In its original game this thing could turn faster that should be physically possible due to how the game worked (you were technically stationary with the environment moving around you instead of actually moving through it). Its probably my favorite design and I like that you kept the back end more robust rather than super spindly like some artists go for, makes it more believable that the ship can do all the things that it can.
Jason Barrios
2 years ago
This is my favorite TIE variant, shame it never entered mass production, would have made a great replacement for the the TIE/IN, meaning the TIE/LN could be replaced by the TIE/IN. The TIE/IN would be replaced by the TIE/D.
STONEhenk
5 years ago
Fractal,
The Interceptor, Avenger and Defender all three have laser canons on the wing tips, targeting sensors between the wing panels and missile launcher beside the cockpit. All three also have chin-thingies. What do you think these are? And how many missiles do they carry? 4? Or 8?
Dr.Zsasz
5 years ago
I am a convert on this ship. I didn’t like it the first time I saw if in video games from a while back. Then Disney buys Star Wars, discards the expanded universe, re-establishes Thrawn and the Tie Defenders become his project. It was fun watching it in Rebels. It was a lot of fun to “watch” Vader pilot one in the newest Timothy Zahn book Thrawn: Alliance. It would be great to see one on the big screen but live action rather than animated.
Will never happen. TIE Defenders would too thoroughly outmatch classic “hero” Rebel ships. Wouldn’t be fun on screen, unless you want a Chiggy von Richhtofen sort of sequence.
I could half see a Rogue-Squadron III style heist where big screen protagonists hijack a flight of prototype Defenders and then use them to cause absurd amounts of damage to some big imperial project. Perhaps it could be somehow connected to the theft of the Tydirium before ROTJ. After all, Rogue One was a pretty solid commercial success, so Disney might have some appetite for a similar type of follow-up.
Snitching a Lambda seems a bit too small-scale for cinematic treatment anyway, and I have doubts about an R1 redux WRT the Alliance’s discovery of DS2’s development making it beyond some novel/comic/animated feature.
As for Defenders-vs-classic-snubs…I groan to mention Rebels, though this involved a 1v1 ‘tween some unnamed Imp ace and a main character. Which ended with the Defender getting faked out by smoke from a damaged Impstar antenna, nailed by said main’s X-wing, and colliding with an Arquitens. Followed by the crippled corvette knocking off another destroyer’s command tower. Even the Rogue/Wraith Squadron novels (which included a scenario not unlike Bradshaw’s, though this involved the Rogues getting caught between two Imp splinter factions) gave ‘trips’ (way) more credit.
Nice reference to Space: Above and Beyond! That would be cool in a Star Wars movie. If only a writer/director had the balls to do a more darker, downbeat (for the rebel scum anyway!) film, I would pay to see the Defender kick ass against a squadron of X-Wings! 😛
Winter eclipse
5 years ago
Some say this tie variant looks ugly but personally I find it beatiful, my favourite Tie design
I’m not denying that the Falcon is both larger and better protected than any fighter, but in both the TFA and ANH cross sections, the powerplant and shield generator on the falcon are smaller than European cars and might just fit in the vast (for fighter standards) fuselage under the ARC’s crew cabin. This being said, the powerplant and shields of the Falcon also have to move and protect a far larger and heavier vessel and have access to much less wing area for heat dissipation.
That, and surely the Incom fighter development team can reach higher volume efficiencies for dedicated strike fighter hardware than Chewbacca. While life support does eat up some volume, the ARC crew does wear flight suits and requires far less creature comforts
The generator is unbounded in the TFA schematic – and may be mirrored on the other mandible, and those may not be the only unit(s). If that unit extends as far as greeble right on top of it, then that is about the volume of an ARC engine in itself. There are too many variables for me to be comfortable assigning individual component volumes. Hyperdrive motivator units perhaps, since we have defined looks at *some* of those.
I’m overall very leery of scaling too far on a volume basis – especially since we don’t actually know if there is a volume~power relationship like with reactors (and even then linearity seems to break down at the ends of the scale). Below corvette level bigger does seem to be disproportionately better, so a high end transport/sloop shield system might be a LOT better than what a fighter system would be scaled to the same size.
Not that I have much of a problem with a fighter sustaining an LTL hit. But from on screen performance fighter shields don’t generally do that consistently, and fighter firepower breaks those shields routinely and possibly on a single-pass basis. Also I do not really accept that TIEs have no shielding whatsoever, from a navigational standpoint if nothing else.
Anonymous
6 years ago
I just notice something on the TIE Defender’s three wings in the middle between the cannons are they sensors or something?
Yep, according to now-Legends technical sources those vaguely blaster muzzle-shaped widgets are targeting sensors. Interceptors & Avengers seem to have those too, though the Striker’s seem to be…somewhere on the fuselage.
You know Fractal with these fighters going around do you think you might finished this TIE variant you were working on?
:https://fractalsponge.net/?p=2043
Steve Bannon
6 years ago
Gork, did you forget about the most famous astromech repair of them all? R2 put Red 5 back in fighting trim at Yavin, which might have made all the difference for Luke. Also, at Yavin and Endor, almost every TIE destroyed took either a frontal or rear hit, making frontal cross section probably more important, but given heavy reliance on targeting computers by basically everyone, that shouldn’t matter too much.
Regarding the Firespray, Saxton’s ICS pegs the hull lasers as 2 kiloton per shot guns “typical of heavy fighters and gunboats” although the barrels don’t look much larger than a stormtrooper repeating blaster. Manually reduced yield is always possible, but I always thought Jango was pretty desperate to score a kill in that fight.
I actually mentioned R2 near the end of that little screed-and still have my doubts about fighter-based astromechs being all that useful vis-a-vis laser grazes that aren’t fortuitously a meter away from their sockets (in an active firefight, anyway). Again, act(s) of Force. Emergency repair on disabled/ignored snubs…more plausible, but how much kit can you cram into that small a droid? Point about targeting computers, though I imagine the EW race might be a factor.
Considering Fett Senior was trying not to splatter himself & son across a half-dozen asteroids & fragments thereof whilst running down a Jedi, he just might’ve been splitting juice between fire rate/deflectors/enough thrust to keep pressure on said Jedi. No easy trick even before he opted to fill the field with *more* random collision hazards.
You’re probably right on this one. I’m not Saxton and haven’t had time to do an asteroid vaporization estimate, but from the hits Slave I was landing on those asteroids, it looked more like he was firing 40mm autocannon rounds than appreciable fractions of fission bombs. Interestingly, after breaking through and landing a couple of hits, he then stops entirely to lob a missile and doesn’t resume firing after it is launched. Perhaps the missile is SACLOS or Slave 1’s capacitors had ran dry.
Sorry if I sound sarcastic, but I doubt a 40mm auto-cannon would be able to shred a 10/15m wide, 4000 ton solid asteroid like tissue paper, even with the entire US ammunition supplies.
And for the missile, no idea, but seeing its particularly sharp A.I. (that thing sticked to the aethersprite tails all the way, despite the density of the asteroid field), I just think Jango trusted it to destroy a small, already damage fighter. Hell, maybe he did it precisely as a test for his recently acquired death-bringing arsenal. He seems happy, as if he was at a shooting range, testing everything up to the RPG on the wreck of a car who just happen to contains one of his mortal enemy.
