Indeed. Trying to imagine the 1974 draft as its own thing is a bit hard because it harks back to Golden Age pulp SF in ways we don’t normally expect from SW.

You’ve got rocket ships that take off vertically from underground hangars that resemble missile silos; Annikin has to don a spacesuit in order to use a spacecraft’s turret gun. There’s even a benign “Old Empire” that was replaced by a more tyrannical new regime, rather than a democratic Republic that was overthrown by tyranny.

That sort of fantastical space-opera imagery largely fell by the wayside, replaced by the more utilitarian, everyday aesthetic of Kubrick’s 2001. Visually, SW as we know it mostly hews closer to Alien’s vision of “space truckers” than it does to the gee-whiz factor of Frank Paul’s magazine covers and the Buck Rogers comic strip.

Another thing that comes to mind is that R2-D2’s original “tripod” design idea was probably a miniature version of the tripods from The War of the Worlds, meant to be realized with stop-motion. That idea probably lay behind the animated Fantasia-esque tripod candlesticks that appear during the finale of Willow, as well as the compact design of Iden Versio’s ID-10 droid in EA’s Battlefront 2 game.