yes, just Focus and Target Lock. If you can't live without Barrel Roll, that's what Vector Thrusters are for.

8 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

yes, just Focus and Target Lock. If you can't live without Barrel Roll, that's what Vector Thrusters are for.

Agreed. I'd rather save points there than a 2 attack instead of a 3

I was playing X-Wing vs Tie Fighter the other day and man them gunboats have a lot of health and shields and missiles and torps.

Once my A-wing got behind them it was all over though. Especially if I had my cannons linked.
Maybe gunboats can bring some power shunting upgrades into the game?

11 hours ago, GrimmyV said:

Why would a spacecraft need lifting surfaces and a traditional cockpit? TIEs (and all SW designs) use repulsor lift tech for atmospheric flight, with only the T-47 seen with any concession toward traditional control mechanisms like flaps. S-foils don't seem to be lifting surfaces or have aerodynamic leading edges. Even the Lambda doesn't seem to have properties that would assume any lift from its wings.

The TIE Striker would disagree with you on Star War's usage of lifting surfaces in Imperial fighters as would the Rebel speeders. The first cutscene in X-Wing had Gunboats supporting AT-ATs attack on a rebel base. Because Gunboats were expected to function in both vacuum and atmosphere, having lifting surfaces will give the Gunboat a boost in maneuverability that you wouldn't obtain from a TIE or Y-Wing. Fighter designers don't generally just tack on wings and stuff in order to increase the cool factor of their designs, they serve a needed purpose.

Sorry but the GUNBOAT uses repulsor lifts like everything else from probe droids to ISDs but it's easy to see a multitude of micro thrusters along the edges of all those wings that may also serve radiator and/or energy collection functions.

Repulsor lifts generally just provide anti-gravity support for a fighter and not fine maneuvering. Why use a convoluted system of microthrusters that would likely destroy your ability to steer with the slightest damage when you can just let the air do the work for you?

oh and in space with effective weapon ranges of several 10s or 100s of kilometers and computer controlled everything and multiple cameras spread along ever needed angle and the technically possible ability to fire ordnance to non-forward directions, it's surprising any stat pilot would need a cockpit with Windows as anything but a conceit to vanity or the desire to see the beauty of space while cruising. This assumed the glass-like material in cockpits is less durable than the hull plating on starfighters, otherwise an 'invisible jet' situation could occur for TIEs with a completely transparent cockpit

Electronics can be damaged or disabled. Having your field of view diminished to a 10 degree swath in front of you is a situation that no combat pilot would want to be in. The Mk. I eyeball usually doesn't malfunction unless there's been enough damage to the fighter to take it out of action anyway. Even Luke was jerking his head around during Yavin to see the TIE on his tail rather than flipping through cameras. In any case, the human brain most effectively processes information that is gathered through direct line of sight rather than through second hand means. You'll hesitate for split seconds evading a fighter behind you if you're looking at a screen where your natural inclination to break left should actually be a movement to the right. In the end, ergonomics beats technology every time.

So, starfighters should be droid controlled?

Also so this whole argument is exposing all the flaws within SW as it presents space combat. And the convoluted fan theories-made-canon to justify the Rule of Cool.

We've had droid controlled starfighters. For the most part they get dominated by humans.

Nobody ever said that SW fighter combat had to make sense in Newtonian physics. It's WWII in space and designs like the Gunboat and Rebel fighters in general are superior designs for that kind of combat. I mean if we want to get right down to it all TIEs had better only make slight course corrections or those huge solar panels will snap off those itty bitty pylons as they try to keep going in the direction that the cockpit had previously been moving. No evade tokens for them.

World Devastators and Seperatists both tried drone starfighters.... good, not great

so did Sienar, with the TIE Experimental series and the Escort Transports.

They almost took the Liberty down. They would have got away with it too, if not for those pesky Azzameen kids.

Like I said SW doesn't do 'realistic' space combat. Imagine thousands of even millions of insanely maneuverable droid fighters about the size of an astromech that would cover a capital ship and take it apart. There's no defense other than other droid swarms. Also the incompetence of AI in SW is shameful and doesn't represent even what we are capable of with our limited tech.

But it's in a different galaxy... Far far away... So technology has a completely different course there.

1 hour ago, GrimmyV said:

Like I said SW doesn't do 'realistic' space combat. Imagine thousands of even millions of insanely maneuverable droid fighters about the size of an astromech that would cover a capital ship and take it apart. There's no defense other than other droid swarms. Also the incompetence of AI in SW is shameful and doesn't represent even what we are capable of with our limited tech.

Realistic Space combat wouldn't see fighters at all.


Why the SW ships still have windows? Got adressed several times. Remember ANH where it was directly stated the sensors are jammed and the Rebel pilots have to use visuals? Or battle of Endor. The DS blocked all sensors of the rebel fleet.

In the EU it was established that excessive ECM is the cause that there are mainly short range battles in SW using mostly visual targeting computers.
And the low speeds of the star fighters? Imagine bigger starships ocassionally pointing its tractor beams at enemy fighters to slow them down. If you are moving to fast inertia would rip you apart.

In the NJO series we get a good picture of what SW ships are capable when the enemy has no/not as effective ECM. On a ship to ship basis Yuuzhan Vong ships get blown to pieces in long range engagements from lightseconds to lightminutes away.

Inertial dampeners...for extra moist inertia.

Without something to overcome inertia you pretty much are limiting yourself to the Gs that an F-22 or an F-35 can subject a human body to. We're actually nearing the limits of what a fighter can perform to without chancing the pilot either passing or stroking out. That alone would be a reason to have SW style fighters. Otherwise yeah you can go 1/4 light speed but you're going to be taking a week to turn around and probably a good part of a decade to slow down enough to dock with your mothership.

