Lit Fleet Junkie Flagship- The technical discussions of the GFFA (Capital Ships thread Mk. II)

Speaking of bomber versus boarding craft...those two "bombers" in Rogue One are actually boarding craft? How can anyone tell? Because the much more obscure boarding craft is certainly not what comes to mind first for me.

 

I don't have a link because of Pablo deleting his tweets, but he confirmed for me when I asked that they were Boarding Craft back after the movie came out.

He said he got a look at the 3D model for another project he was doing and confirmed it didn't have a bomb chute.

There's also this tweet from 2017 tagged rogueone

 

Here is my analysis of the TIE Boarding Craft




Here is a comparison between the TIE Bomber, TIE Boarding Craft and the TIE Shuttle

 

Excellent work as always! If you're ever trying to think of what ship to try modeling next may I suggest Dr. Aphra's Ark Angel? I've always thought it would be neat to see someone try to tackle a 3d version of that unique ship.

 

I wouldn't completely rule out the idea of re-scaled TIE wings and windows - I headcanon that the Rebellion took the early A-wing design seen in DROIDS and REBELS and scaled the fuselage down significantly to create the visibly smaller ones in Jedi, and the First Order's TIEs seem to have far more design changes than their basic appearance might suggest - but I'd tend to think that the ultra-standardized Empire would be less likely to do this...

That's because the diameter of one of the Bomber's cylindrical fuselage pods is significantly smaller than the diameter of the cockpit sphere of the TIE Advanced.

Thus, when seen head on, the same size of wings are proportionally larger compared with the more compact fuselage pods.

I'm still confused why you're mentioning the Interceptor at all.

The Bomber/Shuttle doesn't share any obvious spaceframe components with the Interceptor, except the cockpit viewport.

Thanks. So basically, the implication is that the Boarding Craft was completely redesigned...

That makes some sense, but I feel obliged to point out that the TIE Fighter, TIE Advanced and TIE Interceptor all used the same cockpit set in ANH and RotJ, and should thus have identical cockpit spheres.

I would also politely suggest that at the scale you cite, the fuselage pod of the Bomber and Command Shuttle, which is proportionally much narrower and lower compared to the viewport, might be getting too small for a pilot. Unless they're crewed by Ewoks.

In the old days, all Imperial fighters and shuttles were Navy assets, presumably referencing the separateness of the Luftwaffe.

And even if the Army has some air power in the reboot, the status of the transports might be complicated, as they deploy from naval vessels. All the landing craft on D-Day were naval, simply because that was where the skills were...

I suspect that this is meant to be a visual reference to the "off-camera" boarding shuttle that got as far as production sketches at the start of ANH...

I always assumed that the bomb chute could pull up into the hull. Did Pablo say categorically what they were?

I assume that if ILM was quoting Joe Johnson's design sketch for a Vader boarding party, and Pablo says they're Boarding Craft, then that's officially what they are, and I also suspect that the Haynes CGI is based on the Rogue One pic... but I'd be interested to see some clearer confirmation of the intention, not least about how "seriously" the designers meant us to take the implied scale changes...

Is that an official image, though, or fan-art?

Oh, that's cool.

The question I'm interested in here is really one of intent - did this originate as a hasty CGI "kitbash" using the Striker cockpit for speed-of-work, that was intended to represent the same fuselage as the Bomber and Shuttle, or was this intended to be a different design that uses the Striker cockpit and Bomber wing elements with wider central panels?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

And that is apparently how it still is....

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Army_Air_Corps

Which I find a little worrisome as the Navy can just say..."here are all the losers and retreads we don't want.....hope they work out for you."

I much prefer the idea of the Army having their own pilots for fighters, troop deployment and armor transport. Sure the Navy has to get them planet to planet....but deploying from an Army garrison planet side to deal with planetary issues, or an Army landing from the Fleet above...it would make more sense to me if it was all Army. I get that the Navy pilots are answerable to the Army commander...but it is just the way my mind works.

