Droids make some sense in the original Star Wars trilogy, zero sense in the prequels

Cafe Society
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The reason why is pretty simple: In IV-VI, droids are used as information processors (C-3PO, R2D2), medical droids, and in a few other pretty limited capacities. Droid technology seems fairly expensive. They are everywhere, but at the same time a family like Luke’s doesn’t have a huge passel of droid servants. Jawas scavenge droids and droid parts and trade them because it’s worth the effort (i.e., droids are valuable).

Further, droids are rarely warriors, and when they are, it’s special. IG-88 the bounty hunter droid is one that comes to mind.

In I-III, Lucas of course lays on the stupid in every way possible, and the massive droid armies are one big example. But there are plenty others. There are the destroyer droids that are a match for Jedi, and the IG-100 Magnagard droids that are supposed to be fierce fighters but are derpy.

This brain-dead “ecosystem” completely cheapens the value and role of droids simply by the sheer number of them. But they are also stupid and shitty in every way possible. As warriors, they make the mooks going after James Bond look like fuckin’ Achilles. In the 21st century, our drone technology is already better than these shitters. How would a real droid army with strong AI and laser rifles behave? Well, I think the following is plausible:

• First and foremost, they would contain bombs and would not have to get very close to something to blow it the fuck away. This is already 21st drone tech. No finesse required.

• They’d have a bunch of sensors and perfect eyesight and misses with those rifles would be rare.

• They’d be fast as fuck. None of this tottering around like tinker toys. They’d be running around like lightning and annihilating everything.

• They’d have perfect communication with each (no derpy voices required!) and would instantly adapt to anything and everything on the battlefield, swarming like rats or retreating, hiding, and sniping like guerrillas. With their advanced AI, they’d immediately understand the limited battle tactics of meat soldiers and react efficiently.

• They’d use their droid-ness and disposability to their advantage. They have no fear, so they’d use suicide tactics regularly. And why not just douse the battlefield in poison gas? Who needs lungs?

When you remember the prequels (as painful as that may be), do you remember the battle droids doing anything? They are just standing there getting blown away. In reality, they’d shred anything organic in their path. Jedi? Don’t care if you can cause laser bolts to go bouncy-boo off your lightsword. These guys would shower you with fire in a solid sphere around your body, and you’d be dead (in Episode III, Obi-Wan and Anus-kin have to retreat from destroyers, which at last is a bit of realism with respect to this tech).

I know no one is going to want to defend anything about the prequels, but there you go. I think the use of droids is one of the dimmest and dumbest things in those crap-a-ronis.

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Wait - are you saying that The Phantom Menace wasn’t a good movie!?

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I would consider it one of the most elaborately bad movies of all time.

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"When I said “deadly neurotoxin,” the “deadly” was in massive sarcasm quotes. I could take a bath in this stuff. Put it on cereal, rub it right into my eyes. Honestly, it’s not deadly at all… to me. You, on the other hand, are going to find its deadliness… a lot less funny. "

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They also wouldn’t all be controlled by a single ship, so that if that gets blown up, all droids shut down. Or if they were, nobody would park that ship right in the battle zone. They do have FTL communication after all. Also, why build vehicles that the droids have to climb into? Why not just give the tanks their own brains? etc. pp.

But of course, the bottom line is: they needed enemy combatants that can be destroyed in mass without any ethical qualms (although of course, those robots seemed to be sentient, if dumb, so even that didn’t work out). Also, they needed a convenient off-switch, so that a massively overpowered army could nevertheless score a victory (there would certainly have been other ways to do that, but those would have required, you know, thought and careful plotting). So they simply went with the first lazy option they could think of—a decision-making pattern that apparently worked very well, considering how ardently they continued to stick to it.

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Right. And they actually did gas Obi-Wan and Anus-chin at the beginning of Ep. III, but they held their breath! Umm, just keep doing stuff like that until they’re actually dead?!

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Actually, midichlorians can synthesize oxygen from force energy. You know, like photosynthesis, but stupid.

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Roger roger!

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Yeah, it’s not like there’s some 1960s IBM mainframe filling the entire ship needed to provide the AI. Even if some type of central cloud processing were needed, you’d deploy multiple redundant units. And the battle droids seem to have individual computers, anyway.

