Official: STAR WARS THREAD. These are the droids you're looking for. **WARNING MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

[mhip]

Quite obviously a Tie Fighter...

MSN

 

[Omega Male]

Asking the right questions.

 

[mhip]

New season of Bad Batch just dropped...

 

[VaderDave]

Asking the right questions.

.

 

[mhip]

Amazeballs…

 

[Texasmade]

Amazeballs…

Tiefighter should've pulled a Maverick move and hit the brakes to have the X-wing fly right by.

 

[mhip]

Tiefighter should've pulled a Maverick move and hit the brakes to have the X-wing fly right by.

The pilot was a new recruit/traitor to the resistance. She wasn't really up to speed yet on advanced maneuvers...

 

[venividivicibj]

 

[smittycl]

https://www.cbr.com/patty-jenkins-back-on-star-wars-rogue-squadron/

 

[hpreston]

https://www.cbr.com/patty-jenkins-back-on-star-wars-rogue-squadron/

View attachment 2149085

I'm all for a RS movie.... but honestly, after all the Lucasfilm movies in development, then dropped, than back on, or jsut dying on the vine, I won't hold my breath on this one.

 

[Omega Male]

“When I grow up, I’m going to be an AT-ST!”

 

[Gibonius]

lol they start the video by smacking the crap out of the little dude.

 

[otc]

Thought this post was interesting.

Why do the X-Wing Fighters in A New Hope look so beaten and weathered if they were new, state of the art fighter craft?

Eric Lowe's answer: Do you know where the story of them being new, state of the art fighter craft comes from? That lore comes from the 1987 Star Wars The Roleplaying Game, which was licensed from Lucasfilm but obviously had no influence on the production of Star Wars just over 10 years prior. Th...

www.quora.com

Why do the X-Wing Fighters in A New Hope look so beaten and weathered if they were new, state of the art fighter craft?

Do you know where the story of them being new, state of the art fighter craft comes from? That lore comes from the 1987 Star Wars The Roleplaying Game, which was licensed from Lucasfilm but obviously had no influence on the production of Star Wars just over 10 years prior.

The Watsonian answer is that X-wings look kind of grungy because the Rebels lack the personnel, the time, the facilities, and the materials needed to keep them pristine.

I mean, you try keeping the ships looking spotless in a jungle.

But I actually think the Doylist answer is more interesting in this case. You see, X-wings weren’t supposed to be state of the art. That was supposed to be TIE fighters.

Fans have lived for 36 years with the “knowledge” that X-wings are advanced and TIE fighters are cheap and disposable, so this is sometimes hard to see. If you’re ever at a con and get to talk to one of the original model makers, do so; they have fascinating stories to tell. But imagine it from their perspective. They’re trying to sell the audience on the idea that there’s this whole vast universe of lore just beyond what the camera can see. They have to use visual cues to do that. One of the ways Star Wars’ production design worked was that your mind was supposed to subconsciously go, “Oh, I recognize that. That’s a space version of a _______.” And if you can think yourself back into that mindset, you can maybe understand that, visually:

That’s a space car.

That’s a space sword.

That’s a space plane.

That’s a … space flying saucer?

The Imperial stuff intentionally lacks the design cues that make your brain subconsciously go, “Yeah, I know what that is and how it works.” There’s no big visible engines on a TIE fighter, no wings like there are on an X-wing; even the guns are barely visible. It’s supposed to look kind of alien and ineffable and high tech, because of course it was supposed to be high tech. After all, the rebels were, well, rebels. Scrappy guerrilla fighters aren’t supposed to have better equipment than the massive oppressive military machine that they’re fighting.

George always thought of the Rebel fleet as essentially hot rods because they acquired their stuff used, and it was beat up, and they patched it together, and supercharged the engines, and they were basically hot rods. And the Empire stuff is right off the factory floor.


Frankly, I’ve always liked this explanation better. Star Wars is boring to me when the Rebels have better fighters, better ships, better soldiers, better pilots, and yet are still somehow supposed to be the underdogs.

But regardless of my personal preferences, once you know what the original design idea was, you can’t unsee it (also, if you know anything about George Lucas and his relationship with West Coast hot rod culture, the whole thing becomes pretty undeniable). So … what happened?

