Are stormtroopers clones?

Counterpoint, Yssane Isard probably did utilize Cloning technology during her tenure as misterss of the Empire...specifically she utilized the same sources of clones that the Emperor had used in Carida.

There was no shortage of troops and manpower or equipment during Yssane's reign. The problem was that the Empire was in the throws of civil war and breakup. Lets not forget she 'let' the Republic have coruscant out of a plan to destroy it from within.

She realized I think the Empire needed to be proven the legitamate government, a billion billion billion billion clones would get the entire galaxy to turn against her en masse should she even have the time or wealth to do so.

What she needed was the people to NOT join the New Republic and that required humiliating them. No ammount of military force will conquer the galaxy as a whole (The Yzzung Vong prove that) alone.

As for Pelleon I remind everyone Pellaeon was never really commander of the Empire until after Daala's resignation as Supreme Commander.

He was head of the Outer Rim territories fleet out of mutual respect and the fact none of the Admirals seemed to have any idea what the hell they were doing. A process that continued under Pestage through Isard with Zsing until the rise of Thrawn.

The fact Pelleon was head of the remanents of the Empire when Thrawn came is just a example of the fact that his faction prospered as the others were destroyed.

No doubt he was getting any stormtroopers he still got from Carida and the other sources that the Empire usually got them from.

That is unless the shortage of stormtroopers in the Empire was caused by palpatine ceasing production from the Deep Core.

Also it is possible if Cracken and company knew about the Clone facilities that hundreds of them might have been located and destroyed and thus create an actual loss of clone sources.

As for why pelleon never used such an idea afterwards my answer is alittle simpler...

Pellaeon was repulsed I thought by Thrawn's use of clones and preferred actual military soldiery serving the Empire because they wanted to rather than reality. A veteran of the clone wars I imagine Palpatine refrained from reviving clone tech because of the very real reason its a pandora's box.

Why the USA hasn't used nukes more often.

I also reiterate clones are not really economically preferrable to recruitment. Without ysalamari and knowing nothing about the Spaarti and Kaminoan cloning methods the only benefit clones have over normal soldiers is that they can be conditioned to be mindless automatons incapable of disobeying orders due to morality.

in other words to produce an instant army of SS fanatics.

It seems to me its much easier to just recruit from the billions and billions of citizens of the galaxy to outfit your capital ships (the real power in the galaxy) as well as transports and so forth.

Thrawn needed the clone troops for only a two reasons I think

A Fear
B Expediancy

No doubt billions would have flocked to Thrawn once he proved the Empire was once again the New order they dreamed about

As Thrawn's own charisma has infected these boards...how would they affect the SW masses

It was shown that Daala and Pelleon revived the Empire up to managable war levels simply by accepting aliens and women into the ranks

 

Not all EU stormies are clones. Kyp Durron's brother was on Carida in training when it was destroyed (Jedi Academy Trilogy) and he was not a clone.

 

He might have had clones made of him though. For all we know Zeth duroun that we met might have been a clone of the original and Kyp might encounter another on a star destroyer some day.

 

The odds of that one particular trooper having been so good that they said "hey, let's clone an army out of that guy!" is kinda rare. Assuming they were doing it at all by that point, which I doubt. Otherwise Thrawn wouldn't have needed to do with Wayland to get cloning tanks.

 

Well possibly the cloning had stopped by then but George has pretty much indicated it was never stopped and the stormies are.

 

Who cares what George indicated; his opinions aren't canon. If it's not explicitly shown in a movie, it doesn't matter.

 

