Shadowsuit

A shadowsuit was a suit of body-stocking armor made of shadowsilk, a special light-absorbing material. The shadowsuit was designed to maximize the covert movements of the wearer. As such, shadowsuits did not use electronics that could be detected by sensors, except for the optional goggles for the wearer's eyes&mdash;the only part of the body that the suit did not cover. Cushioned gloves and slippers reduced the noise the wearer made by moving.

Ayelixe/Krongbing Textiles produced a retail model of the shadowsuit. While not widely available, a number of thieves and assassins used it. Later, the SpecForces of the Alliance to Restore the Republic custom-made a number of shadowsuits for their elite covert operatives.

Description
The shadowsuit looked like an unpretentious, pitch-black body stocking  that covered the whole body of its wearer   except for the eyes. Users commonly employed goggles in conjunction with the suit to provide eye protection; in fact, factory-model shadowsuits routinely provided mass-produced goggles, while the Alliance to Restore the Republic included VidGraph Peer macrobinoculars, known as "snooper goggles", with its standard-issue suits.

The shadowsuit was made of shadowsilk,   a soft   but tough  special fiber that absorbed both light    and sound. As such, the resulting suit improved the stealth of the wearer. The shadowsuit lacked any electronic device that could be detected by sensors, including sensor scramblers and energy signature, relying entirely in its passive abilities.

The shadowsuit also included gloves and slippers that featured additional sound-attenuating stuffing  to reduce the noise a wearer made by moving  and thus increasing that user's stealth. Including those cushions, the shadowsuit weighed a total of three kilograms, or two kilograms in some cases. It was made from cloth that was thin enough to allow a second type of armor to be donned either over or under the shadowsuit.

History
Ayelixe/Krongbing Textiles produced the shadowsuit, bringing it to the market at some point before 22 BBY at a price of  undefined600. Not commonly found in prestigious stores of the Core Worlds, it was available to military interests and found use among thieves and assassins. During the last decades of the Galactic Republic, this item was legally restricted in the Cularin system, but the bounty hunter Shiana Trist used it there nonetheless.

During the Galactic Civil War, the covert SpecForces of the Alliance to Restore the Republic manufactured custom-made shadowsuits, hand-sewing these with the best available shadowsilk, shaking the shadowsuits to avoid rubbing noises, and including a muffled layer in gloves and slippers. The SpecForces had a limited number of units of the armor, even if they tried to keep up with their sizeable backlog. None of these individualized units was available for sale.

Behind the scenes
The handcrafted shadowsuit of the Rebel Alliance was first mentioned in Rules of Engagement: The Rebel SpecForce Handbook (1997), a role-playing sourcebook for West End Games' Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game written by Timothy S. O'Brien. The book included the first image of a shadowsuit, drawn by Storn Cook. Arms & Equipment Guide added information on the shadowsuit, connecting it with Ayelixe/Krongbing Textiles for the first time.

Arms & Equipment Guide and The Clone Wars Campaign Guide mention that a user can don a shadowsuit and second armor at the same time, but both mention that the game benefits of the shadowsuit are lost in such a case. The Scum and Villainy sourcebook says that the shadowsuit weighs only two kilograms, while both the previous Arms & Equipment Guide and the later The Clone Wars Campaign Guide say that it weighs three kilograms; this article assumes that some units weighed two kilograms while others weighed three.