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Allow me to start by saying that I wouldn't have thought of this if I hadn't been looking at the fics listed in the series The One With All the Prompts (2024) by elismor_aswell , where I saw a Stargate fic in close proximity to a bunch of Star Wars and finally had a place to put a thought I had about standard trooper equipment, but no actual story - at least not one that wasn't the problematically silly self-insert I keep talking about that you will never see because I'm too old to inflict that on people.
Anyhow, anyone who shows up here and doesn't know Stargate, allow me a short introduction so you know who Clone Jack O'Neill is.
In an early episode of Stargate, one of the characters of our main team (known as SG-1, hence the subtitle; there are other teams, SG-2, SG-3 and so on, but they're secondary characters), team leader Colonel Jack O'Neill, wakes up and finds himself about fifteen years old, wondering what the hell happened. He contacts his team and after much running around they find out that he has not been de-aged, he's actually a half-grown clone of the original Jack, who is being held captive elsewhere. At the end of the episode mini-Jack heads off to do whatever, and I don't think we ever hear from him again in the series.
The thing is, he has all of adult Jack's memories and military training.
I assume this is based on the notion of someone have the technological capability to affect brain development in cloning and force identical neural connections into the clone as are in the original, thus creating a brain with all the same memories. Or something like that. It's handwavy sci-fi science, after all.
So, mini-Jack is going about his business when he falls into an interdimensional portal to Star Wars, during the Prequel era, specifically during the period after TPM and before AotC. For reasons that crop up later, I like to imagine he's moving and lands with boxes of his albums and movies (purchased by adult Jack, because however uncomfortable mini-Jack makes him, he's not going to let him go off without his albums and the Simpsons).
He lands somewhere like Alderaan. Somewhere civilised, with educational facilities and the ability to help a stranded (claiming to be) amnesiac teenager. Jack very easily passes himself off as an amnesiac because he knows nothing about the universe he's just landed in. Further, discreet research shows that none of the concepts he's used to floating around in his region of reality are there. There are no Goa'uld, there are no hok'tar, no Tau'ri, no Ancients (well, there are probably Ancients, but they're nothing like his), no recognisable mythology from Earth etc. etc. They speak English, but they call it 'Basic' and have some alphabet the likes of which he's never seen.
He wishes Daniel were there.
Jack gets resettled and learns all about this new reality, its government (hinky), weapons (often weird), magic space monks (what in tarnation?), space ships and other flying contrivances (so awesome), and general sociopolitical situation (also hinky). At the age of majority he finds a Republic military to join up with and rises fast because he's already a trained member of a military.
When the Clone Wars start, he winds up being rapidly promoted because he's super-competent, more so than many others because Jack has been in on-the-ground military operations for decades and knows what frontline war is actually like.
He winds up in Krell's battalion. He watches Krell, looks at his fellow clones and gets Krell removed by reporting his behaviours to various authorities. He tells the Jedi Krell is being a Bad Person, getting his men killed for what seems to be his own entertainment, he tells upper echelons of military that Krell is wasting resources in a dramatic way that looks very suspicious, and he contacts secret services or whatever with his suspicious of treason.
Krell is removed by various authorities, and Jack is promoted in his place.
The first thing Jack does is pull the clone senior staff in and admit to them that he is a clone. He's from 'somewhere in Wild Space' or something to that effect, but he tells them that and lets them check his bloodwork, which contains all the hallmarks of his being a clone. With that done, having set himself on a more even footing, Jack starts to set about fixing things in his little corner of the 'verse.
Because of his background, he has the knowledge of many gun types and their exact specs. So, he uses Star Wars fancy fabrication tech to make a gun (slugthrower), which is known as one of the most effective weapons against a force-sensitive, standard equipment for his battalion. Because if they get attacked by Dooku or Ventress or a fallen Jedi or any other random darksider, he wants his men to have an effective weapon, not just 'where's the nearest Jedi?'. He trains them all in using, say, a Desert Eagle, (not that I know anything about guns, but I was thinking something that's sort of handgun-sized but with really large calibre bullets).
Anyhow, when Dooku hits the field, they're able to shoot him with bullets and Dooku is forced to retreat because what happens when a lightsabre-user gets shot at with a gun is they don't reflect it, they break it into little bits of molten metal still going forward at the same speed and get pelted with molten metal bits travelling at gunshot speed. It's very painful. There is much rejoicing and they get to show off at their fellow clones because they drove Dooku off without a Jedi.
He also, and this is where the albums and movies come in, makes copies of all his music and movies for the men to watch.
