If you are curious, all the art assets are from Wookieepedia and the logo is the regular basic black logo but I erased the "A's", replaced them with "4's" from the font SF Distant Galaxy, and then recolored it all to white.
Improving upon the B3 Ultra Battle Droid (and Ruminations on the B1’s Evolutionary Lineages)
Everyone rightfully gives flak to TROS for its incredibly lazy Xyston-class Star Destroyer design. You know the ship that can BlOw uP a pLaNeT and whatnot. It’s literally just a regular Star Destroyer but with some extra paint and a weapon slapped on haphazardly with no real integration into the overall shape and surface of the design. Oh and it’s technically “scaled-up” but I’m not giving credit for that.
But holy shit Legends gave us something just as bad with the B3 Ultra Battle Droid because like. With the B1 and B2, there’s a clear design language in the evolution:
When designing a droid that’s actually built for warfare against enemy combatants who can fight back, rather than just suppressing people who are already outmatched, you can tell some Geonosians at Baktoid Combat Automata sat down and asked themselves: How can we streamline this design? How can we make it more efficient? The original B1 was designed in their image and its humanoid shape meant it could operate pre-existing weaponry and vehicles, rather than waste resources building new armaments and the like into these new droids. But for the proposed B2, that wasn’t gonna cut it.
So they not only armored up the B2, they made it more streamlined. Baktoid realized they were too reliant on the humanoid shape but that it wasn’t really all that necessary. Rather than make the head its own separate gangling thing, build it into one solid, compact torso and minimize the number of joints because joints are a weak point. Build the blasters into the droid itself. The red sensor is all the droid needs to see with and it’s very small and off to the side, which throws off the conventions of aiming for most troops, and it’s within the armor. It’s all very efficient.
With that design language in mind, surely a proposed B3 Ultra Battle Droid would continue that philosophy right? So what does it look like?
I hate this so much. It’s literally just a B2 but someone added some extra bits and weapons that clearly stick out and changed the paint and oh my god it’s literally the Xyston. It’s TROS-levels of lazy design. Even down to being scaled-up to be bigger!!! It’s also got these inexplicable spikes on the back of its legs but the placement is so impractical that I can’t imagine the B3 actually doing anything with these hooks.
What’s crazy is that the B3 Ultra Battle Droid had its debut in a Star Wars comic where it was unnamed which otherwise makes the laziness of its design perfectly fine. Like if it ain’t broke don’t fix it-type philosophy.
But then some EU writer decided instead of naming it as a B2 variant, it’s actually the next evolved step in the B-Series Battle Droid line, it’s not some in-between phase it’s the B3 itself! And it also has some stupidly-impractical hooks that look cool but add nothing to the functionality. Christening this thing as the B3 just exposes the design as lazy because with the precedent of how the B1 so drastically changed into the B2, you set up expectations for the B3 to be a similarly radical follow-up. But now it isn’t!
I’ve seen like one attempt to redesign the B3 into something a little more original and streamlined but I’m still dissatisfied with how similar it still looks so it makes me think. How would I redesign the B3 Ultra Battle Droid, say in the new canon, to be an actual evolution and not just Original OC Do Not Steal!!!
If the philosophy is to make the Battle Droid more streamlined and compact (and add some missiles and a flamethrower), then why do the arms need to be their own thing? Joints are a weakness and it makes the actual weapons stick out while creating unnecessary distance between the weapon and the source of its power, which is strangled by the narrow choke points that are the shoulder joints.
So build a bigger and more compact torso where the weapons are a part of the solid shape. No arms, except for compact ones that can fold away when not in use; You never know when the B3 might need to grab or hold onto things! Make the legs more stocky in order to handle the weight. Give it wide toes to distribute that weight as well and grip the ground so the B3 doesn’t fall over as easily. Hell, let the toes grip the ground and reinforce the pneumatics of the legs so that if a Jedi tries to force-push the B3 over, it can stay in place and resist the (literal and metaphysical) force!
Also, the B3 has a hatch in the front to spew the flamethrower. It’s not just sticking out there, it’s all built in and the hatch is shaped almost like a dragon’s maw (while still being streamlined) for aesthetic and functionality! The back has plating that can slide away to fire targeted missiles. This also means that if a Jedi were to jump on top where the blasters are angled away, they could still be blown up.
