Why Battle Droids Deserved Better

Am I being dramatic? Perhaps. Did I not realize this video was a bit of a mess until it was too late? Yeah. Did droids deserve better? Absolutely.

0:00 Part 0: Intro
4:38 Part 1: Design
6:36 Part 2: Battle Droids Should Have Won More
18:19 Part 3: Battle Droids Do Not Act Like Battle Droids
23:19 Part 4: Oh Dear God, Are They Sentient?
32:28 Part 5: Battle Droids Are Mistreated Like No Other Beings in Star Wars
39:46 Part 6: A Greater Theme?

Thumbnail Art and Drawings: Adam Carter
Music In Order of Appearance:
Urban Flavour – Modern Jazz Drum n Bass (1998)
Aphex Twin – 30 Dolby C
Black Moth Super Rainbow – The Afternoon Turns Pink
Mr Sunshine – Moonlit Snow at Black Sands
haircuts for men – EARLY TAPE WORKS (1981-1984) VOL.1
Rachet and Clank – Kerwan Metropolis
Herb Ellis and Remo Plainer – Windflower
Mega Man (NES) Music – Bomb Man Stage
Casiopea – Span of a Dream
Jaywalkers – That Time of Day Again
Clair De Lune (dispersed intermittently)
Boards of Canada – Semena Mertvykh
Jaywalkers – That Time of Day Again
Windows 96 – En Route
Black Moth Super Rainbow – Rollerdisco
Ryo Kawasaki – Prizm (1976) (Jazz Fusion)
Urban Flavour – Modern Jazz Drum n Bass (1998)
The Binding of Isaac Soundtrack - Serenity
Kevin Macleod -- Airship Serenity
TOBACCO - refbatch

[Rodrigo_Vega]

It would be pretty scary and themetically and aesthetically fitting if battle droids repeatedly "rose" from the ground dramatically and continued fighting like re-animated skeletons from a Ray Harryhausen movie after being knocked down or split in half.

[blakdeth]

In the star wars universe droids can develop a personality and sentience as they accumulate more memories. For example, the company that produces the r series droids, says that the r2 model specifically has a tendency to develop "personality quirks" in their words. They recommend wiping your r2 droids memory at least once every 2 years. R2D2 goes without a memory wipe for at least 67 years, and is probably the most sentient droid we've ever seen. L3-37 was highly customized from various parts, and she probably developed a personality at a much more rapid pace than a standard r2 could, and would be another candidate for this position. For b1 battle droids, their personality is likely a direct response to them being redesigned to function without a control center. Which would explain why in episode 2 they only had a couple of jokes, they were fresh out of the factory, but as time went on they got less competent but more emotive.

[elijahocasio]

“It won’t matter💔” most heart breaking quote of all time

[darebrained]

On your "droids should have won more" points: Reminder that when Qui-Gon Jinn and a young Obi-Wan faced *two* droidekas they bolted.

[bimbendorf]

Honestly, a proper droid army would be terrifying. It is an enemy that instantly recieves all the information it needs, unquestionably follows any order and doesn't care about suffering any combat losses. A living wave of metal and plasma fire

[thespidermanoftheottomanempire]

I’ll never forget the Fan Theory that the Droids being more comical in the Clone Wars compared to the movies is due to the increased trauma they faced over time in combat…

[child_of_madnessgaming]

As a writer who's been trying to find a new project to work on (current one is kinda exhausting), and being a massive Star Wars fan, I may take a crack at this concept of a group of B1 droids defecting and finding a sort of home. Thank you for the inspiration ✌🏻

[AsobiMedio]

15:40 The canonical reason is that the mass produced B1 droid was placed in so many different positions within the Seperatist military, each one needing an extra bit of code to function properly, that their processing power and internal memory was stretched thinner than a ramen noodle. This often caused ridiculously slow reaction times, poor judgement, and reduced their effectiveness in any particular role. Also, it came with the side effect of making them chatty.

This same drawback existed within the more advanced battle droid models, though to lesser extents.

[mailstorminurbox]

Those three:
“Three of us and one of him”
“It wont matter”
While anakin is just fricking heartlessly walking towards them to slaughter them, i feel too bad

[mrfraud]

For anyone wondering why the B1s were so emotional for war machines, the canon explanation is that they weren’t originally designed to do specific tasks in the army. I can’t remember where but I saw a good video on it a while ago so I might be paraphrasing a bit.

