When they weren't failing to find the droids they were looking for, or challenging Sith Lords publicly about their hokey religion, the Empire must have managed to do something.
Just to be entirely clear, we're absolutely not backing any kind of fascist totalitarian state - but they did manage to assemble a few moon sized death stars, overthrow a republic and take out an army of mythically impressive Jedi.
Unfortunately, when you look around at our planet, it's hard not to think that there's a fair chunk of our big technologies that the Empire would definitely approve of.
With Star Wars: The Last Jedi opening on the silver screen this week, we're taking a look back at our feature of exactly what the Empire would have loved about our own little planet in a Galaxy far, far away.
And you never know, if the First Order are looking for any tips...
Nuclear Weapons
Need to blow up a planet? Well we don't have Death Star rays that can do it in one fell swoop, but nuclear weapons are definitely the most insidious weapons that we do have on planet Earth.
Given that the Emperor used his Death Star as the ultimate deterrent for those pesky rebel sympathisers, we can definitely see him using an arsenal of warheads to stay in control of any situation - we're just not sure if he'd be especially delighted that the nasty tech was available to plenty of others as well.
Prism
Manipulating idiot arrogant Jedis into becoming your evil Padawan is time consuming - if you really want to control your populace then clearly information is where it's at. Stand up Prism, the technology that governments brought in under the radar to monitor all of our communications and store it.
So they fractured a few laws in the name of security - pffft, what price liberty anyway? The Empire would love Prism, and whistleblower Edward Snowden would no doubt be dealing with a squad of Stormtroopers right now if the Grand Moffs weren't far, far away.
Military drones
We all know that R2-D2 would have been far better at flying the X-Wing than his master (and his hokey religion) and it's pretty clear that Darth Vader wouldn't have been troubled by Han Solo if he wasn't lumbered with incompetent humanoid pilots, so we reckon drones would be high up on the Empire's wishlist.
Now, given that robots are already doing most of the heavy lifting we'd have to come to the conclusion that there was some reason why pilots were still a thing. But we reckon unmanned drones might well be something of a hit in the Coruscant corridors of power.
Star Wars
No, not those Star Wars - that would be strange - we're talking about the space-based defense systems that were much beloved by the Regan administration but that found themselves never deployed to the extent that had been planned. This was partly due to the end of the Cold War but also due to some fairly hefty diplomatic consequences to sticking weapons (even defensive ones) in space.
Obviously, the Empire had very little problem getting space-based weaponry deployed, so you can chalk this one up on the 'approved' list.
Cloning
Dolly the Sheep might have been remarkable but, frankly, her ability with a blaster was sadly lacking. Still, the principle of cloning definitely appealed to the Empire - given that the Clone Wars were the machinations that brought the Emperor to control the senate in the prequels.
There are some hefty international laws about cloning humans, but technically Jango Fett was a Mandalorian so you might manage to squeeze that through if you wanted to pick out a decent starting point to produce a first wave of Storm Troopers.
Robots
There were no shortage of top-notch Rebel robots in the original trilogy but fewer high profile imperial ones.
That's not to say that the Empire was opposed to leaning on mechanised help - although we reckon they could have programmed the mouse droid (MSE-6) to be a little less afraid of Wookies and the Viper Probe to be a little less noisy around Han Solo.
Bionics
Medical tech is a burgeoning business - and although we're not quite at Luke and Vader levels of bionic limbs great strides have been taken in terms of helping amputees.
The Empire would definitely approve of bionics - not least because without them Vader would definitely have been less effective following his fight with Obi Wan ("get over here I'll bite your legs off!").
Cryogenics
When you absolutely must transport a smuggler to a crime lord to fulfil a contract there's only one way to do it - carbon freezing. And if that creates a lovely piece of art for a Huttese lair so much the better.
Skype
Pulling the strings from afar is all the harder without decent video conferencing facilities - and given the sorry lack of a holographic communications system, we reckon the Emperor would be okay with making do on Skype.
We're relatively sure that he'd be less okay with Snapchat and, frankly, his Facebook page would only have one apprentice on.
Gun sights
Now Stormtroopers have their uses, but despite old Ben proclaiming that their shooting accuracy was the stuff of legend we didn't actually see any evidence of it in the films.
We know that blasters are clumsy and random compared to a lightsaber but we reckon with the addition of a simple gunsight they might have been a little more capable of, say, taking out Princess Leia from about 10 yards away.