Also, there’s something who bother me about rogue one’s climactic hammerhead trick. seeing it like this, the shockwaves created by Slave I’s seismic charges were significantly more powerful than the colliding ISD, being able to instantly cut km-wide asteroids 10 times denser than a starship in half, without slowing…. and the Slave I had twelve of those. Does that mean Jango had the capacity to destroy half of an Imperial sector group four years before the first Imperator came out of Kuat’s assembly line ?
The Rogue One thing can be explained by shield and tensor field interactions between the destroyers, which are presumably far stronger than some crook’s seismic charges. Besides, star destroyer hull armor is presumably a composite far tougher than any asteroid, with a couple sources citing it as neutronium.
Does that mean that the colliding ISD would shred the geonosian asteroid the same way the charges did ? It must be able to, if it is more powerful.
A nickel iron, km-wide asteroid is a solid block with an average density of 7000kg/m2 and a weight in the multi-billion ton range. The energy necessary to cut that clean in two would be well over what a SD could provide at a couple 100m/s at best. Note that the shockwave didn’t stop after that. it continued with no noticeable change in velocity, so this represent only a fraction of a fraction of its real power.
Also since the targeted ship was a similar destroyer (who was untouched, compare to the other ship who was fully disabled), but was still completely bisected, it would suggest a massive gap in structural integrity between armored and unarmored sections of the hull. I mean, I get it, they’re not both as strong, but armor isn’t the only thing holding a ship together. At the end, the only ship to keep its original shape was the hammerhead, who did a pretty good dent in the edge of the first SD.
The ICS mention neutronium-impregnated armor, not entire hulls made out of it. Neutronium is degenerate matter, it theoretically would make great ultra-dispersive armor (albeit in minuscule proportion, since it’s like a hundred million tons/cm2), but it doesn’t really affect the structural integrity of a starship.
All I am saying is that it looks more like the crazed fantasies that a rebel soldier would tell to its grandchildren, rather than a viable, useful tactic.
Steve Bannon
6 years ago
I agree with you on the doctrine point, but we never really get to see what the V-Wing was actually capable of in regards to firepower. It’s a pity the Clone Wars show never highlighted the V-Wing, so any speculation on the comparative laser yield and shielding is just conjecture, although I’m inclined to believe that OT fighter guns did focus more on single bolt output rather than rate of fire.
You’ve said before that you don’t believe that there are major jumps in technology between the cinematic eras, so I don’t really think that the TIE chassis has some sort of miraculously efficient energy density in comparison to legacy spaceframes. While TIE/ln squadrons are certainly deployed in huge numbers, I’d argue that the V-Wing fits that model to an even greater degree. The standard line destroyer of the Empire only has 72 fighters, with a number of those being bombers, while the standard late Republic Venator throws out a 192 V-Wings, an equivalent number of Actis, and a half wing of ARC heavy recon fighters to boot.
So much of the volume in Imperial hangars is taken up by AT-ATs and their enormous landing barges that fighters in early Imperial doctrine seem to be an afterthought. Perhaps the reason the V-Wing was phased out was political. The Jedi were huge proponents of strikefighter based doctrine, and the New Order’s naval staff might just want to distance itself from anything the Jedi were fond of in a vain competition for ideological purity. It isn’t inconceivable that the biggest advocates for fighters in the Senate were purged or otherwise marginalized by the capital ship procurement lobby, or maybe the Empire just wanted to shrink the fighter jock population because there weren’t enough ideologically compatible pilots signing up for the service.
As a side thought, your “Storm of Knives” Defender is absolutely brutal looking, although I’ve always been more of a TIE Interceptor guy myself.
I don’t think the baseline tech was too different. But the packaging is definitely a totally different order. Most of the volume outline occupied by a TIE is empty space between the wings. The individual elements in the ball and wing strut are probably less than a quarter of the total volume of the VW, which has a nose, and much much bigger wing roots for equipment. Sienar was reputedly a genius, and it’s possible that his genius wasn’t in basic components but how it was all packaged together. In terms of material added if nothing else (as the crudest measure of cost and mass), a V-W is FAR larger. That it was still faster accelerating on less power to weight tells me that the powerplant was bigger, more expensive, and less able to feed power to weapons vs engines than a /ln. This is all speculation, but I think it fits.
Be careful citing Venator numbers vs ISD numbers. That’s a (doctrinal) measure of ship, not fighter. An ISD configured for carrier operations similar to a Venator could easy mount a Venator complement of fighters without even digging very deep into basic hull volume. It is simply in a completely different class (hehe) in terms of volume available. The killer is AT-ATs yes, but that’s telling you that ISDs were multi-role (and presumably could swap between carrier and assault roles). A wing may be an optimal number for independent action, but not necessarily what is considered good enough for fleet actions. There you would count capital ship (real capital ship) numbers rather than rounding errors in destroyer starfighter wings.
While I do think the Empire was more capital heavy in investment terms, I don’t think that that necessarily means that they built fewer fighters – they just built that much more all across the board, and capitals were more lacking after a millenium of underinvestment thanks to Ruusan. After all, KUAT built the VW and Aethersprite and Actis, and they were also the capital ship prime contractor – the Empire is not going to out of its way to piss them off.
While the V-Wing is bigger than the TIE/ln in terms of total hull volume, it can still be packed into carriers in huge numbers, and might be more hangar space efficient than the stock TIE. The V-Wing’s nose in the ICS is packed with com/scan equipment and two fairly sizable shield generator banks + reactant tanks, suggesting longer scanner ranges, decent range, potential e-war and jamming kit, as well as shielding worth mentioning against vulture swarms. Since the V-Wing is a wartime development with lots of combat data and pilot recommendations to work with, presumably the shields do enhance survivability by a meaningful factor. In total size, the V-Wing is still remarkably compact at around 2 meters shorter lengthwise than the already tiny A-Wing.
While Palpatine certainly lavished Kuat with contracts, no company that size is a monolith. The different divisions of Kuat responsible for capitals and fighters probably had significant rivalries over budget allocations, R&D, marketing, and promotion tracks. Sienar driving a wedge between them and then poaching the Kuat fighter development team sounds pretty plausible.
V-W and /ln have similar volume requirements, so they are packed about as tightly, but is going to be a lot more expensive because of the material used and extra equipment provided. And it is absolutely not 2m shorter than an AW. I don’t care what official numerical source you want to cite; the geometry does not lie here. Look at the cross sections and the relative size of the pilot.
I’m not going to argue that the VW isn’t a good fighter. Absent screen performance, by the numbers it certainly seems attractive. I do dispute that per unit cost they’d be effective vs /ln. +20/30/40% effectiveness for certain missions certainly has the potential to pale when fleets weigh 10,000 vs 5,000 units firing at each other in massed volleys. Sort of like body armor being abandoned by early modern armies, or Shermans vs Panthers. At small numbers, quality matters more. At larger numbers, scale matters more. Rebel fighters were effective because they were built for the hit and run actions of the Civil War. But in a massed fleet action where both sides were going full out, I think it’d have been a lot more questionable. Sucks to be the TIE pilot on Rim patrol when Rebels show up in even numbers though. As a pilot, I’d want shields for morale if nothing else. But the trend from Aethersprite to Actis over the Clone Wars suggests that the fleet is moving towards actually dropping shields. Presumably, this is how Actis managed its crazy 5000g+ acceleration (not to be matched still Defender came along, except that added much more armament and shields and hyper all in one package).
