That's why I included "patches" (including the quotes), to account for the personality.

Thinking more about it, though, Threepio is an odd duck...how much of his personality is "factory," and how much is a side effect of being cobbled together (and presumably modified) by a 9 year old?

My thoughts exactly! Who knows what sort of redundant storage C-3PO might have versus a droid fresh off the line. Perhaps C-3PO has a hidden swap partition that stores some data in a non-standard way. I've seen weirder....

I imagine that for protocol droids, a degree of emotional understanding is a fundamental requirement, as accurate/diplomatic translation requires knowledge of the emotional nuances involved in word choice. The emotional capacity is necessary in order to properly translate that nuance. The droid developing its own emotional subjectivity and personality is the unintended (but perhaps necessary) consequence that is controlled by mind wipes.

Of course, if a droid's personality endures along with fragments of memories after a memory wipe, it suggests there is a part of the droid's sentience that transcends the information stored on their hard drive equivalents. That would mean that memory wipe=execution is not quite adequate as an analogy, though a memory wipe still undoubtedly counts as a grievous psychological assault.

I don't think C-3p0 has ever actually been memory wiped. He's only really had 3 owners same with R2D2

That scene were they just casually order 3PO's execution in RotS always pissed me off, essentially killing a main character like that is terrible.

Funny that the obnoxious aspects of his personality persisted through multiple memory wipes.

OS, updates, and "patches" remain...files and programs deleted.

That sounds less than thorough, but I could roll that way with it. You're saying they go to the "please insert girder" phase and not the "insert OS media to continue" phase.

A Mac will always continue to be a Mac regardless of how many times you format the hard drive?

I don't think C-3p0 has ever actually been memory wiped. He's only really had 3 owners same with R2D2

So Antilles ignored Bail Organa's order to "have the protocol droid's memory wiped?"

I don't think C-3p0 has ever actually been memory wiped. He's only really had 3 owners same with R2D2

According to that comic, which is presumably considered to be Canon, he has been wiped. Possibly multiple times. R2 may not have been, but 3PO has.

And he should certainly have remembered the name Obi-Wan Kenobi, if Captain Antilles had not done as he was told by Bail Organa.

A Mac will always continue to be a Mac regardless of how many times you format the hard drive?

On modern Macs, you can install Windows. You could even install only Windows, if that was the way you wanted to go.

You’d have to reformat the non-volatile storage (can’t really say “hard drive” anymore because so many come with SSDs instead), and then re-install, but that’s easily do-able.

But there are plenty of devices have have a mode where you can “insert pin here and hold for ten seconds to restore to factory standard configuration from ROM”. Seems to me that a droid memory wipe is probably a lot more like that, and is really more of a personality wipe than an actual true memory wipe.

It does make me wonder if there might be more secure ways of doing a personality wipe that could perhaps write zeros or random numbers or whatever over the sectors multiple times, thus achieving a DoD-grade 7-pass minimum secure wipe, or somesuch.

Which also leads to another interesting question — What if part of the personality acquisition process is through programmable hardware, like FPGA circuits, where you can only wipe them so many times before they can’t be changed again? Maybe that doesn’t lead to conscious memories being stored in those circuits, perhaps just personality quirks that might survive a standard wipe. Or maybe there are strange ways in which flashes of conscious memories might be able to be stored in those circuits, perhaps in a manner that is non-deterministic and not something that is understood by their “modern” science.

All good questions to ponder….

This was a good read, and is quite stylistically different from the rest of the new lines. Who knew these droids were programmed to feel feelings?

My understanding is that emotional capacity is unintentional, emergent behavior that occurs over time and is ordinarily prevented with routine memory wipes. I might have simply imagined that though...

Did you say you imagined?!?!

Prepare a memory wipe!!!

With regards to 3PO having only 3 owners, wasnt it canon that Anakin didnt make him but actually only reassembled him after finding his parts on the scrap pile, and that he was actually a very ancient droid

Edit just checked Wookieepedia and it would appear that background is legends now although there is info on some parts being over 100 years old and that he served as chief negotiator of the Mankoron system prior to being reassembled

As a side note, in our Edge campaign my Pilot regularly downloads the Droid's memory into a back up. We discussed it as players and went with it,,,, of course if the Droids PC is destroyed, all we'd have to do is save up and rebuild him/it... yay we now have the Tech splatbook!

'We have the technology' (only players 35+ will get that reference)

With regards to 3PO having only 3 owners, wasnt it canon that Anakin didnt make him but actually only reassembled him after finding his parts on the scrap pile, and that he was actually a very ancient droid

Edit just checked Wookieepedia and it would appear that background is legends now although there is info on some parts being over 100 years old and that he served as chief negotiator of the Mankoron system prior to being reassembled

According to the blurb about C3PO in the decipher(?) card game he/it '.. is 112 years old.'

'We have the technology' (only players 35+ will get that reference)

Like 3PO, I have had many lives, and am at least 112 years old. So yes, I got that.

And now I am going to go and cry.

A Mac will always continue to be a Mac regardless of how many times you format the hard drive?

Sure, but without an OS, it's really quite similar to non-macs. Same processor, same RAM, same ... well, almost everything. I don't envision droids as being so homologous.

