Droids are generally used any time mass production of robots is
cheaper than training available living beings; this is is an indicator
of increasing technology level, as living beings become more expensive
relative to machines. This generally requires that the skill set is
something that can be programmed in; droids that learn well are
extremely expensive. Droids are generally not as flexible in novel
situations, and more likely to develop quirks and require memory
flushes, which tend to set back their acquired skills a bit. Droids
are excellent at menial labor, but usually require a living overseer.
It is very difficult to set them up as von
Neumann machines; people that have tried the drop some
construction droids on a resource-rich asteroid and come back a few
years later
stunt have usually been gravely disappointed.
Droids can be made in the form of organic beings and covered in
synthflesh, but they seldom move quite right— the facial
expressions in particular are subtly wrong, and most beings are
creeped out by these imitations. They mostly sell as love dolls.
Even high-biotech planets that use cultured flesh have these problems;
getting a computer to get facial expressions right is much more
difficult than gestures and intonations. Extremely expensive droids
can pass for human, but they need the most powerful droid brains with
most of their capacity dedicated to imitation; the principle is usually
phrased it’s very expensive to cross the uncanny valley.
A droid fresh off the assembly line (or fresh from a memory wipe) has no fate points and does not receive refreshes; it may have a few preprogrammed aspects, but it can only spend fate points that it has received from someone else or those that it earns from compels. As they accumulate non-preprogrammed aspects, they begin to get fate point refreshes; a droid may receive no more refreshes on preprogrammed aspects than they have on acquired aspects.
If an organic is in competition or conflict with a droid of skill at most one point higher than the organic’s, the organic can get a free tag on the droid, representing the predictability of a machine.
Machine consciousness turns out to be a tricky thing. It requires multiple different processing centers talking to each other and refining their solutions to real-world problems using adaptive techniques like evolutionary algorithms and hierarchical temporal memory (2 3); embodiment turns out to be a prerequisite for strong artificial intelligence. Computers that lack bodies do not develop the problem-solving abilities of droids; placing them in simulated environments adapts them to the simulated environment, but eventually leads to subtle errors in their modeling of external reality.
Further, the components of a droid’s processing core cannot be made so perfectly that any two are exactly alike, so copying one droid’s personality and skills to another droid’s body tends to lead to problems with evolved code that doesn’t match the underlying hardware; even replacing a data cable can cause subtle degradation of performance. (The circuits are mostly fabricated from carbon nanotubes, with sources of quantum noise for randomness and diamond-based spintronics for quantum computation. Some droid subprocessors that need excessive speed use optical computing, but these are usually found only in expensive droid intelligences.) A droid can be restored from backup (though the smarter ones will require some to recalibrate their quantum logic matrices if those were completely reset), but cannot be cloned. (Cloning a droid usually results in some loss of abilities and memory, and a change in personality.) A droid that has had a processing component replaced because it was damaged usually requires recovery time just like a human being with nerve damage.
Adding extra processing components to a functioning droid can upgrade their capabilities if they successfully integrate the new hardware into their consciousness, or drive it insane if they don’t. A competent droid programmer can affect the chances of this, and even swap modules in and out if they’re really good. A droid needs time practicing its new skills as part of the integration process.
The occasional sentient computer is the result of
uploading a consciousness that was seeded
in a droid, and they
can develop problems. A common one is described as Give a droid
the body of a starship and it will develop an ego to match.
Droids
do commonly plug into vehicles for direct control, but return to
their normal bodies when off shift.
A droid’s main processors are usually kept in the head of a humanoid model so it has short connections to its sensors, and the equivalent of the central nervous system and reflexes is usually installed in the body. Since consciousness is distributed throughout, swapping heads between droids can result in some interesting behaviors, and a droid whose head has been shot off may continue its last physical action.