Sienar vs Kuat – sure, I buy that backstory (like it even), but it’s not the same thing as the Imperial Navy deciding whether mass fighters vs fewer individually more versatile fighters is its preferred fleet doctrine.
What makes me question the cost efficiency en-masse argument is that the V-Wing was designed to fight in a full scale galactic war threat environment where Republic fleets would routinely engage CIS armadas anchored by Lucrehulk carrier squadrons that could launch hundreds of thousands of vultures/tri-droids/hyenas. In that kind of attritional all-out numbers based fighter engagement, the Republic still chose to procure shielded, highly capable V-Wings instead of something more like the TIE/ln. It seems like when faced with a counterinsurgency situation, the V-Wing would also thrive, although it probably is outmatched in terms of firepower and survivablility by the classic T-65. It’s annoying that the huge V-Wing production run was seemingly scrapped instead of being distributed to 2nd line and garrison units when the Sienar lobby won though, as we pretty much never see V-Wings in Imperial hands by Yavin.
The arguments about the various Jedi-favoured starfighters dropping shields is kind of nullified by the fact that the Jedi don’t really even need shields to remain survivable because of their limited precognition.
I’d like to propose an alternate hypothesis. Perhaps the expensive and capable V-Wing requires constant management and readjustment of shielding and e-war settings and equipment, which wouldn’t be utilized to the fullest extent by a standard human recruit. Elite Fett clones trained from birth to fight together as a squadron/wing/group could handle the rigorous pilot workload while coordinating with the rest of the swarm, but as they were retired, their human replacements wouldn’t be able to achieve the same performance metrics.
Actis was carried in their hundreds per Venator. No way they were Jedi exclusive, even if a Jedi would’ve been able to take advantage of their performance much better.
We do see V-Wing in Imperial service in the recent novels I believe. I think Vader’s ship had them for that Vader-Palpatine buddy trip novel (which was embarrassingly enjoyable to read).
Republic designs changed during the wars too. Aethersprites eventually were phased out despite their performance and Actis without shields became as numerous as VW in Venator complements. I like the VW, but clearly it was on its way out. Perhaps it was part of the Aethersprite lineage that the fleet eventually chose to run down in favor of Actis and /ln type small craft. We can only argue about what we see (in in-universe terms). The move from VW to /ln was total so we’re left with rationalizing that. Incompetence is possible, but odd for a power that just fought and won a major war.
Very late reply to this, but I’m inclined to agree that the fleet was moving toward the Actis line as their primary fighter, for a few reasons. First, they employed them in numbers that make no sense if they were Jedi-exclusive fighters. Second, fleet doctrine after the Clone Wars moved toward lighter, faster fighters with no shielding (aside from particle, as has already been discussed on this site). Third, look at the TIE fighter design pedigree, and compare with the two fighters being discussed here. The Actis front viewport is clearly used in the TIE, as is their engine design and non-shielded setup.
Now for the confusion from the film representation, I have this explanation: The Actis was chosen as the Jedi “hero” ship, so the filmmakers couldn’t SHOW that ship being flown by hundreds of clone pilots. (Even though from a military doctrine standpoint, that makes more sense than giving your commanders distinct ships that scream “hey, shoot this one!)
They didn’t want to give us negative associations with the “hero” ship, so the filmmakers used the V-wing in shots that showed the Imperial side of things, such as escorting Palpatine’s shuttle, and at the Death Star construction site. But we can explain that as Palpatine wanting tougher fighters escorting him, so that’s why we see V-wings whenever he’s around.
I don’t think the fleet ever used the Aethersprite. While Actis were on the ascendancy, the ICS does state that they are designed to Jedi specifications for Jedi use. I never denied they were built in huge numbers for clone/stock human pilots, but the Actis was commissioned for the Order first and foremost. The starfleet purchased them because they were available and the Jedi made them look really good. The early clone fighter was the V19, which despite being fairly large and having hyperdrive didn’t actually have combat shields. The move away from the V19 towards the shielded Z-95 and the V-Wing suggests an opposite impetus on behalf of the elite Clone pilots.
The V-Wing shows up in Sheev’s buddycop romp on Ryloth, but that’s only 5 years after ROTS. Interestingly, the Tarkin novel that happens the same year shows the TIE/ln arriving in quantity, and after that we pretty much never see the VW flying Imperial colours.
The Republic did just fight and win a major war, but it was also rapidly transitioning into a totalitarian state. The Jedi and everyone who supported them were rapidly purged, and Palpatine was cultivating an atmosphere of fear and distrust among his subordinates. There is a lot of war experience, but also an attitude of complacency now that the galaxy is unified without a major external threat. Warfighting takes a distant second priority under politics for the decision making class of 18 BBY, which explains quite a bit to me, unless you buy into the theory that Palpatine knew about the Vong and was arming up to prepare for them.
I made some rough estimate for the volume of the different fighter, if anybody has any use for those…
ARC 170: 75 cubic meters
X-wing: 35 cubic meters
TIE /in: 20 cubic meters
V-wing: roughly 10 cubic meters
actis ETA 2: less than 5 cubic meters
All of the estimates were obtained using the most generally mentioned sizes of the different fighters (14,5m for the ARC, 12,5 for the X-w, 7,5 for the TIE, 7,9 for the V-w and 5,47 for the Actis). Obviously they include the volume for the pilots and the one of the wings.
Thanks for running the numbers. This is really interesting to try and gauge power density efficiencies. I’m surprised that the V-Wing has that much less volume than the TIE, and again how absurdly massive the ARCs are.
ARC-170 is not less than 100 cu meters volume at the very minimum if it is 3-4m high and 13m long.
A TIE/ln is 8-9 cubic meters (non panel) in terms of usable volume – and a large proportion of that is empty space within the cockpit. Usable equipment volume may well be on the order of 5-6 cu meters.
The V-Wing is on the order of 15 cubic meters (non panel) in volume.
I re-made the calculation and I found the same result for the ARC. It is 3,5 m, but only at his thickest point, its thinnest one is less than a meter.
For the TIE… I completely screwed up. I don’t even know how I managed to achieve that, but its real volume is 12,2 cubic meters (7 for the wings and 4,2 for the cockpit).
For the V-wing, sorry but I consistently found around 10 cubic meters, excluding the panels.
Your /ln and vw numbers are still off. I am directly measuring from full res and mockup models respectively. Sub 10 cu m for the /in and at least 14 for the vw, again with a lot more empty cockpit volume for the /ln. I don’t have a mockup arc but I will mock it up at some point. The panel and empty cockpit volumes must be excluded though, and there’s a lot more of both for the /ln compared to the VW.
For the TIE, I scaled images from ANH. It’s 6,3 m long, 7 m high, 5 m wide and its cockpit is 2 m in diameter (so 4,2 m3). I assumed the wings to be 10 cm thick.
For the V wing, I don’t know how I could have missed a third of the ships volume, unless we’re not using the same dimensions for it. assuming the main body of the fighter is a 6 m high pyramid with a 3 m2 base (which is massively generous), I get 6 m3, plus the engine block of (1,7 X 2 X 1) 3,4 m3, and the cylindric wing pivots of 1 m3 each, I’m only at 11,5 m3. Even adding the panels and the engine nozzles, I get 12,5 m3 at the very best.
