A couple of things ....
TD - you've made me a very happy guy
Now We can officially say that the ESB Helmet on an ROTJ suit is Screen Accurate
!!!
Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong
Albeit inly a spit second, perhaps even just a frsme or two, but it counts !!
As far as the Jet Pack thing goes ... I noticed this way back, and forgot to even mention it here.
I was just talking about this recently with a friend, and nearest we can come up with, is that they pre-chunked out of the pack (stunt pack) and put the pyrotechnics in for when they were ready to do the scene, because it would have been too dangerous for it to actually explode while on the actor/stunt double for a couple of reasons.
First off, blowing up models is far different from containing an enclosed explosion in such close qaurters without first getting into the engineering aspects of what the pack was made of, how combustable those materials were, as well as the trajectory of the explosion in relation to directing the explosion outward from the pack, instead of having the whole pack explode by accident because the jet pack would have been a closed container. So when they pre-chunked it out, they most likely put some kind of baffle in the hole so that the explosion wouldn't set the whole pack afire, and this allowed them to use directional explosives so they wouldn't have to worry about the closed container bottleneck.
Made sense to me ? :facepalm
They probably never took into consideration that people 25-30 yrs later would be paying that close attention