The Great Star Wars Logic Fault Problem, droids and cockpits

[adam_grif]

God, even the hopeless fucking battledroids who you jokers argue are so cheaply produced they don't even have the ability to shoot straight get shipped with the ability to speak basic. Right, they don't need to communicate with people speaking basic, except when they do, which all the time since everybody talks to astromech droids in basic. But they don't need to speak back since some people can understand their bleep bloop language? Hey, what'd be even better than that is if people didn't need to learn an extra language because they just synthesized basic with a text to speech program.

It's not like R2's bleeps are more efficient or some shit, 3po's translations usually take the same time or less as the bleeping did. But I'm sure someone will dig up some obscure EU reference about how the bleep bloop language is a hyper precise log-lan and his work would somehow be compromised by being able to communicate with normal people.

[Simon_Jester]

Nah, it's just silliness, and I think we all know it: a legacy of people whose ideas about computers came from the '60s and earlier, who didn't quite grasp the full implications of a programmable computer the size of a human brain.

About the only way Artoo's bleep-blooping would make any sense is if the droid wasn't designed to communicate with human beings at all, if this was simply not a factor in the design. Which doesn't seem true, so it's not a good argument.

To explore it a little further, though, because I just had another thought...

Look at the basic Trade Fed battledroids, look what they are and are not capable of. They're terrible in a fight with competent opposition, and anyone who knows modern infantry tactics could cut them to ribbons. Some of their support, the droidekas and the robotic tanks, are more capable and deadly, but the basic ground-pounder of the Trade Fed army is very bad infantry.

Does it make the slightest sense to send those things onto a battlefield, where they don't even have the sense to take cover? Hardly. So why do they have so many of the damn things?

And then it hits me. They're not robot soldiers. They're robot rent-a-cops. They're designed around a generalized chassis that's also used for noncombat roles (like the ones we see hauling ammunition in Episode III), given little or no extra armor plating and minimal weaponry... more like a rent-a-cop, and MUCH less like a dedicated kill-bot.

So perhaps the Episode I droids' original designed job is to stand around looking vaguely menacing, stop people from stealing office supplies, and dragging troublesome employees off the premises. They're actually pretty good for that purpose... but what does a rent-a-cop need? They don't need to be deadly marksmen or bulletproof, not really, but they do need to be able to communicate with pretty much anyone that might walk up to them.

Suddenly it makes more sense to give the droid a cheap-shit blaster and still bother with a speech synthesizer.

Remember that the Trade Federation's "army" was something of an improvised affair; the 'battleships' of the blockade fleet were converted merchantmen. And Naboo didn't have much of a military, either. So is it any wonder that the Trade Fed's attack on Naboo took the form of an unopposed landing with umpty million rent-a-cops?

They weren't expecting to face, they didn't face, much in the way of opposition. Not until the Gungans mobilized against them, and even then they were fighting people whose tactical concepts and equipment were so primitive that overwhelming them with a swarm of robot rent-a-cops was actually an option. Would've worked, too, if it hadn't been for that meddling kid.

...

Naturally, the first thing the Separatists in the runup to the Clone Wars should have done was redesign the battledroid into something that could actually fight; we saw some of these in Episode II. I'm not sure how thoroughly they'd replaced the 'basic' battledroid for front line duty in Episode III, though...

[DudeGuyMan]

Nah, it's just silliness, and I think we all know it: a legacy of people whose ideas about computers came from the '60s and earlier, who didn't quite grasp the full implications of a programmable computer the size of a human brain.

I wouldn't even go that hard on Lucas and friends. There were certainly enough talking droids around, so it's pretty apparent that they wanted R2 to be essentially mute for artistic reasons. Fair enough, and good enough for me as a movie viewer. As a viewer, I don't want R2-D2 to talk. He wouldn't be as cool if he did.

But at an internet nerd debater, don't try to bullshit me, either. (Not you, people in general.) Those droids are designed to be able to hear and interpret spoken Basic, and that alone pretty much annhilates any argument that they weren't meant to work in close proximity and communicate directly with humans.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. Like I said, it's a bad argument... but interestingly, we can find an excellent reason for the Trade Fed droids to have speech capability, and that reason also tells us other things about them (the whole rent-a-cop thing).