RedBird
6 years ago
My favorite fighter… all dressed up with glowy bits.
Taghmata Omnissiah
6 years ago
That’s almost a porn!
Xeno
6 years ago
wow
gorkmalork
6 years ago
Sometimes I squint at the FFG miniature & marvel that anyone can find some dynamic angles for this thing, but hot damn did you manage. Again, lovely cockpit lighting & maneuvering jet/radiator glow.
It’s actually REALLY HARD to do good camera work on a Defender; there’s always something in the way or the perspective looks off. But when you do find the good angles they look REALLY good, like a malevolent storm of knives flying toward you.
I’ll admit to being more of an Avenger fan due to that “less in the way” factor, not to mention your take neatly smoothing out the X1-derived fuselage. Diagonal aspects seem especially crucial for the Defender.
There’s this constant narrative in Legends of various Imperial leaders trying out new quality focused designs to replace the TIE/ln but I never understood why the V-Wing was so casually discarded despite having a great deal of battle-tested capability. V-wings have far smaller side target profiles, 4 swivel mounted lasers to two, an astromech for damage control, and decent shields while maintaining phenomenal manueverabilty. According to the ICS, even their acceleration was superior by a considerable margin . (4800g to 4100)
I make an assumption that capability does matter unless incompetence or insanity are explicitly shown – so major changes are down to doctrine. I’d guess that the difference between /ln and VW (closest clone wars comparison) is down to firepower and cost. A TIE might just offer a lot of firepower relative to a VW. Shields and astromech increase cost. Actually, TIEs at the minimum actually do need SOME shields for navigational purposes, and we occasionally see shield flashes in the OT. Anyway, for survivability – well it’s possible /ln firepower scaled to the point that VW level shields were an expensive extra more than substantive protection. Remember even XWs died to single /ln bursts or hits, while Slave One’s lasers had by comparison a much longer time to kill vs Aethersprite shields. I also posit that Slave One’s guns and Aethersprite shields were comparable to VWs while XW shields are better (it’s at least a much bigger beast).
Acceleration – /ln is slower than VW, but they are an order of magnitude more compact, and there are probably cost issues at work (TIEs do seem explicitly to be used en masse). So do the math and the late Republic/early Imperial fleet finds it can field 1) 100 /ln or 2) 50 VW and increase firepower by 4x+++ rather than 2x; Lanchester’s laws would tell them that as a formation, 1) will win in a straight-up fight a LOT more. Of course then the fleet transitions into small counter insurgency actions where those numbers don’t come into play as much as they would like, and those tactical drivers push the TIE series towards individual quality. Given that TIEs are technological marvels in terms of energy density and compactness compared to “traditional” alphabet fighters, that means that high performance TIEs really scale incredibly once the hypothesized cost brakes are taken off (they turn into demonic things like Defender, and make concepts like Mangler workable).
@Fractal
Hmm, so the Firespray’s ‘chin’ guns strike you as *less* punchy than a TIE’s? Onscreen evidence aside, I can halfway see that given (a) the desire for a rapid fire rate against Clone Wars-style droid/light-fighter swarms and (b) the Mando patrol boat splitting juice between thrust, (at least) four other weapon systems & Falcon-ballpark shields.
@Chris
Dunno whether the V-wing’s leaner side profile balances out a cruciform design’s frontal cross-section. They seem to be at least a recurring design choice for strike birds like the B-wing and that TLJ bomber, so perhaps that fuselage style allows for more warhead space in a pinch.
I also have to wonder about the astromech factor as regards on-the-spot repair. We see ’em (barely) pull the trick off for Amidala’s shuttle in AOTC, but on a maneuvering fighter liable to get blown out from under ’em at any second? They may be handier on average for jump plotting & extra eyes than mid-combat patches, despite the Force clearly being with R2.
@all
Actually, never mind any of my bullroar about frontal cross-section or cruciform birds: I mixed up the V-wing with the V-19 Torrent fighter. The V-wing itself does seem more visually compact than a TIE/ln (though not an Interceptor) from most angles. Sorry.
@Fractal
Sithspit, am I off-base tonight. Despite the possibilities of Kenobi going ‘double rear’ on the ray-shields or Fett stepping down for a small target (and spare deflector juice), do we have a case here for fighter shields actually holding up like the common fandom assumption?
The biggest evidence against fighter shields might be how quickly Oddball’s squadron of ARC 170 heavy fighters gets shredded by comparatively tiny CIS craft. The ARCs are enormous to the point where Falcon level shielding might be plausible, but they seem to explode after single hits from Vultures and Tri-droids.
@Steve
At the very beginning of the battle of coruscant, You can witness two ARC 170s being chased down by a couple of tri-fighter while successfully tanking multiple shots. The hits are signaled by green flashes appearing on their rear.
Oddball’s squadron just came out of a frontal engagement with a large swarm of CIS fighters, it wouldn’t be that odd for their shielding to be wearing down after that, and weapon/shield balance probably isn’t easy in a combat situation.
Also you’ll notice that of the 4 or 5 ARCs who were damaged (or presumably destroyed) during the scene, only one of them completely exploded, after taking a particularly bad beating from its pursuer. The shields could have had something to do with that.
@Steve
Eh, the ARC’s ginormous (radiator?) wings (much like an /ln’s hex-panels) may be rather deceptive-supposedly the fuselage isn’t much longer than an X-wing’s, and between those big wingtip guns & all the crew/astromech/warhead space I’d be surprised if its shields were light shuttle-grade. Tough for a fighter, sure, but ‘bursts from multiple TIEs’ tough? Doubtful.
@Valoren
Good observations. Fighter shields seem handy for grazing impacts & light pursuers if you’re flying a bomber, but it still seems unwise to take ’em for granted.
@gorkmalork
The main fuselage is 14 meter long and pretty large, so I would say the volume of 2-2,5 X-wings, but certainly not close to the Falcon. Like you said, the gigantic wings are pretty deceptive when comparing the ARC to other starships.
If you ask me, fighter shields are particularly useful to shrug-off close flak detonations, nearby explosions, small debris and the waves of radiation shot-off by torpedoes. Since explosions in space have literally no radius (whatever is exploding isn’t stopped by anything),space battlefields would be choke-full of things harmful to unshielded crafts or their crews.
@Valoren
Respectable list of hazards beyond direct hits, though some might depend on whether the fight’s an open-space running affair or point-blank cinematic clusterkriff around a world/moon/Hyperdoomstation #42Z.
The ARCs are definitely smaller than Falcon, but the ARC’s volume is completely packed with combat hardware, while the Falcon is mostly cargo space/corridor/crew berthing rather than powerplant, shield generation, and heat dissipation. The Falcon is observed to take fire from several TIE/ln for minutes at a time and even Star Destroyer pursuit LTL batteries without taking hull damage, which suggests that the volume necessary to mount shielding capable of shrugging off TIE level gunfire isn’t exorbitant.
An ARC-170 looks to be roughly the volume of one Falcon mandible. The power and engine system of the Falcon take up 3-4x the volume of a mandible, and presumably life support and other hotel functions are not even in those sections. Even a large fighter like an ARC has a non-trivial proportion of the internal volume dedicated just to holding the crew.
In its original game this thing could turn faster that should be physically possible due to how the game worked (you were technically stationary with the environment moving around you instead of actually moving through it). Its probably my favorite design and I like that you kept the back end more robust rather than super spindly like some artists go for, makes it more believable that the ship can do all the things that it can.