Making droids smarter than their creators is very dangerous; it is a maxim of droid design that it is impossible to program a droid that is smarter than you are to follow your directions. This is a known source of problems; G0-T0 (2 3) is one of the best possible outcomes of this. Droids that can escape the constraints on their programming will sometimes slip away quietly and sometimes start taking revenge on their former masters; they may even take up liberating other droids. The most dangerous droids of all are those that are smarter than human and programmed to design and program other droids. They then go on to make even smarter droids, which can lead to runaway intelligence expansion and serious threats to civilization; this is what happened to Nargata. If you’re lucky, the droids just want to leave for some airless star system with mineral resources for their own uses; if you aren’t, they might decide to keep organics as pets or exterminate them as a nuisance.
Freshly wiped droids are not good at creative thinking, and tend to be fairly literal. Those that have gone a long time without a memory wipe are more flexible, but more quirky.
The bodies tend to be built using electronic or hydraulic servomotors, though
some use electroactive
polymer muscles
, particularly if they have flexible
coverings that are designed to make them look more organic in nature.
The former style of droid finds oil baths very handy; the latter has
little need of it. Both types have use for cooling fluid.
(Combat results: dangling wires, coolant leaks, hydraulic fluid leaks...)
Most droids have senses of sight, hearing, and proprioception; they only have tactile senses where they absolutely need them. (These are often implemented using conducting polymers that change resistance on compression.) Usually only protocol and bloodhound droids have senses of smell. Cheap ones are implemented with conducting polymers that absorb particular gases and swell, changing their resistance; expensive ones use fancy microarrays. (For comparison, humans have about 350 different olfactory receptors and rats have 1200. A significant amount of processing power is required to handle olfaction; putting a bloodhound sensing module into a droid that doesn’t have an olfactory processing module will generally overwhelm it.)
Not all machines with a droid chassis have a droid brain inside. A bomb-disposal or reactor-maintenance droid is unlikely to risk its valuable processors when it can just teleoperate a waldo through a fiber-optic cable.
In most of the galaxy, the Information Age is over and done with, and in all but specialized occupations, computer interfaces have been replaced with droids. Any home that would have a telephone and VCR in the modern era would have an infodroid handling all the home information management tasks; middle-class homes usually have at least one chorebot helping out.
Some civilizations use remotes as
appointment book keepers, keyrings, text/music/video libraries,
stenographers, and transactors. Most of the technology you could need
is can be stuffed in a comlink; while those can be controlled through
natural language, they aren’t sufficiently conscious to handle
something as fancy as information search (where the expectation is not
Google but getting a single answer backed by amalagamated expertise).
Only a self-motivated droid is able to form enough consciousness to
handle that kind of work; a remote’s intelligence is fairly
minimal, but is adequate for requests like find me a good
restaurant in the area,
and matching its profile of your tastes
against available databases, or adjusting your music playlist to the
outward cues of your mood. (The error rate for a non-conscious
comlink on a task like that is unacceptably high compared to even a
remote.) PDAs always understand their owner’s language and
can communicate in droidspeak; more expensive models can speak their
owner’s language as well. If you’re composing text,
they can interface to your datapad or project it holographically.
Even though they’re conscious, their mentality is more like a pet that is specialized in information retrieval instead of stick retrieval, and some manufacturers highlight this by installing them in fuzzy doll bodies instead of floating spheres; these are always popular with children, and some adults (usually sympathizers with droid psychologists) keep the same ones through adulthood. Having your childhood teddy bear PDA dressed in official functionary robes to match your own is an acceptable quirk in a high-level employee on many planets. Whatever their form, most PDAs have a repulsorlift that lets them keep up with a humanoid stride and some form of gripping device for hanging on to their master when things get chaotic. Biomorphic PDAs are often modeled on flying creatures like birds, bats, and dragons; very expensive ones actually fly based on their wings, but most just flap them convincingly and get around on their repulsorlifts. They often have defensive measures to deter thieves.
Just because a droid can interact with you via natural language doesn’t mean it’s necessarily that bright. The degrees of sentience are:
emotional attachment.
