Full Series The Star Wars Rebels Stormtrooper Incompetence Thread

It is hard to see Palpatine as an tight wad, less he was just good as spending other peoples money during his stint as Supreme Chancellor. What the Empire appears to be doing is spending all its money on military weapons and installations but it mostly inferior to Republican era just 10-15 years before, where it looks like they abandoned their own highly trained men and superior military hardware. I think it wouldve made more sense if this is the case that there was a civil war between Clones and Stormtroopers, but there is no mistake that Clones would win, so that doenst work. This The Empire instead turns to cheap mass produced low quality men, equiplent and vehicles. These Tie Fighers become like 'people's fighters', some suicidal Volksturm fighters that can explode on you due to design floors and cut backs, lack of good training for crews, lack of adequate firepower and lack of modernity as they lack shields, lack the ability to go into lightspeed and have only enough oxygen for a few minutes with no onboard lifesupport. I remember in Battlefront Tie's would explode if you over accelerate the engines or overcharge the blasters,lol.

If Mothma was like Ronald Reagan she could of taken a hard-line stance that favored matching and exceeding the Soviet Union's strategic and global military capabilities couldve just had Palpatine's Empire collapse onto itself within another few fews without going to actual war.

 

Problem is - the Rebellion may not be rich enough to get the Empire "spending itself into bankruptcy".

 

I think it was less about saving money & more about saving time. The Empire needed so many ships & men to rule a vast galaxy they turned to the fastest & easiest options. This was a strategy that worked well for many years. Perhaps also by the time of ANH the Empire had become complacent. It had been years since they killed off almost all of the Jedi. The Rebellion was a minimal threat, having only achieved its "first victory" by stealing the Death Star plans. So the Empire was just cruising along without any real opposition for years. I guess there just wasn't any motivation to change a system that was working so well. It's good that following Yavin we saw the Empire respond with new & better ships.

Still, what would've made more sense is for the Empire to have their TIE's but then also an elite smaller force of vastly superior fighters & pilots. Have them stationed at key Imperial installations like the Death Star. Then the Rebels probably would've been wiped out quickly. Same with the stormtroopers, have your run of the mill foot soldiers but also some elite commandos. Obviously these guys should've been stationed at Endor protecting the shield. Problem is if Lucas had've applied this sensible logic to how the Empire was structured it would be too powerful & the good guys wouldn't stand much of a chance.

 

The Rebels are well funded, that is made clear in the OT and even said by the Imperials themselves. They have a wide range attack craft that is designed to travel without being transported around in heavy ships and they're heavily armored and armed enough to bring down Imperial Star Destroyers on their own and more than a match for Imperial starfighters which are made up of Tie's. Their installation on Hoth was able to hold back long enough what looked to be almost the entire Imperial fleet that Vader had assembled to successfully evacuate.

 

Also, Sheevy might not be a tightwad, but it's never been clear how interested he actually was in day-to-day ruling. Many of the middle-ranking Imperials who did a lot of the actual running of the Empire were (or at least have always been portrayed as) heavily obsessed with "efficiency" at the expense of anything else. I can see that leading to a lot of support for cheap mass-produced hardware like the TIEs.

 

It would be in his best interest to have the most capable and able men in places of leadership in his military and have the best troops and military weapons which was he had with the CIS military and Republic Army, plus its 14 years into the his Galactic Empire, not a 100 or 1000 where things could degrade so its hard to believe this genius would let his own Empire go to pot within such a short span. Moreover being that Jedi survived and a certain rival rogue Sith Lord is out there, it is now Civil War without end as he predicted back in ROTS.

 

This is a chart they used during production of ROTJ.

 

Can't enlarge the image.

 

not sure why it screwed up, I'll try again.

 

A repair droid and hyperdrive is useless chaff in a one-person fighter. It just uses up ressources and fuel that could be used somewhere else. I understand why the Empire would axe both. The repair droid takes forever to repair anything if he can do something at all.

The only relevant advantage of the X-Wing is the shield, but it is not a game-breaker. Maybe the X-Wing is a better fighter plane, but only by a small margin since the TIE makes up in maneuverability and dishes out just as much damage. If you get hit by its lasers, chances are you are dead if you're sitting in a fighterplane yourself.

You just acted as if 20 X-Wings were worth a 100 TIEs! That's absurd.

