8 hours ago, Shadows of the Future said:

Seatroopers are more in scuba type gear, Shore Troopers are for environments where it's still wet, but more for surface operations where it's more of a situation where they aren't weighed down by the armor if they end up in the water. You're giving up some armor for not ending up dealing with drowning or getting stuck in the muck. It's also possible that it's a generally outdated version of the Scout Trooper armor that still works great for that environment, so while it was updated elsewhere, the armor got left in use there.

The various vehicular troopers seem to have largely the same armor, but different head gear. The helmets might actually tie into the various vehicles systems for a HUD there which would be a pretty good reason for why there are the AT-AT drivers and the tank troopers. Some of the armor pieces could be added or removed either by how dangerous the area is or by preference...

My point in bringing up Seatroopers et al was to note that if the basic trooper armour with some modification can handle extreme deserts, magma, trench warfare, and even underwater combat, it just seems silly that they need a specific type of gear for paddling in the surf. They could literally just put on Scout armour. As for it maybe being older stuff, sure, we could make-believe that, but this kind of logical scrabbling to establish a headcanon that doesn't seem silly shouldn't be necessary in the first place, and the way the Visual Guide article is written doesn't have any implication that their gear is anything other than bespoke.

The R1 vehicle stuff is a whole other thing, if they didn't want to use the existing styles they'd have been better off just not having a guy in the tank cupola than adding a third kind of vehicle driver gear.

I dunno. At my workplace alone we have... ten? different types of riot control gear. Old gear gets replaced, but the supplier no longer provides that line or a new line is cheaper or the guy in procurement thought this different one looked good, or whatever. Uniforms have been changed several times over the years with various parts being phased in and out, so on any given day people might be wearing six or seven different variations of the same uniform. And that's just one workplace.

Given a galaxy spanning Empire, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see different types of uniforms/gear/whatever. I'd be surprised if they ONLY have three types of vehicle driver gear in the entire Empire. I'd be expecting more like fifty or sixty possible variations, at a bare minimum. Regional availability, new models/marks of existing gear, total replacements, repaired gear, specialists gear... the list goes on. Somewhere like Scarif is obviously a cushy post. They have money to burn in a place like that. They've got a planetwide shield, a permanent two ISD garrison, and are home to the most delicate and sensitive plans in the Empire. Their budget is certainly big enough that if they want to order 50,000 sets of Shoretrooper gear, no one is going to bat an eyelid.

Some bureaucrat on Coruscant might look at the request and be like "Why do they need special gear for their stormtroopers on Scarif? Don't they just sit on the beach all day?" and the guy in the next cubicle is like "Yeah, but you know what the guys out there are like. They get gold-plated trashcans and use refined coaxium to power their coffee machines. Must be tough being posted to a quiet tropical planet, huh?"

2 hours ago, Chucknuckle said:

Given a galaxy spanning Empire, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see different types of uniforms/gear/whatever.

I always use the 40k universe as an example for this. Though larger is scope than the Star Wars universe, it properly represents a lack of standardization due to geographical, cultural, logistical, developmental and many other factors across the regiments of the Imperial Guard. If anyone is familiar with the Gaunt's Ghosts novels there are several situations that come to mind, when they are issued the wrong size power cells for their guns because that's what the other regiment they were fighting with used. Or another where they fight on a planet in the middle of its own WWI, with trench warfare and the local armies using bolt-action and predominantly semi-automatic weapons while they are using laser weapons. The galaxy is a big place.

I, for one, am encouraged by one directional trend that Disney has clearly brought to the SW universe, and that is moral ambiguity over simple good vs. evil. Cassian Andor was an assassin... a murderer even. Saw Guerrera was a terrorist. The rebel alliance lacked moral spine in its nascent form. Aleksandr Karrus, a former agent of genocide, turns double. And there is little coincidence as to why Adm. Thrawn is one of the very few characters adopted by Disney from the EU... he is charasmatic and likeable, an unexpectedly debonair villain among a widespread class of institutional goons and sycophants serving a one-dimensional Empire of Evil. It is something that Disney seems to explore with an appreciable pace and subtlety with the anthology and Rebel series.. completely unlike the capricious moral duality of the Jedi / Sith seen in the Skywalker Saga. Moral ambiguity makes for a more compelling story than moral duality.

And so it can translate down to the institutions and loyalties that the commoner and the unextraordinary serve. You can rationalize the so-called "mudtrooper" as something like the Wehrmacht... the feld-grau German schutzen serving a chain-of-command with somewhat mixed reluctance and commitment whereas the Stormtrooper Corps is something like the SS, both the hardened Waffen-SS battle formations or more security-type troopers of lesser prowess (think RSHA goons)... absolutely committed careerists in the new Imperial apparatus and bureaucracy. After all, it took membership in the Nazi Party or Communist Party to go anywhere up the chain in their respective 'empires,' but the bulk of infantry and soldiery were not Nazi or Communist Party members. They would have their own motivations, their own 'reasons to serve,' whether compulsory or otherwise... but they were never, ever to be discounted as a fighting force as a whole. The regular army was always, after all, the primary gauntlet of state power that the hand of the Party (or Imperial apparatus, if you will) wielded.

