Galactic Style Guide – Mechanics and Technicians II

Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! In this entry, we’re continuing our examination of blue-collar mechanic or technician-type characters by seeing how examples from print sources compare to those from live-action. While most SW titles center around exciting or elite character classes (Jedi, Sith, politicians, mercenaries, troopers, etc), if there’s one subset of GFFA publication that fully embraces the more mundane characters like these, it’s role-playing games – especially the current license holder Fantasy Flight Games. FFG’s Age of Rebellion and Edge of the Empire games include sourcebooks for Technicians and Engineers to give us a number of examples to help fill out our sample. If they follow the trends we noted in our live-action examples last time, we should expect these RPG designs to dress in text-free, one-piece coveralls of a muted single color. Let’s see how they measure up!

The vignette that opens Special Modifications (the Technician sourcebook) sees Twi’lek mechanic Chalan Talosi hanging with her pit droid, WAC-77. We can see she wears a gray or slate blue coverall with the sleeves and legs rolled up – normally if a tech is wearing tall boots, they’re visible because the pants are tucked/bloused, not rolled up, so this is certainly a choice…but hey, maybe it gives better ventilation or something? It could simply be a gathered waistband, but it does look like she’s wearing a belt. Also note the goggles (not currently in use), which are a prime accessory for any welding-related occupation!

Coming from the Pilot sourcebook Stay on Target, this Mon Cal is FFG’s example of the “Rigger” specialization – essentially, someone who continually tinkers with starships to max out their stats. His jumpsuit/coverall is a deep purplish blue with gold detailing and a puffy collar; I’m not sure what’s going on with the upper arms, but they appear to have pleats or ribs down the outside, and while short sleeves are comparatively rare in the visual record, if it makes sense for anyone to wear them, it’s a Mon Cal.
I want to take a second to draw attention to his well-stocked tool belt – one of the things that makes Star Wars as a setting feel so grounded is that just as in the real world, there’s a right tool for every job, so it’s rare to see something that tries to do too many jobs. I’ve gathered that a recent VR game introduced this ‘All-in-One-Toolkit’ thing, which always strikes me as a video gamey shortcut and not very in-universe at all, compared to the full compliment this fellow has on display. (The ‘DataGrip’ from the same game does this as well and is thus pretty much indistinguishable from Fallout‘s PipBoy – its functions would more authentically be served by (at least) a datapad, a comlink, and some sort of scanner.)

Next we have a desert-dwelling droid repairman who has forgotten to close up his toolbox. As he’s wisely wearing a long coat and scarf/hood for sand protection, it’s not clear what his main layer is, but we can see that he also has a very well-equipped toolbelt, including an over-the-shoulder brace to hold everything up – a great touch!

It’s hard to tell, but the mech/tech in this exciting scene appears to be wearing either an olive green coverall (brown leather yoke/shoulder detailing?) or matching top and bottoms. Even if you’re not wearing a full one-piece, this matching is a key part of the visual shorthand that creates the mechanic ‘look’ and helps differentiate you from other classes.

Besalisk is one of the new species added to Special Modifications, so there are a few more examples throughout the book. Our turbine mechanic on the left wears a cream-and-taupe coverall with kneepads, a quilted vest that appears to snap on, and of course some tool pouches! We can’t see much of the fellow on the right, but he may be the first example I’ve seen of bib overalls in GFFA artwork (when you have four arms, it makes sense to wear a garment with as little sleeves as possible!) I don’t think they’re particularly SWarzy, but they’re at least distanced from terrestrial stylings by not using the familiar wire fastenings and not being BLUE DENIM! – they’re almost Carhartt brown, which always looks good with honest weathering.

These next two show up in sections dealing with droids. The first one I deliberated for a while on whether I should even include it, as it feels like a definite outlier in our sample. I’m including it here mostly to be intellectually honest, but with the large caveat that I don’t think it passes the ‘SW Sniff Test”. I wish I had a clearer version so I could see what’s going on but there’s just so many divergent elements here: the contrasting colorblocked pocket flaps/elbow reinforcements, buttoned belt loop & pocket flap, long strip of loopy things down the leg, two-tone shoes, Hello Kitty-colored shoulder droid…
Our Sullustan on the other hand, while I don’t love it, looks…fine. Aside from the central visible zipper, the main thing I note is that to my eyes, it looks like the gloves are integral to the suit, and everything is made of leather. Also, it makes me uncomfortable that he’s taken off his toolbelt, but he’s still wearing the backpack?? You’ve got it backwards, dude! Hey, at least his weird suit is still SWarzy earthtones and isn’t like, canary yellow.

This next one also makes me wonder if it wasn’t originally just a standalone piece of artwork that got co-opted into the Technician book to fill space, because I hope you’ll notice her outfit includes something that none of our other examples really have. Armor! Honestly, the only things that really ‘read’ as mechanic/technician about her are her drab clothing (matching top & bottom) and her tool belt – aside from that, I would just as soon assume she’s some flavor of unhelmeted trooper. There’s an important lesson in here that I wish more OC cosplayers considered: while a good GFFA costume/character design uses a combination of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ pieces (more on that later), when the hard parts start to outnumber the soft, the conclusion drawn by the viewer is ‘combat-oriented’. If your days are spent repairing droids, blasters, or other hardware, there’s no need for armor!

