The Essential Guide to Force Exile/Droideka

Description
The droideka, or destroyer droid, was a lethal war machine originating from Colla IV. Its manufacturers, the vicious insectoid Colicoids, modeled the droid after their own appearance and made the droid a lethal combination of mobility, firepower, and defenses. In its combat stance, dual twin blaster cannons gave the droideka four times as much firepower as a standard battle droid, while a deflector shield generator protected the droideka from both blaster bolts and physical projectiles. This combination gave droidekas a reputation for being well-nigh unstoppable&mdash;even Jedi were known to avoid giving battle to droidekas directly. When not in combat stance, the droids collapsed into a wheel shape that allowed them to roll around at high speeds, affording them excellent mobility.

When unfolded, the droideka resembled the Colicoids themselves, though some likened the shape to a metallic flower blossom of sorts. Two arms, each packing a twin blaster cannon extended from its sides, while the droid balanced itself on three legs mounted near its minireactor. A curled head of sorts protruded from the top of the droid and contained numerous types of sensors for acquiring and targeting its opponents. Models employed by the Yanibar Guard were externally indistinguishable from the ones utilized by the Separatists during the Clone Wars.

History
They were used heavily by the Separatists during the Clone Wars, and as such, the Republic science division sought to find weaknesses to exploit to help Republic clone troopers and Jedi take down the deadly droidekas. One researcher who worked on the project was a brilliant young engineer named Sarth Kraen.

Kraen, after months of slicing, was able to decipher the master algorithms of the droideka. This, in effect, would allow him to reprogram droidekas to do his bidding once he was able to download his program into their control matrices. Such knowledge would have been a comfort to his brother, Selusda Kraen, a Jedi Knight who had lost many friends and comrades to the lethal killing machines, and to Alpha-28, an ARC trooper with the nickname of Spectre who also counted droidekas among his least favorite opponents and one that he had faced on battlefields from Kamino to Tellanroaeg. However, before Sarth could truly report his discovery, he was drugged by an unscrupulous lab technician working for a Separatist-aligned mercenary faction known as the Mistryl Shadow Guards. While Sarth was unconscious, his research was utterly erased by the Mistryl agent. Sarth later speculated that the Mistryl couldn't find a way to transport the information out of the laboratory. However, in light of later developments that revealed Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, secretly Darth Sidious, and a Dark Lord of the Sith, was playing the Republic and Confederacy against each other, it is highly possible that the Mistryl agent was also indirectly under the control of Palpatine and ordered to erase the research in order to prolong the Clone Wars.

His research lost and his normally near-hologenic memory addled by the drugs he had been slipped, Sarth was unable to demonstrate his discovery, and was fired from his job. In the mean time, droidekas slew thousands of clone troopers and numerous Jedi in battles raging from the Core to the Outer Rim. However, whatever her true allegiances were, the Mistryl agent in question knew that if Sarth Kraen could slice the master algorithms of the droideka once, he could do it again. Control of thousands of droidekas would be a significant aid to the Mistryl campaign of conquest they were waged in across their sector. For his part, Sarth Kraen became an engineer on a freighter, but spent much of his free time trying to reconstruct the code. Though he lacked the source code of the original droideka, he was able to piece together enough of the fragments to reconstruct the control algorithms bit by bit. The challenge of the task was simply too much for him to resist.

As such, the Mistryl made numerous attempts to seize Kraen, even as the Clone Wars ended and the droid armies were deactivated. The Mistryl saw this as their opportunity to seize thousands of droids from abandoned Separatist arsenals, and reclaimed a few hundred droidekas for use. However, they could not control the droids, which meant that they needed Sarth. They intensified their efforts to capture him, sending an elite strike team to his homeworld of Commenor to capture the elusive scientist.

Sarth eventually turned himself over to the Mistryl&mdash;or so they thought. In fact, they had captured his brother, Selusda Kraen, now a fugitive Jedi Knight-turned-smuggler and who had defended Sarth from the Mistryl. While Selu was on Emberlene, the Mistryl homeworld, Sarth and a number of his comrades journeyed there also on a foolhardy rescue attempt. They arrived on the surface of the planet as Selu was engaged in a lightsaber duel with a Dark Jedi who up until shortly before had been another instrument of the Mistryl. Her name was Asajj Ventress, and she had served Dooku during the war, commanding droid armies, including droidekas. Ventress had defeated Selu, when Sarth burst into the room. En route, Sarth had found a couple of deactivated droidekas that the Mistryl had expected Selu to reprogram for them. Using a control stick onto which he had loaded his finally-completed droideka control program, which he kept on his person at all times, Sarth commanded two droidekas to accompany him, and their presence was enough to scare off Asajj Ventress before the Dark Jedi slew Selu&mdash;she was intimately familiar with their capabilities and had no desire to face two of them.

Sarth and his comrades were able to rescue Selu and escape Emberlene, but the droidekas were left behind and presumed lost in the destruction of Emberlene shortly thereafter. Sarth would not encounter the droids until years later, after he had become the founder and head of Kraechar Arms, a defense company based out of the Jedi refuge created by Selu on the remote world of Yanibar. The defense force of the refuge, the Yanibar Guard, had uncovered a sizable Separatist weapons cache, which included droidekas. However, despite his best efforts, Sarth was unable to control the droidekas with his program&mdash;they had different control algorithms. With the help of Xi Charrian technicians in the employ of Kraechar Arms, he was able to activate B-2 battle droids and Vulture droid starfighters, but the droidekas continued to resist his efforts.

In the end, it took Sarth another two years to create a new program, which allowed the Yanibar Guard to finally control and operate droidekas. His new coding completely overrode the original programming of the droidekas and allowed them to interface with Yanibar Guard command interfaces, meaning that they could be much more easily employed. Kraechar Arms also began manufacturing droidekas in small numbers at that time, and the hard-hitting war machines were gradually integrated into the Yanibar Guard. Over time, hundreds of droidekas were added to its ranks and served as shock-weapons in frontal assaults, maintained vigilant perimeter defense, or were stationed aboard Yanibar Guard Fleet ships as defense against boarding actions.

Behind the scenes
The idea of having Sarth slice the control system of the droidekas originated in Force Exile I: Fugitive, and was influenced by similar attempts by other belligerent civilizations to acquire droidekas in canonical works, most notably Survivor's Quest and Outbound Flight. The concept of having the Yanibar Guard include droidekas among its ranks was present in the first draft of the Force Exile saga and persisted into later drafts.

In Force Exile II: Smuggler, Sarth Kraen quickly takes over a pair of droidekas on Emberlene in order to save his brother, Selusda Kraen. His methods for doing so were not explained, leaving reader Victor Dorantes to later question the realism of Sarth being able to so quickly seize the war droids for his own purposes. Furthermore, it was never explained how Sarth had the control algorithms for the droidekas in the first place&mdash;the knowledge had been presumed lost in Fugitive. In response, author Atarumaster88 initially and facetiously attributed the speed of the event to "Sarth's 1337 haxxor skillz", but later, additional content was added to the chapter in question explaining how Sarth had slowly reconstructed the code and placed it in an easy-to-use format that Sarth kept on him at all times, due to his paranoia about losing it again.

Appearances

 * Force Exile I: Fugitive
 * Force Exile II: Smuggler
 * Yanibar Guard Sourcebook