We've had waves and waves of announcements this year from FFG about X-Wing. We would all agree the game seems healthy and will continue on for some time. At some point you will just simply run out of pilots for all these ships. You start digging deeper and deeper into the EU for names and abilities, soon it will be to obscure for even the die hard EU fans.

We all know the unique pilots don't allow us to take similar named cards in a squad. For now this means the exact same pilot or a crew member of the same name. After all it would be silly to have Chewy sit shotgun to Chewy. When or will we see the same pilot show up for either the same ship or different ship? It's a shame Vader sees little play as important as he is to the whole universe. Would having to Darth Vader pilot cards to pick from be to confusing for the players ( "do you mean the old Vader or the new one?"). As more pilots and ships come out Vader, Luke and others will fall further behind to the more obscure. Perhaps the balancing act we need to see is a pilot specific modification. Of course that just screams "sorry we made a mistake".

Under other circumstances I would agree with you, and I do think that same pilot/different ship is a viable option, but now we have SW Rebels coming out later this year and then the new movies are up to bat. I don't think they are going to run out of possible pilots for a long time.

For that matter, I didn't even realize that all the named pilots were from the EU until I started reading the boards here, I just assumed they made up all the TIE Fighter pilots and such.

The one named TIE Phantom pilot we know was made up by FFG (at least as far as anyone can tell), because the only two named characters to ever pilot a TIE Phantom were Rebel spies.

I don't really see the big deal with one pilot showing up more than once, at least in different ships. We already have Pilot and Crew cards of the same characters (and, I believe, an Astromech and Crew version of R2-D2). Context is everything and the unique rule already covers them. They seem to be avoiding it for now, but I don't see why we wouldn't see the same pilot in different ships eventually.

I honastaly hope we DON'T see unique pilots take more then 1 card. I love creative lists and it would stink that two pilots can't go together just because they wanted people to be able to recocignise them? I would rather them start making up pilots then reusing named pilots.