But there are plenty of devices have have a mode where you can “insert pin here and hold for ten seconds to restore to factory standard configuration from ROM”. Seems to me that a droid memory wipe is probably a lot more like that, and is really more of a personality wipe than an actual true memory wipe.

Like a consumer-grade router, or even how it's advised that one wipe one's smartphone and start fresh every now and then to "clean up the cruft."

Given they make mention (citation needed) of certain things being "modules," like an empathy module or a personality matrix or other such mumbo jumbo, it makes me think the droid's systems are really decentralized, like Docker-becomes-hardware kinda decentralized. Case in point: EV-9d9 and the MDF motivator that makes her enjoy torture.

As a side note, in our Edge campaign my Pilot regularly downloads the Droid's memory into a back up. We discussed it as players and went with it,,,, of course if the Droids PC is destroyed, all we'd have to do is save up and rebuild him/it... yay we now have the Tech splatbook!

'We have the technology' (only players 35+ will get that reference)

Ha! Thanks to the miracles of Google, your strange, esoteric references no longer go over the heads of 17 year olds without giving g them so much as a chance to jump up and grab it! And hey! This is where Kanye and Daft Punk got the lyrics for their songs?? *mind blown*

More like, his memories are the hard drive and his core programming is the unwritable ROM chips built into his system. So, wiping a droid restores him to whatever is in those areas of his brain that can't be written over.

Yet, it seems to imply that core programming would be "reset to factory settings" but I feel like a "personality matrix" wouldn't live in the read-only memory of a droid. That part would seem to be "how to move an arm" and whatnot.

Of course any sort of attempt to overlay our technology over droids is doomed to failure just like communications and sensors.

If their brains operate similar to ours, then resetting to Factory would wipe the connections between parts of the matrix and reset them to the connections they came from the factory with.

If their brains operate similar to ours, then resetting to Factory would wipe the connections between parts of the matrix and reset them to the connections they came from the factory with.

Which gets back to my question about programming FPGAs, where links can only be severed or re-connected so many times before the chip is basically stuck and no longer re-programmable.

What happens if a droid has had their personality wiped so many times that it’s not possible to wipe it anymore?

As a side note, in our Edge campaign my Pilot regularly downloads the Droid's memory into a back up. We discussed it as players and went with it,,,, of course if the Droids PC is destroyed, all we'd have to do is save up and rebuild him/it... yay we now have the Tech splatbook!

'We have the technology' (only players 35+ will get that reference)

I think there was talk about remaking that, with $6 million of modern money.....

As a side note, in our Edge campaign my Pilot regularly downloads the Droid's memory into a back up. We discussed it as players and went with it,,,, of course if the Droids PC is destroyed, all we'd have to do is save up and rebuild him/it... yay we now have the Tech splatbook!

'We have the technology' (only players 35+ will get that reference)

I think there was talk about remaking that, with $6 million of modern money.....

So a wheelchair, a prosthetic arm, a glass eye, and a massive addiction to opiate pain killers? Six million doesn't really go very far today.

As a side note, in our Edge campaign my Pilot regularly downloads the Droid's memory into a back up. We discussed it as players and went with it,,,, of course if the Droids PC is destroyed, all we'd have to do is save up and rebuild him/it... yay we now have the Tech splatbook!

'We have the technology' (only players 35+ will get that reference)

I think there was talk about remaking that, with $6 million of modern money.....

Which would mean he'd either be the $36 million dollar man, or he'd cost 1/6 of what he did back in the 70s if he cost $6 million today.

They've already redone The Bionic Woman, so not surprised they'd do yet another 70s show. Heck, they've done variations on it as the general premise is a person with hidden super talents (Chuck, John Doe, Dark Angel, etc...)

Perhaps even more relevant to the thread, how long before they remake Short Circuit?

No disassemble Johnny 5!

Personally, I think C-3PO painted the arm himself, kind of like a sleeve tattoo for droids,,, he'll be nicking speeder bikes next and throwing on a leather biker jacket...

Sons of Anarchy droid style. 'Oh My! Please excuse my droid speeder bike gang, they can get a bit unruly'

As a side note, in our Edge campaign my Pilot regularly downloads the Droid's memory into a back up. We discussed it as players and went with it,,,, of course if the Droids PC is destroyed, all we'd have to do is save up and rebuild him/it... yay we now have the Tech splatbook!

'We have the technology' (only players 35+ will get that reference)

We have the technology splatbook!

(I'm so egotistical, I quote myself )

There's a passage in Special Modifications that indicates that droids can simply upload into new bodies. It doesn't really have a lot of detail on whether the new body has to be the same model, or whether all droids use compatible OS so R2 could just as easily clone himself into a Droideka (like changing morphs in Eclipse Phase). I can't say as I like this idea, as I strongly prefer SW droid personalities and memories to be hardware-linked for various reasons.

There's a passage in Special Modifications that indicates that droids can simply upload into new bodies. It doesn't really have a lot of detail on whether the new body has to be the same model, or whether all droids use compatible OS so R2 could just as easily clone himself into a Droideka (like changing morphs in Eclipse Phase). I can't say as I like this idea, as I strongly prefer SW droid personalities and memories to be hardware-linked for various reasons.

There's precedent for it in the original Marvel series with the Wheel's Master-Com, also included by FFG in Beyond the Rim.