Rusty Rogers’ Clankers

You think you’ve got them droids figured out … and then they throw you a curve ball and it stops making sense.

https://jalopnik.com/we-need-to-talk-about-star-wars-droid-names-right-godda-1786060642

How you like them apples ?
Remember C-3P0 ?
That’s a Cybot Galactica 3P0 series protocol droid.
So we’re back to square one …

And as a reminder why organics are terrible at remembering droid names :
C3-P0 and C-3Po are two different droids.

Some names definitely appear to be related to their function (T-series tactical droids) and others appear to have their manufacturer as part of their naming convention (Cybot => C in C-3PO)

Maybe we should invent our own solution instead ?
To quote the quote from the Jalopnik article :

… droid names are usually fragments of much longer serial numbers. He uses G8-R3 as an example, speculating that his real name might have been something like “R5-X41238-G8-R3-3124-D2.”

Interesting, isn’t it ?
Like clonetroopers droids have identifiers that are more than short ident used by organics in their language. A string of a few dozen characters is not a problem in binary languages used by droids amongst themselves. And it should be sufficient to identify every possible droid in the galaxy.

We’ve got actual real-world / non-fictional examples of this sort of thing.
USB-devices have their own ‘rules’ that describe how they are identified ( source : usb-drivers designations )

Then there’s another one : the MAC-address
Those seemingly random numbers do have reasons to exist (and they’re hideously complicated ). And like the USB ident there is a manufacturer specific code hidden inside. It’s not human readable, but then it doesn’t need to be. It merely exists to ensure that no address can overlap without needing to check it every single time. Google is your friend if you feel the need for more info.

And finally there is one that may be familliar to programmers : GuID (Global Unique Identifier)

Food for thought ?
I’d say yes … ’till next time.

Painting tutorials are always nice to have, so these will be posted as both a source of inspiration and technique.

The weathering in this one is interesting.

Unlike the clones there doesn’t appear to be any naming convention for droids.
Or rather … there isn’t enough data that I could find, but maybe we can extrapolate something out of the names we do know ?

Let’s start with the list of known and named B1 Battledroids in the Star Wars universe :

• Mister Bones :
  https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mister_Bones
• R0-GR aka ‘Roger’ :
  https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/R0-GR

Not a lot, right ?
That’s one named by humans and another whose name was designed to be a pun.

What’s next ?
Kx-series droids :

• K-4D8
  https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/K-4D8
• K-2SO aka Kay-Tuesso
  https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/K-2SO

Hmm … a possible pattern.

IG-series : https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/IG-series
Basic naming convention here (IG-xx), no attempt at humanizing (sp?) their names.

Astromech droids : https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Astromech_droid

Here we find the R2-series R2-D2 and C1-series C1-10P aka Chopper
( https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/C1-10P )

Of course we can’t ignore the famous rebel droids C3-PO and R2-D2

If canon does not provide … then we must invent our own.
The pattern we can extrapolate from these is this :

• droid identifiers are always two sets of characters
• Initial set is definitely indicator of class/type of droid followed by an optional version
• second set of characters are a mix of numeric and alphanumeric identifiers
• humanized versions of names exist and are usually based on how the identifier looks ( C1-10P  => CHOP) or pronounced (K-2SO => Kay 2 eS O)

Thus our B1 droids ought to have one of these pattern :

• B-[0-9A-Z]{2,3}
• B1-[0-9A-Z]{2,3}

Hey … these are droids, so regular expressions makes sense 😉
It’s also fairly obvious that R0-GR is an exception to this, which may be based on the rule of cool.

For non-programming geeks here’s a link
http://www.rexegg.com/regex-quickstart.html#quantifiers

These look cool … but I need to get my core box built first.
However as they haven’t been released yet, that should be possible.

Starting with the droids from the Clonewars corebox this project will document the construction of a droid army.

One thing I’ve noticed is that almost everyone uses the default paint scheme as seen in the prequels. It is easy (according to some guy on the internet that is …), but it is kind of boring.
With that in mind I decided that my army will be different.

Key features :

• survivors of the clonewars
  everything will look like it’s had its fair share of repairs and replacements
  factory fresh units will be rare
• no humans/aliens
  Droids last forever (or until no parts can be found)
• narrative first
  Unit choices are based on what looks cool, not what is effective in tournaments.
• as little official named characters as possible