[adam_grif]

Suddenly it makes more sense to give the droid a cheap-shit blaster and still bother with a speech synthesizer.

I was actually expecting someone to say "they don't speak basic, the control computer does!"

There's nothing wrong with droid blasters (humans pick them up and use them just fine), they just seem to be incompetent at aiming. Since aiming a gun is a trivial computational task assuming you know where your targets are (and droids certainly seem to have no problems finding their targets, just hitting them), people have to make excuses for why they're such poor shots when the kind of robot we could build now would be terrifyingly accurate assuming it had the capability to identify humans on the same level that these droids do. So they say something like "oh, they're just so cheap that the droid limbs can't aim properly. The blaster is probably more expensive than the rest of the droid is!"

And that's a pretty weak argument. It's really weak because they would just be that much more effective if they cut down on their numbers a bit and used slightly more expensive robotics, because they would have slaughtered the Queen's guard and the Gungans and the Jedi. No matter which way you cut it the Trade Federation come off as big stupid idiots.

[Imperial528]

Well, to be frank, the Trade Federation wasn't even expecting to use them. The only time they had been used before was against weak pirates and the occasional smuggler, and it explicitly states in the Episode 1 visual dictionary that battle droids were primarily built for intimidation, since they were in-universe modeled after Nemodian skeletons. The visual dictionary states that because the droids can wield high-quality blasters, they were designed to be less accurate than a human. The cross sections even state that the paint on the MTTs and AATs was chipping because of how long it had just been sitting in a hangar not being used or maintained. I think it's obvious that they were hoping to win by numbers and intimidation, rather than strategic and tactical advantage, since that costs more.

[Formless]

What, are we still hung up on the "Stormtrooper academy of Marksmanship" effect, only applied to droids? Because you know that was always bullshit (real life soldiers have never had Rambo like accuracy), yet here we are still spewing it because "OMG, robots must be better at anything and everything humans do!" (rather than simply cost efficient).

[jollyreaper]

Disregard for the moment whether that output is broadcast visually or audibly, that shit is just a matter of format. Now every single starship computer in the goddamn universe needs to be it's own fully-functional droid translator just because astromech droids are supposedly programmed with some sadistic bizzare devious mental block where their extensive knowledge of what the words mean and how they're used is all magically denied to them when trying to express themselves.

Two explanations, as I said: 1) Droid union trying to make sure as many droids are on the payroll as possible. (they overlooked the bit about droids being property and not getting paid.) 2) The protocol droid manufacturers lobbied to keep the voice chips out of astromechs to increase demand for protocol droids.

[jollyreaper]

What, are we still hung up on the "Stormtrooper academy of Marksmanship" effect, only applied to droids? Because you know that was always bullshit (real life soldiers have never had Rambo like accuracy), yet here we are still spewing it because "OMG, robots must be better at anything and everything humans do!" (rather than simply cost efficient).

It's simpler than that. If the robots and stormies were good shots, these would be very short movies.

[Purple]

You all are forgetting that the droids were newer built to win the war, and neither were the clones. They were both made just to create a long and drawn out backdrop that Palpatine could manipulate.

So it is quite possible that the defects in terms of quality in the droids were purpose included to balance out their numerical superiority. And that Palpatine would have used force persuasion and some clever stuff about it being cheaper to make them in bulk than to make them good to push for it happening.

It is not like there are not precedents for that kind of logic in our world as well.

[Simon_Jester]

You all are forgetting that the droids were newer built to win the war, and neither were the clones. They were both made just to create a long and drawn out backdrop that Palpatine could manipulate.

No, that's not a good enough explanation. There are too many individual points at which Palpatine would have to interfere to make the battledroids shitty. He wouldn't just have to mind-trick a few Trade Fed executives; he'd have to do that to a significant fraction of all the engineering and production talent working on a galaxy-sized project.

It's one thing to use Palpatine's deliberate interference to explain things that happened during the Imperial period, when he was all-powerful and could make almost anything happen by giving an order. But in the pre-Clone Wars era, it's very hard to believe the notion that Palpatine could stop people from turning out effective battledroids, if they wanted to.

[Metahive]

The B1s aren't actually as incompetent as they're made out to be here. Watch the scene in TPM where Amidala's small squad assaults the palace, those droids defending it not only do take cover, they also manage to hold the line while being outnumbered. In Tartakovsky's Clone Wars series we even see them laying a halfway competent ambush on the ARC troopers on Muunilinst.

