Lit The Official StarWars.com Blog Thread - That's right, I went there

Frankly it never seemed odd to me: given the number of World War Two analogues in Star Wars, I always took the TIE fighter to be based on the Zero.

Sacrificing nearly everything for speed and maneuverability with exceptionally trained pilots, they dominated the earlier parts of the war, but quickly became outclassed as America produced newer fighters that had similar flight capabilities while maintain armor and firepower advantages, especially as military disasters drained the pool of trained pilots and forced the Japanese Empire to send rookiees into battle.


Plus, it isn't like TIEs are the Empire's only fighters. Gunboats in particular are very tough customers and not the kind of ship you want to run into in a dark vacuum of space.
Which brings me to the Clone explanation...which, to be honest, doesn't really work for me because the majority of clone fighters were shielded and had hyperdrives. From what I understand, it was actually the Jedi fighters that sacrificed everything for maneuverability - which worked pretty well seeing as they had precog powers.

 

That's a good comparison and you make great points as well.

The number one thing I always want to see when it comes to Star Wars would be design and size variety for capital ships and starfighters. I really hope Rebels gives us a few other new TIE models we haven't seen before, just as the movies gave us the TIE bomber and TIE interceptor.

 

When books came out listing their maximum accelerations - it was a moderately big difference.

X-wing: 3,700 G
TIE Fighter: 4,100 G

A little over 10%.

 

Fair enough. Still, even in the movies, Vader and his wingmen are able to catch up to Luke and Biggs in the trench despite them "going in full throttle - that oughta keep those TIE fighters off our back".

In the X-Wing Miniatures game, TIEs, I'm told, play as significantly faster and more manoeuvrable - Speed 5 rather than Speed 4, plus the ability to Evade and Barrel Roll, neither of which X-wings can do.

 

Differences in the quality performance of TIEs could easily be explained away by saying the better pilots modified their TIEs. In fact I think one of the trading card games does that.

 

Well, the parts of the war we see anyway. The X-Wing is somewhat new around Yavin, if I remember correctly, and I think the TIE fighter runs rings around the open market fighters the rebels had before then.

 

Or that TIEs are simply designed for a different flying style than most pilots are used to- Remember comments that Tycho has a hard time in the Blades because they are less manueverable than the X-Wings or A-Wings he is used to. TIEs are smaller and lighter than most other fighters, and probably demand a more manuever heavy, darting, hit and run style of warfare than say a Y-Wing or Z-95. It just takes time to get used to, and experience to get the most out of, and is unforgiving in the process.

 

Wow. How long is it since I wrote one of these huge-long-reply-to-everyone thingumys?

Don't you mean Faie?

Quick clarification up here at the prominent end of the post: I always figured that Lucas intended the tactics to be dissonant. They're Yoda's tactics, not GL's (and they're Montgomery's, and Black John Pershing's, and Clausewitz's, and Vegetius', and ultimately, Palpatine's - and in a modified form, arguably even David Petraeus's).

The twist that Gett can't see inside that helmet is that Yoda (like Napoleon, like Field Marshal Hague) is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of throwing numbers at a problem made of shrapnel and automatic fire, and probably even more uncomfortable with the implied use of battle meditation to motivate them, if we're drawing on non-movie ideas... but he can see no better way to fight.

"Wars not make one great".

That, on the other hand, is exactly as I intended...

I'm glad you approve. Should I be worried?

That's good, right?

This piece was entirely Jason's, but as I'm pretty sure I said to him when we were working on this part of WARFARE, I've always thought of the TIE being a homage of sorts to the Mitsubishi Zero. It trades everything for extreme speed and manoeuvrability, with the expectation that a skilled pilot will simply outperform all opponents and not get hit.

Speaking personally, I've often felt that the Empire's main problem was lacking enough pilots who were good enough to fly the TIE Fighter...?

Of course, if the TIE is the Zero, this presumably makes the X-wing into... let's see, something that can out-dogfight a Zero, and single-handedly sink a battleship? Ahah! The Fairey Firefly!!

I feel obliged to admit that I always found myself flying the TIE upside down....

I'm glad you liked this one, on both levels. It was huge fun to put it all together, and I'm delighted it's finally been given an audience.

Sorry if that wasn't clear - as Val said later in the replies, it was a name which didn't make it through the editing process, and he ended up as "Rohlan of Hoth".

You are actually familiar with the name when it's not in German, though.

[face_cryptic]

Very definitely.

Thank you. I thought you might like this one, actually. I was very careful to keep the less... shall we say, loyal, aspects of his ancestry concealed in subtext, too...?

Thank you. I can't actually take any credit for Rette, as has been noted below - I just added a couple of pages to her military biography, without touching her character. I share all your prejudices on this point, and felt it was important to take a canon character and present her as is, without changing her at all.

