SWTOR Imperial Agent Cosplay : Rank Insignia

Unlike in the films, there doesn’t seem to be any actual lore behind the rank insignia in the game, rather they just use what looks good (or more cynically; pick a random one per NPC) so following suit, I just picked one that I liked.

SWTOR imperial agent insignia

After taking a lot of screenshots and working out what the scale should be, making the rank insignia was actually harder than I thought it would be. I got some 3mm thick aluminium sheet and cut it to the size I decided, and cut up some 3mm acrylic sheet in red and blue to make the coloured squares. I have to make a jig for my jigsaw as a poor mans band saw to get the acrylic bit as square as I could.

I first tried super-glue to stick the squares to the aluminium, but as they are transparent, the super-glue always seemed to leave air bubbles and weird marks under the squares no matter how careful I was.

In the end I settled on sticking them down with 1mm VHB double sided tape which is a sort of clear double sided sticky gel. This wasn’t perfect as you can see from the photos, but it was good enough.

swtor imperial agent insignia boxed

I made a lattice of scraps of 3mm acrylic to act as spacers and to keep everything square. Again, it wasn’t perfect but it was close enough.

I epoxied a couple of magnets to the back and use them paired with another set behind the uniform to hold the insignia in place.

As you can see from the photo, I used a left over project box and PCB to make a travel case to prevent the insignia getting scratched in transit.

The lapel badges are small stainless steel wall tiles that I unstuck from their tile backing and affixed more magnets to with epoxy. These magnets match up with more inside the collar of the tunic.