Lit Imperial rank insignia - what do you think each element should represent?

We know from Rebels that there exist both "single row Admirals" (Brom Titus - single 6 plack rank bar) and "double row Admirals" (Kassius Konstantine - double 6 plack rank bar) in the same era - so it seems that it isn't a case of the insignia design being reformed between ANH and TESB.

So - what's the difference between the two represent? Do "double row Admirals" outrank "single row admirals" and what does having two rows mean, in rank terms?

I'm also curious as to what each color represents as well - with Kallus in season 1 of Rebels, we now have 4 colors - red, blue, yellow, and silver (Kallus doesn't have a silver plack in season 2 though).

My guess is that red has something to do with the Army - because Tagge, in ANH, only has red placks (6).
Blue - Stormtrooper Corps? I know that the stormtrooper officer Daine Jir has only blue placks. Navy officers tend to be shown with both, at least.

Yellow - governing-associated, or maybe Death Star associated? Moffs/Grand Moffs like Tarkin have them, Season 2 Kallus has them - and some officers on the Death Star have only yellow placks.

And finally - there's code cylinders. Some admirals have 4, some 3. In the old EU it was the difference between ordinary Admirals and High Admirals - but I don't know if it still represents an actual rank difference.

 

Tagge's Grand General's insignia is, if I remember rightly, the same as the old Grand Admiral insignia.

 

A new Imperial Sourcebook is what we need.

 

I want in.

Is it possible that Single/double row is a distinction between staff/operations tracks?

 

It might be worth noting what officers with the same badges, have fairly different ranks.

Cass and Bast - Cass is a Major, Bast is a General, both appear to have a 4 yellow, 2 red, single row badge:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Cass
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Moradmin_Bast

Khurgee and Romodi - Khurgee is a Captain, Romodi is a General- both have a 6 yellow, single row badge:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Edmos_Khurgee
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Hurst_Romodi

(They also both have 2 cylinders - so cylinders can't be used as a rank-distinguisher here, at least)

Pre-Rogue One Krennic and Tagge - Krennic is a Commander/Lieutenant Commander in flashback scenes, Tagge is a General, both have a 6 red, single-row badge)

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Orson_Callan_Krennic
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Cassio_Tagge

(Their uniforms are different and they're from different services in the Imperial Military - but the idea behind "present-day Krennic"'s admiral badge, seems to be that he holds rank equivalent to an admiral (Rogue One Visual Guide). Which raises the question - was he equivalent to a General, in those flashback scenes?

Tagge is not the only person at the Death Star Meeting with an all-red badge, too - the man in the grey-ish jacket to the right of Tarkin has one:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Hurst_Romodi

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.ne...ing-ANH.png/revision/latest?cb=20130312015030

(for a better close-up, go back to the Hurst Romodi page - (character is not Romodi but is the next person seated along from him - to the right of the image) and click on the meeting image there).

The "different sectors have different badge ranking systems" might work in some cases - but it's trickier when the officers are all serving on the Death Star (Cass/Bast, Khurgee/Romodi) - which one might expect to have a standardised system of its own, even if it's different from that of other places.

 

Let's face it: Imperial rank insignia are a mess because nobody except a few nerds like us care about that kind of details. And whenever we'll ask TPTB why they can't come up with a coherent system, we'll be told (albeit in a more diplomatic way) to get a life and stop bothering people with things like that.

 

Supposedly, Mollo created a perfectly coherent system, and it's the EU which has jumbled it:

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...ep-vii-spoilers.50024351/page-7#post-54079674

However - we're stuck with EU ranks for movie characters being "newcanon-ised".

 

It's so weird reading other parts of the board where they only watch the films and don't read any of the books. Constant speculation about things that have already been answered!

 

Not everybody likes the answers though. But with franchises, one must expect that some answers don't match with "analysis".

 

It's too much of a mess to try and fit all the pieces together at this point. Now figuring out what ranks/structure/plaques would make sense without ALL of the constraints imposed by previous Legends and Canon material would be more up my alley.

 

One thing that sure confused me in Legacy was the officer aboard Animus.

Admirals, Captains and even Lieutenants wore a more complicated uniform. Is she an NCO? That aside what does the insignia mean? It doesn't match anything else in Legacy I recall.

 

Easier to take the ESB system with two rows as the standard (as it's the easiest to extrapolate to each rank), and then single line ANH/RO style as on the whole being used for special deployments, i.e. part of the Death Star project, Vader's command staff, ISB, Intelligence, Weapons Development etc.

Not perfect but it's easier to gloss over the whole thing with a broad brush like this than to try and explain costuming "mistakes" by people with a low budget and no particular reason to pay intricate attention to detail for the sake a few fans like us 40 years down the line.

At least the Imperial badges can be rationalised to an extent - the Rebel officer badges are hopeless.

 

I don't know about the colours - but Rogue One Visual Guide repeats the WEG chain of command:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rebel_command_insignia

I would guess that multi-coloured badges like Willard's imply training in more than one speciality.

 

What's certain is that the ROTJ badges should NOT be taken into account. Even Pablo said so. Costuming blooper a.k.a "Everyone's a Commander Day".

 

Some of them have one cylinder instead of two - but that doesn't undermine the basic point that Piett should not be wearing that badge if he's still an Admiral.

I've been wondering - the guy who sits between Romodi and Major Cass at the Conference Table on the Death Star - did Legends ever name him? He wears a 6x1 all-red badge, has brown hair, and has a grey uniform intermediate in shade between Yularen's white, and the average officer's brown:

Spoiler

He's on the far right.