I have a theory about tech in Star Wars, and that is that bloatware is very real. Bloatware, for those of you unaware, is the very real process whereby files take up more and more memory space for exactly the same amount of information at the human end. For example, when I was a kid, I had a bunch of fanfics that I saved as .txt files on a floppy disk. I transferred them to a new computer, turned them into Word files and added back in some formatting. When I went to transfer them again, I turned them back to .txt files and tried to save them on the floppy.
Where I was once able to save fifty files, I could save only two. There wasn't enough room, even though they were supposedly the same file format and were the exact same stories. The people programming Microsoft Word had added so much extra junk in, that the exact same content took up twenty times the space in memory.
So, I would not be surprised if in Star Wars their music and entertainment took up a squillion times too much space to bring with them. Jack, on the other hand, has the compressed forms of 20th century technology and can fit a whole library of CDs into the space of a Star Wars thumb drive. His battalion is the only one with a library of music and 'holos'. It's totally unknown to Star Wars, but the clones don't care, because they get to have entertainments like regular people. Jack treats them like regular people and does his best for them. He lacks a Jedi's ability to lead from the front, not having super-powers, but he lands with the men on the ground and puts himself as close to the action as possible, earning their respect as someone who will not sit back on the ship and let everyone else get killed while he's sitting in safety and comfort. He goes on as many on-the-ground missions as he can, because Jack is not a desk jockey and he hates it, but is a general for much the same reason the Jedi are, and that's because he knows some worse asshole will be in charge who will not treat the clones like people if Jack doesn't do it.
The battalion that was formerly Krell's isn't totally sure about other Jedi, and they get into scraps on the regular when on leave with the 212th, 501st, Wolfpack, etc. etc. because they say their non-Jedi general is as good or better than those Jedi.
(Eventually an armistice is reached as Jack becomes known as the as-good-as-a-Jedi-general-General)
He also meets Anakin and he and Anakin become friends. First in bonding over flying, and then because Jack takes up being half-Dad and half older brother. Because Anakin knows that Jack is not friends with Obi-Wan (Jack finds him intensely irritating with his fancy speeches and from-a-certain-point-of-view-ing), Anakin is willing to listen when Jack says things that Anakin disagrees with. Jack puts things in plain language, and Anakin gets to hear his moral dilemmas boiled down into essentials that are not laden with Jedi philosophy with big words and complex ideas. When Jack points out that Palpatine is being hinky, he does so in a way that Anakin is able to hear. The thing is, like I keep harping on about with Anakin getting a political education, Jack is a pragmatist about politics. He knows it affects him, so he pays attention, but he isn't a policy wonk. He can narrow down what Palpatine says and does into simple cause and effect and Anakin can't argue with that. Or rather, he can, but Jack can argue him out of it with straightforward things, rather than twisty weird political things. And since Jack doesn't know Palpatine and has no axe to grind, Anakin is willing to listen.
Jack talks Anakin into telling Obi-Wan that he's leaving the Jedi once the war is over because of Padme, and Jack tells Obi-Wan when he's being stupidly dramatic or twisty instead of just talking to Anakin like a person. That is, Obi-Wan needs to talk like a person, not a character in a stylized holodrama. I maintain that no one ever explained to Obi-Wan that most people find being twisty irritating, not deliciously clever, and most of them don't punch him in the face only because they are adults, not because they don't really really want to.
Palpatine, meanwhile, has no idea about Jack, because when he and Anakin are talking Jack just doesn't come up. There are certain things that Palpatine thinks he has settled into Anakin's mental architecture such that he thinks he doesn't need to reinforce them, so all of that being undercut by Jack is just totally missed.
In fact, Jack is on Coruscant with his battalion on leave when the whole Fives debacle goes down. Jack being Jack, finds Fives first and gets him to safety. Jack listens and takes Fives into his battalion, faking his death to get Palpatine off his back. He starts dechipping and has his men spread the word.
When he tells Anakin, Anakin is willing to believe that Palpatine may have been possessed or mind tricked or something by the Sith behind the war, which is good enough for going on with.
When Echo is rescued, it's a cooperative effort that includes Jack's battalion, which is where Fives is now, because they need him out of sight of Palpatine. Echo gets brought to Jack's Venator (which the boys, after much argument, chose to name 'The Orca' - The Homer was a close second in the vote for a new name). He and Fives leave with Bad Batch while Jack gets all misty at Hunter over his team, because he really still misses SG-1.
Anyhow, general de-chipping, undercutting Palpatine's manipulation, fixing Anakin's relationship with Obi-Wan . . . when Palpatine tries to take over, Jack shows up at the Senate with hard evidence of Palpatine's treason, collusion with the enemy etc. etc.
And everyone lives happily ever after.