Like I said, at Yavin they were very effective. I don't understand the need to portray them as some super-inferior ship. They are a very well designed and useful mass product.

 

The repair droid & the hyperdrive go hand in hand & they're in no way chaff. The point is the X-Wing unlike the TIE is a long range fighter. By traveling vast distances through hyperspace it risks encountering mechanical problems & being stranded. That's when the R2 unit is most crucial. The TIE's only operate at sublight speeds so in close proximity to a base, space station or capital ship. Therefore any repairs can be undertaken at whatever base they're stationed at. Nevertheless, a starfighter's ability to also affect repairs while in combat is a major advantage. I'm sure as a pilot you'd rather have this assistance than not. The droid also can assist in navigation, weapons use, all kinds of things. It's not hard to think of the many examples of Luke, Anakin or Obi-Wan's R2 unit providing crucial assistance, even in the thick of battle.

No I wouldn't say the TIE's can dish out as much damage. Apart from them lacking torpedoes they also have dual lasers compared to the X-Wing's quad laser array. That makes it pretty simple: if an X-Wing fires at you you're at risk of being hit 4 times with a single blast compared to two. Also by having their blasters mounted at the ends of the S-foils the X-Wing has a much wider firing pattern. This also increases the chances of scoring a hit, especially against larger targets. This is all covered in the various technical manuals & starfighter games, which I spent far too many hours playing as a kid

I may have stated my comments poorly. I didn't mean to suggest you'd need 100 TIE's to be able to match 20 X-Wings. I just plucked a figure that may represent the sort of mismatch in numbers the Empire would usually be able to achieve. This is a big part of the reason they didn't need to have the absolute best & most advanced starfighters (although they should've also had some elite fighters). The Empire had strength in numbers. If I was to guess (& that's all it would be) I'd say that...15 TIE's to 10 X-Wings all with pilots of the same ability would be a fair match.

All of what I've described here makes perfect sense when you look at how the Empire responded to the defeat at Yavin. The TIE Interceptor was developed as a response. It was considerably faster & more maneuverable than the X-Wing. It also matched it's quad laser array which like the X-Wing were mounted on the outer wing tips for a wide firing pattern. The X-Wing's sturdier build, deflectors & R2 unit is evenly balanced by the clear advantages of the Interceptor. IMO that's an even 1-1 match up. I hope we see Interceptors in the ST.

 

The Tie Interceptor is usually compared to match to the A-Wing, in speed, which is just a vastly superior craft. X-Wing's have heavier armament, and armor than Tie's, plus they have hyperdrives. X-Wings just have a wide range of advantages compare to the Tie models, cept for numbers. Tie's need to be piggy backed across the galaxy in Star Destroyers or Imperial cruisers which also make them vulnerable to enemy attach and too late.

The Tie's have basically 7.62mm mg's compared to the X-Wing's 20mm cannons, and quad array plus missiles. One hit from an X-wing on a shield-less Tie would blow it to pieces. In battlefront I used use the Tie's speed to just board a Rebel ship then steal a Rebel craft and proceed to destroy their ships. As much as I like the looks of the Tie's and all, it just a oddball design and not a craft I would put my life in. The Tie Bomber carried bombs which gave it some impact against enemy ships but it too suffered from same drawbacks.

The Astromech on the rebel crafts more or less acted as a co-pilot and helped with navigation and repairs while the pilot can concentrate on other tasks like staying alive.

I still prefer the V-Wing and Republic/early Empire era military and craft:

 

Thematically I feel the TIE as a weak death trap doesn't really fit.

The Empire has the heavily armored Star Destroyers for capital ships.

On ground they have the heavily armored AT ATs.

For Soldiers they have the heavily armored Stormtroopers.

For a Space Station they have the heavily armored Death Star.

For fighters they have the lightly armored TIEs that are easily destroyed?

 

..vulnerable to enemy fire before they detach and deployed too late. Tired need sleep,lol.

Closest to equivalent to the Tie would be the Vulture Droid but they had better armament. Not sure why the Jedi Starfighter design was abandoned altogether either.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Eta-2_Actis-class_light_interceptor/Canon

Vader still used his for some time:

 

Maybe it was too associated with the Jedi?

