Wednesday, April 28, 2010

GrS 17:2:8 Astromech droid review

Reviewed plans for the astromech droids to be used on the "Death Star". With every system (except the tractor beam) controllable by astromech droid, you just know we're going to need them.

Apparently, in spite of all the sudden-death turmoil going on there, we managed to agree last week to license the R2 design from Industrial Automaton on what Vader calls "very favourable terms." Hmmm.

So not much is changing. Vader doesn't want to bother buying the thruster jet mod, because he hasn't seen any R2 units use them in a few years; it's like R2 units equipped with them have forgotten the jets exist.

I asked about dropping in a speech module. It wouldn't cost much, a few decicreds at most, and the R2 units would be able to communicate properly. Nope, said Tarkin, no added expense. Besides, that's what protocol droids are for. I pointed out that needing a protocol droid every time you wanted to talk to an R2 unit would be more expensive than adding the speech module. Anyway, everyone knows protocol droids are annoying, prissy-as-hell silver and gold prigs.

Vader shot me down this time. "At least they're respectful," he rumbled. He added that some R2 units he'd encountered were pretty mouthy, and adding speech would only "exacerbate an already unpleasant conversational experience."

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