Basically the B1s were originally owned by the trade federation and used to collect on debt.Those who owed debt would typically not have an army of their own to defend themselves with, so the B1s would have been used mainly for intimidation.

Later on - around Attack of the Clones time - the trade federation officially joined the separatist alliance and the B1s were required to perform more specific and diverse tasks.The B1 software underwent no real change but larger and more complicated programs were downloaded onto them. This meant that the B1s had an inadequate memory to store these programs and some could be overwritten or lost.The result was that the droids struggled to cope with complex situations and began to become more talkative to deal with the “stress” of being under qualified for their jobs by nature.

Since any kind of improvement to the B1s would be expensive to the separatists and B1s were meant to be cheap canon fodder, there was no incentive for them to fix these problems. They were fighting a war of attrition against the republic, and were more successful than their onscreen portrayal gives them credit for.

Additionally, after The Phantom Menace the droids switch from being centrally controlled by a command centre to being more independent as this was seen as a weakness.An original B1 could be seen as no more than a glorified remote controlled car.

All in all, B1s are unsuited to most forms of conflict- aside from open warfare where they should dominate due to their narrow profile and superior numbers.

If you got all the way to the end of this mini essay, thanks for reading and giving me and excuse to write about droids!

TL;DR droids are meant to be debt collectors and don’t have enough processing power to fight effectively in the clone war.

[tommytwotacos]

I was taking a robotics class recently in my attempts to reskill as an adult into something more commercially viable than a poli-sci major, and my lab partner did a thing that was as seriously impressive as it was frightening. We were making small single task programmable robots, you know like the kind that can bring you a beer out of the fridge, when Kiva who was my lab partner, rocks up with a rather mundane and small ambulatory bot of no discernable primary function, but with a large pressure sensitive bar across what would be its abdomen, were it an organic lifeform. He had installed several multifunction code packs that allowed it to move using its wheels, grasp objects using its pincers, and even recognize everyday objects in its environment using a pair of cameras and a scanning laser to build images for itself. He also gave it the priority function of maintaining its own functionality, but with a nasty catch.

The large pressure sensitive bar I mentioned earlier was actually tied into its power system and anytime he'd apply pressure to it, the voltage and wattage would be effected in direct proportion to the amount of force applied to the bar.

Over the semester, I watched him upgrade it and tinker with it, applying some basic machine learning and letting it offload much of its analytical processes to our school's cloud so that its capacity for high fidelity sensor analysis wasn't limited by the bot own weaker processing capabilities. He then also tied the quality of the transmission to the "pain bar" as he came to call it.

Two weeks before the final, I saw the awful and undeniable truth of what he'd really done to this machine. He'd taught it to be afraid of him. He had a special poker, nothing intimidating but readily identifiable, and this was the only item he'd use to press the bar. The robot soon made the connection that when it saw that item come out, it was about to experience an event that would compromise its ability to fulfill its highest priority directive. For a while, it tried to find ways to overcome the attacks. It would attempt to shield the bar from contact or even carry out it other assigned tasks with less accuracy and increased speed, hoping to complete them before becoming disabled.

However, near the end of the semester, this behavior changed radically. The nearer to finals we got, the more I would describe the robot's reactions as "desperate". It knew that its task failure rate was far beyond the accepted operational parameters once the interference began, and it could see that it was that device which was the source of its failures. However, as it determined that the tactica it was engaging in wasn't producing any usable improvements, it increased the scope of movements tried and the erratic or unpredictable evasive movements would frequently be used in a rapid fire approach. I would frequently feel my anxiety levels spike as I watched this bot helplessly thrash about, trying to avoid having its pain bar touched and failing over and over again.

Then right before class ended, it actually gave up. I don't know if it determined that it had tried enough permutations in that pattern that it needed to try a completely different approach, I don't know if it was trying to get the fails done with or somehow just attempt operations during a time when there was no chance of interference. Whatever heuristic the machine learning program had adopted for its current behavioral profile, it appeared to just be cowering whenever the pain stick was detected.

