ST Would You Like to See Enemy Droids Again?

I love C3-PO's humor; him and R2-D2 provide the needed comic relief very well IMO. I just think that droids of the battlefield should be more serious.

I still love the PT.

 

I like this post one thousand times. I think our original droids provide enough comic relief. I really wouldn't mind seeing enemy droids again but if I have to hear "roger, roger" one more time....just give me droidekas.


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what i meant was annoying in the way han finds him annoying. goldenrod and r2 are the only droids we need for the ST.

 

Oh, I see; I misunderstood.

 

There will be droids of all kinds, it's Star Wars, but I think we've seen the end of droid armies, as we saw living beings trump droids in battle for the most part.

 

No.

No droid armies, please. Leave that in the PT.

 

If you mean battle drioids then no. Thats one of the things that made the PT too kiddy friendly, I accept it was probably done so you didn't see people in armour being dismembered all over the screen. But I thought the droids weren't as good as armies of people in armour, like stormtroopers for instance.

 

Droids yes. Stormtroopers/Troopers of any kind no. At least not at first...maybe by the second film. Forty years of Cold War peace should render Troopers' existence completely unnecessary and costly. Armed forces, yes, but any governing powers afe going to want to distance their looks away from the Palp regime. Later on we can have a Trooper-esque kind of forces again and being used by BOTH sides.

 

Would producing droidekas only be too expensive?

 

Would training only Navy SEALs be too expensive?

 

But come on, battle droids break when you blow at them!

I would definitely invest in droidekas instead of creating a trillion of metal (plastic?) eqivalents of bandaged old ladies!

 

How about an army of aliens? Then each trilogy would have a different type of enemy foot soldiers.

 

The moment you make more droidekas instead of B1 droids is the moment your enemy invests in guns to kill them, thus forcing you design a better droid, then build manufacturing plants, then sending them to the front line. All the while your previously all powerful Droidekas are victims of turkey shoots and you have no B1 or B2 battledroids to fall back on, Droidekas are calvery units who can't even climb stairs they clearly can't serve in an infantry role. If you want more powerful droids great, invest in B2 Superbattle droids but remember they cost dozens as times as much so now your giving up the attritional advantage. Also you should keep producing enough B1s for ship crew and cannon fodder for the B2s.

Why stop building countless panzer tanks just to make a few hundred tiger tanks... mistakes like that caused Germany to fall.

In a sense battle droids, from the economics side of warfare, are brilliant. So what if you lose 100,000 every battle, from their scraps you can likely rebuild 80,000 of them cheaply and have 200,000 more in the next months production batch. Remember race cars are designed to break so the vital spot survives, just do the same with the droids have them break just right to protect the expensive parts then slap some new legs on them. Your clone opponent on the other hand take 5 years to grow.

Further modify the old ones with cheap upgrades, like we do with military vechicles where say todays F-16 would slaughter four old gen F-16s. Its cheaper than building all new ones that had to be designed from scratch. Also remember the droids being defeated by being cut in half isn't like a real robot that would keep fighting, its just dramatics for the movies and show... don't take them falling apart so seriously. There are six year olds in the audience who find it funny.

Finally the Sepratists are only 10% of the galaxy that used to be in the Republic (so 1 to 9 odds in resources, infatstructure, and economics), so to them mass production is key or they'd simply be outflanked and overwhelmed. The B1 droids might have only been a poorly designed but cheap warfare droid but later once the Clone Wars broke out they servered an actual purpose and though individually weak and stupid they countered the Republics greatest advantage its sheer size and resources. Germany tried to out tech and over power Europe and America in WWII and kept falling back on more and more powerful limited number tech, but they simply got overstretched and overwhelmed time and time again. This isn't a video game (or Star Trek) where a single all powerful new unit saves the day, Star Wars in this aspect is far more real where numbers and how they are applied really matter. In Star Wars recources and economics matter, say in Star Trek they purposely ignore economics, infastructure, and resources (no economy for Starfleet, only a few resources matter due to replicators and it cuts build/repair times) since it'd break their utopia vision of the future and all they have left is uber tech and outwitting the enemy with pretty obvious moves. On this front I fear your viewing Star Wars not in aspects that matter to its verse but not so much to others. Or say where some random main cast crew member randomly on their own designs the perfect weapon counter to their problem and the enemies never counter it, where in Star Wars it takes massive teams to design stuff in the background but who are there.

 

While I'd rather avoid having masses of battle droids used as foot soldiers... I think one thing we haven't seen is the proper use of both organic soldiers and droids as a team. A droid could theoretically carry heavier weapons then a normal soldier... I mean just look at the Droideka. Imagine a team of soldiers using droids for fire support or the most dangerous missions. If you're breaching a door, that first guy through is inevitably the most likely to be killed - so send a droid.

The greatest problem the Separatist droid armies had was that most of their droids were cheap things made to to fight insurgents, terrorists, and conscripts. They didn't have individual initiative or the ability to react quickly to changing conditions.

A good army in Star Wars would have organic leaders operating at least as low as the squad level. I'd say having two organic soldiers directing the actions of four to eight droids would give us the best of both worlds.

 

Most of you do know that the reason George went with a Droid Army vs an organic army is because due to the large number of Jedi that would be in the PT, it would be impossible to get a PG rating having Jedi fight and organic army. The main weapon of choice for a Jedi is a lightsaber and there's no real PG way to have two armies fight if one sides main attack is slicing, stabling and decapitation. But using droids George skated that issue. You can slice up and decapitate a toaster and no one cares. But if they were real people, moms would be boycotting the film. YES there was a decapitation or two in the PT, also a couple arms (and legs). But imagine whole armies with limbs flying all over the place for half the movie. Yeah, that wouldn't work. Blasters are a little less graphic on screen: flash of light, small explosion and the guy falls over with a little smoke.

Good point. I like the idea of using both. This way Jedi can slice through droids, but there can still be organic on organic action.

 

Yes. Also, for reasons within the the story, mass producing battledroids was an easy way for Palpatine to start a war--and to make sure he WON the war. His new clone army was meant to easily dispose of the battledroids, and then become his own special guard after the smoke cleared to keep power over his new Empire. So, in a major way, the droids' purpose was already served. No one in the galaxy is likely to produce them again.

 

From a story aspect, this is definitely true.

Also the Clone Army had another convenient side effect for Sidious: since they age so quickly, the chances are once he gained control of the galaxy, the Clones would die of quickly leaving little to no one to turn on him! TCW started to flush this idea out. Some clones were already starting to challenge the Republic. If that type of dissent was allowed to grow and spread, Sidious was in jeopardy of being overthrown by his own clones.

 

An IG-88 type of droid as an individual enemy combatant would be welcome, I think. In fact, why not use Ralph McQuarrie's old IG-88 design for this new assassin/combat droid?



In fact, a droid that resembles the old IG-88 concept art is slated to appear in Rebels, named IG-RM.

 

The EU had a couple of droids based on that art:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Eliminator_434
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Uulshos_justice_droid