E-11 blaster rifle/Legends

"You can't stay on target with these things! You miss your first shot, and you're lying on the ground with a hole blasted through your armor."

- An unnamed stormtrooper on the Cairn Installation

The E-11 blaster rifle was a blaster rifle manufactured by BlasTech Industries during the Galactic Civil War. It was the standard blaster rifle of the Imperial stormtroopers. A powerful, light and compact weapon, the E-11 was used widely through the galaxy. It was sometimes referred to as a laser pistol.

Description
Standard-issue for Imperial stormtroopers, the E-11 can alternate between semiautomatic, fully automatic and pulse-fire settings, and is designed to use a variety of ammunition, including grenades, darts, and flares. A computer enhanced scope compensates for dark, hazy, or smoky conditions, while a supplementary computer enables the scope to display data specific to the weapon's current operating mode. The E-11's long barrel produces a tightly focused and very powerful particle beam, and has a maximum range of three hundred meters and an optimum range of one hundred meters.

The E-11 rifle proved to be a highly versatile design, spawning a wide number of variations. To make up for the high demand for these weapons, BlasTech authorized SoroSuub and Merr-Sonn to manufacture them under license. These three manufacturers were found mixed indiscriminately across the Empire in Imperial stocks.



Stormtroopers carried E-11 rifles throughout the Galactic Civil War. The design was based on that of the DC-15 series of blaster rifles, carbines, and pistols favored by the Republic clone troopers. Some stormtroopers were known to complain that the original E-11 had been poorly designed to compensate for recoil, leading to diminished accuracy in firefights, and preferred the carbine model instead.

The basic E-11 was 438 mm long when folded and weighed 2.6 kilograms. The power cell housing opened on the left side of the action housing, above the trigger, giving the E-11 a very low profile (useful when shooting prone or from a barricade). The E-11's plasma gas cartridges allowed for over 500 shots, while the power cells lasted for about 100 shots, depending on the setting.

All moving and/or metal parts were fitted with a corrosion-proof, vacuum-rated, dry lubricant. The top of the receiver had a universal, quick-detach sight rail, which came from the factory, mounted with a ring reticule 2x optical scope. The basic three piece folding stock rode along the left side, under the power cell. When the stock was collapsed, the weapon could be fired one-handed

The power settings ranged from stun to kill. The rifle also had a rapid-fire mode with an expanded fire area, at the cost of poor accuracy.

Modified versions of the rifle had also been produced. The E-11b was capable of higher rates of fire, but was prone to overheating. A carbine version of this weapon was also produced&mdash;the E11 carbine, as well as the smaller E-11A and E-11A1, capable of fitting a pistol holster, largely because the extendable stock had been removed. There also was an additional scope that could be added on to make the E-11 into a small scale sniper rifle, with a maximum range of about 8x zoom. While effective, it was not as effective as the E-11s sniper rifle.



By 14 ABY they had been succeeded by the E-15 and E-19 blaster rifles in some Imperial Remnant forces. Around 130 ABY, the ARC-9965 blaster rifle, another product of BlasTech and advertised as an upgrade over the E-11, had become the new standard issue firearm for the Imperial Stormtroopers.

Behind the scenes
The E-11 blaster rifle prop was built from a British-made Sterling L2A3 sub-machine gun.

Expended 9mm casings, the ammunition fired by the underlying Sterling sub-machine gun, can be seen ejecting from the props in several scenes in A New Hope, particularly during the assault on the Death Star's detention level. This can also be seen briefly in a closeup of Lando firing one in The Empire Strikes Back.

Though the stormtroopers made the E-11 famous, some Rebels (notably Princess Leia) also used the rifle.

The game Star Wars: Battlefront II has several classes and at least one character who use the E-11. The four Imperial classes that use the E-11 as their primary weapon are the Imperial Stormtrooper, the Imperial Marine, the Imperial Engineer, and the Dark Trooper, but the Imperial Engineer's model serves as a shotgun-type weapon and the Dark Trooper's model is the Arc Caster. The other character in the game to use this weapon is Boba Fett, but like the Imperial Engineer and the Dark Trooper, the E-11 is not used as a standard blaster rifle (The game incorrectly refers to the blaster as the EE-3 Blaster Rifle).

Appearances
The E-11 Blaster Rifle appears in every game that the Stormtroopers who used them do.

Non-canon appearances

 * Trooper
 * Tag & Bink Are Dead
 * Star Wars Infinities: A New Hope
 * Star Wars Infinities: The Empire Strikes Back
 * Star Wars Infinities: Return of the Jedi
 * The Revenge of Tag & Bink