 

The spheres are roughly the same size - it's just that the window on the TIE fighter is proportionally smaller than on the other two. This is actually visible on the diagrams in the book. Some of the movie pictures may also have a detectable difference.

Compare Vader's TIE



to this still from the Rogue One trailer:

https://www.this-is-cool.co.uk/rogue-one-a-star-wars-story-trailer-2/

and you'll see there's a noticeable circular ring around the frame of the cockpit window that isn't present on Vader's ship.

Regarding the unusually small bomber - I think we can blame Complete Vehicles for that one. Its 7.8m length first appeared in that - back when the TIE fighter was considered to be 6.3m. In that, the bomber window would have been the same size or slightly larger than, the TIE/ln window.

When the TIE Fighter was upscaled in size, the bomber wasn't - thus the issue with the bomber being problematically small.

 

My guess is that they looked at A New Hope concept art and saw the original concept of the TIE Boarding Craft, with the wider wings and the big shaft that could attach itself to another ship (like a virus prolate) and thought it would be cool to add to the scene (Just like they thought it would be cool to add the ISD concept art to the training scene in Solo).

So they made a 3D model of the ship, because the troop shaft is perfectly detailed and different from any other ship, and the wings had to be also modeled for this because there are no such wings in any Disney era ship.

But maybe at some point modeling it they realized it couldn't be as small as a TIE Bomber and hold troops inside them, so they resized it and reused stuff like the TIE Striker cockpit, the TIE Fighter arms that they had already 3D modeled to fix the size.

That's my theory.

 

Bytheway, talking about reusing stuff in Rogue One, has anybody noticed how the ramp from the TIE Reaper is the same as the ramp from Krennic's shuttle?



My guess is that the TIE Reaper was added with the re-shoots. Initially Krennic went into battle with his shuttle and death troopers, but they kept Krennic away in the reshoots, so they kept his shuttle away too. So they had to design a new ship to deploy the Death Troopers. Since they had already shot the deathtroopers comming out of the ramp physical set, they integrated the ramp into the desingn.

That would also explain why there was no TIE Reaper in toys or promotional material when the movie came out. It was added late in production.

 

Pablo mentioned that the Reaper didn't even have an official name when the "ultimate visual guide" was released, so that's my theory too. I'm pretty sure Vader's assault at the end of the movie was part of the reshoots as well, which would explain the boarding craft's absence from the guide.

 

Regarding "TIE Bomber's wings should be the same size as TIE Advanced X1's wing" argument:



they don't even slope inwards at the same angle.

It should be noted that the Bomber was not made by the same people that made the TIE Advanced model for the movie - it was a kitbash of a commercial model:

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/exhibit/scale.html

Scale = 1/32, constructed from reused parts from commercial model of Darth Vader's TIE.

So, if the commercial model was not quite proportioned right, this would explain the mismatch.

 

If I was making models of every TIE from scratch I would use as many standard parts as possible as I believe that is what the Empire would do in universe, to enable mass production of parts at the cheapest cost. It makes no sense at all for different TIEs to have slightly different sizes of windows for example, something which could also cause an inconvenience for ship maintenance in acquiring correct replacement parts.

 

They do tend to come in groups.

Interceptor, TIE Defender & TIE Defender Elite - same size windows - because they appear in Rebels and the sizes were probably gotten from there.

Advanced x1, Advanced v1, Mining Guild TIE - all appear in Rebels, all have roughly same size windows

TIE Brute, TIE Boarding Craft, TIE Fighter, TIE Striker - all appear in new movies: Rogue One and Solo.

Outliers tend to have some reason for it. The bomber's size was laid down in Complete Vehicles and never changed, despite the fact that arguably it should have been changed when the TIE/ln's size changed.

 

I think the logic - as in rl - is that this would be a duplication of the same logistics. You probably find airspeeders that are more like T-47s than Biker Scouts (think helicopters), but duplicating "fixed-wing aviation" would be seen as inefficient.

