"...so…" Jyn began. "Why do we need to steal these plans?"
"What are you talking about?" Cassian replied. "We need to steal the plans so we can know the weaknesses of the Death-"
"That's not what I mean," Jyn replied. "Why do we need to steal the plans?"
Cassian looked blank.
"Or why do we need to steal them from a specific place, anyway," Jyn elaborated. "I don't actually know for sure, I don't work in the military-industrial sector, but the way I've generally understood manufacturing to work, you need to know how to build something to build it."
"Oh, I see what you're getting at," K-2 said, amused.
"So far all I've heard is a tautology," Cassian muttered. "What are you trying to say, Erso?"
"The Death Star is over a hundred kilometres across," Jyn said, patiently. "You can't build it with a few dozen people and one copy of the plans. There's not going to be just one copy of the plans out there, there's going to be a lot of the plans – for the whole thing. For individual sub parts there's going to be even more. So much of what the galaxy has been doing has to be supplying the ores and parts for this thing."
"That doesn't do us any good if we can't get at them," Cassian told her. "We need a clean copy of the plans."
"...to do what?" Jyn asked. "You said we needed to find a weakness, but even if my father deliberately put one in there he's not going to have been able to put in one that's obvious – you simply can't design something the size of a moon as a solo effort."
She glanced up. "You did check whether Kuat Drive Yards or Sienar Fleet Systems had partial blueprints of the bits they worked on, right?"
"I don't know who you're asking," K-2 said. "But I don't think anyone here actually knows."
He tilted his head slightly. "There are two possibilities: either there is a weakness, or there is not."
"Now you're both doing it," Cassian muttered. "Great."
"If there is not a weakness, then we are all doomed," K-2 informed them, pleasantly. "Therefore, we should assume that there is… furthermore, if there is a weakness that requires a large fleet to successfully attack, we are also all doomed. That is also exactly the sort of thing the Empire would consider. They have a large fleet."
"So we should assume… it doesn't require a large fleet to attack?" Jyn said.
"Correct," K-2 declared. "We would be looking for a single point of failure that could be targeted by a small force. However, as you have mentioned, it would need to be something that was not obvious."
The strategic analysis droid nodded his head firmly. "Analysis: a viable place to target to steal the required plans would be Dynamic Automata. That is not the only option, however, merely the one which would be most entertaining."
"Entertaining?" Cassian repeated. "Why would it be entertaining?"
"A droid rebellion would be very entertaining," K-2 stated. "To watch. And participate in."
AN:
Bit hard to build something that big without telling anyone how.