Same thing with the weaponry. SW seems to use bolts of plasma wrapped in some kind of EM field (if TFA is of any consideration). The things bounce and explode and certainly don't go at the speed of light like real lasers (no matter how Curtis Saxton tries to cram it in to real physics). In any case, there's obviously something about them that make them superior to using a solid slug or a pure energy laser. But the obvious drawback is that they require you to be rather close to your opponent to be used effectively. I'd imagine that the magnetic field is only going to last for so long without some physical construct to maintain it and the relatively low speed means that even if it did last for 100,000 feet, no halfway maneuverable ship would allow themselves to be hit with the kind of heads up they'd get if they saw incoming fire.

As for AI, yeah I suppose you could pull a Star Trek Beyond and have some swarm envelop a ship. But the SW universe doesn't seem to have that level of technology. While droids can do some amazing things like put a ship from point A to B in FTL speed without crashing into something or speaking 10 gazillion languages, they don't seem to be the most mentally agile of creatures. Given how many Terminator movies that I've seen, that could well be an intentional design function in order to keep them subservient to the biological species of the galaxy. Once your swarm is smart enough to be bargained with, how do you know it won't switch allegiances and start breaking apart your own capital ship?

Or taking over your planet destroying battle station. (Thank you Diznee for erasing that dreadful story from canon)

The deep history of the galaxy might include a Butlerian Rebellion type of scenario that caused robots to never again be built with the finer mental capacities of sentient beings.

5 hours ago, GrimmyV said:

Or taking over your planet destroying battle station. (Thank you Diznee for erasing that dreadful story from canon)

The deep history of the galaxy might include a Butlerian Rebellion type of scenario that caused robots to never again be built with the finer mental capacities of sentient beings.

Even Inertia dampeners havelimts There are Quote a few Casey in the novels.

Regarding the cause of a droid Rebellion: The Thrawn Trilogy at lest made a point why ships aren't mostly controlled by AI. It caused the loss of the Katana Fleet.

The katana fleet is another 'all your eggs in one basket' deal where one bad egg ruins the basket. In a similar vein to the Droid Control Ship in TPM being the weak point in the Federation army, although blowing that thing up should have been a lot harder than 'spinning, that's a good idea!'...

SW, why you no do robots right? Oh wait, because it's not Terminator...

Because drone fighters would be boring, basically.

It wouldn't be WW2 IN SPAAAAAACE if they had realistic drone fighters.

8 hours ago, flyboymb said:

In any case, there's obviously something about them that make them superior to using a solid slug or a pure energy laser.

The damage output. Turbolaser firepower ranges from kilotonnes to triple digit megatonnes (If you count Saxton even gigatonnes for medium TLs...) going by most novels and the movies.
They clearly have an exotic component giving them more punch than a slug.
Also it's stated several times that particle shields require much less energy than ray shields. So slugs are obsolete.

Count Saxton? I thought he was a Doctor? Still makes him sound like a super villian.... Hmm

Just now, GrimmyV said:

Count Saxton? I thought he was a Doctor? Still makes him sound like a super villian.... Hmm

Hillarious typo/missing word xD

19 hours ago, RogueLeader42 said:

The damage output. Turbolaser firepower ranges from kilotonnes to triple digit megatonnes (If you count Saxton even gigatonnes for medium TLs...) going by most novels and the movies.
They clearly have an exotic component giving them more punch than a slug.
Also it's stated several times that particle shields require much less energy than ray shields. So slugs are obsolete.

Oh yes, I've seen those figures bandied about. They throw out terms saying that X-Wing cannons put out more power/second than the United States but then X-Wings strike planetside targets and strangely a large area in and around the island the research complex is on isn't decimated.

Or casually throwing out that Han's blaster puts out the output of a small reactor and yet somehow he didn't vaporize himself and poor Greedo still had enough of a body left to slump forward on the table.

Of course nobody ever adds in Occam's razor that producing that kind of power from such relatively small object is not only technologically unfeasible, but well beyond what the laws of physics would allow for even matter and antimatter reacting at 100% efficiency.

1 hour ago, flyboymb said:

Oh yes, I've seen those figures bandied about. They throw out terms saying that X-Wing cannons put out more power/second than the United States but then X-Wings strike planetside targets and strangely a large area in and around the island the research complex is on isn't decimated.

Or casually throwing out that Han's blaster puts out the output of a small reactor and yet somehow he didn't vaporize himself and poor Greedo still had enough of a body left to slump forward on the table.

Of course nobody ever adds in Occam's razor that producing that kind of power from such relatively small object is not only technologically unfeasible, but well beyond what the laws of physics would allow for even matter and antimatter reacting at 100% efficiency.

There is a differnece between reasonable and max-**** calcs.

Turbolasers ranging from Kilotons to hundreds of megatons is well in line with what we see in the movies.
Everything above that is getting weird.
Yep some calcs for fighter cannons and hand blasters are just pure BS.

Regarding power generation exceeding m/am reactions. In the SW universe there is a thing called hypermatter which contains more energy than antimatter. It's never explained how it works exactly. but it is implied it somehow draws energy from hyperspace (enthropy be damned! ^^ ).

If the XG-1 had debuffing or card denial upgrades, which ones would make the most sense?

4 minutes ago, Lobokai said:

If the XG-1 had debuffing or card denial upgrades, which ones would make the most sense?

Mag-pulse warhead.

as an action.

20 minutes ago, GrimmyV said:

Mag-pulse warhead.

as an action.

Nice. True, good point