alien drive systems, for example, that I'm not sure I can just list them all here from memory. Wars is content with repulsorlifts, sub-c drives and hyperdrives being just the way they are.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, I enjoy both for different reasons. But I think we need to watch our terminology.

Gatac