CT Luke Skywalker - Fighter Pilot

By "award", I mean "reward". Why can't I edit my post?

 

It's on page 161 of my somewhat later version of the omnibus - but the point is sound.

 

The more you think of X-wings as being similar to modern-day fighter planes in terms of how many people know how to fly them and how long it takes to get trained, the bigger the plot hole gets. But, per capita, I would think the Star Wars galaxy has many times more spaceships than Earth has planes. Being a SW star pilot is more like knowing how to drive a semi -- specialized skills are required, but they're not skills reserved for an elite few.

 

Yeah, there isn't exactly a real world equivalent of a T-16 Skyhopper: a recreational vehicle with similar controls to and requiring similar skills as a military-grade fighter jet. I mean, you have civilian airplanes, but I don't think you could transition from one of those to a jet with no prior training, and as far as I know you don't see teenagers messing around in them like they're nothing more complicated than an off-roader.

 

Is this really a debate?

The XWings were stolen, weren't they? Isn't that what the opening crawl references as the Rebellion's first "Victory"? If I hijack a big rig that is transporting half a dozen cars to a dealership, don't I now have more cars than I can drive?

I would imagine many of the YWings they had were also stolen, or belonged to their pilots who brought the ships when they joined the Allaince, defected or otherwise. It's not like the Rebel Alliance was manufacturing XWings at that point in the war, and had a supply officer making sure the ratio of pilots to fighters remained exactly 1:1. And as others have mentioned, a pilot can die in a lot of different ways that don't involve actively piloting a space fighter.

Is it really that hard to imagine a scenario where there might be more space fighters than experienced pilots? Especially at one specific base at one specific point in a big big galaxy?

 

No, the first victory was stealing the Death Star plans. The X-Wings and Y-Wings were purchased from Incom and Koensayr. The latter being leftovers from the Clone Wars.

 

I would agree that a number of the YWings could have been purchased, as they were more or less for sale to the open market, and being older, less desirable models of star fighters it would be safe to assume the Rebellion would buy them. There was no purchasing of the Xwings, however. Incom turned over a handful of prototypes, and a bunch more were stolen from the Empire. Technically stolen from the manufacturing facility, but they were being designed/built for the Empire.

":The X-wing was originally designed by Incom Corporation for the Empire byVors Voorhorian, but the entire engineering team defected to the Rebel Alliance with the prototypes hidden on Fresia....After four prototypes were extracted from Fresia during the Battle of Fresia, it first encountered Imperial forces in the Battle of Turkana.Many more of the ships were liberated from an Incom assembly facility prior to the Battle of Yavin."

I will admit that you can interpret the "stealing" of the Death Star plans as the "victory", but I always assumed that the plans were only a piece of the puzzle, and the actual "Victory" was the Rebellion surviving it's first deliberate space engagement against the Empire during the Battle of Toprawa. And yeah, the XWings were obtained before the Battle of Toprawa, so my mistake.

 

Saving the princess and blasting out of a space station that's on its way gives you plenty of juice.

 

Losing pilots was a huge problem for the Luftwaffe in the BoB because theirs would be captured or killed if they got shot down, while the Brits if they survived could just return to base and get a new plane. You can make a plane in a few days if you have the factories, but you can't produce pilots at the same rate since they need weeks and months to learn how to fly it. The plane already knows how to fly when it comes off the assembly line. That's the major difference between humans and machines.

Factor in that the Alliance don't have academies and fighter schools to pool pilots from. They have to defect, and since most able starfighter pilots will be working for the Empire that's not going to be easy. Generally military personnel are harder to "turn" than a disgruntled Joe Blow. Someone like Luke coming in on the fly to pilot a ship might be a stretch, but it's not that much of a stretch.