CT Why are Stormtroopers so lightly armoured?

Why do Stormtroopers have those suits when they get no protection from them and besides that how is it that Princess Leia gets away with shooting dead Stormtroopers instead of aiming for the leg or arm?

It seems the Rebel Alliance don't have ethics when it comes to fighting soldiers of the Empire.

 

The armor is what happens when you contract to the lowest bidder.

Also, what is this new idea going around that in order to fight the Empire, the Rebels should just let themselves be mowed down into obliteration.

 

They're soldiers in a military engagement. Shooting them dead is perfectly ethically and legally correct, and aiming for centre mass if possible is standard procedure - biggest target, biggest chance of a hit. Besides, the stormtroopers's own inaccuracy was purely because they were cheap goons with mass-produced gimcrack equipment, they would have shot any rebels without qualm. Turnabout's fair play.

 

Yes but there is one moment in all of Star Wars that contradicts this. Leia was being pursued by the Stormtroopers and a superior officer orders them to stun her and she goes and kills the guy who had no intention of killing her. She was far more valuable as a prisoner than dead yet here we have a princess willing to kill a petty officer. A little cruel. The Rebels were a bit heartless.

 

They wanted her stunned so they could torture her for information. And then kill her. She had no worth to the Empire beyond the information she had. And the Empire was in the habit of blowing up entire planets just to prove a point. Frankly there's no realistic way to sling stones against the Rebel's relative morality from that point onwards.

 

Grand Moff Tarkin wanted her tortured and he gave the order to fire on her home planet. I'm not questioning the morality of her actions she was in a life or death situation only that given her position within the Alliance she could come across as more restraint. At the end of the day the soldiers of the Empire would one day be taking orders from her. By this stage in the Saga she was still in the Imperial Senate.

 

Stormtrooper armour isn't going to protect from a direct hit any more than contemporary kevlar body armour will save a soldier from a rifle shot.

It CAN however be effective in somewhat negating the effects of glancing blows.

Also, I believe it has been mentioned somewhere that the armour is good against projectile weapons.

 

Frankly, Stormtrooper armor is designed to absorb and deflect blows. She couldn't stun them, because it would be ineffective. In Rebels, there's a point where Rex is in Stormtrooper armor and the troopers around him stun him. The first stun blast only works moderately on him, because he's wearing all armor with only his head exposed. It took two stun shots to effectively take him down. Also, shooting at a Stormtrooper's armor in the shoulder, arm, or leg area is going to be ineffective since their armor is designed to deflect blasts in these areas. Only a direct hit center mass is going to penetrate their armor and bring them down.

 

The armor is blast protection not shot protection. It's also light for mobility. Quick strike.

 

The main purposes of Stormtrooper armor seem to be the following: conformity and intimidation. To quell individuality, each Stormtrooper wears the same armor within his or her class. The unsympathetic Stormtrooper helmets let citizens know they will not be exempt from any Imperial order no matter what.

Ewoks and Rebels have demonstrated Stormtrooper armor does not protect against plasma or melee particularly well.

 

Storm trooper armor made some sense to me up until ROTJ. I figured "ok, maybe not super effective against blasters... but it protects against more primitive projectile weapons, shrapnel, etc".

Then they showed Ewoks throwing ROCKS AT THEM. I tend to just ignore that part of the movie and keep on with my original head canon

 

Body armor protects it's wearer from penetration, not impact. Real life body armor can stop a bullet from penetration, but the force of impact can still injure or kill the wearer. Also the armor in the PT was just as ineffective, only took a single shot to kill a clone, and lightsabers went though it like butter. Plus the original films imply OT stormtroopers are still clones, at least some are.

I doubt Leia heard the command to the stormtroopers to stun her. Even then, police are taught to shoot to kill anybody armed with even non lethal weapons like stun guns or pepper spray.

 

The rocks made some sense as armour isn't going to protect you from the physical force of a large rock hitting you just limit the potential for it to crack your skull open. The arrows were pushing it although I'm not sure we saw a fully armoured trooper hurt by them.

 

Cause they looked cool for the film and the mask/armor adds a sense of evil/dehumanization. They are awesome looking canon-fodder.

As far as Rebels having no ethics, stormtroopers are trained soldiers of war and they are aware of the risks they are taking. Is an American soldier in WW2 evil for killing a Nazi soldier?

 

If they hit in the joints between the armor.

 

Bloody Halliburton...

 

Or in the case of Star Wars, Halle Burtoni.

 

Here we go again...stormtroopers are precise (according to Ben Kenobi) and what we saw in the Death Star were obviously stormtroopers with explicit orders from Vader to shoot but to miss.

Vader had installed a homing beacon aboard the Falcon and wanted the Princess to escape so she would lead them to the Rebel forces' hidden base on Yavin IV.

Regarding the use of stormtrooper armor I'd first like to say that what they show in Rebels (i.e. not protection from stun beams) is a major retcon, IMHO, which just illustrates they didn't really sit down and wonder what the armor is good for.

While it won't protect from a direct laserblast, I imagine stormtroopers being also used to crush revolts on planets enslaved by the Empire where the locals are technologically still on a 21st century level or less. I'd say the armor protects best against

• projectiles
• grenades (shrapnel)
• gas
• light energy beam weapons
• lethal radiation

 

Stormtrooper armour is awesome...just not so much on the small moon of Endor where trippy, localised, gravitational anomolies render it impotent against slow moving projectiles such as against shale dropped from kites or ewok-lobbed pebbles and such. Everywhere else it's brilliant.

 

The Stormtroopers seen on Hoth were far more deathly than the other troopers. They come across as combat forces as opposed to regular troops and even the TIE fighter pilots were more important than these regular troopers.

 

Their armor is only as good as for what the plot calls for.

 

Bob the X-Winger wrote:

The Stormtroopers seen on Hoth were far more deathly than the other troopers. They come across as combat forces as opposed to regular troops and even the TIE fighter pilots were more important than these regular troopers.

If you pay close attention almost all of them wear a vertical rank badge on the left belly armor segment with three red rank "rectangles" which according to my research suggests the rank "sergeant". Thus we might have been looking at an elite group of General Veers' best men and some of the best soldiers of the Galactic Empire.

 

First Order Stormtroopers > Imperial Stormtroopers.

 

First Order Stormtroopers >>>>