And so it is perhaps the Death Star and the Moff system is the "final solution." It is the final solution to an over reliance on an unreliable system of criminal syndicates, planetary governors, an obsolescent Senate and an enormous Imperial Army of dubious quality in an expeditionary scope that reflect the ultimate hubris and folly of Palpatine's ambitions.

6 hours ago, Marvingardns said:

I, for one, am encouraged by one directional trend that Disney has clearly brought to the SW universe, and that is moral ambiguity over simple good vs. evil. Cassian Andor was an assassin... a murderer even. Saw Guerrera was a terrorist. The rebel alliance lacked moral spine in its nascent form. Aleksandr Karrus, a former agent of genocide, turns double. And there is little coincidence as to why Adm. Thrawn is one of the very few characters adopted by Disney from the EU... he is charasmatic and likeable, an unexpectedly debonair villain among a widespread class of institutional goons and sycophants serving a one-dimensional Empire of Evil. It is something that Disney seems to explore with an appreciable pace and subtlety with the anthology and Rebel series.. completely unlike the capricious moral duality of the Jedi / Sith seen in the Skywalker Saga. Moral ambiguity makes for a more compelling story than moral duality.

And so it can translate down to the institutions and loyalties that the commoner and the unextraordinary serve. You can rationalize the so-called "mudtrooper" as something like the Wehrmacht... the feld-grau German schutzen serving a chain-of-command with somewhat mixed reluctance and commitment whereas the Stormtrooper Corps is something like the SS, both the hardened Waffen-SS battle formations or more security-type troopers of lesser prowess (think RSHA goons)... absolutely committed careerists in the new Imperial apparatus and bureaucracy. After all, it took membership in the Nazi Party or Communist Party to go anywhere up the chain in their respective 'empires,' but the bulk of infantry and soldiery were not Nazi or Communist Party members. They would have their own motivations, their own 'reasons to serve,' whether compulsory or otherwise... but they were never, ever to be discounted as a fighting force as a whole. The regular army was always, after all, the primary gauntlet of state power that the hand of the Party (or Imperial apparatus, if you will) wielded.

And so it is perhaps the Death Star and the Moff system is the "final solution." It is the final solution to an over reliance on an unreliable system of criminal syndicates, planetary governors, an obsolescent Senate and an enormous Imperial Army of dubious quality in an expeditionary scope that reflect the ultimate hubris and folly of Palpatine's ambitions.

I love this post.

On 5/28/2018 at 9:30 AM, Chucknuckle said:

I dunno. At my workplace alone we have... ten? different types of riot control gear. Old gear gets replaced, but the supplier no longer provides that line or a new line is cheaper or the guy in procurement thought this different one looked good, or whatever. Uniforms have been changed several times over the years with various parts being phased in and out, so on any given day people might be wearing six or seven different variations of the same uniform. And that's just one workplace.

Given a galaxy spanning Empire, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see different types of uniforms/gear/whatever. I'd be surprised if they ONLY have three types of vehicle driver gear in the entire Empire. I'd be expecting more like fifty or sixty possible variations, at a bare minimum. Regional availability, new models/marks of existing gear, total replacements, repaired gear, specialists gear... the list goes on. Somewhere like Scarif is obviously a cushy post. They have money to burn in a place like that. They've got a planetwide shield, a permanent two ISD garrison, and are home to the most delicate and sensitive plans in the Empire. Their budget is certainly big enough that if they want to order 50,000 sets of Shoretrooper gear, no one is going to bat an eyelid.

Some bureaucrat on Coruscant might look at the request and be like "Why do they need special gear for their stormtroopers on Scarif? Don't they just sit on the beach all day?" and the guy in the next cubicle is like "Yeah, but you know what the guys out there are like. They get gold-plated trashcans and use refined coaxium to power their coffee machines. Must be tough being posted to a quiet tropical planet, huh?"

****, even with the real military there are how many different camo patterns and gear sets for different environments?

Pretty much every environment has a camo pattern designed for it. You also have piles of environmental specific gear that is issued in different areas, it's not a one size fits all scenarios thing and a galaxy is a heck of a lot bigger than a single planet.

Scarif is also a place where they store high security info, it might also be a testing ground for new gear because it's already classified what's going on there other than it being a data center.

From the official Databank Entry

Basically these are parts from shore trooper uniforms (arm guard, leg plates and ammo pouch) and general veers uniform with a cape!