(I think the officer who reports to Tarkin that they've just arrived at Alderaan, before Leia is brought to him, wears the same pale grey jacket and has curly brown hair - I'm not sure if it's the same guy though - all the screen caps I can find look pretty blurry.

EDIT: after looking at a Youtube video on the Conference - apparently in the EU, he was Trech Molock:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Trech_Molock

Still makes me wonder - does the different shade of his uniform, mean anything?

 

What's up with the guy in the Lando comic who had green plaques?

Sent from my SM-G386W using Tapatalk

 

Even then, it's something of a nonsense - General and Colonel are army ranks, while Commander is a naval rank. (Also, General itself covers four different ranks...)

And then in the real world Commander is a lower rank than Captain - while a Captain may command a larger ship, it's not unheard of for smaller ships (frigates, corvettes) to be headed by a Commander.


The RotJ rank plaque farce is the final nail in the coffin of the argument that there's some single intended insignia system portrayed onscreen. Though I don't know how you can retcon around that oversight. Truthfully, it's one of the things I wish they had tinkered with in a re-release - remember they did switch Piett's rank badge to the correct side of his chest in a couple of shots at the end of ESB.

 

I always thought it was just weird coloring. His plaque is probably made of blue squares, and they only appear green because it's an image on a viewscreen.

 

In some navies, yes - but it's also an "Air Force" rank too.

And in the Dutch navy - it's a senior rank, more like Commodore:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander


Regarding "ways of distinguishing different levels of Admiral" - I don't know exactly how it works - but I think it's safe to say that it does not work the Saxton way - the higher the number of cylinders, the lower the rank.

Using the Saxton formula, Admiral Jhared Montferrat (1 cylinder) would outrank Fleet Admirals Ozzel and Piett (3 cylinders).

And Governor Pryce (2 cylinders, same badge pattern as Tarkin) would outrank 4-cylinder Tarkin.

Not a chance.

Probably - given that 4-cylinder Admiral Konstantine is not a Fleet Admiral, it doesn't run "high number of cylinders outranks low number" - either.

Maybe number of cylinders is relatively unimportant, having to do with particular security concerns, but not rank itself.

 

I suspect that Mollo's fully-worked-out system was only ever seen in ESB, but what's seen in ESB and RotJ can be made to fit together without any need to suppose a continuity error - whether or not anyone intended it to work the way it does, Lt. Hija apparently figured out the details back in the '80s, and contacted WEG with his observations; from WEG, it was picked up by pretty much every pre-reboot source (the basic principles, as I understand them, are that Imperial Army lieutenants and captains share essentially the same insignia as Imperial Navy lieutenants and captains, notwithstanding their rank difference, and that in both services, as Iron_lord just mentioned, a rank of commander then follows next above captain, borrowing from various non-Anglo military traditions)...

Pre-reboot canon was actually remarkably consistent...

As to what we see in ANH, REBELS, and the Scarif campaign, that's complicated - the easiest insignia to understand are those of "one-row admirals", with Tagge and Ramda having six red tabs and two code cylinders (I'm currently liking the headcannon that Tagge commands the TIEs assigned to Tarkin's technological terror),[1] the more senior Motti having two blue and four red, and the very senior Gorin having six blue tabs and three code cylinders...

"Two-row admirals" are obviously the highest-ranking, including the classic admiral's insignia from ESB (used both in REBELS and by Krennic), the even more classic Grand Moff's insignia from ANH itself, and the equally iconic Grand Admiral's insignia originating on the cover of Heir to the Empire. My suspicion is that the more junior officers' insignia varies, as the uniforms do, between various services and departments, although the pattern of tabs might remain the same, aiding inteligibility...

As to the "pocket cylinders", my own interpretating for WARFARE was that they largely indicate responsibility rather than actual rank, with the number increasing (often only temporarily) with increased authority, although they also help differentiate officers with similar insignia.

- The Imperial Ewok
--
[1] Yes, this is a footnote. It's mostly just to point out that in one of ANH's most underappreciated ironies, if the Empire had only sent in Vader leading a force of nine TIE Fighters, they would have probably have defeated the Rebels on Yavin. Thrawn could have solved the same problem with a couple of Gozantis before breakfast.

 

That would be an interesting reversal of Saxton's version, which has Tagge as senior to Motti because Tagge has all-red tabs - Tagge being a High General, but Motti only being a Commodore.

Oddly, for the Rebellion, he uses "blue tabs are senior to red tabs" - making Bob Hudsol and Captain Antilles the highest-ranking Rebel officers seen in ANH (Antilles being a captain only because he's in command of a ship) - with them outranking even Dodonna and Vanden Willard.

I think the difference between single-row and double-row might have less to do with rank, and more to do with differing regions of the Empire representing rank differently, as mentioned in Rogue One Visual Guide. Given that Motti is supposed to be Chief of the Navy, I can't see him being outranked by Konstantine at least, who isn't even a Fleet Admiral.

I think it's more likely that sometime shortly before Rebels, the Empire starts switching from single-row to double row, many officers in ANH and Rogue One not having adopted it yet, and by TESB, most officers have.

 

Not so sure about ROTJ though. All we can do is ignore the ROTJ plaques, since they're all identical (even for Piett and Jerjerrod). Heck, even Pablo Hidalgo did say "everyone's [plaque) is wrong in ROTJ". If we've got to try and establish a system, we must do it using ANH, ESB, R1, and Rebels.

Unfortunately, Junior Lt Jams from the Adventures in Wild Space series already wears a two-row plaque around 18 BBY.