Jason also helped with the presentation here (my original narrative tone was too much a British idea of what a populist American voice-over sounds like)...

Nonetheless: I'm very pleased it worked.

Hey! That's you thinking that, not me, sir!

The direct reference is to attainting. Any reference to "taint" is actually a nod to Mike Stackpole's observation (via Corran in I, Jedi) that the Empire likes to take names for its ships that sound imposing and authoritarian, but which are actually all about oppression, and thus subtly and psychologically corrupt their troops by making them identify with them...

There's a lot more to it than that; but it's tl;dr, so you get it on personal message....

Thanks. I'm really pleased people have enjoyed this. And yes, being Shira's best friend didn't damage her - Rette is characterized as tough enough to stand on her own two feet, and I'd imagine that that toughness would enable her to negotiate the dangers of the Empire; thereby humanizing the personnel, and hopefully subverting the threat of "taint" I alluded to in my comments to Coop above...

Yes, the 61st are Black Squadron (or rather, Black Squadron's formal number is 61st Squadron)... I'm not quite sure if that went into the Holocron, though - it was something I originally intended to confirm in an earlier section on Yavin....

The intention was that he's a previously-unrecorded character - not everyone needs to be someone's father's brother's former roommate, and I wanted to provide a "character biography" that did different things than usual, too (I realised afterwards that you could probably bend DS-181-4's biography to fit, but it really would be bending it in some places)....

I hoped that the use of a von would be something people would find easy to accept, especially as we have Air Marshal von Asch already - I feel it works more effectively because it has clear semantic connotations in English already (unlike, say "Makkor", which is a private homage to the divergent Scottish and African assimilation of the Greek name Makarios, but which I can't expect to do anything more than sound interesting to the reader)....

But I was playing around with language and identity a little more when I came up with the "von Urron" surname - there's a complex in-joke here, hidden inside a meditation on translation and identity....

Yep. See above for more discussion.

The reference is simply to them being part of Executor's fighter group - as to Derra IV no-one's done a detailed narrative synthesis of all the sources, as far as I know; but Vader seems to like to hide his Super Star Destroyer behind planets in case it's needed to oppress small spaceships....

Yes, we are.

Why, thank you, sir.

There's extra connection to be made, too, for anyone who has a copy of XWRS #25 to hand.

Nothing like this was planned, but it's appropriately bizarre. The fact that the movie shares the song title is obviously intended to suggest a connection - it might be the theme song from the movie, for example, which would be ironic considering that Soontir is simultaneously fighting the Lortan Fanatics, but nothing's defined - it's basically just an in-joke, because I liked the name...

It's a reference to something.

Exactly the intention: in the notes to this section, I identified Chaser explicitly as Black 4 (or rather, I took the likeliest candidate for Phennir's brother at Yavin, and was pleased to find that there was already a character with the same callsign in the TFU era; whoever edited the Wiki article might want to note that "Cartha" is actually Chaser's surname, though, and those inclined for trips down hoojib-holes might recognize that this is an Eiattu name, not a Valahari one: my intention was to indicate that Chaser is Count Phennir's son, an elder step-brother for Turr)....

Definitely the intention, yes, but I'm not sure if it reached the Holocron.

I figured her for a generational, since Nils warned her about the gravity on Carida - and it's not like people from Beheboth normally send their teenage daughters to prestigious military high schools on Coruscant...

I also wondered, just to myself, if "Nils" was a Space Scandinavian name, or a Kaminoan one.

*nods* I agree, but I think you put it very well indeed.

***

And, yes, obviously, Jason's piece on the blast shield is superb. No surprise there.


Mac

 

Haven't seen you posting much - but it's good to see you again.


I believe you're thinking of the scene in Starfighters of Adumar, when Wedge comments on it to Teren Rogriss:

"Admiral, have you ever wondered by the Emperor gave such nasty names to his Star Destroyers? Executor, Agonizer, Iron Fist, Venom?"
"I've heard every schoolboy theory ever proposed on the matter."
"This one comes from Luke Skywalker—"
"Having exhausted the schoolboys, we now turn to the farmboys? How charming."
"—who has a certain perspective on the matter the rest of us don't. He thinks it has all to do with corruption, with the seduction of the not-too-unwilling."
Rogriss gestured for him to keep speaking, but his expression suggested that he'd heard it all before. The bartender brought Rogriss his drink, and Wedge waited until the man departed before continuing.
"Put a man or woman in a situation where the actions he's obliged to take, such as serving Emperor Palpatine, are a certain path to personal corruption. Fill his ears with words saying that his actions are honorable ones. But surround him with constant reminders of what he's doing. Our victim will cling to the words but will, at some level, always be aware of the wrongness—he can't escape it. The symbols, such as the names of the ships he commands, won't let him forget. He's always aware of his descent, of his slow transference to the dark side. Skywalker thinks the Emperor found this knowing acceptance of corruption, this half-accepting, half-struggling process, particularly delicious."

