I totally get that, Mrebo. It's something I've done my best to take into account in writing this: that Star Wars is Star Wars, not Tom Clancy-world. If this were actually made into a film, we wouldn't know all those thousands of years of history that I posted up there or the planet Ceres was born on or the history of the alien secessionist movement. I'm thinking of sneaking in a little reference to the Unification War of 150 to 129 BBY but if I can't do it sensibly then I won't try to crowbar it in there.

What's left of the Republic after the film's opening battle is either enslaved or exterminated by League forces or coalesces into two different remnant groups, which are the embryonic forms of the two factions seen in the OT. The Alliance to Restore the Republic is formed on Alderaan by Bail Organa and Commander Cev'ko in the early days of the Clone Wars. The Galactic Empire (a name which was a gross misnomer during the early days of its existence) was formed after Admiral Palpatine defended his homeworld of Anaxes with the naval fleet entrusted upon him by Antior.

In an attempt to avoid being "overly political", I destroyed the Republic's governing structure near the very beginning. You can't have those boring Senate scenes if the whole Senate has been vaporized by turbo-lasers, can you?

We would just see that the humans in charge of the Republic were pretentious and racist (kind of a parallel to the early twentieth-century notions of social darwinism and white man's burden)...who then got blasted to bits by vengeful aliens and now our rag-tag band of heroes must escape to the stars.

Then the question must be asked: What happens next?

Star Wars happens next.

As an aside, I estimate that the point where Anakin kills the hornagaunt is about twenty minutes into the film. Ben and Jeni's first encounter with him is what starts us towards the film's second act.