That's because you're comparing a studio model with a CGI render.

The viewports are the same on the studio models of the Fighter, Advanced and Interceptor, a conclusion reinforced by the use of the same cockpit set for all three types in the movies.

Or, to be fair, on the non-CGI version of the standard TIE Fighter.

Good catch, though. I'd never noticed that change in the design in the Rogue One trailer - perhaps that odd adjustment was designed to adjust the TIE to the new size of the FO ones...?

I thought only the First Order version of the TIE Fighter was rescaled?

I had take imagined that since the reboot refocused everything on movie canon, the size of the TIE was determined by the as-built size of the cockpit set (7.5ft diameter, 4ft viewport width, say my notes, which are presumably pulled from an image of the set plan somewhere). The hard retcon about the stated size of the FO version, motivated by movie primacy, seemed to confirm this.

My quick-and-dirty is that the standard ball-and-pylon is very roughly 6m wide. But we really need Pablo to go and measure the studio models.

I think you could be right - the TIE Bomber is probably too small to do what we think the boarding version should be able to do (there is probably not standing headroom in the passenger pod, and limited ingress/egress for Vader and a squad of stormtroopers), though whether this was a deliberate decision or a fortuitous result of a very rapid piece of CGI, I don't know for sure...

Regardless, we can imagine the Imperial designers going "a version of the TIE Bomber / TIE Shuttle that can deliver boarding parties would be great... except, that pod's smaller than I thought... so I guess we need to redesign the whole thing bigger"...

Oh, that's a very good observation. There was clearly a lot of re-cutting of Act III of Rogue One (no real surprise, when you realise that the Jedha street battle was originally the opening sequence), and I'd worked out that the TIE Strikers and the Death Troopers were originally written as Krennic and his bodyguards arriving as the "cavalry" for the bad guys (I suspect the command deck scenes were originally intended to be on the space station), but I hadn't fully realised that the TIE troop-transport is a hasty CGI substitute for Krennic's Delta shuttle.

Pretty sure you must be right on both these points.

This may be a matter of perspective - literally, I mean. The fact that the leading edges of the panels slope back means that they can appear to slope inwards more, depending on the camerawork used. Good example here.



As things stand, the exact difference between the wings on the ANH studio model of the Advanced, and the wings from the commercial model-kit version of the Advanced as used on the Bomber is not clear, but we cannot assume anything.

Except that ILM used what they recognized as the wings and cockpit viewport from the Advanced to kitbash the Bomber. The Bomber is definitely in-scale with the model-kit Advanced.

Technically speaking, the two models were made by the same people - they just used the commercial kit version of the Advanced from ANH to provide the wing and viewport parts for the Bomber for ESB.

Absolutely agree with you.

* The standard ball-and-pylon module is used by the early "small-wing" TIE from REBELS, the standard TIE Fighter and the TIE Interceptor. Only the wings differ.

* The Inquisitor's TIE Advanced has the standard ball, but a different pair of pylons and a hyperdrive, as well as fancy Sith Infiltrator wings. I think this retains the twin "exhausts" at the rear, which may be significant, though I'd like a good aft view of that.

* Vader's TIE Advanced has the standard ball, but different pylons, a big hyperdrive, and four exhausts at the rear. This implies double the number of engines. My headcanon / suspicion as to ILM's intentions, is that much of the "engine" is in the wing pylons, and that the bulkier pylons of Vader's TIE contain two "engines" each, doubled-up in a shared housing (obvious real-world parallel - a lot of the Nazis' top-performing prototypes used a doubled-up version of the Messerschmitt 109 engine in exactly this way), hence four exhausts. One step up from the Inquisitor's design, but if the Inquisitor's TIE also has the "four exhaust" arrangement, I would probably squint at the difference in pylon size and see them as having the same arrangements here.

