Adam Reynolds wrote:Perhaps there isn't actually a difference and they are all within a unified chain of command, with the different ranks merely a tradition rather than anything real.
Possibly, though that gets a little messy. Not sure why bother with the separate titles though if there's no way to tell them apart anyway, since people unfamiliar with the individual officers would constantly be getting wrong.
TBH I like the old idea of Veers' plaque having those extra spacers on his badge to be a way to tell the difference. I know Saxton discounted it, but I honestly don't recall anyone else's service uniforms having those gaps. Granted he lacked those spacers on his field armor but in context it's pretty clear he'd be Army anyway.
Of course Tarkin IIRC wore essentially the same thing himself, but nobody's confusing a Grand Moff badge with anything else. Naval officers generally won't be leading ground operations anyway so it should be a nonissue for them.
Based on the films, I would also not assume that there is a separate Imperial army in addition to stormtroopers, with Veers and his army units being a heavy mechanized stormtrooper unit.
"Rebels" is also pretty much running with this, so yeah I'd say stormtroopers = Army at this point. I just find it interesting that the one trooper has a badge when we pretty much
never see armored troopers with badges. Maybe the colored pauldrons weren't practical so they had to default to the plaque for that mission. It's an odd outlier though, because why would that officer even need a visible indicator of rank in that scenario?
Galvatron wrote:Okay, but does that mean that the cylinders are intended as a visible indicator of rank?
As previously noted, on the ESB uniforms it almost has to be, unless you go by the old Legends where each badge represents three or four different ranks/titles and you'd have to be psychic to know who is who. Or if they make the jump from Lieutenant -> Captain (in Navy terms) with nothing in between. Otherwise, they pretty much
have to be significant because there's no other way to tell the difference.
The ANH style doesn't require it though, and if the
Tarkin quote is speaking in that context - I'd assume it's describing Tarkin himself - then in that situation they indeed wouldn't have anything to do with rank.
Galvatron wrote:Okay, so what do black uniforms signify and why does
Admiral Titus wear one? Some black unformed Imperials don't even have rank badges. Are these supposed to be NCOs?
That's a tough one, mainly because Titus fucks it up. The SWTC theory of them being stormtrooper officers works well enough in the ANH context, but then why would a Naval officer be wearing one?
I know the black uniforms came back for RotJ (Vader's shuttle arriving in particular), did they also have rank badges or were they badge-less? I can't remember and don't have the DVDs at hand. If no badges, one could assume that's some kind of Senior NCO or Warrant Officer uniform.
But again, Admiral Titus fucks all of that up.
Look, at the end of the day we kind of have to acknowledge that, out of universe, there more than likely is
no consistency between different movies, the shows and the comics when it comes to the Imperial uniforms. Whether or not ESB had a plan internally consistent with itself, it obviously had nothing to do with ANH and then RotJ comes along and does something different again.
So the three highest Canon sources for Imperial uniforms and insignia show us three different things which means we're as good as screwed from the outset.
Anything we try to bash together is an adhoc justification that pretty much has nothing to do with the (lack of) plan between the costume designers of the three films.
And it just filters out from there. Like, I'm pretty sure the only reason Admiral Titus wears a black uniform is because it's a nod to ANH and little to no thought was given to its significance beyond "officers in ANH wear uniforms like this so here's a nod to that" by the design team.
At the end of the day, in this thread and elsewhere, we're just trying to make sense of a system that was never actually a system to begin with. We'll never answer
all the questions or adequately explain
all the outliers because it is vanishingly unlikely that the content creators who made said outliers or raised said questions by sticking something into their works ever gave that much thought to it in the first place.
One person with 3 blue over 2 red and another with I think 4 red.