Yeah, it’s all very dumbly anthropomorphic. Which is, again, a step back from the original trilogy, where you have droids like R2D2 that are not humanoid and not even communicating in English.

Yes, it’s all extremely childish. The whole fantasy of robots in sci-fi is that they have abilities and natures unlike ours. When you make them simply depowered human mooks, that fantasy factor goes right down the john. Or the george, in this case.

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Lucas did the robot thing very well in THX-1138 and with a budget that was probably a billionth of Phantom Mook’s.

I’m not sure what kind of stupid pills this guy had to take or for how long to even be able to make the prequels.

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I’m reminded of Iain M. Banks’s The Culture series of books. In that setting, “Drones” meet many of the criteria laid out in the OP. There’s a kind of mechanized weapon called a knife missile that just kind of flits around and cuts people up (at a rate of several people per second); it makes it hard/impossible for the author to put several characters in actual danger.

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“Awright, we’re looking for volunteers to suit up and go out on the wing to repair the hyperdrive in the middle of a spacefight. Any volunteers?”

crickets crickets crickets

“Okay, we got any droids we don’t like much?”

Seems like a perfectly reasonable use for droids, except for that whole “sentience” thing.

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Yeah, in reality, they would have specialized droids for that–and for everything else, granted the level of technology one sees in the prequels.

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You have a couple of good ideas and a lot of terrible ideas.

If you are building a drone to shoot things and with no other purpose you would build something like a UAV - something that does not have legs or hands, and is pretty much a gun or missile rack, a propulsion system, a computer brain and some sensors. But the Separatists don’t need a killbot, they need an occupation force. So these worlds which haven’t fought a war in generations don’t build a killbot, they go with what they know: bipedal robots with hands and heads and not just turrets on tracks.

You are correct that they wouldn’t need to speak to communicate among themselves, but there is nothing about AI that inherently means it has to be better at military tactics than a human, especially when it has been developed by someone who doesn’t know enough about military tactics to tell if they did a good job.

The droids don’t get to call the shots, and even if they did that is a terrible idea both strategically and tactically. Strategically, it undermines the Separatists by making them the bad guys who used chemical weapons to attack either a peaceful planet they were blockading or on their own planets. Tactically, neither Jedi nor clonetroopers in sealed armour nor starfighters are especially vulnerable to poison gas at the best of times.

Why not? If the Separatists in charge of the Naboo blockade are killed, why should they care if the droids remain active or not? And if it’s their first time building AI that does not follow Asimov’s First Law, building a killswitch into the design as a failsafe isn’t a bad idea if the only way it can be incorrectly triggered is if the mission is already a complete failure.

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Eh. I mean, it wasn’t great, but it was no Star Trek Into Darkness. That is a movie I spent shouting at the screen.

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And you had a couple good compliments and a lot of terrible critiques!

They’re sending the droids into battle, and the droids lose for stupid reasons. So they should have made the droids more effective through the simple ideas I provided.

Sure, but they could at least run around and, you know, aim.

It was just an example. Hand grenades… how about that?

The mission wouldn’t necessarily be a failure if all the robots didn’t go awl-fawl-down.

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Shouting at the screen is the path the Dark Side. Hence… the title of the movie?!

Yeah, that looked terrible.

There was a recent thread on whether TPM was the worst movie of all time, and of course it wasn’t. That’s why I described the prequels as “elaborately bad.” They are not cheap 80s sex comedy not trying too hard where’s Bill Murray when you need him?-level bad. They are high-voltagely gifted-and-talentedly the bigger you are the harder you fall-type bad. And I think it goes beyond the high expectations there were for them, though that certainly didn’t help.

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I thought the idea of the losing side of The Clone Wars using Droids kind of made sense because it didn’t make sense in the original trilogy that the Empire didn’t have Droid armies if droid technology was as it was shown (although when we were kids there were tons of arguments because many kids thought Stormtroopers were droids) but the fact that the loser of a relatively recent Galactic war had used them explains why they would be soured on the idea.

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IMHO, no one should expect the SW movies to be any more plausible than the Buck Gordon serials and shitty 50s science fiction movies to which they’re an homage.