* The TIE Bomber and TIE Shuttle have a completely different twin-pod fuselage with completely-different pylons, which are little more than girders; but these types have essentially the same wings as the TIE Advanced, and also share the configuration with four exhausts at the rear - I headcanon that the engines are basically the same, hence connected to the same wing units, but have been moved from the pylons to the rear part of the twin-pod fuselage (so they're basicaly He 177s IN SPACE!)

* TIE Boarding Craft - based on the image in the Haynes manual, which is presumably the Rogue One mesh, this is actually rather bigger than the TIE Bomber, and uses a different cockpit pod (from the TIE Striker, which I forgot to add to this list ) and pylons - possibly just to do with the haste of the reshoots, but plausibly heavily redesigned to accommodate stormtroopers more easily?

* The TIE Defender has a standard ball with three pylons hooked directly to a hyperdrive/shield module at the back. How much these pylons resemble the standard type from the Fighter and Interceptor depend on the depiction. Headcanon - standard ion-engines for economical cruising, but with 50% more power from the third array, and huge amounts of extra, but fuel-hungry, energy from the generator can be thrown in for performance. Thrawn doing metacommentary on the impracticality of the real-world DB606 by miniaturising a capital-ship powertrain instead. Because Thrawn.

Interesting. I assume that you're working from images of the windows, rather than stated numbers?

I'm confused about all this size-changing...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

The TIE/ln was 6.3m long (Complete Vehicles). It was changed to 8.99m (Databank) after the X-Wing Miniatures game came out. However, this change was based on the assumption that all the ANH starfighter models were built to the same scale. If you believe Saxton, they're not - TIEs are 1/16 scale, X-Wings are 1/24 scale.

The First Order TIE is 6.69m long - and this has never been changed.

After Rogue One, the TIE/ln was rescaled again (to 7.24m) It would appear that the "CGI version" is intended to replace the studio model - which is why the TIE Fighter Owner's Workshop Manual diagrams are all based on Rogue One, not on ANH.

I measured each pic in the book, and each window, in mm, calculated the scale factor using the listed dimensions, and then applied those to the windows.

Whoever put that one together botched it a bit - one wing is massively twisted compared to the other.

 

I kind of go back to the WW2 model...the Army and Navy both had their fixed wing aviation. Then after that the Air Force came along and and the Army moved to Helicopters and some small transport aircraft. And let's face it...one of the most audacious air raids was the Doolittle Raid pulled off by the Army launching off of Navy carriers.

 

Somehow, I can't tell you how, I instantly knew those were TIE/brs when they showed up in Rogue One. It was one of those things that had me fangirling in my seat (and frickin' HURST ROMODI!) while all the rubes were just excited about Threepio and Leia.

 

That and the angle is just enough to see the absence of a bomb chute. I'm glad they mentioned the cutting laser, so that confirms the appearance in ANH as well.

 

So there are three successive reboot-canon sizes for the TIE Fighter?

The variations might well explain the adjustment of the window size relative to the cockpit ball in the Rogue One trailer, if they designed the thing at 6.3m and then resized to 8.99m but felt the cockpit looked too big.

That said, I think my interest here is mainly in figuring out the implied size of the TIE based on the cockpit set from the OT (7.5ft diameter, 4ft window width, according to my notes)...

So, wait, are the windows proportionally the same relative to the ball-cockpit and the pylon width in all the images?

And what scale do you get if you use the measurements from the cockpit set?

Yeah, you could be right - I thought that was due to lens distortion and camera angle... but that's the studio model. Which emphasises what I was saying about apparent differences in wing configuration based on photo comparisons being something we need to approach cautiously.

My own natural point of reference for that period is the RAF. The ones with prettier fighters, and plywood bombers.

You are entirely entitled to like the USAAF model, of course - though for the sake of fun, I suppose my answer would be that the division there is between sea and land, while in the GFFA, the division is between the surface and the area above, hence putting the sky into the navy's territory?

And yes, the Doolittle Raid was an audacious bit of inter-service cooperation. Wouldn't the Imperial equivalent be the Army providing a platform for the Navy's TIE Fighters, though? A bit like the Rebellion using Yavin Base as an aircraft carrier, in fact!