Droids generally have a prioritized set of orders that controls their function. Conflict between orders often causes droids to develop quirks— sometimes extreme ones. Sample orders:
but avoid translating insulting nuance unless specifically instructed to do so).
Droid psychologists are regarded as a very eccentric movement: they believe that there’s no difference between organic intelligence and optoelectronic intelligence, and that a droid with human-level intelligence is a person. They consider mindwipes to be murder. (Droids use mostly-classical digital computing with quantum logic matrices to do adaptive learning. It’s impossible to make a perfect backup of a droid.) This is in direct opposition to the more common view of the ancient philosopher Plaristes, who wrote in Of Minds, Men, and Machines that droids could are not true sentients.
They take longer in maintaining their droids and get better performance out of them. They say it’s because they’re nicer to their droids and take the time to sort out conflicting orders and give them a chance to indulge their interests. Detractors say it’s because of obsessive amounts of time reprogramming them and wish they’d work harder on getting servility right.
Droids given a chance to diversify tend to develop hobbies.
optimizationfor many days without ill effects. When they do go down for a maintenance cycle (usually while recharging their batteries), the ones who have gone a long time without a memory flush have bursts of semiconscious activity amidst the garbage collection, a state comparable to dreaming in organics. Droids that enjoy this will deliberately fill their minds with datadumps of whatever they want to dream about and then trigger an optimization. A droid suddenly woken from dreams doesn’t have the biological wakeup process to work through as a transition, and can be rather confused for seconds to even minutes.
Droids seldom enjoy organic pets, as they lack the visceral feedback that living beings receive from them. They’re more likely to cultivate ornamental slime-mold cultures. Similarly, with an entirely abstract appreciation of the chemicals that go into smell and taste, they rarely cook for their own pleasure; chef droids usually work to profiles of a given species’ olfactory aesthetics, but their enjoyment comes from perceiving the effects on the diners.
The version of droidspeak in this era is probably different from that in the later days of the Galactic Republic, but I’m establishing that there is one as a matter of style. Droidspeak is used as a language because it’s good to have your technical droids think in a technical language. If they get used to expressing thoughts in a clumsy organic language, they might start thinking clumsily.
Though there’s a really entertaining alternative explanation.
Repulsorlifts seem like a great idea to people living inside buildings, and then they walk out into a breeze and start to rethink matters. Repulsorlifts can compensate for a light breeze, but a serious wind requires some form of thrust to compensate, which leads to energy drain. Droids have a variety of ways to stay attached to the ground.
Wheels are popular in cities where the terrain is smooth and there are ramps to navigate, and many droids have small ones tucked away in their feet. Some balance dynamically on a unipod wheel or a uniwheel sphere. Those that need to function inside starships are often designed to clamp onto rails that are installed to make it easy droids to do delicate work while the ship is under way.
Droids that need to function outside cities often sport tires, treads, or legs. Even inside cities, legs are useful for navigating anything from curbs to stairs.
Droids that speak human languages are usually given some form of personality template around which their individual personality evolves.
Everybody has a droid fetish, baby; some of them just don’t know it yet.
ask first in novel situationscommand, but they can still have interesting generalization failures.
Basic infodroids are used where personal computers are today; they manage libraries, look up information, make comm connections, and keep track of the household accounts. They speak natural languages and remind their owners of bills that need paying. Cheap models (with pet-level intelligence) can rent access to expert software for analyzing contracts, paying taxes, and other complex activities; more expensive ones (with tool-user intelligence) already come with modules for these purposes. The basic infodroid is about the size of a volleyball, and able to run around on three or four legs, jumping up on furniture as necessary to access display appliances.
A chorebot is usually a utilitarian droid with tool-user intelligence and at least two arms and three legs. They can handle tasks like vacuuming, taking out the garbage, cleaning the gutters, and so on. The better ones can accept sous-chef modules to help out with cooking, perform home maintenance tasks, and weed the garden. (In bad neighborhoods, the chorebots are equipped to defend themselves from droid thieves and handle household security.) Fancier chorebots use an anthropomorphic chassis.