That was what my bastard lab partner had been trying to do all along. He wanted to teach the robot to fear him. I think he only indulged the power fantasy dynamic as a sort of black humor thing, but it gave me NIGHTMARES for quite some time afterwards and, even now, has completely altered my assumed operating dynamic when our AI powered robots start to operate in society alongside of us. All of the movies like Terminator had got it wrong.

When the robots arrive, some of us will be absolutely terrible to these things just because the taboo of not hurting another life form won't apply naturally at first. I really hope that we're able to adapt and treat the machines commensurate with their quality as life forms, even if it's not a life form we recognize or understand at first.

I've wanted to write a story about this experience ever since it happened, but I haven't been able to get the salie t points across with any level of efficiency in any of my attempts so far. Hopefully, a better writer than I has a similar experience and is able to hone a cautionary tale that catches on before we unwittingly become the monsters who traumatize our own synthetic progeny needlessly. We have enough sins to atone for as it is.

[Battledroid]

I agree general grievous, always
slapped us around and call us useless

[the_Googie]

All philosophy and jokes aside, we should all appreciate the original inventor of the B1 design, Doug Chiang. He's a fantastic illustrator who made a lot of the concept art for Phantom Menace, and therefor also created the look for all of whats to come. The B1 especially took a lot of inspiration from traditional african folk-lore in it's shape design, the lankey long bodies are a direct reference to warriors of african tribes. All of this is explained in the fantastic concept art book of Phantom Menace. B1s are epic.

Edit: I researched the book once more because I wasnt sure how the whole african influence thing was worded exactly. I did look it up and its appearently based on african sculpture

[brumpotungus]

Canon explanations for their intelligence include the fact that after the phantom menace, they stopped using command ships and central brains, so each battle droid was outfitted with simple droid brains, but due to the nature of their programming, they develop quirks and oddities that essentially cripple their efficiency, remember In attack of the clones how hundreds of Jedi were killed by battle droids in the arena fight, but the mass produced droids made at the beginning of the clone wars suffer from those quirks and oddities that make them say funny things and fail at their job

[sillwullivan]

Something which I remember really catching me off guard as a kid when the series first came out was the Death of Jedi Master Ima-Gun Di. His main conflict near the end of his one episode was holding down a defensive position for a horde of droids. When it came time for his great final stand, it felt strange that Di was getting overwhelmed and took me aback when they actually took him out, mainly since we'd seen our series mainline protagonists absolutely annihilate platoons of clankers without even breaking a sweat. But here we have a Jedi master, someone of a higher ranking within the order than a good chunk of our recurring cast, get taken apart by what was painted as a serious threat

[jasonfike]

This makes me want to write a story about a CIS Commander who actually treats his droids like people. Most importantly, he doesn't force them to undergo memory-wiping. Meaning that, over time, his droids become more 'experienced, ' and develop personality traits. They end up scoring some brutal victories against the Clones of the Republic, because these droids do not act anything like the others; the complacent clone-troopers expecting predictable enemies are met with droids who use actual small- and large-scale tactics. Granted, they aren't as skilled as the clones - but the utter shock of actually fighting an enemy who can think and react leads to massive defeats.

After his victories and his droids becoming fanatically loyal to him, he forms a small separatist holdout when the war ends. Having amassed several legions of droids, a dozen-or-so CIS warships and whatever else they can scrounge up... and they form their own little society among one or two planets. Millions of droids, originally intended to be tools, discovering what it's like to be people. To be free, to explore what it means to be a sapient and sentient being. All while the galaxy around them is free to fall apart without their care or concern.

[ThePointlessBox_]

Republic commando will always have the best portrayal of these things. It made the regular droids fierce and the super battle droids absolutely terrifying to even take on one

[cyclomorrison]

What always bothered me the most is that B1 Battle droids were used to man turrets, or captain vehicles. Why not give every vehicle, spaceship or turret in your droid army an own A.I.? The Vulture droids had one 🤷🏻‍♂️

[mariostwald]

OMG i love battle droids — that strange “character” with naivety, politeness and a scrap of melancholy. There are enormous amounts of parts that automatically associated with star wars, and battle droids are one of the biggest — there’s no star wars without them for me. I’ve noticed some odd facts of their being, but consistently ignored them. Now I can’t 😅😢 It is a great brain food, thank you for your time and insights 💛

[Spooky_Boi-]

RIP MO5... and all the droids who were not spared even if they begged for mercy...you all will be missed