Vehicle practicality retcon/headcanoning..?

I was curious if anyone out there establishes their own little engineering "fixes", independent of cross-section canon, for the purposes of making vehicles (or other props) more plausible.

For example, I have some of the TIE main thrust routed and exhausted through the 12 wing spars - opened/closed through individual valving - to provide retro-thrusting and enabling the craft to turn.

I've always found it fun to make Star Wars as "real" as possible, even if just within the context of in-universe physical properties. Anyone else like to do this?

 

This is the kind of thread I would have loved to start but didn't dare.

I just noticed today in the third draft of Star Wars that the TIE fighter panels were referred to as "solar fins". Where it gets interesting, IMHO, is that the purpose of a fin is either to stabilize or to dissipate waste energy (there are examples among animals).

To cut the story short before it really does get too long, the artist's cross-section depiction of the TIE fighter is beautiful canon to me, but the annotations are not:



That clearly looks to me that the panels are indeed "solar fins", i.e. designed to dissipate waste heat created by what appear to be two nuclear fusion reactor arrays (judging by their tokamak doughnut shapes) in the center of each panel.

Back in the 1990's had the chance to talk to Lorne Peterson (ILM modelmaker) and asked whether "Twin Ion-Engined" was the only acronym for T.I.E. they came up with. To my rather big surprise Lorne told me that they considered "Thermal Ion Energy" as an alternative - and nuclear fusion reactors are actually devices that make use of thermal ion energy.

Hence I wouldn't discount the possibility that "ion engine" is actually a colloquialism for the nuclear fusion reactors in the center of TIE spacecraft panels (especially since Vader's advanced TIE fighter has four propulsion thrust nozzles, so it then should rather be a Q.I.E. fighter).

In hindsight that would also suggest that the original Kenner action figure toy was really more accurate than usually assumed. You could eject the panels before their reactors would overload and explode (and it seemed to suggest that by adding a hyperdrive module at the back you could turn the "short range fighter" into a long range one).

And another thing: I'm convinced that the panels also act as a mechanical blast shield to provide some amount of minimal protection. This is based on the observation that Vader's fighter, the twinpod variant and the interceptor all feature panels curved toward the cockpit (good for protection, bad for heat dissipation) while the TIE fleet shuttle features panels curved outward (bad for protection, good for heat dissipation).

P.S.

Bazinga'd

IMHO, discussing the pseudoscientific technologies of Star Wars vehicles belongs into a general thread as it neither revolves around "costumes" or "props" (it's not the VFX models Keycube wanted to discuss, as far as I can tell)

 

But...the title wasn't what got the thread moved, I suspect..? All one had to do was read the post for context.

<eyeroll>