#seatrooper

[oh-no-eu-didnt]

Aquatic assault stormtroopers were a specialized type of Imperial stormtrooper, specifically trained and equipped for operations in aquatic environments. Seatroopers armor was lightweight and flexible, based on scout trooper armor. It was able to withstand immense pressure and allow quick movement. In addition to a propulsion unit to assist with movement, seatroopers carried hybrid blaster rifle spearguns, in case conditions made blaster fire ineffective.

Source: Battle for the Golden Sun (1988)

First Appearance: Star Wars 74 (1983)

Read more on Wookieepedia.

#aquatic assault stormtrooper #seatrooper #stormtrooper #galactic empire #star wars comics #marvel star wars #star wars #expanded universe #star wars canon #star wars legends

[venatohru]

drenched with memories

Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

Pairing(s): Finn/Rey

Rating: General Audiences

Summary: Rey returns to Ach-To with Finn.

Written for the Gen Prompt Bingo square "water".

Aside from their brief visit to Kef Bir, Finn had never been anywhere with so much water - well, technically Starkiller Base had quite the abundance of frozen water, but that wasn't the same. Now that things were beginning to settle down, Rey had wanted to show him Ach-To.

She stood by him with the waves lapping at her feet, blistered from hiking up and down the mountain. One of the colossal thala-sirens draped itself over a nearby rock, lazily chewing on something that looked like seaweed.

"Can you feel it, too?" Finn nodded. He didn't need to ask what she was talking about. The whole island was drenched with memories of Luke. The Jedi might have severed his connection to the Force during his self-imposed exile but echoes of his presence remained, from the stony mountain trails to the cold depths of the ocean. The island remembered Luke Skywalker.

They remembered Luke Skywalker.

"Sometimes he went diving." Rey smiled. "I'd like to try that someday, but...I'd need to learn how to swim first. Not much opportunity for that on a desert planet." Finn laughed.

"That would certainly help. "

"Did you ever learn?" Finn's chest still tightened when he thought of his past or tried talking about it, but it was easier with Rey. She never expected anything he wasn't willing to give.

"I did." He remembered Captain Cardinal - no, he reminded himself, the man beneath the armor wascalled Archex - instructing them in various exercises from the poolside before plunging into the water himself to demonstrate. "I wasn't good enough to be a seatrooper, but I managed not to drown...obviously."

"Obviously."

"It's been a while though. I might be a little rusty." Rey grinned, setting her long scarf on the rock beside the basking thala-siren, who already appeared to be watching dutifully over her boots and satchel.

"Well, there's only one way to find out."

#finn #rey #finnrey #jedistorm #ach-to #star wars sequel trilogy #post-tros fic #ficlet #gen prompt bingo #tohru writes

[shin-butt-blog]

Since this site is going to shit even more than it already was, there’s no telling if I’ll be purged again along with everyone else. Not that I care anymore.

I only post on twitter now anyway https://twitter.com/seatrooper

[jasonfry]

Notes: Rebel in the Ranks, Pt. 1

WARNING: These notes will completely spoil Servants of the Empire: Rebel in the Ranks. If you haven’t read it, stop and go here.

(Here are notes for the first book in the series, Edge of the Galaxy.)

On the surface, Rebel in the Ranks seemed like an easier project than its Servants of the Empire predecessor, Edge of the Galaxy. With the first book, I’d had to introduce Zare Leonis and his family and show how an Imperial poster boy was plagued by doubts and finally decided to resist the Empire. Rebel seemed like an easier lift – that work had been done, and about a third of the new book would be based on “Breaking Ranks,” the Star Wars: Rebels episode that introduced Zare.

I was wrong about the easier part, I think because Rebel was a larger story that needed to incorporate an adaptation. I had to work up to moments in “Breaking Ranks” that the show used as starting points, explain some things that worked on TV but not on the page, and figure out how to go beyond an adaptation without drifting into filler.

I learned a lot and it was a lot of fun. But not without some nervous moments.

Prologue: The Intake

The prologue’s main purpose was to catch the reader up on what had happened in Edge of the Galaxy: we get a quick review of Dhara Leonis’s disappearance, Zare attending Lothal’s Imperial Academy under false pretenses, and that Zare’s girlfriend, Merei Spanjaf, is helping him.

Exposition is the bitter medicine of storytelling, so you want to cover the taste with a little sugar. One technique is to deliver the exposition through dialogue, ideally as part of a conversation that has some other purpose and its own tension. I couldn’t do that everywhere here, as Zare has to keep secrets from Sergeant Currahee. But it works because Zare is essentially having a conversation with himself even as he’s answering Currahee’s questions.

The section also spins up the wheels for what's to come -- the most effective scenes do more than one thing. The reader meets Currahee, who’s straight out of central casting as the tough-as-nails drill instructor. And both Zare and the reader are tantalized by the possibility that the truth about what happened to Dhara is close at hand, maybe even displayed on the datapad that Currahee can see but Zare cannot.

We also get something new: a question that Zare, the reader and Currahee herself didn’t expect. Currahee asks if Zare ever dreams about his lost sister. What could that mean? We’re not going to find out, though – at least not yet. Currahee welcomes Zare to the Empire, and off we go.

