50H31
Seeker of Enlightenment
Image Source: Deviant Art submission linked here, made by "Sephiroth Art."
Intent: A fun autonomous droid to fill the streets of Freehold. Works great as a crew-mate, NPC, or even a player character if they want to start as a rogueish free droid.
Development Thread: If you want a thread of me cannibalizing droid production facilities in the for former Hegemonic Automaton facility, I'll do it.
Manufacturer: The Temple of the Route to M4-78, made in the Ord Cestus Foundry.
Model: Ashigaru class.
Affiliation: While they are made by the Temple, many of them are of independent allegiance. However, About 2/3 of them work for the Temple or the government of freehold in some capacity, primarily as peace-keeping officers.
Modularity: The Ashigaru model was designed with easily replaceable components in mind, and is surprisingly good at integrating after-market parts into its own designs as the need arises. Around a fifth of all models currently in existence have been modified in some way.
Production: Minor. Only about 10,000 units were manufactured. More may be made in the future, depending on Five-oh's interest in attempting to repeat the project. It is more likely a one-off.
Material: Plasteel for the majority of the chassis and armor.
Classification: Their programming mixes components of class two (repair and redesign), four (self-defense and weapon utilization), and five (basic labor and negotiation of sales) into one model of neural architecture.
Weight: 85 Kilograms
Height: 1.92 Meters
Movement: Bipedal, able to run at a top speed of 40 kph.
Armaments: The default model possesses no internal weapons. However, the weapon utilization and heuristic algorithm show a marked preference for melee weaponry, particularly vibroswords and force pikes.
Misc. Equipment: Basic photoreceptors and a specialized self-diagnostic engine. Heuristic brain. Vocabulator programmed in binary, galactic basic, and huttese, with ability to learn more languages.
Strengths:
- The Ashigaru model is made of cheap, easily replaceable parts, making maintenance relatively easy.
- The Ashigaru uses Heuristic architecture, and can learn in the field.
- It is light in weight, and can run as fast as an athletic human with no loss to overall operation.
- Frankly, the simplistic design makes modifications easy, and many of them have taken to self-modding for both aesthetic and practical reasons.
- The humanoid design of the chassis makes for a machine that is both comfortable and capable with tool usage in most environments.
- The intelligence is programmed with an emphasis on survival and flexibility, making for effective long-range usage and extended wandering in areas where maintenance is not easily done.
- The basic design is surprisingly suite to urban camouflage.
- An Ashigaru can autonomously diagnose and repair damage to itself and other robots if there is equipment and sufficient parts handy.
- The armor is relatively weak on stock models, proving fragile in prolonged firefights.
- Designed as initially manumissed, Ashigaru units are very independent, and will often add their own directives to orders given.
- An Ashigaru's multi-class 2/4/5 design and Heuristic architecture leads to a resistance to memory wipes. Memory wipes will also reset to factory default, which includes no loyalty without active reprogramming.
- Ashigaru units have a tendency to develop wanderlust, and are sometimes too curious for their own good.
- They are aware of their own self-repair and often get reckless in combat, happily damaging themselves to win a fight, as it can be repaired later.
- Ashigaru units have a tendency to salvage fallen parts, and some less scrupulous models have become an odd mix of grave-robber and bandit.
Description:
The Temple's first experiment into autonomous droid porduction, the Ashigaru is given its name form the old Atrisian word for "commoner soldier." Studying the architecture of multiple Droid Classes, Five-oh's proposal for the Ashigaru was simple: Produce a droid whose brain included multiple classifications to increase learning versatility. After settling on a Heuristic crystalline brain structure, the architecture was to combine labor recognition, self-repair, and basic combat training into a sort of generalist droid. Adding droid repair data from the Z-5's skillset in conjunction with crude military droid design created a clever, somewhat autonomous and crafty droid that could self-modify as well as maintain its own existence armed only with scraps.
Given vibroblades and full manumission upon completion, the Ashigaru were informed that they were welcome in Freehold as free citizens, and could earn a salary working for Five-oh if they chose to do so. Many of them became part of the Temple guard, while others worked for the government in repair or security capacity. Some of them became wanderers on Ord Cestus, and a few have booked passage to other worlds as sellswords or shiphands. All in all, Five-oh's first wave of children entered upon the galaxy with minimal fanfare, and still resides largely within freehold.
Primary Source:
Z-5 droid