Because it’s a bit bigger (but not as ludicrously scaled-up as the EU B3) this hypothetical B3 can pack more firepower and so its blasters hit a lot faster, stronger, and more plentifully as well, like a Gatling gun. That means it’s not really viable to deflect a stream of fire from even a single Ultra Battle Droid because there’s just too many of them coming too fast and hot.
This is important because the tactical philosophy behind taking down Jedi during the Clone Wars was less about having the perfect Jedi-killing weapon, and more just overwhelming them with as much blaster fire as possible, from as many angles as possible, as simultaneously as possible. Jedi are great and fast and accurate but in the end their lightsabers can only be in one place at a time and they’re living beings who wear out. So just throw a gazillion Battle Droids at them from all sides and wait until they inevitably slip up because you can build so many Battle Droids while it takes years to train a single Jedi.
(I’ve heard that in actual warfare, being able to outlast your enemy and possessing superior numbers is usually the most reliable way to win. Tactics don’t mean much in the face of logistics if you can’t feed your troops for extended periods of time, as Sun Tzu pointed out. Having the biggest baddest thing ever doesn’t matter when it’ll still be blown up. But if there’s a bunch of smaller things then blowing up one is just distracting you from defending against the others swarming on you. Everyone wants to be Big and Macho and Blaze of Glory in war but in the end it’s about patience and practicality.)
I actually even have thoughts and sketches not just for the B3, but also for a B4 and finally a B5… I may have gotten a bit carried away but in the end I’m not confident enough in what I’ve made so for now I’ll just say this: As I molded the B3’s design in my head like clay and constantly kept re-shaping it, I found myself unconsciously gravitating to the ED-209 from Robocop:
Indeed, I realized my B3 ended up following a similar design philosophy to the AT-STs and the like. Where it was a big compact shape that shoots death while being an impervious block, but then has legs so it can maneuver all sorts of uneven terrain.
I’ll also add some additional ramblings as well! It’s interesting how in The Clone Wars, the crew understandably didn’t even bother with the boringness of the B3 when they opted to create a new Battle Droid to improve upon the B2. But I guess someone didn’t want to “disrespect” pre-established lore so the beloved Commando Droid was given the designation BX instead.
It’s an interesting design! It hearkens more to the B1 than the B2 with the re-introduction of an actual neck and head, which alongside the name suggests it as a branching evolutionary line that splits off at the B1! And I can really appreciate the logic behind it; Adding so much armor to the newest B-series iteration is kinda useless after a point because it’s just gonna weigh the thing down more than it will protect it, especially if a lightsaber will cut through the thing as cleanly as possible.
So then don’t bother with clunky armor! You don’t need armor if you’re not going to be hit anyway! Thus we have the acrobatics and light frame of the BX. It’s zipping all over the place, too fast for lightsabers or blaster bolts to hit and that’s more practical than a heavy block that is so big and slow it’s impossible not to hit. Like the B2 it’s still a bit more streamlined, albeit to make the BX more aerodynamic. Whereas my proposed B3 relies on overwhelming firepower as its defense, especially in numbers, the BX just avoids the problem all around. Sometimes the best solution to an issue is to not engage in it at all!
But yeah, this thing does feel like it was made for Jedi in mind, what with the understanding that armor becomes redundant when lightsabers are a thing. Not that it doesn’t have extra armor as explicitly pointed out in its debut! It’s like how size becomes more of a liability after a point, so you need to find the right balance. This also gets me to the Droideka as well:
I do appreciate how even before the B2, someone realized that armor plating is redundant and too much of a literal burden when you can just rely on energy-based force fields! Ngl as a kid before I knew of the EU B3 or saw the BX, I always thought to myself that this thing would work as a B3 Battle Droid, especially thanks to the framing of this great piece of art here:
It kinda does continue the design philosophy of the B2, doesn’t it? In terms of focusing on armor, albeit forgoing standard armor for the more efficient force field. Having built-in blaster arms, but no fingers because this shape has truly moved past being humanoid. It can still be compact though by folding into a wheel-shape that allows it to move quickly, at speeds a B2 can’t! Funny how it’s introduced before the B2, like at some point both the IRL and in-universe designers realized the earlier point about striking a fine balance per the variable needs of different war campaigns and so created the B2. The B2 also strikes a fine balance in cost since I’m sure metal is cheaper than the complex technology of a force field.