It isn't until the CG Clone Wars series that they degenerate into complete dolts only good for comic relief.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, all right.

What's problematic is that the droids are used for comic relief (to an extent) in the main movies: "Roger roger" sets the tone of our perception of Trade Fed battledroids very early on. They make a poor showing against Jedi, which isn't surprising... but they also make a poor showing against just about everything else. There aren't a lot of scenes that establish their competence, the way stormtroopers benefit from the assault on the Tantive IV or the "only Imperial stormtroopers have such accuracy" incident on Tatooine.

What strikes you about battledroids isn't that they're tough, it's that there are a lot of them. I may be overstating their buffoonery and incompetence (though I've actually never watched the TV series, either of them). But I still think there might be something to the notion that they were originally designed as cheap security for situations where you would at most expect low-intensity conflict, not as specialized killbots or heavy units for fighting pitched battles.

By the same token, one might expect that the droidekas are the high-end compliment to the low-end security droids: they are the heavy combat unit, though that does raise the question of why they weren't deployed against the Gungans at the end.

[Elheru Aran]

Droidekas were actually deployed in the Gungan battle. There's a bit where Jar Jar is stuck to a battle droid and trying to get it off, making it fire, and it accidentally hits a droideka under its shield or something. They were there, but they weren't as effective as they should've been...

[Wing Commander MAD]

I seem to recall some speculation that the average droideka did not possess shields. There was even a bit of supporting evidence in the Star Wars Age of Empires clone that had two versions of destroyers, one of which lacked shields. Mind you theres also a good chance that merely a gameplay thing. Still, the idea of your line infantry model lacking shields isn't all that crazy, while having them on the version used for guarding facilities. I'm sure the shield adds to maintenance complexity and also has other disadvantages such as causing greater power draw, and thus leading to shorter deployments. There is also the fact that your likely to have weapons heavy enough to render the shield useless on an open battlefield, while enemies are less likely to have heavy weapons aboard a ship or inside a facility.

[Themightytom]

Couldn't the apparently ineffectual design of droids be explained as a cultural imperative?

And... hasn't it, in other places on this site? I guess I don't understand how this thread got so far in the first place.

If you make droids TOO smart and TOO capable, they become difficult to control, or even a menace. ilet's not forget SW treats droids like slaves. Discrimiantion against them is not considered unusual, they are treated as property and refer to their owners as "master".

It doesn't seem like a good idea to start mass producing unkillable death machines in the assumption that nothing could ever go wrong with them, maybe there is just a deeply ingrained conservatism among the peoples off the SW galaxy that compels them not to give a droid too much control over anything.

The treatment of droids in star wars is by no means unusual in science fiction, look at Frank Herbert's "Dune" series which centers around a band on thinking machines (now that they retconned the shit out of anyway). look at Battlestar Galactica,old, OR new.

Astromech's can effectively coordinate repairs and plot hyperdrive courses right, and fit right into a socket on a fighter, that you could have just built them into saving all the space wasted on independent power supplies, wheels, rocket packs, little flowers that squirt water etc.

When they do make a droid star fighter they... suck. they completely lack initiative and have to be remote controlled from a control ship...managed by a crew. All of the artificial intelligence technology in SW seems intentionally compartmentalized so that you never have the self aware components capable of too much independence.

Protocol droids built anatomically similar to humans can't run particularly effective, appear to have limited dexterity and are designed with personalities (Admittedly based entirely on Threepio's) that are docile, lack initiative, and generally conducive to remaining subservient. While Threepio is capable of piloting Amidala's ship, do you think he's the temperament to hop in Luke's X Wing and run off with Artoo in it?

I don't there's any logic flaw in the way the droids are depicted, I think they are consistently portrayed as competent enough for service, but never enough to cause a problem for their owners. in fact there are frequent comments that a droid that is seemingly "too" independent gets its memory wiped.

[Metahive]

All that speculation went overboard once CG Clone Wars introduced the Tactical Droids, who are quite smart, rather full of themselves and even have the capability to betray their meatbag superiors if it suits them. They're also shown to be independently in command of large army and naval units from time to time. Of course, OOM-9, commander of the droid force on Naboo already gave hints in that direction.