Well … The Roleplaying Game happened. In Star Wars, the Empire is actually pretty scary and effective. Stormtroopers win the boarding action at the start of the film, they slaughter the Jawas without apparent effort, and when our heroes escape them on the Death Star, Princess Leia points out on screen that “they let us go.” The only large Rebel ship we see, the Tantive IV, is obviously no match for the Devastator, and Imperial Star Destroyers are not only big and powerful but fast enough to chase a Rebel blockade runner and even the Millennium Falcon, the rat rod of all rat rods (notice also that in 1980’s Empire Strikes Back, they’re still fast enough to chase the Falcon). And as for the Empire’s fighters, well, only three out of thirty Rebel fighters survive the TIE attack, and Darth Vader’s TIEs would have saved the Death Star despite Luke’s burgeoning Force ability if not for the intervention of Han Solo.

When you’re playing Star Wars The Roleplaying Game, you aren’t going to be rescued by Han Solo.

Now, that’s not necessarily a problem. The Roleplaying Game could have been a game where the Empire is just better at everything: they have better ships, better guns, better training, better coordination, better reconnaissance, better intelligence. It could have been a game where even the boldest Rebels didn’t dare get into a firefight with even a single stormtrooper squad for fear of what would follow, where even the most carefully laid ambushes resulted in grievous casualties, where the only way for the Rebels to win is by losing slowly enough militarily to win sociopolitically. That’s how real rebellions work, and it’s at least arguably the story the films present of how the Rebellion actually wins.

But that was not the game that West End Games presented. Star Wars The Roleplaying Game is a game that encourages the game master to—and this quote has been burned into my brain since I was 11 years old—“blast merrily away at stormtroopers.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if that’s the game you want—a space opera game, a game where the heroes can beat the Empire through daring and verve—then you’ve got to give them some advantages. So which ones do you give? You can’t very well give them superior numbers and still have them feel like the scrappy heroes, and even if you could, you wouldn’t want to, because a roleplaying game ought to feature the individual player characters, not the individual player battalions.

So how does a band of scrappy pilots with no formal training “blaze merrily away” at a numerically superior force of highly trained pilots in qualitatively superior ships? Well … they don’t.

So The Roleplaying Game changed the equation. It made TIE fighters disposable deathtraps rather than the highly advanced craft they were originally envisioned as. This is where a lot of TIE lore comes from. Why do TIEs not have shields? Because of the RPG. Why do they have inferior firepower to X-wings? Because of the RPG. Why do they not carry missiles or torpedoes? Because of the RPG. The story about Incom engineers defecting to the Alliance and giving them their state of the art X-wing? That’s the RPG.

As I said, I actually vastly prefer the original version, where the Rebels are inferior both qualitatively and quantitatively to the Empire in every possible military sphere. But The Roleplaying Game was absolutely beloved by hardcore Star Wars fans, and many of its retcons became canonized over time. The superiority of the X-wing over the TIE fighter was one such retcon. And the rest is history.

I don't know if I 100% agree, and I never touched the roleplaying game (though I see how its lore spread and had influence), but there are a lot of good points in there.

I do tend to think of the TIE as a sort of disposable cheap ship and the X-wing as an overall much better fighter--but with trade offs in order to accommodate a broader mission profile (such as likely higher running costs with things like the astromech droid requirement). But I don't know that I ever believed x-wings were new/state of the art. So I think the hotrod aspect is apt.

I think the other aspect to keep in mind is that the Empire is...trying to maintain an Empire, and a fledgling empire at that. They certainly do well in the core worlds, but it is a very large galaxy and there really are a lot of other neutral (or hostile) parties out there. Dealing with the rebel alliance is only a small part of their day-to-day. The empire has built out a simple standardized fleet that they can mass produce and move around the galaxy. TIEs don't have to be anything other than light-fast-cheap fighters because they have lots of Star Destroyers to carry them around, and lots of other classes of ships to handle different tasks.

 

[Jr Mouse]

Yes that is correct. TIE Fighters were designed to be cheap and mass produced. That's part of why they don't have FTL engines or pressurized cabins. They have to wear spacesuits to fly them.

 

[mhip]

Yes that is correct. TIE Fighters were designed to be cheap and mass produced. That's part of why they don't have FTL engines or pressurized cabins. They have to wear spacesuits to fly them.

They have always been my favorite "noise" from the movies...