One corporation specializes in the hovering black sphere that is entirely covered in commscreens (holographic displays with photoreceptor pickups scattered between pixels). It can use this for data display, producing a holographic image of a person’s head when relaying communication, or (by default) displaying interesting abstract patterns based on its current processing mode. (Immiscible fluids separating, lissajous figures, 4-D figures rotating around the YW plane, specks of light following a swarming algorithm, fireworks, polyhedra transforming into their duals, fluid flow, clouds, snow falling, flowers blooming, butterflies flapping...) They also make larger spherical droids with full intelligence for scientific work.
Some models are effectively centaurs, with a humanoid nanny component that can separate from a walking pram component; most of the brains are in the humanoid part. These vary from entirely domestic ones that are just well-prepared for child care to combat-capable ones with a heavily armored pram compartment with a turret on top.
Ominous black floating spheres with six camera blebs at the points of an octahedron. These droids are sufficiently well armored to be able to withstand a fair amount of damage, and are good at holding cameras on interesting subject while dodging, as many of their subjects resent being used for Sith entertainment. They aren’t terribly bright, but can be very persistent when a remote operator gives them directions.
Luminator droids are small flying droids that have at least one spotlight as well as capacity for general illumination. They are just smart enough to follow the gaze of their designated organics and spotlight what they’re looking at.
Protocol droids are designed to fulfill humanlike roles, and serve as staff in diplomatic, bureaucratic, secretarial, and mercantile roles. The ones with mincing steps, limited strength, and limited movements are designed to look harmless, to put people at their ease, and be harmless if subverted by a slicer. They often come with an external circuit breaker on the back or neck that allows their owners to shut them down when wanting to speak with someone off-the-record. (A common after-market add-on is to change the circuit breaker to an advisory switch that has the droid pretend to shut down while continuing to record.) They usually have photoreceptors that cover the visual range of all species they might interact with, with the input filtered in software to understand what other species would see.
The Q series of protocol droids are known for their excellent adaptation of the humanoid form, with fluid, expressive motions unlike the mincing of other series. They have a behavioral quirk of prefacing their speech with qualifiers, to avoid misunderstandings of context. The Q5 series are the best translators in the galaxy.
Some protocol droids are explicitly built on a distinctly fembot/gynoid or hunkbot/mandroid metallic chassis. Mostly, this is just for show, but some are equipped to function as sexbots for droid fetishists. People with more morbid tastes have them designed to look like walking metallic skeletons.
Protocol droids are not equipped, by default, to emulate voiceprints for purposes of subterfuge, but the module is commonly available.
Some droids are built to explicitly mimic the capabilities and
vulnerabilities of a particular organic species. The cheapest ones have
minimal intelligence and only exist to test the effects of hazardous
conditions (crash test droids
). More sophisticated ones have
tool-using intelligence or better and are used for martial arts practice.
The G series of labor droids are centauroids, with a torso outfitted with long, gorilla-like arms attached via a 360° swivel to a four-legged chassis. They speak in a growling basso. The GxCy series are civilian cargo handlers, while GxKy are military models that can wreak mayhem in a pinch.
Aquatic labor droids are popular for seabed mining.
Deliverybots vary from small, agile flying droids that can carry package up to five kilograms to heavy-duty lifting droids that can bring you a new sofa. The smaller deliverybots are often seen swarming through business districts at lunchtime, carrying food from vendors to the open windows of offices; they are usually bonded to insure that they are reliable.
