The Essential Guide to Droids (Page 22-23)
Protocol: 3D-4X Administrative Droid
[edit]Faced with Cybot Galactica's overwhelming dominance in the protocol market, many smaller companies attempted to mirror their competitor's success with their own entries. Those that tried to duplicate the 3PO precisely met with failure—without specific hardware such as the AA-1 Verbobrain, the droids couldn't match the newly defined industry standard. Wisely realizing that one-on-one competition with Cybot Galactica was beyond their abilities, Genetech Corporation developed a limited protocol unit with an emphasis on systems administration instead of interstellar diplomacy.
The 3D-4X administrative droid is most often employed as a personal assistant for businesspeople who require a traveling droid with the built-in initiative to handle many tasks on its own. Unlike outwardly comparable models such as Serv-O-Droid's CZ secretary droid, the 3D-4X is highly intelligent, meticulously precise, and endowed with a distinctive personality that somehow manages to be both aloof and deferential at the same time.
The droid's internal database of nearly four and a half million forms of communication, combined with an exhaustive library of business, financial, and administrative issues, allows it to communicate effectively with executives from any number of planets and commerce systems. Frequently, 3D-4X units are used by their owners to initiate preliminary trade negotiations with a competing corporation or merchant house, though the droid lacks the authority to finalize a deal.
Its humanoid frame is covered with thick plating of silver chromite, buffed and polished to a blinding sheen. Under focused lighting, the droid glistens like a landing beacon; when outdoors under a hot sun, the droid is blistering to the touch. The unusual head is shaped like the blunt end of a test tube and contains a vocabulor and a single photoreceptor. A laser pointer is built into the right index finger, while a sophisticated comm unit hangs from the neck. Various storage compartments lie concealed beneath sliding body panels.
Genetech utilized the factory world of Mechis III for the production of the 3D-4X, where one of the units was appropriated by then-administrator Hekis Durumm Perdo Kolokk Baldikarr Thun. Administrator Hekis allowed Fourex to run most of the day-to-day operations, and pressed the droid into menial service as a personal waiter, ordering it to deliver three hot meals to his office each day and an order of stim-caf at the top of every hour. Perhaps chafing under such rudimentary duties, Threedeefourex gladly accepted modified programming when the assassin droid IG-88 arrived on Mechis III and conscripted the entire mechanical population into his service. Immediately after, Threedeefourex delivered something unexpected along with the daily production summaries and status reports—his master's death.
Info Boxes
[edit]Front View
[edit]- Storage Compartments (behind panels)
- Systems Power Couplings
- Microphone/Stenographic Recorder (behind panel)
- Recharge Coupling
- Internal Business Database
- Direct Cranial Uplinks
- Photoreceptor
- Vocabulator
- Auditory Sensors
- Communications Scrambler/Transmitter
- Laser Pointer
- Hidden Storage Compartment
- Circuitry Cooling Cables
- Polished Chromite Shell
Rear View
[edit]- Storage Compartments (behind panels)
- Recharge Coupling
- Communications Scrambler/Transmitter