 

With "chaff" I mean that those features don't add much to the overall efficiency and usefulness of a fighter plane. Fighter planes aren't meant to travel long distances on their own since they have no space for provisions and they don't have the sensors to be effective scout ships. You can't even go to the toilet on one. The X-Wings are kind of jack of all trades in that way.

Because you mention navigation and weapons use: That's what the board computer is for.

Maybe the individual bolts pack less of a punch or the lasers are less accurate? We can't easily judge this.

Okay, that's a more sensible number. I too would say that 15 TIEs are worth about 11-12 X-Wings.

I agree that the war, like every war, started a technological arms race. The Empire didn't want to fall behind in the department of 1-man fighter planes so they built a couple new ones. But so did the Rebellion with its B-Wings and whatever the other ships are called.

 

In the X-wing Miniatures game the proportions tend to be fairly similar - TIEs are cheap enough that, depending on how pricey the X-Wing pilots and their kit are, they will be outnumbering the X-wings at least 1.5 to 1 at the same points cost. If it's the least experienced TIE pilots (Academy Pilots) vs good X-Wing pilots with droids and torpedoes - it's going to be outnumbering them 2:1 or more.

 

The TIE fighter was developed from the ETA-2 Actis light interceptor developed by Kuat Systems Engineering. The Eta-2 was itself a successor to the Delta-7 previously favored by the Jedi. It had no shields, the lack of the mass of a shield generator affording it extra maneuverability. Since it was primarily used by the Jedi Order, the lack of shields was less of an issue, since its pilots were typically highly trained Force users who could sense incoming fire and evade with the high maneuverability.

At the end of the Clone Wars, Kuat sold off the KSE division along with all its ongoing projects to Sienar. Sienar picked up the Eta-2 and continued its development, ultimately into the TIE/LN (the basic TIE fighter). Like the Eta-2, it has no shields. Had the TIE fighter been adopted as a Jedi fighter, it would undoubtedly have been a very successful starfighter in small numbers, the marriage of extreme maneuverability and Force-adept pilots more than making up for its lack of shields. In this role the hyperdrive-less TIE would likely have operated in concert with a hyperspace ring, as did the earlier Delta-7 and Eta-2 fighters, which also had no hyperdrive.

This never happened of course, since by the time the TIE was in production, the Jedi Order had been swept away. Instead, the Galactic Empire realizing it was very cheap and easy to produce, siezed upon it for very high volume mass production as an expendable fighter. In a top down ultra-authoritarian regime like the GE, where the individual is of little concern and the state is exalted above all, with troops being regarded as expendable to be given a base level of training, and used in mass numbers (rather than in lesser numbers but super-competent highly trained men like the Clone Wars era clone troopers) a mass produced, cheap, unshielded expendable fighter piloted by expendable men to defeat the enemy simply by mass spamming, was perfectly in line with the prevailing ethos. Instead of small numbers piloted by Force adepts, operating with a hyperspace ring for each individual fighter, vast numbers of them would operate from large capital ships that served as carriers, piloted by normal men, overwhelming the enemy with numbers.

 

Separate point, but the hyperspace ring was one of the dumbest design concepts in Star Wars. The idea that you make a hyperspace jump to a possibly hostile & remote world & then leave your vulnerable hyperspace ring in orbit or just floating in space somewhere. The enemy can easily destroy it leaving you stranded. They can then pursue you until you run out of fuel & you're done.

 

What about the Borg from Star Trek? They were done very well until Voyager, but that's a different conversation....


Overall I'd say it's hurting the show, at least the couple episodes I've watched. At least we saw Battle Droids killing clone troopers, and the B-1's were the only place where it actually worsened the show. The Commando droids were cool.
It didn't hurt TCW so much because you got a sense of how many droids the CIS had. The Empire seems to only have 8 stormtroopers at a time who are just as incompetent as the droids, if not more so.

 

I could see them(writers) using that as an excuse but I don't see the logic in that as its concept design was built around the premise of bridging the gap between ROTS and the original trilogy by reminiscent of both Tie Fighters and Vader's Tie Advanced from A New Hope.

Too bad we wont see this released as a toy, but you'd think this wouldve been the more natural descendant by the OT, if the OT was not already made:

 

Love this design.

 

That ship design looks weird.

 

I like it except the solar panel wings. They looked tacked on & don't suit the rest of the craft.

 

Yeah, thats what makes it weird.