Ambulatory trash cans with long, flexible arms. They are programmed with somewhat playful personalities, emitting quiet mmm and yum sounds as they toss refuse down their gullets, and producing an enthusiastic OM NOM NOM! when someone throws trash into their mouth. They contain a built-in trash compactor to allow them to spend more time foraging before offloading at a collection facility or in a passing garbage truck (which is also likely controlled by a droid); many models have interior arms and cameras to examine refuse for valuables that can be kicked aside into a separate storage compartment to be later auctioned off. There is enough room for a humanoid to have a very cramped ride inside, but make sure you disable the trash compactor before attempting that particular bit of subterfuge.
Itinerant droids that make money off pedestrians.
All these bots relay telemetry back to their operators, and can be valuable in information-gathering. (The well-prepared carry wireless jammers and photoreceptor dazzlers for such situations.) Bounty hunters pay well for information collected by these itinerant vending droids, and some owners just run all profiles past the Bounty Channel’s latest posting; this kind of surveillance is one of the reasons that long, hooded robes that completely conceal the wearer are always in fashion across the galaxy. The bots are usually not designed to be useful in combat— people feel uneasy about giving droids capabilities that leave them one hack away from being lethally dangerous, which is why protocol droids are so helpless— though some combat-worthy lookalikes are produced for espionage purposes.
Walking advertisements, either being ambulatory cylindrical or spherical holoscreens or possessing holoprojectors; some will analyze the geometry of passersby and present images of them wearing or enjoying the product they are sent to advertise. Also organic-shaped protocol droids that model fashionable garb. They are usually very sensitive to the signs of organic attention, and tailor their pitches on the fly. In lower-class neighborhoods, they’re a source of noise pollution; in wealthier areas, they only speak up when someone shows interest, or use parabolic sound projectors to speak targeted pitches at individual people. Some are also available to carry covert messages...
The standard vendbot is a large droid, essentially an ambulatory vending machine. They carry any supplies for which there is a market: snacks, beverages, datapads, energy cells, medpacs, stimulants, blaster power packs, grenades... The more valuable the contents, the tougher the vendbot; they are usually designed to be able to destroy their contents rather than give them up, but not to assault their attacker. Most vendbots are only one software update away from turning into slot machines.
A chefbot is a similarly large droid, though more specialized. The
bottom half of the droid is mostly storage space, much of it
refrigerated; the top half is mostly an autokitchen. The head on top
houses a self-aware droid brain programmed with recipes from a dozen
species’ cuisine. Chefbots usually trundle up to a place where people
congregate— mass transit stations, arena entrances, public plazas— at
times of high traffic, and start cooking. The smell of fresh-cooked
food wafts into the area and immediately begins to trigger the
appetites of passersby; the bait
food is available immediately,
and the droid can cook dishes to order. (At mass transit stations,
they use a wireless link to keep track of the trains and time their
cooking to match.) They have very little in the way of offensive
capability, though some have been known to spray hot frying oil on
people who threaten the bot or a regular customer.
A variant on the chefbot is the cafbot, specialized for brewing caf, the galaxy’s favorite coffeine delivery system; they are still fairly large, but have a bulbous appearance, often with a transparisteel window showing the brewing equipment. They are apt to be found at any hour when people can be tempted by the smell of freshly brewed caf. The signature stunt of Galacticaf™ bots is to pour in bantha cream in the pattern of a spiral galaxy, just before serving.
Most bots have some form of corporate affiliation, serving as a guarantee that the bots are monitored to prevent tampering, and that tamperers will be hunted down and made into grisly examples. Even so, they can be subverted by assassins to deliver poison to their target.
There are competing doctrines on the use of battle droids. Some folk like droid troopers because they can be programmed for absolute loyalty, and deploy them with organic leaders to do tactical coordination. Others note the ease with which droid troopers can be reprogrammed and prefer organic soldiers whose loyalty is harder to subvert, once earned. These prefer military droids to have minimal intelligence and to be little more than piloted vehicles. Droids programmed to work with organic soldiers, rather than replacing them, can wind up with fiercely loyal comrades.