This is my favorite TIE variant, shame it never entered mass production, would have made a great replacement for the the TIE/IN, meaning the TIE/LN could be replaced by the TIE/IN. The TIE/IN would be replaced by the TIE/D.
Fractal,
The Interceptor, Avenger and Defender all three have laser canons on the wing tips, targeting sensors between the wing panels and missile launcher beside the cockpit. All three also have chin-thingies. What do you think these are? And how many missiles do they carry? 4? Or 8?
I am a convert on this ship. I didn’t like it the first time I saw if in video games from a while back. Then Disney buys Star Wars, discards the expanded universe, re-establishes Thrawn and the Tie Defenders become his project. It was fun watching it in Rebels. It was a lot of fun to “watch” Vader pilot one in the newest Timothy Zahn book Thrawn: Alliance. It would be great to see one on the big screen but live action rather than animated.
Will never happen. TIE Defenders would too thoroughly outmatch classic “hero” Rebel ships. Wouldn’t be fun on screen, unless you want a Chiggy von Richhtofen sort of sequence.
I could half see a Rogue-Squadron III style heist where big screen protagonists hijack a flight of prototype Defenders and then use them to cause absurd amounts of damage to some big imperial project. Perhaps it could be somehow connected to the theft of the Tydirium before ROTJ. After all, Rogue One was a pretty solid commercial success, so Disney might have some appetite for a similar type of follow-up.
I like this idea, but it couldn’t be closely connected to Tydirium’s theft. That was covered
in the book Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure.
Snitching a Lambda seems a bit too small-scale for cinematic treatment anyway, and I have doubts about an R1 redux WRT the Alliance’s discovery of DS2’s development making it beyond some novel/comic/animated feature.
As for Defenders-vs-classic-snubs…I groan to mention Rebels, though this involved a 1v1 ‘tween some unnamed Imp ace and a main character. Which ended with the Defender getting faked out by smoke from a damaged Impstar antenna, nailed by said main’s X-wing, and colliding with an Arquitens. Followed by the crippled corvette knocking off another destroyer’s command tower. Even the Rogue/Wraith Squadron novels (which included a scenario not unlike Bradshaw’s, though this involved the Rogues getting caught between two Imp splinter factions) gave ‘trips’ (way) more credit.
Hail space above and beyond
Nice reference to Space: Above and Beyond! That would be cool in a Star Wars movie. If only a writer/director had the balls to do a more darker, downbeat (for the rebel scum anyway!) film, I would pay to see the Defender kick ass against a squadron of X-Wings! 😛
Some say this tie variant looks ugly but personally I find it beatiful, my favourite Tie design
Metoo, maybe because its not classical, but really beautiful
Fun fact there was a TIE Defender prototype called the TIE Advanced X7.
more info here: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/TIE/Ad_x7
I’m not denying that the Falcon is both larger and better protected than any fighter, but in both the TFA and ANH cross sections, the powerplant and shield generator on the falcon are smaller than European cars and might just fit in the vast (for fighter standards) fuselage under the ARC’s crew cabin. This being said, the powerplant and shields of the Falcon also have to move and protect a far larger and heavier vessel and have access to much less wing area for heat dissipation.
That, and surely the Incom fighter development team can reach higher volume efficiencies for dedicated strike fighter hardware than Chewbacca. While life support does eat up some volume, the ARC crew does wear flight suits and requires far less creature comforts
The generator is unbounded in the TFA schematic – and may be mirrored on the other mandible, and those may not be the only unit(s). If that unit extends as far as greeble right on top of it, then that is about the volume of an ARC engine in itself. There are too many variables for me to be comfortable assigning individual component volumes. Hyperdrive motivator units perhaps, since we have defined looks at *some* of those.
I’m overall very leery of scaling too far on a volume basis – especially since we don’t actually know if there is a volume~power relationship like with reactors (and even then linearity seems to break down at the ends of the scale). Below corvette level bigger does seem to be disproportionately better, so a high end transport/sloop shield system might be a LOT better than what a fighter system would be scaled to the same size.
Not that I have much of a problem with a fighter sustaining an LTL hit. But from on screen performance fighter shields don’t generally do that consistently, and fighter firepower breaks those shields routinely and possibly on a single-pass basis. Also I do not really accept that TIEs have no shielding whatsoever, from a navigational standpoint if nothing else.
I just notice something on the TIE Defender’s three wings in the middle between the cannons are they sensors or something?
Yep, according to now-Legends technical sources those vaguely blaster muzzle-shaped widgets are targeting sensors. Interceptors & Avengers seem to have those too, though the Striker’s seem to be…somewhere on the fuselage.
Lol. Screw canon. They’re targeting sensors.
You know Fractal with these fighters going around do you think you might finished this TIE variant you were working on?
:https://fractalsponge.net/?p=2043
Gork, did you forget about the most famous astromech repair of them all? R2 put Red 5 back in fighting trim at Yavin, which might have made all the difference for Luke. Also, at Yavin and Endor, almost every TIE destroyed took either a frontal or rear hit, making frontal cross section probably more important, but given heavy reliance on targeting computers by basically everyone, that shouldn’t matter too much.
Regarding the Firespray, Saxton’s ICS pegs the hull lasers as 2 kiloton per shot guns “typical of heavy fighters and gunboats” although the barrels don’t look much larger than a stormtrooper repeating blaster. Manually reduced yield is always possible, but I always thought Jango was pretty desperate to score a kill in that fight.
I actually mentioned R2 near the end of that little screed-and still have my doubts about fighter-based astromechs being all that useful vis-a-vis laser grazes that aren’t fortuitously a meter away from their sockets (in an active firefight, anyway). Again, act(s) of Force. Emergency repair on disabled/ignored snubs…more plausible, but how much kit can you cram into that small a droid? Point about targeting computers, though I imagine the EW race might be a factor.
Considering Fett Senior was trying not to splatter himself & son across a half-dozen asteroids & fragments thereof whilst running down a Jedi, he just might’ve been splitting juice between fire rate/deflectors/enough thrust to keep pressure on said Jedi. No easy trick even before he opted to fill the field with *more* random collision hazards.
You’re probably right on this one. I’m not Saxton and haven’t had time to do an asteroid vaporization estimate, but from the hits Slave I was landing on those asteroids, it looked more like he was firing 40mm autocannon rounds than appreciable fractions of fission bombs. Interestingly, after breaking through and landing a couple of hits, he then stops entirely to lob a missile and doesn’t resume firing after it is launched. Perhaps the missile is SACLOS or Slave 1’s capacitors had ran dry.
Sorry if I sound sarcastic, but I doubt a 40mm auto-cannon would be able to shred a 10/15m wide, 4000 ton solid asteroid like tissue paper, even with the entire US ammunition supplies.
And for the missile, no idea, but seeing its particularly sharp A.I. (that thing sticked to the aethersprite tails all the way, despite the density of the asteroid field), I just think Jango trusted it to destroy a small, already damage fighter. Hell, maybe he did it precisely as a test for his recently acquired death-bringing arsenal. He seems happy, as if he was at a shooting range, testing everything up to the RPG on the wreck of a car who just happen to contains one of his mortal enemy.
