Yep, It’s a Sandtrooper Article

I'm not usually interested in the exhausting minutae of things. In fact, I usually mock the OCD extremism of many in our hobby. But we all have our faults, and I'm certainly no exception. I too will suffer the details on occasion, and the Sandtroopers of Mos Eisley are one of those exceptions.

It wasn't all that long ago that I was utterly unaware of such trivial matters, aside from being cursorily cognizant of the different color pauldrons. But even then, I was a victim of Hasbro's nonsense (which I'll get into shortly). I believe I was first made aware of the sandtrooper variations by a former Banthaskull colleague. Many of us dissect the Cantina, and how there was filming at two different sets in two countries which meant that many of the final shots don't actually make sense for the sake of continuity, like Ponda Baba's hands, or Zutton's ability to teleport, or how there is no actual place for the Modal Nodes. Madness! Well, it turns out that the Sandtroopers are kind of in the same boat. Many have tried to do the research to piece together who is who, wearing what armor combo, and carrying which weapon. If you do the frame by frame thing like a true nerd, you probably can only piece together about 90% of what you'd want to know. But even with the magic of high def and freeze frame, there are still some inaccuracies, continuity errors, and costuming issues that ruin the illusion. If you try to pull an Icarus, you're going to get burned. Nevertheless, my goal is to do my best to have screen-accurate dioramas using whatever Hasbro has to offer, without delving into customization or 3D printing. The furthest I get into those realms are the occasional weapon or gear swap.

With Hasbro having just released a Sandtrooper, I felt it important to at least try to get some traction on my desire to see the sandtroopers represented accurately. As we discussed when we reviewed the new Stormtroopers of the Empire set, the Sandtrooper, while a nice action figure in a vacuum, is inaccurate. It's not egregious by my standards, but the figure still takes some important shortcuts. The abdominal plate, lack of thermal detonator, pauldron, and backpack are accurate (although I feel something is off with the sizing of the backpack). But we are missing the belt's black ammo pouches and the diamond shaped left knee plate, while the big ammo pouch is improperly attached to the pauldron. Also, the figure lacks barbell hips (which doesn't make it inaccurate, just sub-par). Additionally, the set included an E-11 blaster, a T-21 Light Repeating Blaster, and the DLT-19 Heavy Blaster Rifle. However, it lacks an RT-97C heavy blaster rifle, and there is no option for a "hovering" security droid, which may be okay if you're a Special Edition hater.

Not everything has been neatly and clearly established, nor carried forward into the new canon particularly well. However, it is fairly well established that for the pauldron colors, orange designates squad leaders, white is for sergeants, and black is for enlisted troops. There are multiple inconsistencies of course; some of this is due to filming continuity errors while some is just because of lack of clarity in the established canon. As for the aforementioned Hasbro tomfoolery, they have produced grey pauldroned troopers. There seems to be no official or semi-official recognition of a grey pauldron, either in canon or legends. At some point Hasbro made a grey pauldroned figure that was likely based on what really should just be a white pauldron that's very dirty. So if there's a 4-pack of sandtroopers in the white box format on the horizon, I certainly hope we don't get a fake gray pauldron jammed in there.

I would implore Hasbro to address all of these issues before going nuts on this current sculpt and repainting and re-releasing it 150 times. But once corrected, I would personally hope that Hasbro also be sure to give us the variants necessary to cover the screen accurate versions to go along with our Streets of Mos Eisley and Cantina sets. So here's a bit of a rundown of some of the Sandtroopers we see in Mos Eisley.

There is a canonically unnamed Sandtrooper regiment on Tatooine, but it seems the majority of the characters we see on screen are members of Foot Patrol 7. While some of the new canon info is predictably incomplete or contradictory, Foot Patrol 7 had enough members that some combination of them formed the roadblock that questioned Luke and Obi-Wan when they entered Mos Eisley in their landspeeder, investigated the Cantina to interview Wuher, and also stormed Docking Bay 94 after getting intel from Garindan. Other Sandtroopers that may or may not have been part of Foot Patrol 7 can be seen in the desert searching for the escape pod and also patrolling the streets of Mos Eisley knocking on doors as well as when the Millennium Falcon blasts off from the city. It's the roadblock and DB94 groups that I am most interested in.





