I just noticed an odd detail in the stormtrooper armor in the last panel. The stormtrooper in this scene has on his left hip a secondary plate that's sort of under the main thigh guard and extends into the gap between it and the codpiece (something that looks like it must be absolutely terrible for basic movement), but on the right, there's no such plate, and just a very broad gap (that is, no less, highlighted as a target by being black against the white of the armor). Do all the First Order troopers have that setup?

No, I looked it up, and they definitely do not. I suspect the actor in this scene just has a longer thigh than did the average extra they used and the costume department had to make do. Seems like an ugly hack for a billion-dollar movie or whatever the budget was, but I suppose John Williams doesn't work for cheap.

This reminds me, though, of a common trend I see in sci-fi armors (which have some odd tendency to be almost uniformly plate-based) in that the costume designers seem to not want their characters to look too much like late medieval/early modern knights and therefore eschew a lot of the pieces viewers might see as looking "medieval" (such as rondels, faulds, or just generally a lot of historical armor about the hips, because they tend to have a skirt-like appearance). Yet if the idea is that people are protecting the human body from harm with a system of rigid plates while retaining as much of the range of motion as possible, historical full plate is probably one of the best, most-optimized systems for doing that exact thing that has ever existed. Sure, you could strip out a variety of the decorative elements (or, if it's that kind of setting, replace them with different ones appropriate to the culture), but the form of the armor for something like Mass Effect or Star Wars* should be well-served by being the same as that of historical plate.


*I've chosen these examples and not, say, Halo because they avoid the complicating factor of the armors being powered, as ME and SW armors generally are not.