C3PX said:
I am pretty sure when they talk about the Imperial Navy, they are talking about the Imperial military in general. You never hear them mention the Imperial Air Force or Imperial Army, the Stormtroopers are all soldiers on board Navy vessels, makes sense they'd be considered Navy.
Typically in science fiction, ground troop types, whether they fight on ships or on planets, are not referred to as Navy. "Navy" is usually reserved for the space equivalent of what would be air force and navy in our world. The usual term for something like the stormtroopers would be marines or army. You get a lot of "space marines" in science fiction. As it stands, with the stormtroopers clearly intended to be clones and Luke referring to conscription into the imperial navy, it does look like navy does not mean stormtroopers here. Also, the fact that Luke's skills were particularly in the area of piloting would suggest he was talking about being conscripted as an imperial pilot.
Also, the stormtroopers are not necessarily all soldiers on navy vessels. There would have to be planet-stationed soldiers too and we see some on Endor. Also, being on navy vessels does not necessarily mean you're classified as navy -not all countries classify their marines as navy, and even when they do, casual usage of the term "navy" generally refers to more typical navy people rather than marines.
"Imperial army" is certainly a term I'm familiar with re Star Wars, as is "imperial military". They could use either of those terms if they meant just the military in general or the ground troops. The separation between ground troop types and navy is demonstrated by the imperials having both navy type titles like Admiral (Admirals Ozzel, Piett) and land-type titles like General (General Veers). Veers is clearly not navy or he'd have a navy type title. He has a land-type title and is clearly army or marines. At least in the expanded universe there is a term "imperial marines", and they are stormtroopers but not the main body of stormtroopers. The classic imperial Navy is guys in grey and black uniforms with caps, plus the guys in black or grey with the open-faced broad black helmets that look a bit like the rebel helmets at the start of ANH. Also the the gunner guys with the closed helmets like who fired the death star guns.
Btw, here's the Star Wars Official Poster Monthly article that was the first known public mention of Stormtroopers being clones: http://www.theforce.net/image_popup/image_popup_global.asp?Image=timetales/misc/arcana/post4-03.jpg
You have to scroll sideways to get to the relevant article. Also, in 1977 Lucas said there are some female stormtroopers, though the writers of this article don't seem to have gotten that memo.
C3PX said:
Maybe it is just me, but I think it would be silly to conscript officers but mass produce cloned humans for your regular joes. Why wouldn't all the officers be clones too? You have to admit, this whole mess is very poorly thought out. If you have the technology and resources to makes vasts armies of clones, you'd obviously want to aim for mass producing the best soldier you can possibly find (obviously, judging by the general intelligence level of a Stormtrooper, the Empire and I don't see eye to eye on this one), so if you are able to mass produce the perfect soldier, why wouldn't you simply use this same perfect soldier for your commanding officers as well?
Maybe Lucas was just as retarded back then as he is now, only back then retarding things like this clone nonsense was simply not known by everyone. The whole idea of a clone army sounds cool, a military that consists entirely of the best soldier they could get their hands on... but that is clearly not what we see on screen, and this just makes the Empire look way more incompetant and stupid than it should.
Conscripting navy who are not stormtroopers does not necessarily mean conscripting officers. We see a share of guys (on the death star and star destroyers) with revealed faces who are obviously not clones and are not in officer uniform, and the TIE fighter pilots are not stormtroopers and could be conscripts too. Obviously, the navy officers we see are not clones, but we have nothing to indicate whether they've been conscripted or not.
With the imperial army, we see a fair dose of land officers (like Veers and guys on Endor (as we can see from this, black or grey uniforms with caps can be army as well as navy, despite the different titles marking them as separate)) and judging from those land officers, such officers are not clones, but we don't know if they've been conscripted.
Maybe Lucas considered clones to be considered a lower order of being by the empire and thus not fit for officer status. But we don't know how serious Lucas was about the clone thing way back. I think he may have had some conflicting ideas for Star Wars backstory. In modern times (2006), Leland Chee, the Lucasfilm canon authority, has said "You're never going to know what George's view of the universe beyond the films at any given time because it is constantly evolving.". That last bit is kind of a kick in the balls for the Lucas-had-the-same-story all along myth. Like, if he goes in for constantly changing his story, wouldn't it have changed between 83 and when he wrote the prequels? Strikes me as rather letting the cat out of the bag.