For the roadblock, there are 6 sandtroopers that can be seen (sort of) on screen. I have numbered them 1 to 6 starting with the trooper that addresses Luke and then going clockwise. Not everything is completely clear, but piecing together the shots gives us this group:

#1 - Orange pauldron (Squad Leader) / E-11 blaster / hovering security droid nearby
#2 - Black pauldron (Enlisted) / RT-97C rifle
#3 - Black pauldron (Enlisted) / RT-97C rifle
#4 - Black pauldron (Enlisted) / E-11 blaster
#5 - Orange pauldron (Squad Leader) / DLT-19 rifle / No shoulder ammo pouch
#6 - White pauldron (Sergeant) / E-11 blaster

It is odd that there are two orange-pauldroned troops in this group, but that's what we see. The second trooper with the orange pauldron (#5) lacks the big ammo pouch on the left shoulder.





For the group that meets with Garindan, there are 7 sandtroopers. There is the leader who speaks at the front of the formation, and he is followed by two files of 3 troopers each:

#1 - Orange pauldron (Squad Leader) / T-21 blaster canon / no shoulder ammo pouch / no backpack
#2 - (1st in file over leader's left shoulder) - White pauldron / E-11 blaster
#3 - (1st in file over leader's right shoulder) - Orange pauldron / DLT-19 rifle / no shoulder ammo pouch
#4 - (2nd in left file) - Black pauldron / DLT-19 rifle
#5 - (2nd in right file) - Black pauldron / E-11 blaster
#6 - (3rd in left file) - White pauldron / E-11 blaster / no shoulder ammo pouch
#7 - (3rd in left file) - No pauldron / DLT-19 rifle / no shoulder ammo pouch / no backpack / 2 pouches on his back/belt

Again, we have two orange pauldroned leaders. The one who speaks to Garindan has neither a backpack nor an ammo pouch on his left shoulder. He's got a T-21 blaster canon. His loadout is completely different from the one who spoke at the roadblock, which would indicate these are two different squad leaders. Several of the troopers also have different loadouts than that first group, so it would appear this is a distinct squad from the one at the roadblock, although canon has all of them being part of Foot Patrol 7. Also of note, trooper #7 in this group has no sandtrooper gear, although he is carrying two large black ammo pouches on his waist/lower back and he does lack a thermal detonator. (More on this guy in a minute.)

This same group then enters Docking Bay 94 after speaking with Garindan. When the scene cuts to inside the bay, we see the sandtroopers enter the hangar one at a time. There are 7 of them, but there are slight differences in the loadouts with a couple of them. My guess is these are just filming continuity errors, as this is clearly supposed to be the same group of 7 that we saw head for the door from outside. The troopers don't enter the view from the Falcon's POV in the exact order we see them outside, but it's pretty close, and we can more or less identify the same 7 troopers with a couple of differences:

#3 - Orange pauldron / DLT-19 rifle has a shoulder strap hanging down which wasn't visible when he was outside
#7 - No pauldron / DLT-19 rifle E-11 Blaster/ no shoulder ammo pouch / no backpack / 2 pouches on his back/belt

I've never noticed if the DLT-19 is supposed to have a strap, but it's got one when #3 enters the hangar. As for the "not a sandtrooper guy", you can get a better look at him once he's inside the hangar. He's got the abdominal plate of a sandtrooper, so he's not just a regular stormtrooper as I had once thought. Also, he gets shot by Han as he turns to the side, and falls to his knees and to the ground. You can see that he has lost the two large black ammo pouches that were attached to his lower back and were clearly visible when he marched towards the exterior door with his squad. For some reason, he's got an E-11 inside the hanger, instead of the DLT-19 he carried outside. The best part of this scene is the acting. The squad leader does his best Cam Skattebo impression and puts his head down to charge the Falcon. Meanwhile, several others just sort of stand to the side like they're waiting for the bus and can't be bothered.

So all this is in the hopes that Hasbro gives us the correct representation of Foot Patrol 7 - complete with proper variants of pauldrons/weapons/pouches/backpacks etc. But not before they make the corrections to the base sculpt of the figure. This is very important to me. On the other hand, I don't care what photo they use for the TVC card, nor what font and hexidecimal color they use for the name pill. That stuff is for nerds!

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