I really like this next one! Saska Teft comes from FFG’s Imperial Assault II game, but I’m including her here because she’s identified as a ‘battle technician’, and in this case, that comes across very clearly in her character design. We can tell she’s something technician-related because she’s wearing what appears to be a one-piece green-gray coverall, welding goggles, leather gloves, and a fully-loaded toolkit-belt. But the presence of a Rebel pilot-style flak vest shows us that there is a slight combat orientation! The fact that it’s a textile-based piece of armor (as opposed to more Imperial-style rigid plastoid) helps underline her allegiances. Overall her look almost says ‘pilot’, but the lack of helmet, life-support chestbox, or ejection webbing keeps her solidly in the ‘battle technician’ arena where she belongs.

This last one dates way back to when Wizards of the Coast held the RPG license; unfortunately they didn’t really do occupation-specific sourcebooks like FFG does, but it’s quite clear that we’re seeing a droid technician at work. Though he wears a vest (something we surprisingly haven’t seen much of in our examples so far), the coveralls and tools (plus the whole ‘elbow deep in astromech guts’ situation) leave no doubt who he is!

While researching something completely different, I came across artwork for a mechanic character from the Jedi Survivor game, ‘Zygg Soza’ – notice anything?

Remember how I said that Besalisk wearing bib overalls mostly avoided looking too Earth-y only his bibs weren’t blue denim? Well, it sure looks to me like that’s exactly what Soza is wearing here; the kneepads, quilted hip/knee padding, spacey buckles, and angled pocket flap are really the main things keeping her garment slightly SWarzy – but at least they’re plenty dirty, and don’t fasten up the sides with riveted buttons! The drop-leg tool carrier is a nice detail, and we can see that it is (as we would expect) made of sturdy leather instead of something like lightweight cloth or modern-looking nylon.

Finally, let’s round out our sample by returning to FFG materials with what is perhaps the archetypal, gold standard of a GFFA Mechanic.

Our Dressellian grease monkey here perfectly illustrates how uncomplicated an effective in-universe ‘outer persona’ can be. Let’s break it down! Besides a t-shirt, his outfit is:
-one-piece coverall in a muted color (some flavor of gray)
-natural fiber with good texture, and somewhat baggy (not shiny, knit synthetic)
-text-free (it should go without saying)
-long-sleeved
-authentically weathered
-pants are untucked over simple boots/shoes
-Simple belt (with a slightly ‘spacey’ buckle) to hold up his simple toolkit, with an unobtrusive piece of wired hardware slung over his shoulder
-the ultimate technician accessory- a greasy rag!
Honestly, aside from the style of belt buckle and the sci-fi tools in his pouch (and y’know, being a Pruneface), this guy would fit right in among the aircrew or tank mechanics of the Second World War – as he should!

Now let’s apply the same quantitative analysis we did last time to our 12 examples above, and see how they measure up to our live action sample.
Main color- tan/khaki: 5, OD green: 2, dark blue: 2, light blue: 2, brown: 1, gray: 1.
Totals: tan/khaki: 11, light blue: 6, OD green: 4, dark blue: 4, rust: 3, mustard: 2, gray: 1, brown: 1, teal: 1, black: 1.

Lower legs: boots/bloused: 5; unbloused: 6; 2 unknown
Total: boots/bloused: 17; unbloused: 13; puttees: 1; 2 unknown

Belt vs. no belt: 11:0; + 2 unknown
Totals: 11:4 + 2 unknown

Sleeves: long: 10, short: 1, sleeveless: 2
Totals: long: 29, short: 2, sleeveless: 2

Text on clothing: 0!

As noted before, the Rebels using tan/khaki coveralls is a big contributor to that color’s strong showing, but even so, it just barely beats out light blue. Therefore, based on our stats, we might expect a hypothetical most-representative GFFA mechanic to look something like this:

Sadly, doing a google image search for ‘Star Wars mechanic’ gets the following as the top result, which is very unfortunate (on the bright side, our own G. Palmer is like, the #7 result!)

The image itself comes from a totally separate FFG title ‘Starfinder’, while the referring culprit is a wannabe Wookieepedia-lookalike, the ‘Star Wars Canon Wiki‘, which I’m pretty sure is the same place people keep finding that ‘Bubba Jett‘ image and thinking it’s legit. (Whoops, nope, that’s the ‘Star Wars Canon Extended Wiki‘, but same difference). This really underlies the importance of doing your own research and vetting your sources of ‘inspo’!
Here’s a little formative assessment for those of you costume scholars playing along at home: aside from a general ‘sniff test’, what is it about this particular piece of character art that says ‘Not SWarzy’ to you? Let me know with a comment below or come discuss with us at the SWLH facebook group! Thanks for reading!

A big thank you to my supporters! Researching, compiling, and writing this series takes a lot of time and energy. If you’ve learned something from this series, or if this post has given you some ideas to make your own mechanic costume more in-universe authentic, please consider supporting my work via ko-fi, or with a small donation below! Thank you!