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

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Everyone loves B1 Battle Droids, and if  you don’t, you’re wrong. In Star Wars:   The Clone Wars especially, they’re pretty  endearing for killer robots, known among fans   for their tremendous stupidity and numerous funny  moments. But if you spend enough time watching   clips of the B1s’ antics, you start to wonder  why on earth the Separatists made them so chatty.   In The Clone Wars, the battle droids never shut  up, and sometimes, their antics outright hinder   their combat performance. It just doesn’t seem  fitting for droids mass produced as cannon fodder   to be given such personality - so what gives?  In this video, we’ll be answering that question. As most of you surely know, the original B1  Battle Droids were not capable of independent   thought. While their OOM-series commanders  had a limited capacity for higher function,   standard B1s relied on external Central Control  Computers to function, typically housed aboard   Lucrehulk-class Droid Control Ships in orbit.  This was at the behest of the Trade Federation,   which commissioned the droids from Baktoid Combat  Automata, and it was partly a cost-cutting move   and partly a strategic choice. Obviously, the  notoriously stingy Neimoidian leaders of the   Trade Federation were looking to save money by not  paying for their units to have full droid brains,   but beyond that, there was actually pretty decent  justification for reliance on a central computer. For one thing, even if the Trade Federation  decided to pay for fully independent droids   from the get-go, they still would have been less  intelligent and especially less creative than   organic soldiers. That’s because combat droids  in particular required extensive programming   restrictions to limit the risk of them going  rogue, which by necessity inhibited creativity,   intuition, and many other things that were  essential on the battlefield but came with   the risk of rebellion. You only need to look  at HK-47 and his progeny to understand what we   mean. When it came to combat droids, you had to  choose between intelligence and obedience most   of the time; 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 came with the added benefit of  massively improving the droids’ coordination.   Since first-generation B1s were all centrally  controlled, they worked together flawlessly,   and on the battlefield, they 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 turn the tide of entire battles. Of course, as we all know, the central  control model had a pretty major   downside - destroying the Central Control  Computer shut down the whole droid army.   The Trade Federation learned this the hard  way during the Battle of Naboo, and when   they began expanding their armies of B1s as part  of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, they   decided to shift away from the central control  model to avoid having a second Naboo fiasco. During the Separatist Crisis, Baktoid revised  their designs for the B1 Battle Droids,   giving them proper droid brains alongside  their CCC transceivers. These droid brains   were as cheap and bare-bones as possible, but they  nonetheless allowed 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 the retrofit meant   that destroying a droid army’s Droid Control  Ship wouldn’t force the whole army to shut down. Giving the B1s independent thought came  with another benefit as well - it allowed   the Confederacy to program the B1s  for a broader variety of roles.   Central Control Computers mostly relied on  algorithms and scanned data from organic armies to   program the droids under their command, making it  difficult to modify droids for specialized roles.   With the advent of independent thought modules,  however, the Separatists could just download new   skill sets into their B1s when they were set  down, making their droids much more versatile. Ever the cheapskates, the Separatist Council  took advantage of this newfound versatility   to avoid commissioning new droid models for  every little task. Instead, they just had their   commanders program B1s to accomplish whatever  tasks they needed. As such, during the Clone   Wars B1s became pilots, gunners, firefighters,  scouts, janitors, and aides, as well as soldiers.   The CIS Navy especially abused this capability,  making up for a constant shortage of organic   crew by manning many of their warships  exclusively with retrofitted B1s. This,   plus the extensive automation seen aboard some  of the Separatists’ cheaper warship classes,   like the Munificent-class Frigate  and Recusant-class Light Destroyer,   meant that the CIS Navy could field whole fleets  of ships that were essentially disposable. Of course, just because the Separatists  could program the B1s to fill new roles   didn’t mean the droids were any good at them. B1  gunners were notorious for being terrible shots,   B1 firefighters were relentlessly incompetent,  and B1 pilots couldn’t compare to their organic   counterparts. Part of the reason for this  was because the constant retrofits pushed   the B1s to the very limits of their processing  power. Their already overtaxed droid brains   were completely overwhelmed by the sheer  volume of information they had to manage,   and it hurt the B1s’ performance not only  in their new roles but across the board. To make matters worse, the Separatists  found out early in the war that two   key parts of regular droid maintenance,  diagnostics and memory defragmentation,   had a tendency to erase the B1s’ specialty  programming. Their solution, predictably,   was to just skip those steps during maintenance,  and that went about as well as you might expect.   The lack of proper maintenance intensified  the data management problems caused by the   droids’ specialty program, and this  resulted in frequent cases of system   corruption, suboptimal performance, and,  importantly for us, behavioral anomalies. The “chattiness” we mentioned at the start of  the video was actually B1s’ attempt to deal   with constant data overloads. Like many people do  in real life, their reaction to being overwhelmed   with more information than they could process  was to keep up a running commentary. Presumably,   this was especially bad with droids that weren’t  connected to a Central Control Computer at all,   as the centrally managed droids could  at least rely on the central computer   to remove some of the strain. But  when central control wasn’t a factor,   the poor B1s had to try to process everything with  their own overtaxed, poorly-made logic modules. Related to this, it’s unconfirmed, but likely,  that the reason B1s had so much personality   for simple combat droids was because of the  aforementioned frequent lack of maintenance.   As you likely know, it was very common for droids  to develop unique personality quirks when they   went a long time without a memory wipe, as was  notably the case for the astromech droids R2-D2   and T3-M4. Since some of the maintenance that  was often neglected for B1s was memory-related,   it’s possible that it might have had a similar  effect, thus explaining the droids’ personality   quirks. That bit’s just our theory, but we  think the evidence for it is pretty compelling. With all that said, not all of the B1s’ quirks  were the result of poor design or maintenance   practices. In some cases, Loyalist saboteurs  infiltrating droid factories were able to   download viruses into thousands of battle droids,  making these memory and maintenance problems even   worse and sometimes just implementing odd  and counterproductive behavior outright.   This sabotage was usually subtle and  indistinguishable from other problems   that B1s often had, and due to chronic lack  of maintenance, these viruses ran rampant in   the ranks of the Droid Army, worsening the  battle droids’ performance. The problem was   made even worse by the fact that most Separatist  droid factories were almost entirely automated,   so saboteurs could have factories program  viruses into every droid they produced,   and there was a very low chance of  this sabotage ever being discovered. All told, the CIS Droid Army  had a whole lot of problems,   and the rank-and-file B1 Battle Droids often  ended up suffering the most because of them.   The entertaining quirks 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 for.   In other words, B1 Battle Droids were even  more of a mood than we thought they were. Yet again, we can’t help but feel  sorry for the plight of the B1s.   But what do you think? Are there other  nagging Clone Wars questions you’d like   to see answered? Feel free to post  your thoughts in the comments below.
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Channel: Geetsly's
Views: 1,665,539
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Star, Wars, Star Wars, Clone Wars, Galactic Republic, Confederacy of Independent Systems, Trade Federation, Baktoid Combat Automata, Geonosians, Neimoidians, B1 Battle Droid, Droid Control Ship, Central Control Computer
Id: VepgEAO-u1I
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)
Published: Fri Jan 13 2023
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