Every Type Of Stormtrooper Explained

The very first living enemies we see in the Star Wars saga, in the opening of A New Hope back in 1977, are the Imperial Stormtroopers as they take over Princess Leia's blockade runner and make way for Darth Vader. Their white-on-black armor, designed by the legendary Ralph McQuarrie, made them into instant space opera icons, and they've since been immortalized through everything from action figures and T-shirts to coffee mugs and every other imaginable form of merchandise. You can even get your picture taken with them at Disney World.

Of course, as the Star Wars universe has grown in the more than four decades since the first film was released, so, too, has the sheer number of variations on the classic Stormtrooper look. With each new film, TV series, video game, comic book, toy line, and novel, Lucasfilm seems determined to show off a new kind of trooper, whether they represent the Galactic Empire or its successor, the sinister First Order. There are a lot of them, so many that we can pretty much count on more joining the ranks in the not-too-distant future, but that doesn't mean we can't try to keep up. This is every type of Stormtrooper (so far) explained.

Note: Because "Stormtrooper" didn't arise as a designation until the Imperial era, we're leaving the well-meaning Clone Troopers out of this. We're also leaving out other assorted Imperial military personnel who don't have the word "trooper" attached to their job title, just for ease of understanding.

Because the Stormtrooper Corps grew out of the remains of the clone armies of the Galactic Republic era, certain classes of Imperial trooper followed as natural successors to their Republic-era counterparts. One of the most obvious of these is the Imperial Shock Trooper, a Stomtrooper variation made up of troops selected from some of the highest-class Stormtroopers in the Imperial military to perform various specialized tasks.

In many ways, Shock Troopers look almost identical to standard Stormtroopers, but they are easily recognized as something different from a distance thanks to the red markings on their armor, which cover parts of their helmets, their shoulders and upper chest, and even their shin plates. They're also set apart by their weaponry, which often includes heavy blasters used for specialized combat duties like offering suppressing fire during assaults. Due to their elite status, Shock Troopers were not only frontline soldiers valued for their combat prowess but also elite security forces tasked with guarding the center of Imperial government on Coruscant and often providing security for Palpatine himself.

From the beginning of their existence in Star Wars, Stormtroopers were designed to evoke a sense of fear, and that fearsome appearance has since been pushed to its limit by subsequent variations on the classic design. That reached an apex of sorts in 2016, when Rogue One: A Star Wars Story revealed the Death Troopers, an squad of elite soldiers clad in all-black armor who were so good at covering their tracks after missions that they were practically ghosts.

The backstory for these elite troops claims that Emperor Palpatine himself gave them their name based on rumors that Imperial scientists were attempting to essentially create zombie Stormtroopers. With that in mind, Death Troopers lean into that sense of fear. They're elite Imperial Intelligence troops assigned to only top officers and officials, they specialize in virtually all forms of combat, and they know how to get in and out of virtually any situation without leaving a trace of their presence. Throw in voice scramblers to make them sound especially frightening, and you've got one of the most unforgettable Imperial military designs in the entire Star Wars franchise.

Though Stormtroopers were primarily foot soldiers meant for marching and charging into battle, they developed a variety of specialized tasks over time, including the job of patrolling larger areas of an environment on some kind of speeder bike. On the forest moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi, we saw what this looked like for the first time in the form of the Scout Trooper. Though similar in design to the standard Stormtrooper, Scouts sport lighter, more flexible armor to allow them to easily move from speeder bikes to fighting on foot, and their helmets are more specialized to speeder bike riding. They were also often equipped with sniper rifles, making them effective as both reconnaissance troops and sharpshooters.

In urban environments, the Empire utilized a similar trooper variant, the Patrol Trooper, to take on the task of keeping order in cities and settlements around the galaxy. Though their helmets more closely resembled that of the standard Stormtrooper, Patrol Troopers (first appearing in Solo: A Star Wars Story) sported similar light armor and blaster pistols to aid in their time spent riding speeder bikes through cities.

Some Imperial troopers were created with a broad purpose that could be specialized based on the addition of various extra training or gear, while others existed for something quite a bit more specific. This brings us to the Purge Troopers, a very specialized type of Imperial soldiers with a purpose you might be able to guess: to bring the Great Jedi Purge to its conclusion by any means necessary.

Though Revenge of the Sith showed us the beginning of the Purge, subsequent tie-in media has given us a broader look at everything Darth Sidious and Darth Vader used to hunt down surviving Jedi, including the Inquisitorius and its various "Brother" and "Sister" Force users. The Purge Troopers were the foot soldiers of this effort, selected as death squads who were used as expendable troops to be directed at destroying surviving Jedi at all costs. They were trained and, in some cases, programmed (some of the earliest Purge Troopers were from the last batch of clones produced) to obey Order 66 at all times, making them a threat to all Jedi, as any player of the Jedi: Fallen Order video game will know all too well, particularly in the case of the ones that liked to wield electrostaffs instead of blasters.

While the First Order built up its ranks in the Unknown Regions, the fantatical cult known as the Sith Eternal were building an army of their own on the hidden plant of Exegol, where the spirit of Emperor Palpatine lay in wait for his rise to begin once again. The result of this effort was the massive and deadly Final Order fleet of Star Destroyers, as well as the creation of the Sith Troopers, also known as Sith Stormtroopers.

The first and most striking quality most people notice about these troopers is their armor, which retains the silhouette of a First Order or Imperial Stormtrooper but trades the smooth, white plating for a ridged, red look meant to evoke both human musculature and the red of a Sith lightsaber. Though they were not Force users themselves, Sith Troopers were born and raised on Exegol, children of the Sith Eternal cultists, and were therefore raised with absolutely fanatical devotion to Palpatine and the Sith cause. Though they were not clones, they were as close to mindless servants as Palpatine was ever able to recruit in his long life, and they were trained from childhood to be his elite fighting force.

Just as many Stormtroopers received specialized training and equipment for various roles, so, too, did they often receive training and armor designed to help them survive in various climates throughout the galaxy, often with subtle variations on the classic Stormtrooper armor. The first of these we meet are the Sandtroopers of A New Hope, who basically just wear standard armor with a survival backpack and various shoulder pauldrons attached. Later in the same film, we also glimpse the Spacetroopers (standing in the foreground as the Millennium Falcon is brought into the Death Star), who wear a version of the standard armor that's been fitted with breathing apparatus for the vacuum of space.

Over the years, numerous other variations on climate-specific Stormtroopers have been added, including the beige-armored Shoretroopers (officially named "Coastal Defender Stormtroopers") prominently featured in Rogue One, the camo-armored Forest Troopers of Kashyyyk, the Range Troopers glimpsed in Solo: A Star War Story with their fur-lined armor and magnetic boots, the Seatroopers equipped for underwater operations, the Magma Troopers with armor built to withstand the heat of planets like Mustafar, and, of course, the Mudtroopers (aka Swamp Troopers) equipped for wet-weather operations on planets like Mimban. No wonder Han Solo wanted out of the Imperial military so badly.

Basically, if it was a planet they wanted to conquer, you can probably assume the Empire and the First Order built Stormtrooper armor designed to operate on it.