The Depressing Reality Behind Why the B1's Talked SO MUCH in the Clone Wars [Not What You Think!]

Everyone loves B1 battle droids and if you don't, you're wrong. Especially in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, they are quite endearing killer robots, known among fans for their tremendous stupidity and numerous funny moments. But if you spend enough time watching clips of the B1's antics, you start to wonder why the separatists made them talk so

much

.   In The Clone Wars, battle droids never shut up, and sometimes their antics directly hinder their performance in combat. It just doesn't seem appropriate that mass-produced cannon fodder droids would be given such a personality, so

what

gives?  In this video, we will answer that question.

As most of you probably know, the original B1 battle droids were not capable of independent thought. While their OOM-series commanders had limited capability for higher functions, standard B1s relied on external central control computers to function, usually housed aboard Lucrehulk-class droid control ships in orbit.  This was at the behest of the Trade Federation, which ordered the droids from Baktoid Combat Automata, and was partly a cost-cutting measure and partly a strategic choice. Obviously, the Trade Federation's notoriously stingy Neimoidian leaders were looking to save money by not paying for their units to have full droid brains, but beyond that, there was actually a pretty decent justification for relying on a mainframe.

For one thing, even if the Trade Federation decided to pay for fully independent droids from the start, they would still have been less intelligent and especially less creative than organic soldiers. This is because battle droids in particular required extensive programming restrictions to limit the risk of them going rogue, which necessarily inhibited creativity, intuition, and many other things that were essential on the battlefield but entailed the risk of rebellion. You only have to look at HK-47 and its progeny to understand

what

we mean. When it came to battle droids, most of the time you had to choose between intelligence and obedience;

Striking a balance between the two was prohibitively expensive for an army. So the Trade Federation didn't bother with any of that. Instead, they essentially commissioned lobotomized droids that could be collectively micromanaged by a supercomputer.   This had the added benefit of greatly improving the droids' coordination.   Since all first-generation B1s were centrally controlled, they worked together seamlessly and, on the battlefield, were more coordinated than was physically possible for any non-Force-sensitive organic army. It was essentially an artificial form of Jedi battle meditation, a rare Force technique that allowed individual Jedi to change the tide of entire battles. Of course, as we all know, the central control model had one pretty major drawback: destroying the central control computer shut down the entire droid army.   The Trade Federation learned this the hard way during the Battle of Naboo, and when they began expanding their B1 armies as part of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, they decided to move away from the central control model to avoid having a second fiasco on Naboo. .

During the Separatist Crisis, Baktoid revised their designs for the B1 battle droids, giving them proper droid brains along with their CCC transceivers. These droid brains were as cheap and basic as possible, but still allowed the B1s to operate independently of a central control computer when necessary.  Most of the time, the Confederacy still used Central Control Computers to manage their troops and improve coordination, but modernization meant that destroying a droid army's Droid Control Ship would not force the entire army to shut down. Giving the B1s independent

think

ing also had another benefit: it allowed the Confederacy to program the B1s for a wider variety of roles.   Central control computers relied primarily on algorithms and data scanned from organic armies to program the droids under their command, making it difficult to modify droids for specialized functions.   However, with the advent of independent

think

ing modules, Separatists could simply download new skill sets into their B1s as they placed them, making their droids

much

more versatile.

Ever stingy, the Separatist Council took advantage of this new versatility to avoid commissioning new droid models for every small task. Instead, they simply had their commanders program the B1s to perform whatever task they needed. As such, during the Clone Wars, B1s became pilots, gunners, firefighters, scouts, janitors, and orderlies, as well as soldiers.   The CIS Navy especially abused this capability, compensating for the constant organic crew shortage by manning many of its

wars

hips exclusively with modernized B1s. This, plus the extensive automation seen aboard some of the Separatists' cheaper classes of

wars

hips, such as the Munificent-class Frigate and the Recusant-class Light Destroyer, meant that the CIS Navy could field entire fleets of ships that They were essentially disposable.

Of course, just because the Separatists could program the B1s to perform new functions didn't mean the droids were good at them. B1 gunners were known for being terrible marksmen, B1 firefighters were ruthlessly incompetent, and B1 pilots were no match for their organic counterparts. Part of the reason for this was that constant upgrades pushed the B1s to the limits of their processing power. Their already overloaded droid brains were completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they had to handle, and this impaired the B1's performance not only in their new roles but across the board.

To make matters worse, the Separatists discovered early in the war that two key parts of regular droid maintenance, diagnostics and memory defragmentation, had a tendency to erase the B1s' specialized programming. Their solution, unsurprisingly, was to simply skip those steps during maintenance, and it worked about as well as you'd expect.   The lack of proper maintenance intensified the data management problems caused by the droids' specialized program, and this led to frequent cases of system corruption, suboptimal performance, and, most importantly for us, system anomalies. behavior. The "chat" we mentioned at the beginning of the video was actually B1's attempt to deal with constant data overloads.

As many people do in real life, their reaction to being overwhelmed with more information than they could process was to keep commenting. Presumably, this was especially bad with droids that weren't connected to a central control computer at all, since centrally managed droids could at least rely on the central computer to take some of the strain off. But when central control was not a factor, the poor B1s had to try to process everything with their own overloaded and poorly made logic modules. Related to this, it is unconfirmed, but likely, that the reason the B1s had so much personality for simple combat droids was due to the aforementioned frequent lack of maintenance.   As you probably know, it was very common for droids to develop unique personality quirks when they went too long without a memory wipe, as was the case with the astromech droids R2-D2 and T3-M4.

Since some of the maintenance that was often neglected in the B1s was related to memory, it is possible that it had a similar effect, thus explaining the droids' personality quirks. That part is just our theory, but we think the evidence supporting it is pretty compelling. All that said, not all of the B1's quirks were the result of poor design or maintenance practices. In some cases, loyal saboteurs who infiltrated droid factories were able to download viruses into thousands of battle droids, further worsening these memory and maintenance problems and sometimes simply implementing strange and counterproductive behaviors.   This sabotage was generally subtle and indistinguishable from other problems that B1s tended to have, and due to chronic lack of maintenance, these viruses proliferated in the ranks of the Droid Army, worsening the performance of the combat droids.

The problem was made even worse by the fact that most Separatist droid factories were almost completely automated, so saboteurs could have the factories program viruses into every droid they produced, and there was very little chance of this sabotage. was discovered. In all, the CIS droid army had many problems, and the base B1 battle droids often ended up suffering the most from them.   The entertaining quirks that many fans know these droids for were actually symptoms of stress and overwork, the ramblings of beings with far more to process than they had bandwidth.   In other words, the B1 battle droids had even more humor than we thought.

Once again, we can't help but feel sorry for the plight of the B1s.   But what do you think? Are there any other annoying questions about Clone Wars that you'd like to see answered? Feel free to post your opinion in the comments below.