Also, there’s something who bother me about rogue one’s climactic hammerhead trick. seeing it like this, the shockwaves created by Slave I’s seismic charges were significantly more powerful than the colliding ISD, being able to instantly cut km-wide asteroids 10 times denser than a starship in half, without slowing…. and the Slave I had twelve of those. Does that mean Jango had the capacity to destroy half of an Imperial sector group four years before the first Imperator came out of Kuat’s assembly line ?
The Rogue One thing can be explained by shield and tensor field interactions between the destroyers, which are presumably far stronger than some crook’s seismic charges. Besides, star destroyer hull armor is presumably a composite far tougher than any asteroid, with a couple sources citing it as neutronium.
Does that mean that the colliding ISD would shred the geonosian asteroid the same way the charges did ? It must be able to, if it is more powerful.
A nickel iron, km-wide asteroid is a solid block with an average density of 7000kg/m2 and a weight in the multi-billion ton range. The energy necessary to cut that clean in two would be well over what a SD could provide at a couple 100m/s at best. Note that the shockwave didn’t stop after that. it continued with no noticeable change in velocity, so this represent only a fraction of a fraction of its real power.
Also since the targeted ship was a similar destroyer (who was untouched, compare to the other ship who was fully disabled), but was still completely bisected, it would suggest a massive gap in structural integrity between armored and unarmored sections of the hull. I mean, I get it, they’re not both as strong, but armor isn’t the only thing holding a ship together. At the end, the only ship to keep its original shape was the hammerhead, who did a pretty good dent in the edge of the first SD.
The ICS mention neutronium-impregnated armor, not entire hulls made out of it. Neutronium is degenerate matter, it theoretically would make great ultra-dispersive armor (albeit in minuscule proportion, since it’s like a hundred million tons/cm2), but it doesn’t really affect the structural integrity of a starship.
All I am saying is that it looks more like the crazed fantasies that a rebel soldier would tell to its grandchildren, rather than a viable, useful tactic.
I agree with you on the doctrine point, but we never really get to see what the V-Wing was actually capable of in regards to firepower. It’s a pity the Clone Wars show never highlighted the V-Wing, so any speculation on the comparative laser yield and shielding is just conjecture, although I’m inclined to believe that OT fighter guns did focus more on single bolt output rather than rate of fire.
You’ve said before that you don’t believe that there are major jumps in technology between the cinematic eras, so I don’t really think that the TIE chassis has some sort of miraculously efficient energy density in comparison to legacy spaceframes. While TIE/ln squadrons are certainly deployed in huge numbers, I’d argue that the V-Wing fits that model to an even greater degree. The standard line destroyer of the Empire only has 72 fighters, with a number of those being bombers, while the standard late Republic Venator throws out a 192 V-Wings, an equivalent number of Actis, and a half wing of ARC heavy recon fighters to boot.
So much of the volume in Imperial hangars is taken up by AT-ATs and their enormous landing barges that fighters in early Imperial doctrine seem to be an afterthought. Perhaps the reason the V-Wing was phased out was political. The Jedi were huge proponents of strikefighter based doctrine, and the New Order’s naval staff might just want to distance itself from anything the Jedi were fond of in a vain competition for ideological purity. It isn’t inconceivable that the biggest advocates for fighters in the Senate were purged or otherwise marginalized by the capital ship procurement lobby, or maybe the Empire just wanted to shrink the fighter jock population because there weren’t enough ideologically compatible pilots signing up for the service.
As a side thought, your “Storm of Knives” Defender is absolutely brutal looking, although I’ve always been more of a TIE Interceptor guy myself.
Whoops, that was meant as a reply to Fractal’s rebuttal of Chris’ V-Wing hype post.
I don’t think the baseline tech was too different. But the packaging is definitely a totally different order. Most of the volume outline occupied by a TIE is empty space between the wings. The individual elements in the ball and wing strut are probably less than a quarter of the total volume of the VW, which has a nose, and much much bigger wing roots for equipment. Sienar was reputedly a genius, and it’s possible that his genius wasn’t in basic components but how it was all packaged together. In terms of material added if nothing else (as the crudest measure of cost and mass), a V-W is FAR larger. That it was still faster accelerating on less power to weight tells me that the powerplant was bigger, more expensive, and less able to feed power to weapons vs engines than a /ln. This is all speculation, but I think it fits.
Be careful citing Venator numbers vs ISD numbers. That’s a (doctrinal) measure of ship, not fighter. An ISD configured for carrier operations similar to a Venator could easy mount a Venator complement of fighters without even digging very deep into basic hull volume. It is simply in a completely different class (hehe) in terms of volume available. The killer is AT-ATs yes, but that’s telling you that ISDs were multi-role (and presumably could swap between carrier and assault roles). A wing may be an optimal number for independent action, but not necessarily what is considered good enough for fleet actions. There you would count capital ship (real capital ship) numbers rather than rounding errors in destroyer starfighter wings.
While I do think the Empire was more capital heavy in investment terms, I don’t think that that necessarily means that they built fewer fighters – they just built that much more all across the board, and capitals were more lacking after a millenium of underinvestment thanks to Ruusan. After all, KUAT built the VW and Aethersprite and Actis, and they were also the capital ship prime contractor – the Empire is not going to out of its way to piss them off.
While the V-Wing is bigger than the TIE/ln in terms of total hull volume, it can still be packed into carriers in huge numbers, and might be more hangar space efficient than the stock TIE. The V-Wing’s nose in the ICS is packed with com/scan equipment and two fairly sizable shield generator banks + reactant tanks, suggesting longer scanner ranges, decent range, potential e-war and jamming kit, as well as shielding worth mentioning against vulture swarms. Since the V-Wing is a wartime development with lots of combat data and pilot recommendations to work with, presumably the shields do enhance survivability by a meaningful factor. In total size, the V-Wing is still remarkably compact at around 2 meters shorter lengthwise than the already tiny A-Wing.
While Palpatine certainly lavished Kuat with contracts, no company that size is a monolith. The different divisions of Kuat responsible for capitals and fighters probably had significant rivalries over budget allocations, R&D, marketing, and promotion tracks. Sienar driving a wedge between them and then poaching the Kuat fighter development team sounds pretty plausible.
V-W and /ln have similar volume requirements, so they are packed about as tightly, but is going to be a lot more expensive because of the material used and extra equipment provided. And it is absolutely not 2m shorter than an AW. I don’t care what official numerical source you want to cite; the geometry does not lie here. Look at the cross sections and the relative size of the pilot.
I’m not going to argue that the VW isn’t a good fighter. Absent screen performance, by the numbers it certainly seems attractive. I do dispute that per unit cost they’d be effective vs /ln. +20/30/40% effectiveness for certain missions certainly has the potential to pale when fleets weigh 10,000 vs 5,000 units firing at each other in massed volleys. Sort of like body armor being abandoned by early modern armies, or Shermans vs Panthers. At small numbers, quality matters more. At larger numbers, scale matters more. Rebel fighters were effective because they were built for the hit and run actions of the Civil War. But in a massed fleet action where both sides were going full out, I think it’d have been a lot more questionable. Sucks to be the TIE pilot on Rim patrol when Rebels show up in even numbers though. As a pilot, I’d want shields for morale if nothing else. But the trend from Aethersprite to Actis over the Clone Wars suggests that the fleet is moving towards actually dropping shields. Presumably, this is how Actis managed its crazy 5000g+ acceleration (not to be matched still Defender came along, except that added much more armament and shields and hyper all in one package).