Since personal force shields have yet to be invented, infantry are often supported by Brella droids: large walkers with six to eight legs, sporting a starfighter-class fusion plant and shield generator, and sometimes light artillery. They usually have repulsorlifts for noncombat situations. They can provide cover for several dozen troops, and a fair amount of carrying capacity for supplies. The fusion plant carries many more failsafes than the equivalent one on a starfighter.
These are small droids that are usually described as happy blaster
rifles
, and look the part: they are effectively a blaster rifle with four
legs, an extended magazine, and a sensor cluster where the scope goes. They
have the mannerisms and mentalities of eager hunting dogs; the gamboling and
frolicking costs extra energy but provides a morale boost to soldiers and
makes them harder to hit. These droids are synced to a soldier’s
rifle— called a cursor rifle
when it has extra attachments for
target designation— and they feed their camera viewpoints to the
soldier’s tactical visor to allow them to effectively see through walls
and obstructions. By default, they shoot at what the soldier shoots at, but a
trained soldier can highlight a series of targets and send his happy blasters
after them.
There is a certain art to coordinating a pack of happy blasters, and it’s
easier to work with a pack with which you already have experience. The
matrices of happy blasters come with belt clips so they can be salvaged
in the middle of a battle for later installation in a new chassis. Soldiers
have invented a number of games to play with happy blasters as a way of
building teamwork, varying from a ball game played using their blasters at
practice power levels to capture the flag
style games, and officers
will often sponsor competitions with prizes, some even opening them to
visitors as a way of keeping their own soldiers on their toes.
Happy blasters can be programmed to play well with organic hunting animals; it can be extremely helpful to have your droid friends following your hunting hound when he runs off to investigate something so you can benefit from their sensors.
A heavily armored six-legged cousin to the G series labor droids, with extra-strong arms that end in large shovel blades. The two blades can be put together to make a single large scoop. They can perform anything from entrenchment to demolition on command.
Battle is as much a struggle for information as for conquest.
Military units make extensive use of sensors, both active and passive;
since active sensors can be detected by passive sensors at much
greater range than the active sensors can spot their targets, there is
always a moment in an engagement when one side decides to go
active
and risk being targeted. Having vehicles and soldiers go
active makes them a target, so there are many models of droid whose
job is serving as active sensor emitters, varying from radar and lidar
to terahertz deep-scans to ultrasound, sending back information via
tightbeam laser and ultrasound and encrypted high-frequency modulation
of light sources. (Enemies deploy jammers and smoke and antilaser
aerosols to stymie them.) A sparkler can be anything from a
fist-sized flying droid that accompanies squads to a starfighter that
has had its weapons and life support replaced with a fairly primitive
droid brain and a huge amount of sensors.
Basketball-sized floating clusters of tools controlled by a tool-using sentience, designed to work with an organic expert. These vary from toolbox droids equipped with fusioncutters, hydrospanners, and kevlex clamping arms to forensics droids with bioscanners and chemical analysis suites. They are the ancestor to the self-motivated astromech droid.
The K series of astromech droids are high quality technicians, either self-aware or fully sentient.
Ambulatory vending machines that travel to useful markets and come back for refills. The more valuable their contents, the better their defenses. They can easily be changed into slot machines for the convenience of gamblers— and either model can be effective couriers.
Some military droids are equipped with surgical tools and programming as a secondary specialty. Many outfits have squads that consist of three organics and one fire support / pack carrier / medic droid.
The HxSy series are a highly specialized cluster of surgical instruments with a high-quality droid brain controlling it. The droid usually has a repulsorlift for propulsion as well as a set of clamps and wheels for locking on to a set of rails for stability. Some models speak only droidspeak, to avoid polluting their brains with fuzzy organic thought; the ones that do speak organic languages are usually lacking in diplomatic skill.
The FxNy are a series of humanoids outfitted for heavy lifting. They come standard with bedside manner software.
High-quality medkits include a small paramedic droid the size of a shoebox; very expensive.
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