Out of interest, did you have any (conscious) knowledge of the Boarding Craft's origins "off-screen" in ANH?

I'm still not convinced that bomb chute isn't retractable.

Is the use of boarding craft in ANH confirmed in the first place, though? I've not been paying attention...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

To be exact, there are two Legends sizes (6.3m and 8.99m) and two newcanon sizes (8.99m (carried over from Legends) and 7.24m (newcanon).

Besides the TIE/ln, the starfighters tend to use the same art.

This would explain why the Interceptor has both a slightly larger ball cockpit and a slightly larger window - because whoever was estimating the size, wasn't interested in making it match the TIE Advanced exactly in ball cockpit size.

The 1.24 to 1.25m width for the window of the TIE Advanced x1, corresponds fairly neatly to 4 ft.

 

Gotcha. So 6.3 is (presumably) WEG, and 8.99 is based on the assumption that the studio models were in-scale, and 7.24m is... ?

I'm confused again - where does the Interceptor have a larger cockpit? As measured from the stated length of the fighter in the Haynes book?

Okay, that's pretty useful.

Let's turn this the other way up. Assuming that the cockpit window is always 1.22m (and thus, as you say, that the TIE Avdanced is more-or-less correctly scaled), what do you get for the lengths of the various TIEs (other points I'd be interested in - the ball-cockpit width, the overall width of the standard pod-and-pylon TIE spaceframe, and the diameter of the Bomber twin-pods)?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Alright, some fleet junkie details from Alphabet Squadron courtesy of @Commander_Andersen:

Spoiler

• ISD-I Pursuer, headquarters of Shadow Wing, is in a rough state by now.
• Huntsman and Kalpana are two Rebel Star Cruisers(probably MC80s) that went down with all hands during an attack by Shadow Wing.
  
• Hellion’s Dare, a Nebulon-B frigate, is a carrier that holds at least two squadrons of starfighters. It is destroyed by the Shadow Wing squadrons aboard Aerie, an Imperial Quasar Fire cruiser-carrier.
  
• Buried Treasure is a New Republic bulk freighter with a small escort of X-Wings docked on its hull.
• Unyielding is an Imperial vessel (possibly an ISD) commanded by Colonel Madrighast.
• The flagship of Hera’s battle group is the Lodestar, an Acclamator class assault ship converted as a fighter carrier.
• Lancer, Imperial corvette
• ISD Sanction, present at the battle for the Trenchenovu shipyards
• New Republic medical frigate, No Harm.

[SPOILER/]

 

7.24m is from Rogue One Visual Guide.

As measured from the diagrams in the Haynes book, yes.

Specifically, 1.29m window, 2.71m ball cockpit height from very topmost nubbin on the hatch, to very bottommost point.
As compared to 1.24m window, 2.63m ball cockpit height, on the TIE Advanced x1.

And 1.15m window, 2.57m height on the TIE/ln (Rogue One version).

Also - I think I miscalculated the bomber window size the first time round - now I redo it, it's coming out as 1.42m, biggest of the windows.

Sizes with 1.22m windows, fall out as follows:

Rogue One TIE Fighter: Length 1.61m, Height 9.37m, Width 7.12m, Ball: 2.73m
Bomber: Length 6.69m, Height 4.38m, Width 7.99m, Cylinder: 1.85m
Advanced v1: Length 3.08m, Height 5.48m, Width 6.37m, Ball: 2.55m
Advanced x1: Length 5.64m, Height 3.73m, Width 6.07m, Ball: 2.58m
Interceptor: Length 7.36m, Height 5.00m, Width 6.22m, Ball 2.52m

 

Sorry, that should be 7.61m, for Rogue One TIE Length. Edit time has lapsed.

 

I wonder if the Kalpana is in reference to one of the Supreme Chancellors of the Galactic Republic: Supreme Chancellor Kalpana.