Sienar vs Kuat – sure, I buy that backstory (like it even), but it’s not the same thing as the Imperial Navy deciding whether mass fighters vs fewer individually more versatile fighters is its preferred fleet doctrine.
What makes me question the cost efficiency en-masse argument is that the V-Wing was designed to fight in a full scale galactic war threat environment where Republic fleets would routinely engage CIS armadas anchored by Lucrehulk carrier squadrons that could launch hundreds of thousands of vultures/tri-droids/hyenas. In that kind of attritional all-out numbers based fighter engagement, the Republic still chose to procure shielded, highly capable V-Wings instead of something more like the TIE/ln. It seems like when faced with a counterinsurgency situation, the V-Wing would also thrive, although it probably is outmatched in terms of firepower and survivablility by the classic T-65. It’s annoying that the huge V-Wing production run was seemingly scrapped instead of being distributed to 2nd line and garrison units when the Sienar lobby won though, as we pretty much never see V-Wings in Imperial hands by Yavin.
The arguments about the various Jedi-favoured starfighters dropping shields is kind of nullified by the fact that the Jedi don’t really even need shields to remain survivable because of their limited precognition.
I’d like to propose an alternate hypothesis. Perhaps the expensive and capable V-Wing requires constant management and readjustment of shielding and e-war settings and equipment, which wouldn’t be utilized to the fullest extent by a standard human recruit. Elite Fett clones trained from birth to fight together as a squadron/wing/group could handle the rigorous pilot workload while coordinating with the rest of the swarm, but as they were retired, their human replacements wouldn’t be able to achieve the same performance metrics.
Actis was carried in their hundreds per Venator. No way they were Jedi exclusive, even if a Jedi would’ve been able to take advantage of their performance much better.
We do see V-Wing in Imperial service in the recent novels I believe. I think Vader’s ship had them for that Vader-Palpatine buddy trip novel (which was embarrassingly enjoyable to read).
Republic designs changed during the wars too. Aethersprites eventually were phased out despite their performance and Actis without shields became as numerous as VW in Venator complements. I like the VW, but clearly it was on its way out. Perhaps it was part of the Aethersprite lineage that the fleet eventually chose to run down in favor of Actis and /ln type small craft. We can only argue about what we see (in in-universe terms). The move from VW to /ln was total so we’re left with rationalizing that. Incompetence is possible, but odd for a power that just fought and won a major war.
Very late reply to this, but I’m inclined to agree that the fleet was moving toward the Actis line as their primary fighter, for a few reasons. First, they employed them in numbers that make no sense if they were Jedi-exclusive fighters. Second, fleet doctrine after the Clone Wars moved toward lighter, faster fighters with no shielding (aside from particle, as has already been discussed on this site). Third, look at the TIE fighter design pedigree, and compare with the two fighters being discussed here. The Actis front viewport is clearly used in the TIE, as is their engine design and non-shielded setup.
Now for the confusion from the film representation, I have this explanation: The Actis was chosen as the Jedi “hero” ship, so the filmmakers couldn’t SHOW that ship being flown by hundreds of clone pilots. (Even though from a military doctrine standpoint, that makes more sense than giving your commanders distinct ships that scream “hey, shoot this one!)
They didn’t want to give us negative associations with the “hero” ship, so the filmmakers used the V-wing in shots that showed the Imperial side of things, such as escorting Palpatine’s shuttle, and at the Death Star construction site. But we can explain that as Palpatine wanting tougher fighters escorting him, so that’s why we see V-wings whenever he’s around.
I don’t think the fleet ever used the Aethersprite. While Actis were on the ascendancy, the ICS does state that they are designed to Jedi specifications for Jedi use. I never denied they were built in huge numbers for clone/stock human pilots, but the Actis was commissioned for the Order first and foremost. The starfleet purchased them because they were available and the Jedi made them look really good. The early clone fighter was the V19, which despite being fairly large and having hyperdrive didn’t actually have combat shields. The move away from the V19 towards the shielded Z-95 and the V-Wing suggests an opposite impetus on behalf of the elite Clone pilots.
The V-Wing shows up in Sheev’s buddycop romp on Ryloth, but that’s only 5 years after ROTS. Interestingly, the Tarkin novel that happens the same year shows the TIE/ln arriving in quantity, and after that we pretty much never see the VW flying Imperial colours.
The Republic did just fight and win a major war, but it was also rapidly transitioning into a totalitarian state. The Jedi and everyone who supported them were rapidly purged, and Palpatine was cultivating an atmosphere of fear and distrust among his subordinates. There is a lot of war experience, but also an attitude of complacency now that the galaxy is unified without a major external threat. Warfighting takes a distant second priority under politics for the decision making class of 18 BBY, which explains quite a bit to me, unless you buy into the theory that Palpatine knew about the Vong and was arming up to prepare for them.
I made some rough estimate for the volume of the different fighter, if anybody has any use for those…
ARC 170: 75 cubic meters
X-wing: 35 cubic meters
TIE /in: 20 cubic meters
V-wing: roughly 10 cubic meters
actis ETA 2: less than 5 cubic meters
All of the estimates were obtained using the most generally mentioned sizes of the different fighters (14,5m for the ARC, 12,5 for the X-w, 7,5 for the TIE, 7,9 for the V-w and 5,47 for the Actis). Obviously they include the volume for the pilots and the one of the wings.
What about the V-19 Torrent fighter volume?
Thanks for running the numbers. This is really interesting to try and gauge power density efficiencies. I’m surprised that the V-Wing has that much less volume than the TIE, and again how absurdly massive the ARCs are.
ARC-170 is not less than 100 cu meters volume at the very minimum if it is 3-4m high and 13m long.
A TIE/ln is 8-9 cubic meters (non panel) in terms of usable volume – and a large proportion of that is empty space within the cockpit. Usable equipment volume may well be on the order of 5-6 cu meters.
The V-Wing is on the order of 15 cubic meters (non panel) in volume.
I re-made the calculation and I found the same result for the ARC. It is 3,5 m, but only at his thickest point, its thinnest one is less than a meter.
For the TIE… I completely screwed up. I don’t even know how I managed to achieve that, but its real volume is 12,2 cubic meters (7 for the wings and 4,2 for the cockpit).
For the V-wing, sorry but I consistently found around 10 cubic meters, excluding the panels.
Your /ln and vw numbers are still off. I am directly measuring from full res and mockup models respectively. Sub 10 cu m for the /in and at least 14 for the vw, again with a lot more empty cockpit volume for the /ln. I don’t have a mockup arc but I will mock it up at some point. The panel and empty cockpit volumes must be excluded though, and there’s a lot more of both for the /ln compared to the VW.
For the TIE, I scaled images from ANH. It’s 6,3 m long, 7 m high, 5 m wide and its cockpit is 2 m in diameter (so 4,2 m3). I assumed the wings to be 10 cm thick.
For the V wing, I don’t know how I could have missed a third of the ships volume, unless we’re not using the same dimensions for it. assuming the main body of the fighter is a 6 m high pyramid with a 3 m2 base (which is massively generous), I get 6 m3, plus the engine block of (1,7 X 2 X 1) 3,4 m3, and the cylindric wing pivots of 1 m3 each, I’m only at 11,5 m3. Even adding the panels and the engine nozzles, I get 12,5 m3 at the very best.