There's no reference to Isard using cloning technology. And I find it interesting that you can on the one hand claim that the Empire proper had no shortage of men and materiél in the post-Endor time period and yet also point out that they were in the middle of an enormous civil war. Zsinj alone was able to seize a third of Imperial space, the other warlords--save for Ardus Kaine--were significantly less powerful, but still tapped Imperial resources, both through defections/mutinies, and through the efforts to stop the various rogue ex-Imperials. After Endor up until roughly Thrawn's tenure as Supreme Commander, the Empire wasn't just fighting a war against the Alliance/Republic. Indeed, they weren't even just fighing a two-front war against Zsinj and the Republic. No, rather they were fighting a potentially thirty-front war against the Republic, Zsinj, Kaine, the Hapans, Delvardus, Harrsk, Drommel, Krennel, and who-knows how many others. The Imperial Civil War was disasterously costly for the Empire, and would have depleted Imperial frontline and reserve forces at a prolific rate. If any one of the factions, the Empire included, could have gotten a steady, unceasing influx of elite cloned stormtroopers, they most certainly would have exploited it to the utmost. But there's no real compelling evidence (that I can see) indicating that this was the case.
We know that the Old Republic produced a butt-load of clones for their Grand Army of the Republic, and it is logical to assume that a very large number of clones served on in the Imperial Stormtroopers. We also know that the Empire utilized cloned stormtroopers as of about five years prior to the Battle of Yavin. We assume that they were created using a technique other than the familiar Spaatri and Kaminoan methods. However, we don't know when these clones were created, and we don't know where.
We know that Carida is a military academy, and was for centuries until it was vaporized by Kyp Duron (two 'r's?). We know that Palpatine ordered the clone troops to be trained there at one poin. We also know that the Stormtrooper Academy was on Carida. It's just fan speculation that clone stormtroopers were created there in some sort of lab (that, apparenlty, nobody ever talked about, knew about, or utilized during the Imperial Civil War).
We know that not all stormtroopers were clones. There are any number of examples that have been cited already--Kyle Katarn, Kyp's brother, Crix Madine, et al.
We also know that Grand Admiral Thrawn's search for and discovery of Spaarti cloning cylinders was a big deal. His ability to produce clones had the New Republic shaking in its boots. We also know about how Luke, Leia, Han, and company reacted upon discovering that the Empire was using cloned stormtroopers. They reacted as if it was a new turn of events, and it scared 'em.
It is reasonable to assume that if the use of cloned stormtroopers was commonplace, it would have been:
1) Oh, I don't know, known about. By anybody. In the galaxy.
2) Significantly less disturbing.
3) Essentially making Thrawn's plan to generate clones laughable--because they'd have been making them all along.
If we decide that the Empire was just making clones the whole time, there'd be *no compelling reason* to find a long-lost cloning facility that could not be reproduced elsewhere so as to gain an advantage in the war.
For me, it just doesn't make sense--in terms of timeframe, strategy, operations, continuity, or logic for the Empire to have just had factories producing cloned stormtroopers the entire time. Sure, in their early days, there were clones. But from all the books I'm familiar with, it sounded like following the clone wars, the basic technology that allowed for the rapid creation of huge clone armies simply did not exist during the majority of the Emipre's reign.

 

First of all we all know that Lucas hints towards the facts that all Stormtroopers are Clonetroopers. But in the AOTC novel it mentions that you can't clone a clone so without Jango obviously the quality of clones goes down so somewhere along the line they start training normal people. And Thrawn did things the fast way by using the Spaarti tanks instead of the more reliable Kamino.

 

We also know that the Empire utilized cloned stormtroopers as of about five years prior to the Battle of Yavin.

We do? What's that from?

First of all we all know that Lucas hints towards the facts that all Stormtroopers are Clonetroopers.

Of course he does. To be honest, the degredation thing's not a bad way of explaining why the stormies in the OT suck so much, but the bottom line is, it doesn't work with the EU for them ALL to be clones at that point.

It's just like Brett said. The whole idea of Thrawn's strategy was for him to have ressurrected this long-lost technology. There's no way in hell they were producing clones at all by that point. Heck, for all we know Kamino may be wiped out in/by Episode 3. And we all know that the Spaarti tech had been deemed essentially useless until Thrawn brought ysalamiri into the mix.

 

Hmm..... Haven't read the AotC novelization yet, but I'm curious. Why can't you clone a clone? As a clone is a normal living organism, I can think of no reason it's biologically feasible. Is it simply that after multiple replications so many transcription errors crop up that even the cloners' safeguards can't leave the organisms with normal phenotypes? Or what?

-Paul

 

The "source" degrades after a while. That's why they kept Jango there.

 

We know that there were at least some stormtroopers that were clones as of roughly five years prior to the battle of Yavin according to a short story entitled "Pax Empirica". Yes, I know, it's not a real word. Even though I have my own personal doubts as to what exactly it says in regards to cloned stormies, I am assured that it is intended to be treated as regular canon.
It is included in the official strategy guide for the Galactic Battlegrounds computer game--which I feel I must point out portrays the Wookies and the Gungans as major galactic powers.
That's my grain of salt.

 

Pax Empirica has a Grand Moff Tarkin in it. Tarkin didn't become Grand Moff until five years before Yavin. So, the story takes place at some point during that time. Ther are other things...

 

I still think that Pax Imperica best takes place during the Kashyyyk slave raid as seen in Darksaber, with Lemelisk's flashback. After all, that was sometime previous to ANH, when the Death Star was being constructed.