 

Thanks for the clarification.

If this is what I think it is, that's really clever. From XWRS #25, Fel says that, "Those causing the Resalian Purge believed someday a Man-Hutt would sweep evil from the galaxy." Kopa Khan from Light the Sky on Fire is most likely a mishearing of "Kukulkan", since that song makes references to pyramids and a glorious return, which fits with the Kukulkan legend. Now what does Kukulkan look like?



A man with the body of a serpent, or if you prefer...a Man-Hutt.

...is this really a reference to https://www.fanfiction.net/s/892322/8/Hitchhiker][/url]"Hitchhiker"? You are all kinds of awesome.

 

Drat. I should have been more confusing. Was it really that obvious?

But (and this is a question that may also be of interest to Paxis)... any idea why...?

(I admit this only has purely abstract interest insofar as it's merely a commentary on the personal train-of-thought that gave rise to the negated proposal for Lord Hoth's name that then gave rise to the firmly distanced "von Urron" surname, but maybe some people will enjoy figuring it out...?)

Thanks. I've been in the Unknown Regions on a mapping expedition.

I believe I am. I associate the concept with the name of the Invidious for some reason, so much so that I edited-out my initial hesitation about which book it was in...

Yes, I was identifying Kopa Khan as the Resalian Man-Hutt. Wookieepedians, please take note.

That, though, is all I was doing - no further context was intended (people are out-me'ing me in this thread; is this legal? ); but I always wondered if the "Man-Hutt" was a sort of Leto II reference, though....

I'm glad you enjoyed it.


Mac

 

/knock knock
"Who's there?"
"Valance."
"Valance who?"
/KABLAM!!!!

 

I guess this means that Bey is showing up in the last installment. This is another great entry that I really enjoyed.

It's always cool to see more RA-7 droids, they don't show up enough. I wonder why Beilert's call-sign is RZ-179. Any significance? I also wonder why we got "RZ" here. No other stormtroopers have that prefix. They have "Restoration Zones" on Telos IV where Valance was repaired that use the "RZ" prefix, but that can't be related.

I like all the background on the Battle of Doniphon, including the Selpathian Hills, Pyrand River, and Damatua (a new planet?). When Valance wakes up, he asks if he's at "the Imsoo", a reference to the Imperial Mobile Surgical Units, some cool battlefield slang. I like the reference to X-wings being at Doniphon, since it's a little early in the timeline, and Valance being confused as to whether they were ARC-170s or Z-95s is a fun detail. I wonder if the AV-9 is the name of Valance's unit or a new name for the towed guns present at Doniphon.

The Tyrant story is interesting, and answers some questions that I didn't even know I wanted the answer to, what happens to a Star Destroyer when it's knocked out by an ion cannon. It's also fun to get more info on Xamuel Lennox, and some cool details like the info about his mechanical hip that malfunctions when the bridge is hit by an ion cannon.

The last portrait on Motti is also interesting, but we've gotten portraits on the guy before. I would have preferred Cassio Tagge instead. Still, his background before the films is fun stuff. It makes sense that Motti would join COMPNOR and the Sub-Adult group, and I like the detail about him being a fan of the Outer Regions Security Force, which has a complicated backstory beefed up with retcons. The reference to the Mhalandian Reformation and a hand-picked General who takes over as regent has to be a reference to General Otto, the only General friend of Motti that I can think of.

Fun piece, can't wait until the conclusion.

 

I thought the same thing.

 

After seeing the recently published character introduction book, I assure you you're gonna get your wish granted.

EDIT: Just to whet your whistle a little: imagine if Darth Maul's Sith Infiltrator had paid a booty call to Darth Vader's TIE Advanced x1 (or the reverse, if that's your preference), and then imagine the resulting offspring. Trust me, what ya get looks reeeal niiiiiice, and very much feels like part of the TIE family without being too much of a clone of other models. Hope that gets you excited!

 

Please be the TIE Oppressor, or better, the TIE Aggressor (my ship of choice as an Imp Ace in Galaxies)

 

Sorry, no dice. It's very much it's own design. Basically an x1 body with Infiltrator solar panels that have some TIE black areas on them.

 

TIE Advanced v1, a precursor to the x1 that Vader has.

 

This one?

 

That's actually VERY close, except there's black stuff only on the inner sides of the solar panels, not the outer sides, and the support struts look like Vader's TIE rather than a standard one. If you like, just do a Google image search for "Inquisitor's TIE Advanced v1" (NOT x1), and you'll see exactly what it looks like. There's images of the toy all over the place.