[Simon_Jester]

Couldn't the apparently ineffectual design of droids be explained as a cultural imperative?

And... hasn't it, in other places on this site? I guess I don't understand how this thread got so far in the first place.

If you make droids TOO smart and TOO capable, they become difficult to control, or even a menace. ilet's not forget SW treats droids like slaves. Discrimiantion against them is not considered unusual, they are treated as property and refer to their owners as "master".

It doesn't seem like a good idea to start mass producing unkillable death machines in the assumption that nothing could ever go wrong with them, maybe there is just a deeply ingrained conservatism among the peoples off the SW galaxy that compels them not to give a droid too much control over anything.

What's seemingly problematic is that the droid soldiers as seen in the movies tend to make fools of themselves. It wouldn't be that difficult to design deadlier, more aggressive droids that are still well within the bounds of what can be controlled (by threatening to nuke them from orbit, if nothing else). In fact, the CIS later does exactly that, creating the "Super battledroid," which is basically what the Trade Fed battledroid should have been all along if it was designed to fight pitched battles.

However, the limited combat abilities of the droid make perfect sense if they are not designed to be war droids, or are a lightly "militarized" variant of a security guard design.

I don't there's any logic flaw in the way the droids are depicted, I think they are consistently portrayed as competent enough for service, but never enough to cause a problem for their owners. in fact there are frequent comments that a droid that is seemingly "too" independent gets its memory wiped.

Agreed.

All that speculation went overboard once CG Clone Wars introduced the Tactical Droids, who are quite smart, rather full of themselves and even have the capability to betray their meatbag superiors if it suits them. They're also shown to be independently in command of large army and naval units from time to time. Of course, OOM-9, commander of the droid force on Naboo already gave hints in that direction.

I'm not sure that speculation is overboard. After all, the CIS has every reason to investigate more advanced, autonomous droids. Their military relies very heavily on droids, and those droids being incompetent puts them at a great disadvantage.

So it's natural that over time, the CIS would cast off the culturally accepted restrictions on what droids "should" be capable of, designing them with ever-greater autonomy and competence, and accepting the marginally greater risk of rebellious droids as the price of producing units that can match the performance of the Republic's clonetrooper/Jedi elite forces.

[Metahive]

After all, the CIS has every reason to investigate more advanced, autonomous droids. Their military relies very heavily on droids, and those droids being incompetent puts them at a great disadvantage.

If it's just a lack of military commanders, they could have stuck to the OOM series of droids, who were already in production a decade before the CIS was founded. They didn't use tactics worse than that of an average Jedi general either and were 100% loyal.

So it's natural that over time, the CIS would cast off the culturally accepted restrictions on what droids "should" be capable of, designing them with ever-greater autonomy and competence, and accepting the marginally greater risk of rebellious droids as the price of producing units that can match the performance of the Republic's clonetrooper/Jedi elite forces.

First off, the T-Series serves purely as a command unit, they usually are not supposed to go toe to toe with enemy troops and whenever it happens in the show, they lose. To match the Jedi and Clones on the field, the CIS has deployed various combat droids who can give them pause, like the Commando Droid, the Magnaguard or the Droideka. It also doesn't explain why the T-Series is programed with a huge superiority complex and the capability of betraying its masters. Neither should be necessary if it's just an automatised leader they're after.

[jollyreaper]

The answer is very simple. Battle droids were ewoked. The ewoks in Jedi were originally going to be wookies. For whatever reason Lucas decided to change that. The rationale is that wookies couldn't be reconciled as tree-dwelling primitives after we've seen Chewie being a sophisticated wookie about town. The other one I could buy is wookies would be much more expensive and difficult to cast than midgets. But I think more likely is that killer teddy bears are more marketable than killer yetis.

[Simon_Jester]

A good point, Metahive. Again, not having seen the show, it's hard for me to know the details.

[Metahive]

I can only recommend this show for watching, it's pretty good and gives much food for thought on military matters during the CW era (I even made a thread about it some time back). You might want to skip any episode whose main topic is politics though, those tend to be utterly dreadful and boring.

[Simon_Jester]

Maybe.

I don't devote all that much time to watching SF media, and I've got 'classics' on my list ahead of the Clone Wars TV shows, but it is something to think about.