If you think about it, the Droideka folding into a wheel where it becomes even more mobile is a reference to the B1s folding up to be stored! So again the B1 and Droideka were clearly designed concurrently and then the B2 came after. Even the alternate name of the Droideka captures the shift; From a Battle to a Destroyer Droid. Battle at least implies the other side could put up a fight, that there was some fairness and equal footing; Destroyer indicates something overwhelming to the point of being one-sided, that goes beyond fights but encapsulates all in the area regardless of connection. Yet it can also convey a bully who is safe to enact and does not expect things to fight back, a big fish in a small pond; Which fits into the panic of the Droidekas when finally faced with the caliber of a starfighter in their debut.
So with all that in mind, one could argue that the B1 splits off into three different lines, or at least into the B2 and BX, and then the B2 splits off into B3 and Droideka. Evolution branching off isn’t limited to just biology and it’s fun how different paths are essentially different designers choosing to develop different aspects of the original B1! So the B2 was its compact armor and fire-power, and the BX was its agile movement and precision. Because the B1 certainly has more of a range of motion than the B2, so obviously someone appreciated that as its own strength (with its own flaws) that needed to be kept when the B2 lineage sacrificed that.
Which meant it needed to be improved upon to show its worth, in light of the aforementioned point on the B2’s armor being useless against Jedi anyhow. Similarly, the BX retaining its humanoid shape coincides with it being a lot more strategic and better at handling complex machinery; We see B1s as commanders and operating vehicles, but not B2s. The BX retains that advantage and the shake these machines were built to be used by. Even the name Commando Droid implies this thing is programmed for complex, tactical missions that the huge brute force of the B2 lacks the sophistication for. Different scenarios and threats lead to different purposes and designs thriving, again like evolution.
Because as much as one could improve upon a Battle Droid, there comes a point where the cost means that just one of, say, a B5 is less efficient than countless B1s, because a B5 only needs to be destroyed once, and if it’s a big enough target that makes it easier for compensating blaster fire to hit it. And if you can build a big death machine, so can the enemy when your B5 can’t be used against a Jedi because an AT-TE is aiming at it.
So a mix of all the different variants is the best bet at having the best of all worlds because they cover each other’s weaknesses, which is what happened on the battlefield obviously. And if numbers truly are the best bet, then I can’t help but imagine an evolution of the BX-line where an idk. A BZ Swarm/Hive Droid is small and light and zips through the air like that training droid from A New Hope. But it shoots actual lethal blaster bolts and has a bit more armor and speed to it. It’s not much on its own but it’s too fast to hit and there’s so many of them because the cheapness of its size affords that and now you have a swarm where each bee only needs to shoot you once to win.
Of course, this proposed BZ would lose on what the BX provides in being able to handle complex tasks and machinery, so either it’s a separate lineage in and of itself, or per its Swarm designation it’s capable of coordinating with other BZs to be a pair of floating hands and feet operating a vehicle while a fifth acts as the head taking in information and conveying orders. That does get into the matter of how they coordinate and if a central computer is necessary, like how the B1s originally used one in their debut to act as a swarm themselves. So maybe this Swarm Droid would be its own lineage that continues this feature, as the BX maintains the agility and coordination and the B2 the defense and fire-power.
But in the end, as much as one can ruminate on how the B-Series could’ve evolved, such evolution takes time not in just noticing a deficiency to improve upon, but also in developing the solution. And in the end the Clone Wars lasted for only a few years before Baktoid Combat Automata was shut down by the Empire, and with Palpatine pulling the strings he could never let the CIS win anyway. In fact it’s a plot point in a canon book where CIS developers obviously not aware that their cause is a farce do too well in creating Cortosis-armored B2s, so Palpatine leaks their development to the Jedi to prevent his Republic from being defeated before it can become the Empire!
And I will also say this: I never considered it this way but the B1 Battle Droid is one of the more absurd Pokemon evolution lines, to rival the Eeveelutions.
I brought some friendly battle droids to a ruin guarded by enemy battle droids, and the results was a chaotic mirror match between most of them. Special shoutout to the Droideka that can't decide whether to roll or not.