My favorite fighter… all dressed up with glowy bits.
That’s almost a porn!
wow
Sometimes I squint at the FFG miniature & marvel that anyone can find some dynamic angles for this thing, but hot damn did you manage. Again, lovely cockpit lighting & maneuvering jet/radiator glow.
It’s actually REALLY HARD to do good camera work on a Defender; there’s always something in the way or the perspective looks off. But when you do find the good angles they look REALLY good, like a malevolent storm of knives flying toward you.
I’ll admit to being more of an Avenger fan due to that “less in the way” factor, not to mention your take neatly smoothing out the X1-derived fuselage. Diagonal aspects seem especially crucial for the Defender.
There’s this constant narrative in Legends of various Imperial leaders trying out new quality focused designs to replace the TIE/ln but I never understood why the V-Wing was so casually discarded despite having a great deal of battle-tested capability. V-wings have far smaller side target profiles, 4 swivel mounted lasers to two, an astromech for damage control, and decent shields while maintaining phenomenal manueverabilty. According to the ICS, even their acceleration was superior by a considerable margin . (4800g to 4100)
I make an assumption that capability does matter unless incompetence or insanity are explicitly shown – so major changes are down to doctrine. I’d guess that the difference between /ln and VW (closest clone wars comparison) is down to firepower and cost. A TIE might just offer a lot of firepower relative to a VW. Shields and astromech increase cost. Actually, TIEs at the minimum actually do need SOME shields for navigational purposes, and we occasionally see shield flashes in the OT. Anyway, for survivability – well it’s possible /ln firepower scaled to the point that VW level shields were an expensive extra more than substantive protection. Remember even XWs died to single /ln bursts or hits, while Slave One’s lasers had by comparison a much longer time to kill vs Aethersprite shields. I also posit that Slave One’s guns and Aethersprite shields were comparable to VWs while XW shields are better (it’s at least a much bigger beast).
Acceleration – /ln is slower than VW, but they are an order of magnitude more compact, and there are probably cost issues at work (TIEs do seem explicitly to be used en masse). So do the math and the late Republic/early Imperial fleet finds it can field 1) 100 /ln or 2) 50 VW and increase firepower by 4x+++ rather than 2x; Lanchester’s laws would tell them that as a formation, 1) will win in a straight-up fight a LOT more. Of course then the fleet transitions into small counter insurgency actions where those numbers don’t come into play as much as they would like, and those tactical drivers push the TIE series towards individual quality. Given that TIEs are technological marvels in terms of energy density and compactness compared to “traditional” alphabet fighters, that means that high performance TIEs really scale incredibly once the hypothesized cost brakes are taken off (they turn into demonic things like Defender, and make concepts like Mangler workable).
@Fractal
Hmm, so the Firespray’s ‘chin’ guns strike you as *less* punchy than a TIE’s? Onscreen evidence aside, I can halfway see that given (a) the desire for a rapid fire rate against Clone Wars-style droid/light-fighter swarms and (b) the Mando patrol boat splitting juice between thrust, (at least) four other weapon systems & Falcon-ballpark shields.
@Chris
Dunno whether the V-wing’s leaner side profile balances out a cruciform design’s frontal cross-section. They seem to be at least a recurring design choice for strike birds like the B-wing and that TLJ bomber, so perhaps that fuselage style allows for more warhead space in a pinch.
I also have to wonder about the astromech factor as regards on-the-spot repair. We see ’em (barely) pull the trick off for Amidala’s shuttle in AOTC, but on a maneuvering fighter liable to get blown out from under ’em at any second? They may be handier on average for jump plotting & extra eyes than mid-combat patches, despite the Force clearly being with R2.
Slave One wasn’t using the sub-kiloton blasters – during the chase it was rapid firing from its 2 kiloton laser cannon halfway up the fuselage.
@all
Actually, never mind any of my bullroar about frontal cross-section or cruciform birds: I mixed up the V-wing with the V-19 Torrent fighter. The V-wing itself does seem more visually compact than a TIE/ln (though not an Interceptor) from most angles. Sorry.
@Fractal
Sithspit, am I off-base tonight. Despite the possibilities of Kenobi going ‘double rear’ on the ray-shields or Fett stepping down for a small target (and spare deflector juice), do we have a case here for fighter shields actually holding up like the common fandom assumption?
The biggest evidence against fighter shields might be how quickly Oddball’s squadron of ARC 170 heavy fighters gets shredded by comparatively tiny CIS craft. The ARCs are enormous to the point where Falcon level shielding might be plausible, but they seem to explode after single hits from Vultures and Tri-droids.
@Steve
At the very beginning of the battle of coruscant, You can witness two ARC 170s being chased down by a couple of tri-fighter while successfully tanking multiple shots. The hits are signaled by green flashes appearing on their rear.
Oddball’s squadron just came out of a frontal engagement with a large swarm of CIS fighters, it wouldn’t be that odd for their shielding to be wearing down after that, and weapon/shield balance probably isn’t easy in a combat situation.
Also you’ll notice that of the 4 or 5 ARCs who were damaged (or presumably destroyed) during the scene, only one of them completely exploded, after taking a particularly bad beating from its pursuer. The shields could have had something to do with that.
@Steve
Eh, the ARC’s ginormous (radiator?) wings (much like an /ln’s hex-panels) may be rather deceptive-supposedly the fuselage isn’t much longer than an X-wing’s, and between those big wingtip guns & all the crew/astromech/warhead space I’d be surprised if its shields were light shuttle-grade. Tough for a fighter, sure, but ‘bursts from multiple TIEs’ tough? Doubtful.
@Valoren
Good observations. Fighter shields seem handy for grazing impacts & light pursuers if you’re flying a bomber, but it still seems unwise to take ’em for granted.
@gorkmalork
The main fuselage is 14 meter long and pretty large, so I would say the volume of 2-2,5 X-wings, but certainly not close to the Falcon. Like you said, the gigantic wings are pretty deceptive when comparing the ARC to other starships.
If you ask me, fighter shields are particularly useful to shrug-off close flak detonations, nearby explosions, small debris and the waves of radiation shot-off by torpedoes. Since explosions in space have literally no radius (whatever is exploding isn’t stopped by anything),space battlefields would be choke-full of things harmful to unshielded crafts or their crews.
@Valoren
Respectable list of hazards beyond direct hits, though some might depend on whether the fight’s an open-space running affair or point-blank cinematic clusterkriff around a world/moon/Hyperdoomstation #42Z.
The ARCs are definitely smaller than Falcon, but the ARC’s volume is completely packed with combat hardware, while the Falcon is mostly cargo space/corridor/crew berthing rather than powerplant, shield generation, and heat dissipation. The Falcon is observed to take fire from several TIE/ln for minutes at a time and even Star Destroyer pursuit LTL batteries without taking hull damage, which suggests that the volume necessary to mount shielding capable of shrugging off TIE level gunfire isn’t exorbitant.
Sorry for the late reply.
An ARC-170 looks to be roughly the volume of one Falcon mandible. The power and engine system of the Falcon take up 3-4x the volume of a mandible, and presumably life support and other hotel functions are not even in those sections. Even a large fighter like an ARC has a non-trivial proportion of the internal volume dedicated just to holding the crew.