Mr Fett

My hoses went right inside the Don Post Biker helmet I was using as well. I think you should have one end or the other able to pop out for ease of trooping and being able to take the helmet off and hold it in your arms or set it down without having to take the entire torso armor section off with it. About the CRL, I explained what I did, and why I did it.....trying to relate the space armor world with real world SCUBA. Stuff like Dive Knife, the mask lights for eerie underwater glow effect (could mount a light source behind the forehead vents I see you cut out of your helmet - same effect), having belt boxes different than Scouts to simulate Diver's weight belt. All practical real world type things stuck in the Star Wars world. I also used the cut down TS codpieces front and back because I was thinking of hip movement for swimming, if this had been a real-world dive rig. You couldn't have bigger armor cutting into your hip/groin area while trying to paddle your legs, like TK armor or Fett armor where it wraps around your waistline..

That's cool. Just checked the CRL and hose color is not mentioned. Just that they HAVE hoses on the helmet. Also it said cummerbund is optional. Speaking of hoses, the way I ran mine was the cheek ones were in there all the time, and the ones on the backplate were the ones I pulled out when taking off the helmet.

I took pics of the parts before I shipped it out, to use as reference to myself in case I wanted to make another one. I know mine is a different version than yours, but if you wanted to see anything in particular, let me know. OK, I can buy those remarks about the cumberbun. Almost like a dry suit around the midsection. I can accept that. Same with the hose. It's just hard to find gray hose, I think. There's also nothing in the CRL that mentioned having the EL lights INSIDE the visor, not outside the visor and up the snout like I did. Hmm....maybe I could create a softer glow with an internal light. But if the CRL people say I cannot, then I cannot. Time to make a white canon one.

Nope, sold it off 2 years ago. Helped fund my Iron Man costume. Now I'm feeling like rebuilding one again. I didn't even know there was a new 501st SpecOps message board until I found it last night while looking around for Seatrooper stuff. My original Seatrooper went to a 501st guy in Australia. Surprised Tachyon hasn't seen it in person. Oh yeah, I forgot something from my earlier post. Talking about the wider TK type shoulder bells. I originally had someone get me some wider bells without the center line the TKs have, but I went with the thinner TB bells because I'm super skinny and the TB bells seemed to fit my frame better.

I am really loving your build on this armor. My suit was finished back in 2004, and at the time I built it, there was one and only one reference picture. The black and white one from the old 1980s role-playing game Imperial Sourcebook.... I based my build off this. But not having sculpting abilities, I used readily available armor parts. Yes, I skipped the frame around the tanks, the light box on the forehead (instead used the EL-wire lights), a few of the other odds and ends like the recessed areas on each pec of the chestplate that you are doing because I was geeked to get the suit done and rushed through it. I tried to do some of the proper looks from that picture like the V-neckline on the chest and backplates, and tried to make the shins match. Not having any reference pics of the backside at all, I never knew what it looked like so made it up. This was before they redid that same picture into the colorized version where you can see a second Seatrooper in the background. The dive knife on my left arm was because I only had one Scout Trooper bicep armor piece so needed something to put on the other side, and in talking to other 501st guys who dive in real life, they said they never go diving without a knife, so that solved my problem. Found a dive knife with a "sci-fi" looking handle, and painted the plastic sheath to match my armor. My belt was made of little resin boxes in roughly the configuration of the normal Scout Trooper vacformed belts. The separate resin boxes to me made it appear more like a diver's weight belt, which I thought appropriate for this costume. The reason the suit was a blue shade was because I wasn't personally fond of the black TK/TB armor look at the time and yet I did not want a white Seatrooper because I thought (and still think) these underwater commandos would not be wearing shiny white suits. One of my TK buddies in my Garrison thought a midnight blue would counterbalance the black undersuit well so that's what I did. Midnight Blue spraypaint with acrylic black overwash to make it more murky weathered. The EL lights on the helmet came about because it looked like the real single reference pics he had some sort of rectangular headlight on the forehead of the helmet, and similar light systems are used by deep sea divers and such in real life, so the blue EL lights were my own version of those diver's lights, but "space style" in the Star Wars realm to give it that "underwater glow effect". I tell you what, canon or not.....EVERYBODY who saw that suit really, really loved those EL lights. They were a huge hit every time I wore that suit !!!!! Cumberbun like a Scout trooper......my thoughts personally are don't use one, unless it's made of neoprene. Why would Seatroopers need a cloth piece around their midsection like the Scouts who use that section to hold their saddlebags? I don't think they would. Why carry extra cloth around underwater to get waterlogged and weigh you down? I also would go with a black cheek hose on your suit. It would blend nicely, and be in the same family as the TIE pilot hoses. My own hose I used was a rubber SCBA breather hose off Firefighter equipment. It was extras from a batch the local 501st TIE pilots were using. Because like I mentioned not having the sculpting skills, my shin armor was built like this.....I started with a base of the old Marco TK shins. These shins didn't have the nice calf sweep of the new TK armors and were more tubular in shape. Perfect for this project. I used Snowtrooper knees because I didn't have any Scout knees. For the recessed side details, I contact cemented pieces of Foamies around the one side of each shin based on the one reference pic to create the depth of layers. To create a more tubular shape around the ankle, I cut a piece of thinner gauge PVC pipe into the proper shape. This is then attached after I'd put the TK shin on. It velcroed under the front center onto the shin. The kneearmor also velcroed to the shin armor. I never got around to making the little jets on the back. I used a cut down Snowtrooper codpiece and put a second one on the backside to cover my butt somewhat instead of just the open bodysuit since I didn't know what the back was supposed to look like.

I'm BAAAAAAAAAAAACKKKKKKKKKKKK !!!!!! ......and I'm gonna need one of those, my Seatrooping brother. I just found this message board tonight. It is time to rebuild my Seatrooper, only this time keep it canon white so they don't boot me off the TX status like they did last time. The midnight blue one was legit for a while until they thought it was too EU to keep active. I did sell it a couple years ago to help fund another costume. Now I've been getting the itch to make another one and I see you've already been on top of things while I've not been around the SpecOps community. Kudos to you!