In my post on all the Top Gun/Star Wars mashup patches, I mentioned that I wanted to mimic the intent/meaning of the original Top Gun patches, as well as their design.
To illustrate what I mean by that, I wanted to do a deep dive on the "Centurion" patch, which is the mash-up patch that visually deviates the farthest from the Top Gun patch it's based on.
The Text
I am not Naval aviation savvy, so I needed to do a little research to understand what this patch was supposed to be for in context of Top Gun/the US Navy before I could figure out how to Star Wars-ify it.
According to AV8R Stuff this patch is awarded to an aviator for achieving 100 "trap" landings on a given aircraft carrier. In the case of Top Gun, the USS Ranger, designation CV-61. Naval aviators are awarded this type of patch in the real world as well, and a Google image search for "centurion trap landing patch" illustrates the wide variety of designs they can have.
Star cruiser hanger bays aren't exactly known for their extensive runways, so it made sense to keep the original spirit and intent of the patch the same for my Star Wars version, commemorating a pilot achieving 100 "trap" landings, only on a star cruiser instead of an aircraft carrier (more on what "trap landings" are in the next section).
This meant the “100” and “centurion” text would remain as-is, but I needed to replace “Ranger” with the name of a star cruiser and the “CV-61” with its designation, or something with a similar vibe.
I could have made up my own star cruiser, but generally if I have the option to make a fandom deep cut instead of inventing something, I will.
So, after doing a deep dive on Wookiepedia, I decided to use the Independence as my star cruiser, which in Legends was the cruiser Red Squadron operated out of both before and after the Battle of Yavin¹. Instead of making up a designation, I went with the model number "MC-80" to replace "CV-61."
The Tailhook
The
more aviation or naval savvy among you probably already knew what that
striped hook thingy on the patch is, but I had to do some research.
Apparently, it’s called a “tailhook” and used in "arrested landing" or "trap landings." It's located on the underside of
a military aircraft and used in conjunction with "arresting
gear" located on the landing area to rapidly decelerate aircraft when
there's not enough runway
(called an "arrested landing" or "trap landing")².
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| The tailhook of a KA-6D Intruder aircraft, about to catch an arresting wire on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Source: How Stuff Works |
Given
that spaceship hangers aren't known for lengthy runways either, it
would make A LOT of sense for this kind of "arrested landing" system to
exist in starfighters and hangers as an emergency fail safe. However, I
wasn't able to find anything resembling a tailhook on any X-Wing
schematics, so I just kept the original design element as-is.
And
now I have strong feelings that any sci-fi ship that docks in a hanger
bay & the hanger bay itself should have a mechanical “arrested
landing” system in case of emergency. I will make an exception for the
sci-fi equivalents of helipads were the ship is taking off and landing
vertically. Is this a thing I expected to ever have opinions about? No. But here we are.
Anyway, back to the patch.
The Font
Originally, text in display readouts in Star Wars were written in the Latin Alphabet in English. Then in 1983's Return of the Jedi, a set of unique symbols in a repeating pattern was used for the monitor readouts instead.
These symbols were then used by Stephen Crane as the basis for the Latin Alphabet replacement script we now know as Aurebesh.
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| Aurebesh letters and punctuation Source: Wookiepedia |
Originally developed for the Star Wars Miniature Battles Companion to the Star Wars Role Playing Game in the early 90s, Aurebesh has since become the canonical way to represent "Galactic Basic" (English) in Star Wars media, making its way to the films in The Phantom Menace and retroactively added to the Original Trilogy for the DVD release.
You can find an Aurebesh font easily online, and it would have been obvious and easy to use since it is a 1:1 replacement script for the Latin Alphabet and has basically become the standard way to make something look Star Wars-y. Case in point, the Aurebesh logos developed for Coca Cola products sold a Galaxy's Edge.
However, I decided pretty early on that I didn't want to use Aurebesh for my patches. Mainly, because it would make them illegible to 99% of people, and the nuances of the changes I made to the text itself would be completely lost in translation.
Which then left me with a conundrum of what fonts to use for the letters and the numbers. Naturally, I turned to the source material. I found this fantastic blog post that breaks down all the fonts used in Star Wars logos, movie posters, credits sequences, etc. It links out to, as Trade Gothic.
After looking at several different fonts identified in Nona Blackman's fantastic blog post All About Star Wars Fonts, I settled on using Trade Gothic. According to Patrick Concannon's Star Wars opening crawl and titles article for Fonts In use, Trade Gothic is the typeface that was used for the 1977 release's opening crawl, subtitles for alien speech, and end credits (the opening crawl was later reset in News Gothic Extra Condensed for the 1981 re-release).
Actually, that's not entirely true. I actually used a 2008 revision called Trade Gothic Next because it was available from Adobe Fonts, which I get as part of my CC subscription.
For the numbers, I briefly toyed with using a font based on the targeting computer numerals, called Scelet AF. After quite a bit of tweaking and trying to make it look good, I decided it just didn't work and used Trade Gothic Next for the numbers as well as the letters.
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| Targeting computer from Star Wars Episode IV |
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| Early iteration of my patch using Scelet AF for the numerals |
The Overall Shape
The decision to keep the original tailhook design element meant there wasn't anything "Star Wars-y" in my patch design other than the altered text. To remedy this, changed the shape of the patch to resemble the hanger bay doors rather than a shield.
 | |
| A hangar on board the Home One Source: Wookiepedia |
To help the shape read as an open hanger bay door, I switched the border thread color from red to grey and added some stars to the navy background field.
The Final Patch
And this is the final design:
How do you think I did giving this patch from Top Gun some Star Wars flare? How would you have handled the tailhook design element? Do you want more design deep-dives like this? Let me know in the comments!
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