RA-7 Protocol Droid

RA-7 Protocol Droids are Arakyd Industries' Imperial-era protocol chassis — almost universally referred to as "Death Star Droids" across the galaxy because of their ubiquity aboard the original Death Star and on Imperial command vessels generally. The RA-7 was sold publicly as a standard protocol-and-translation unit, marketed to Imperial procurement officers as a cost-efficient alternative to the more famous 3PO-series droids. What the public marketing did not mention was the line's darker function, known mainly to Imperial Intelligence and the ISB: every RA-7 unit shipped with covert surveillance subroutines that fed audio, video, and conversational analytics back to Imperial command. RA-7s were, in effect, walking listening devices distributed throughout Imperial installations and any civilian organization the Empire wanted to surveil.

The RA-7's distinctive insectoid head was canonically a deliberate Arakyd design choice — the bulbous photoreceptors were specified to be larger and more sensitive than civilian protocol droids required, ostensibly to support enhanced visual translation but actually to capture high-resolution surveillance imagery. Legends material expands on the line's intelligence function considerably. The Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina and Tales from Jabba's Palace anthologies both featured RA-7s in walk-on roles as covert observers; the recurring Legends gag was that an RA-7 in the background of any Imperial scene was, with near-certainty, a deployed intelligence asset rather than just protocol staff. ISB internal documentation reconstructed across multiple expanded-universe sources suggests the RA-7 surveillance program was code-named "Watchful Eye" and provided a substantial portion of the Empire's domestic intelligence on Imperial-occupied worlds.

The surveillance subroutines became public knowledge in the months immediately following the Empire's collapse, when New Republic Intelligence began publicly cataloging the espionage tools the Empire had deployed against its own citizens. RA-7 units that survived the transition have varied fates. Some were dismantled by Rebel and New Republic technicians on suspicion of being active spy nodes; others were reprogrammed and continued in civilian protocol roles. Among the reprogrammed survivors, two camps developed: techs who scrubbed the surveillance code entirely, and techs who left the subroutines dormant rather than removed — sometimes from technical conservatism, sometimes from the more uncomfortable possibility that an intelligence operative or successor government might want to reactivate them later. (Assumption: the "Watchful Eye" code name and specific ISB program details are drawn from Legends material; modern canon confirms the surveillance functionality but does not document the program's internal Imperial nomenclature consistently.) Particularly thorough Legends sources suggest that some RA-7s themselves became aware of their surveillance function and developed complex relationships with their own programming — a quietly horrifying premise that has fueled several short stories across the years.

An RA-7 PC is the party's social specialist, translator, and (if the player leans into the canon) the unit with a complicated relationship to their own factory programming. The richest RA-7 arcs lean into the surveillance question directly. Did the chassis's reprogramming actually remove the subroutines or merely deactivate them? Is the unit unwittingly transmitting party intelligence to a successor government somewhere? Has the RA-7 figured this out and chosen not to tell the party? RA-7 PCs have access to character ground no other droid line can quite match — the experience of being designed as a tool of surveillance and trying to be something else — and the chassis's slightly unsettling appearance makes the canon paranoia easy to play.

RA-7 chassis run roughly 1.7m tall — slim humanoid protocol frame with grey or gold plating and a distinctive insectoid cranial unit featuring large bulbous photoreceptors set in a flat triangular face. The head shape is the line's signature: less anthropomorphic than the protocol droids of other manufacturers, more distinctly mechanical and faintly unsettling. Internal armor is minimal — RA-7s were not built for combat. The chassis is, however, built for sustained operation in mixed environments (Imperial command ship corridors, Death Star residential sections, planetside government complexes), with sealed servomotors and corrosion-resistant plating.