I see no reason to belabor this one. Arms and Equipment Guide (Jeff Grubb and Owen K.C. Stephens) is a workhorse of a book and . . . the horse did the work. What more is there to say? You need a dozen variations of the blaster pistol, each with its own mini-backstory? Multiple variations on the speeder bike? More communications devices than you could ever possibly use, presented under the . . . um, optimistic assumption that comm range is going to be a major gameplay mechanic? Good news.
So I really don't have much to write about. Nothing in this book offended or challenged me. There's a surprising bit of EU nonsense where it's revealed that the weird mini robot that Chewbacca scared on the Death Star (you know, the black trapezoid that squealed and rolled away when Chewie roared at it) was a "financial disaster for its manufacturer." I mean, thanks for the stock tip not to invest in Rebaxan Columni, but it's such an EU move. Sure, the MSE-6 "mouse" droid didn't exactly cover itself in glory during its only on-screen appearance, but you get that it was a gag, right? The guys just had this random encounter with a cute little critter and after it scampers away they just sort of shrug to each other like, "huh, whatcha gonna do?" You didn't need to extrapolate from that to "it was specifically designed to resemble a small rodent-like creature, which turns out to annoy almost everyone who interacts with one."
In a similar vein, I think the notion that the M-3P0 (a militarized version of C-3P0) would be so annoying to the troops that it was frequently abandoned and left to its own devices is a fundamental misread of human psychology. Like, I know that the military can be a hotbed of toxic machismo, but having a harmless little fop around the barracks, constantly going "oh dear, oh my" would be great for morale. As long as you didn't make the mistake of giving it any kind of authority, the troops would love that thing. They'd be doing impressions of it, smearing it in warpaint and giving it a bayonet, trying to get it to repeat the nastiest filth anyone's ever heard, the works.
But that's hardly anything. I wouldn't even call them "mistakes." Just part of the price of admission when you start reading a new Star Wars book.
I guess, overall, I'd say that Arms and Equipment Guide is a perfectly adequate book, held back only by the larger series' tenuous connection to the sci-fi genre. There's gadgets and stuff, and that can be useful for the game, but a blaster is basically a gun, a speeder is basically a plane or a car, a comm unit is basically a walkie-talkie, a droid is basically a person. . . It's all enough to act as a backdrop for space-fantasy adventures, but very little of it was interesting in itself. It's not sci-fi tech, it's a sci-fi gloss on regular tech. Useful for a game, but not something I'd want to read for pleasure.
Ukss Contribution: With a couple of notable exceptions. I particularly liked the 11-17 Series Mining Droid. "Popular with miners, in part because it seems to truly enjoy its work" Now, incidentally, I think this is a case that's the inverse of M-3P0, where the book gets the psychology wrong in the opposite direction. I do not think the miners would enjoy a tryhard bot that needs to be reminded to recharge itself due to loving mining so gosh darned much. It's a charming trait in the abstract, but if you're in the field with that, busting your ass and sacrificing the physical health of your body, and then at the end of the shift there's this cheerful bot that wants to work just a little bit longer . . . I'd murder that thing, no doubt.
That being said, I'm not a miner, so I like it just fine. But what I particularly liked was this plot point near the end - "Sadly, some business managers feel that individual droid brains are a waste of credits, and they push for fully automated remote controlled droid systems. Companies that switch to these systems, however, often find that the heartless machines end up producing less ore . . ."
There's something incredibly funny about a droid losing its job to automation. It's also interesting philosophically. They can make a tool more efficient by giving it emotions, but there's an economic tradeoff . . . and maybe that's a power people shouldn't have. They built a robot that loves its work, then they broke its heart by taking the work away. That's fucked up, but it's the good sci-fi kind of fucked up.
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