Droid Engineer Archive

I was reading through yet another post complaining about droids and their uselessness and something dawned on me. Perhaps part of the reason droids are thus far fairly useless (although, I read a post by Holocron where he outlined how "cool" the current functionality of droids is) is because they haven't finished adding everything they want (i.e. hover bikes and later ships). After all, what do you always see reparing mechanical vehicles in the movies? Droids. What do you see controling the x-wing fighters? R2 units. Perhaps once vehicles and ships are introduced we'll have more of a demand for specialized droids (i.e. an R2 unit with a repair module may be required for an x-wing fighter).

Maybe so, maybe so...

But if that is the case, there has not been a single word to that effect, so naturally enough, people are not satisfying themselves that all they have to do is wait on vehicles.

Mind you, I think an astromech droid should be an absolute requirement for *any* spacegoing vehicle, and should probably provide significant benefits for anything but the simplest land vehicles.

And we should have those pop-up repair droids as a toss-away schematic for cheap, expendable, charged droids for quick fixes to our equipment.

Astromech droids are required to send nav coordinates to the nav computer. You can do this manually, but this is very difficult, as Han said, "This ain't like dusting crops, boy" mess up putting in Hyperspace coordinates and you are toast. That is the main responsibility of the astromech droid. With out thier R units the hyperspace equipted Fighters of the Rebellion would be stuck to using standard pre-programed routes and the Empire would pick them off very easily.

But as to you question about them being usefull later, does not explain why there is no use for Power Droids, Repair Droids, or Binary Load Lifters now. If they planned to have uses later they would have provided them later. Just my two credits.

Yeah actualy if you read the spec on the Falcon Han took 3 droid brians and hooked them directly to the nav systems so tehy could work faster on hyperspace coords. The by product of this is you have 3 droids with no bodies to move around argueing with each other all day. Thus the ship's systems are somewhat tempermental.

There is NO doubt in my mind once vehicles come ut there will be some stuff for droids in that. However once ships come out droids will be a REQUIREMENT. Thus giveing the DE's a big boost.

Would be rather ironic if no DE's were around to produce all this stuff for the space expansion.

Personally I don't see it happening -though we can hope.