Building the Alliance pilot – Part 1: Concept

It may certainly have been a while since I had a new kit built to break down, but I think I finally picked a real winner with this one! As I mentioned recently, I’d apparently been toying with the idea of assembling a proper Rebel Alliance Pilot kit for a while now: at the end of last April it was an idle fancy, by May, I was highly considering it, and by the end of June I had actively started pricing and sourcing the components!

When I was first entertaining the idea, I experienced a funny, unfamiliar feeling. I’ve become SO used to having to do actual research/work—decide on a home planet, find references to extrapolate the local style, draft patterns, create garments, etc.—for my typical ‘Original Character’ impression/persona that an Alliance pilot (made up of specific elements without much room for customization) feels like just a series of boxes to check off. However, I figured I had already acquired three of the biggest elements (flightsuit, boots, and vest) over the years for use in other kits (because they’re no-nonsense, commonly-seen-in-universe pieces that naturally lend themselves to mix-and-matching!), so why not take the next step and create a kit that would actually be recognizable to John Q Public with minimal explanation? Plus, since opportunities for doing SW living history continue to be pretty much non-existent in my sector, a pilot outfit might actually finally allow me to join up with the Rebel Legion – because none of my previous kits¹ quite jive with their current model!

Usually, whenever I see someone online who has put together a ‘custom pilot’ costume, it’s been prefaced by some variation of “I put my own spin on it!” and leans more on the OC’s go-to “wouldn’t it be cool if ___?”…. and thus the final result rarely ‘reads’ as “pilot”.
As should be clear by now, I have a really hard time going along with the crowd; however, as I hope I’ve also made clear, I believe a valid ‘middle way’ exists between the two extremes of the dogmatic “on-screen assemblages only!” Legion, and more casual, “anything goes, let your imagination run wild!”-type cosplay.
I don’t know how many hundred OT-era pilot cosplayers there are out there (easily 95% of these are X-wings), but I’ve yet to see one that didn’t follow these same old onscreen combinations of flightsuit color and helmet style:

As someone really interested in the early Rebellion period, I think switching things up to be a little less uniform helps underline the ‘ragtag’ nature of the Alliance. I’m sure there had to be pilots who joined up and brought their own personal flightsuits with them – I definitely remember some climate ‘direct actions’ where we street medics were literally told, “Sorry we don’t have any supplies for you, you’ll have to requisition your own or use what you have” and can easily imagine similar situations in the pilots’ ranks.
Obviously, I can’t resist pushing the boundaries of OT-era pilot style at least a little bit, but I’m not going to go so far outside the bounds that I no longer look like an OT-era pilot! (Now there’s a nice summary of the ‘middle way’ approach for you: do your research, push the boundaries, but stay within the guardrails!)
Luckily for me, I don’t have to feel like I’m sticking my neck out too far because an often-overlooked EU source did it first!

LucasArts’ 1995 game Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire follows the efforts of the Alliance to disrupt the Empire’s TIE Phantom project. Throughout the game’s live-action cutscenes, we see pilots sporting unique combinations of flightsuits and helmets – all of which were screen-used from the Lucasfilm Archives!: “…though they have no speaking lines, the undeniable stars of Rebel II are the original Star Wars costumes, brought out of retirement especially for the shoot.”²[1]

Knowing that an existing source had already done my idea back in the ‘90s, I decided to take the best of both worlds by pairing the ‘RotJ Y-wing’-style tan flightsuit and ‘ANH’-style flak vest I already had with the iconic ‘X-wing’ style helmet in a custom paint scheme. Since this would be a variation on an existing style, I didn’t even have to rely on my own sketching for a concept of the final outfit, but could just recolor some existing artwork (I believe this started off as Wedge from the Essential Guide to Characters)!

(A similar “mix-and-match-with-familiar elements” approach was also used to good effect in the more recent Squadrons game.)
SO: What all goes into creating a custom Rebel Alliance pilot impression? Follow along next time as we start checking off the boxes!

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1. -an active, late-Republic-era AgriCorps Jedi – a kit which already required tweaking the apparent AgriCorps uniform to be more recognizably Jedi.
   -a former AgriCorps Jedi who managed to survive the Purge and is now a common, nondescript (=boring) farmer.
   -an Alliance Sector Forces partizan on Sulon – real-world camping gear with a blaster, local-style shirt, and helmet was great, but it needed some more layering to really sell the galactic look. Plus, hardly anyone these days has even heard of Sulon. 😦
   -the above, but this time based on Naboo – using a more-documented home planet proved a great source for extrapolating a common local style, but it’s one which doesn’t quite lend itself to the hardened guerilla look, so while perfectly logical and backed up by research, it’s still fairly divergent from what folks expect/are familiar with. Is the concept too avant-garde for effective visualization???
   -finally, the New Republic Archeological Corps – another great idea, but one with even fewer references to work from, and with no outlet for application has basically petered out, and/or my kit design very much just reads as ‘bluecollar citizen with in-universe milsurp’ and not ‘GFFA Indiana Jones’, which is the direction ‘archeology’ tended towards in the EU (don’t get me started on the post-Disney ‘Doctor Aphra’—whose character design suggests literally nothing towards an ostensible archeologist vocation). ↩︎
2. Berkey, S. (1995, Fall). Rebel rouser. Star Wars Galaxy Magazine, 5, 51-54. ↩︎