Currahee’s name is an homage to Band of Brothers – it’s the name of the first episode, and an actual mountain in Stephens County, Ga., that paratroopers from Camp Toccoa had to run up and down.

Part 1: Orientation

Merei and Zare’s stories necessarily unfolded in parallel, as Zare is stuck at the Academy – a limitation that worked fine in Rebel but would nearly be the death of me in the third book, Imperial Justice. Fortunately for both books and the overall series, Merei had evolved from a supporting character to a main one who could hold her own with Zare – a happy accident I discussed in the notes for Edge of the Galaxy.

My starting point for this section was Ezra Bridger, AKA Dev Morgan. When we see "Dev” in “Breaking Ranks” it’s clear that he’s a new cadet. Maybe the Rebels producers intended the exercise in “Breaking Ranks” to be the first day of orientation, but it didn’t feel that way to me. But if Dev was a newcomer to the ranks, whose slot had he taken?

The answer to that question became Part 1, with Zare assigned to Unit Aurek with three other cadets: Jai Kell, Nazhros Oleg and Pandak Symes.

Jai’s role in the story was a straight line to the events of “Breaking Ranks” – he’s a talented, happy-go-lucky cadet who believes in the Empire but has no idea he’s Force-sensitive. Basically, he’s what Dhara was before she suffered the fate Jai must now avoid.

Oleg was a more interesting nut to crack. In “Breaking Ranks” he’s literally a faceless villain – we never see him with his faceplate open, undoubtedly to avoid stretching the animation budget. 

“Oleg” sounds like a first name, but the forms of address used in “Breaking Ranks” made it clear it was a last name, so I called him “Nazhros.” I suspect the starting point for Nazhros was “nauseous.” In creating names, I like taking words that get at something fundamental about the character, then fuzzing up those words. I learned that from George Lucas himself, who once explained how “Darth Vader” emerged from blending “Death Father” and “Dark Water.” (The Secret History of Star Wars found a high-school classmate of Lucas’s named Vader, but that’s not necessarily a contradiction – we subconsciously channel stuff all the time.)

I crafted a bit of a backstory for Oleg to set up a payoff in Imperial Justice and to give the character a bit of shading. Oleg is basically an abandoned child who’s been left in the indifferent care of his uncles. I intentionally didn’t go too far beyond that – the world is full of antisocial jerks whose stories of how they got to be antisocial jerks are depressingly simple. I also wanted to be true to the show – doing more with Oleg helped my story, but doing too much more with him might have wound up feeling like an inversion of the episode.

That left Pandak Symes. Pandak arrived “pre-doomed,” fated to be replaced by an undercover Ezra. But in that I saw a story to tell. The Zare we meet in Edge of the Galaxy is a natural leader who inspires, instructs and cajoles his grav-ball teammates into becoming league champions. His instincts would be to do the same as an Imperial cadet, and he’d try to help Pandak through his struggles.

That gave me not one but two obstacles for Zare. The first was obvious – the physical and mental rigors of boot camp, which would show Zare gaining strength and discipline and demonstrating his gift for leadership. But there was another wrinkle: boot camp was designed to turn out officers for the very Empire that Zare had sworn to defeat.

That put Zare’s instincts in collision with his goals, which was a dilemma not just for him but also for the reader. Zare helps his fellow cadets because of a basic decency that makes the reader root for him, but that same decency drives him to work against the Empire. There’s a queasy tension there for both character and reader.

My other major character was created to heighten that tension. Lieutenant Chiron is “the good Imperial,” a capable leader and mentor for Zare and other cadets. (In Greek mythology, Chiron is the wise centaur who tutors Heracles, Achilles, Jason and other heroes.) Chiron’s good qualities are real, but undermined by a fatal flaw: his inability to see that the system he supports is evil and cannot be reformed. From the beginning I knew that Chiron would be part of the series’ endgame, so I got to work early.

Quick notes on Part 1:

The book’s working title was The Rogue Cadet. I liked that, but Rebel in the Ranks tied in nicely with “Breaking Ranks.”

Merei’s alarm is a song she hates -- a treacly ballad called “With You Among the Stars.” I thought that was a revealing and funny character moment for her. The song is by Plexo-33, a band mentioned way back in HoloNet News. Heavy isotope was mentioned in the first Medstar book.

Chiron’s speech about “every morning in the Emperor’s service” was a goof on Sergeant Apone’s oorah call-to-arms in Aliens. Which, of course, was itself an homage to innumerable boot-camp stories. Currahee yelling at Pandak about his shower shoes, on the other hand, was a nod to Bull Durham, my favorite baseball movie.

I needed to map out the Academy system a bit here, and drew on The Essential Guide to Warfare. Lothal isn’t the same kind of academy Luke wants to attend in A New Hope – Zare is only 15. Rather, Lothal is a one-year junior academy, with those who do well going on to a regional senior academy. The course of study at a regional senior academy would typically last three years, with top cadets graduating to specialized service academies for officer training within a branch of the Imperial military. I kept all this a bit vague to avoid tying future storytellers’ hands. 

