Star Wars AOTC question.

Cafe Society
1

I just saw AOTC and have a question for the SW junkies. Its not a spoiler so don’t worry.

Obi Wan kept on referring to his droid (the one that looked just like R2-D2) as R4. Why is that? I remember in Star Wars Luke asked his uncle “which one of these R2 units should I get” and he got the one with the cylindrical head. This lead me to beleive that the little droids that you can stick in the socket on top of your ship were all “R-2” units. So why wasn’t Obi Wans an “R-2”? The real R-2-D2 is in the movie, so I know they are called R2 units in this movie too.

Is there an explanation for this?

2

I always thought an R4 unit looked like this.

To confuse things, the “R2” unit that sacrificed his motivator to prevent R2 and Threepio from being separated was named R5-D4. (At least my Kenner[sup]tm[/sup] action figure of him was-- but Kenner tended to give the figures names that were just plain wrong.)

My take on it:
The obliging repair droid that Uncle Owen originally wanted to buy was really an R4e, and neither Kenner nor Luke could tell their astromechs from a hole-in-the-ground.

Or possibly the droids have different looking cases, but are named according to their abilities. Kit droids- you might find all sorts of combinations – Sorta like my P2 which is in an old XT case. :smiley:

3

The R4 unit didn’t look quite like those in your link, Larry Mudd , though this one was in a different light - and the R4 almost seemed part of the ship itself.

R2-D2 seemed to have some clever abilities (no spoilers here) I didn’t know about.

(C3PO had lots of goofy lines. I wonder if George Lucas was sorta saying to all the Jar-Jar Binks haters – hey, see! I created this BOT character who can be annoying too!)

4

There were R1’s, R2’s, R3’s, R4’s, R5’s, R6’s, etc. etc. etc.

It’s kinda like how a lot of modern cars look the same (compare a Camry to an Accord) but are quite different under the hood.

5

I know, but Luke seemed to generalize that the whole line up of “R series” units that the little guys were selling in star wars were all “R2” units. And I think that they referred to them all as R2 units when they were loading them into the fighter ships before attacking the Death Star.

6

The “prequel” trilogy takes place a full generation before the original trilogy. Surely there could have been a few different models of droids in the earlier time frame, right?