Galactic Style Guide – Tents and Shelters

Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! While the Style Guide has traditionally been concerned with topics of clothing and personal adornment, one’s outer persona can also include GEAR. Well, summer has arrived and after spending half of last year in a tent with my wife on the Appalachian Trail, I had two questions on my mind:
1) what kinds of shelters might adventurers in the Galaxy Far, Far Away use to protect themselves from the elements? And 2) are there any tents readily available in 2022 that might approximate these galactic styles?
The answer may surprise you!
While this topic might not be much use to readers planning a visit to the Galactic Starcruiser or their local fan convention, it’s important to remember that ‘doing (in the reenacting/living history sense) Star Wars‘ can (and probably should) take more authentic forms, and that if you want to venture into the outlands or create an in-universe encampment—like say, for an upcoming GFFA airsoft event?—having a good shelter can really come in handy.

While tents seen in earlier Star Wars materials (or only described in text) tend towards the unrealistic (at least by current capabilities)*, many shelters from visual media are actually fairly mundane, which is great for those wishing to create a reenacting encampment, or undertake an in-universe backpacking trip! _{*for a perfect example of this, see Mace Windu’s “wallet tent” in the novel Shatterpoint, which packed down to the size of a pocket yet could automatically unfold into a two-person shelter}

Our first style is seen used by Force-using Generals while on campaign almost 1,000 years apart. We will note that the earlier Ruusan-era tents—both Jedi (top row) and Sith (lower left)—clearly do include stakes and tensioning ropes; while to my eyes the only thing separating the later Clone War-era tent from Earthly examples is that it does not appear to rely on stakes and ropes for support, but aside from this such styles (or something very similar) might be purchased today from a historic tentmaker like Tentsmiths or Panther Primitives, a military surplus supplier, or someone in a local reenacting group: I recently saw a USGI General Purpose Medium tent (weighing in at 200 lbs) sell for $1000 in a WW2 group on facebook.

When reading Rogue Squadron #17 and 18, I couldn’t help but notice that the Bothan crew of the spaceliner Starfaring appear to be camped out in white ‘wedge tents’ (which appear to have plain rectangular footprints without a ‘bell’). Unassuming and no-frills, depending on the size (these look to be pretty small), a Wedge can be bought new for between $250 and 360…and they sometimes pop up on eBay for $100-150 if you’re lucky, or your local reenacting circles may already know someone looking to sell one used!

It’s very hard to tell details from here, but I also noticed a fair number of wedge-type tents in the post-Clone War refugee camp seen in Fire Carrier.

The Imperial field hospital seen in To The Last Man appears to be designed akin to a modern backpacking tent like the trusty Nemo Dagger my wife and I used on our thruhike last year, just scaled up to 4x size and without the perpendicular spreader rod at the midpoint! Might we presume that this style (minus the Earth branding) might have trickled down to the galactic civilian market?

Crimson Empire #4 includes what looks very much like your standard ‘Easy Up’ canopy tent, of the sort typically seen at craft fairs, music festivals, and tailgating events! Note however that it is not the standard white, and appears to have splayed legs (are any existing models designed like this? Let me know!).

The crew of heroes sent to Wayland in 9 ABY (The Last Command) camp in very interesting tents…but which don’t appear outside the realm of possibilities (they’re very reminiscent of the folding shelters used in Darren Aronofsky’s NOAH). Their bent ribs aren’t unlike those used in modern dome tents, so as long as you had plenty of elasticated aluminum or fiberglass tent poles (and a good source of lightweight tent material!) they might be a fairly straightforward project to try and replicate for the adventurous craftsperson!

These ‘plastents’ may be the first chronological depiction of a galactic shelter, as they appeared in issue #55 of Marvel’s Star Wars comics in 1981. Apparently they are inflatable, and while beyond modern capabilities, do give a good approximation of the kinds of prefab housing that would be available to a group operating in the field–perhaps we may picture something like these as the dwellings of Halka Four-Den‘s doomed Dagobah survey team?

The DuraShelter was a one-man tent made by Adventure Hiker and Hunter with an outer covering of ‘dichrome’, a material that could function as electric camouflage. Said to pack down to the size of a datapad, this one is another example of Star Wars writers leaning a little too heavy on the ultra-high-tech side of things. It’s hard to tell from the wonderful illustration (Rules of Engagement) but to me it just looks like a one-man wedge or pup tent.

The utterly wholesome and charming ‘Star Wars Math: Jabba’s Game Galaxy‘ features a few tent designs as well. The first three pavilions feel more medieval than anything else, but Ratts Tyerell’s blue tent appears to be inspired by a genuine Tatooine style (except for the color—but hey, it’s a kid’s game!

The Mos Espa marketplace as seen in Episode I features many similar bent-rib shelters which are used as market stalls. One of these would be Really easy to bang out in a weekend with some PVC and some appropriate fabric, although you’d probably need a ratchet strap to keep the two sides together at the bottom. Bent metal tubing (think greenhouse ribs) would be more permanent, but wouldn’t allow you to disassemble and roll everything up into a neat bundle, nomad style! Anakin’s friend Jira has a stall with a more squared design:

This one is a little harder to grasp out how it’s constructed but I think I’ve figured it out:

So those are the examples of in-universe tents and shelters my research has turned up…but I’m sure that’s not all! The one thing I would love to see is a visualization of the ‘shelter’ that Han and Luke spent the night in on Hoth, but that scene always gets skipped over in every adaptation (how frustrating!). Are there other examples out there that I’ve missed? (I intentionally didn’t include Native Tatooinian urtya as their crunchy walls seem at odds with portability). Let me know in the comments if there’s something I need to add, and I’ll see you next month!

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