Chiron and Currahee transferred to Lothal over the summer from the Imperial Academy on Marleyvane. That meant there was no way they could have been involved in Dhara’s disappearance, increasing the tension as Zare tries to reconcile the idea that there might be “good” Imperials with their support of an evil system.

Note Unit Forn is all-female. We don’t see female cadets in “Breaking Ranks,” but we know they exist – Dhara was one, after all. And female officers and stormtroopers are increasingly common in Star Wars storytelling – something I explored in Warfare.

I turned to the cutaway view of a stormtrooper helmet in The Complete Visual Dictionary to figure out the positioning of the atmosphere intake and the suit-air intake, then checked it approximately 8,000 times to make sure I hadn’t reversed them in my mind. Just checked it again, even though it’s years too late. Make that 8,001.

There’s a quick reference to seatroopers -- a stormtrooper class introduced in Legends -- helping the cadets. I described them sparingly to give future storytellers as much flexibility as possible.

In the obstacle course, Zare directs his unit to switch between wedge and file formation. I read up on the relevant tactics for scenes in Rebel in the Ranks and Imperial Justice, but didn’t go beyond the basics here to avoid slowing things down. That happens a lot as an author – you do a bunch of research that winds up getting boiled down to a sentence or two. But if that makes that sentence ring true, it’s worth it.

Zare’s sports experience comes up a couple of times in this section. He describes his tactics in the obstacle course as a weak-side carry, and accepts Pandak’s departure after Chiron compares the cadet’s weakness to a grav-ball teammate not making plays.

Next up: Naming confusion and the mechanics of a successful computer hack. 

#star wars #writing #storytelling #author's notes

[vythefirst]

Gotta be honest, vy, but by making posts with cutoff pics and saying the rest are on a nsfw blog nobody can join, you're pretty much waving it in everyone's faces. You're a great artist and you're more than your smut art so I understand why you'd make a separate blog for that stuff. I've been following you for as long as i've had a tumblr and I've always loved your nsfw art as well, so let me say that posts like that aren't helping anyone.

Okay, several people have asked about this, I think I’ve had enough. I’m going to be firm.

You are not entitled to my work. No one is entitled to my work. I don’t HAVE to post it, or stream it, or show anyone at all, but you know what? I do. Because I WANT to. I LIKE what I draw. I’m proud of it, and I want to share it.

But wanting to share doesn’t mean I’m obligated to share everything, and it sure doesn’t mean that I have to share it with everyone. Being selective with what I show, either to whom I show or how much I show, is completely within my right. 

My NSFW blog is for me and my friends. I mention the blog because due to it being password protected, it’s not a blog that can be followed and seen on their dash. Saying, “it’s on the nsfw blog” is obvious to those who know it, and irrelevant to those who don’t. 

If I post a crop, it’s because I like how it looks, and if it’s “helping” anyone, it’s for the benefit of my friends.

#vy talks #seatrooper #ask

[shin-butt-blog]

found you seatrooper

I knew this day would come. Now that you found me, what do you plan to do with me?

[ukboatsales]

eBay: Seahog Seatrooper 50hp outboard fishing boat not warrior, endeavour http://rssdata.net/QPVrDf #boatsales #boats

[kataang36]

seatrooper replied to your post: This is the Amazing Person Award! Once you are...

Ahh thank you >//< I know we haven’t really talked but I always notice you on my dash so thank you~ And I hope you had a nice vacation!

You’re welcome! :) My vacation was really nice, though the last day begun poorly, but did turn out alright by the end of the day. Thank you!

#seatrooper #you are one of my top five favourite blogs on this site #thank you so much! #ramblings of kataang36

[ashketchumandthenaegi]

WHY CAN’T I FUCKING REBLOG ANYTHING FROM SEATROOPER?!

Seriously. It’s getting annoying. >:/

#seatrooper #reblog issues

[anon853]

seatrooper replied to your photo:I got a new shirt

I’ve always liked that picture. His ass is just in your face.

yes, it  is ansd same!

#seatrooper

[pokemon-connoisseur-lucario]

seatrooper replied to your post: Diodeshipping

Nice! x) I’ll see if I can dig anything up later to help

Thanks, that would be awesome!!

#seatrooper

[kataang36]

This is the Amazing Person Award! Once you are given this award you are supposed to paste it in the ask of eight different people who deserve it. If you break the chain~ nothing will happen, but it’s sweet to know someone thinks you’re amazing!!

Oh, wow, thank you! This means a lot, coming from one of my favourite blogs! 

#seatrooper #ask kataang36 #sorry for not responding sooner than I did #I've been on vacation #thank you #this really means a lot

[vythefirst]

seatrooper replied to your post “hasuyawwn replied to your photoset “I MADE!! BIRB BAGS!!! at the last...”

It's too bad kiwis are also an endangered species u_u

that is also true U__U 

#vy talks #please save the kiwis #seatrooper #replies

[anon853]

Five articles of Ash's sweaty used clothing

Accurate

#seatrooper #Ash Ketchum