Seriously, why are there skis on it? Did they want to bring it to Pyongchang?

"We're having trouble adapting them to the cold."

"Well, put skis on them!"

Water landings?

I don't know, the whole design of the K Wing is an ugly mess. The giant shovel head on a spindly neck, the giant wings in a world where aerodynamics are irrelevant, the tacked-on turrets with godawful sightlines, the massive weapon racks in a world where very few ships carry external munitions, the skis, etc etc.

It looks like it was designed by someone with only a passing, cargo-culty understanding of both military design and star wars aesthetics.

Which given that it was designed by a 90s eu comic book writer, is... you know, true.

Maybe is VTOL and it is her landing gear, like... choppers??

I think @thespaceinvader has the point, and it was designed like Homer Simpson designed his dream car.

Imagine having to be the poor guy who has to cut the zip ties on the bombs in mid-flight.

A, B, X , Y and U-wings canonically have skis too, just they all get to retract them because those designs wisely don’t place weapons hardpoints on the landing gears!

Landing gear like anything else. They're just much, much larger than every other Letter-Wing because the K-Wing is so **** big. And they don't retract because: 1) More bombs and 2) Its gotta look like a K somehow.

If you include retractable landing gear virtually everything in Star Wars has some sort of skids. They all VTOL and have repulsorlifts for low level manoeuvring, so no need for conventional landing gear.

It's just another area where the K Wing's design is lacking.

It's a shame, the flying wink thing could have been super cool, and potentially even still kept the K shape, but this design is just bad.

It's a well stablished fact that comic illustrators don't tend to be good engineers.

There'll be an exception or two, but almost every time they try to be 'original' a new abomination is born.

Uh, every Rebel fighter has "skis" as landing gear. As, Ys, Bs, Us, and Xs just retract their landing gear once in flight. Heck, the Falcon has big skis too. Every ship in Star Wars has skis for its support while landed, with the only exception being the TIE-series of fighters. These had to suspend onto docking claws, and as such a pilot couldn't be safely land a TIE outside of an Imperial ship or facility (which prevented theft and desertion). Of course, this was all changed with TFA and Rebels , where we now see TIEs just landing on the ground using their thin wing panes as landing gear.

In the case of the K-Wing, the skis are so large because of how much surface area is needed to support the weight of the K-Wing, which has a broad distribution across both an X and Y axis. Seriously, just try it: if you set a K-Wing model on the table without its pegs, it'll just barely balance without tipping one way or another. So, if anything, the skis probably should have been larger in a "real" version to give it more stability. And the K has no need to retract its skis, because it's already big and bulky and meant for bombing and not dogfighting, so the struts supporting the skis has been repurposed to feature additional hardware (sensors, countermeasures, ordnance).

I guess I'm the only one here who thinks the K-Wing is kinda cute?

Like, if it weren't some stupid overpowered grudgefest, I'd probably fly my K-Wings a lot. I think if the TIE Punisher was the stupid broken ship of that wave, we'd all be sitting around saying how ugly the Punisher is and how cool the K-Wing is and trying to come up with K-Wing fixes. I think sometimes our knowledge of the meta changes our perception of the ships' aesthetics.

Just now, Kieransi said:

I guess I'm the only one here who thinks the K-Wing is kinda cute?

Like, if it weren't some stupid overpowered grudgefest, I'd probably fly my K-Wings a lot. I think if the TIE Punisher was the stupid broken ship of that wave, we'd all be sitting around saying how ugly the Punisher is and how cool the K-Wing is and trying to come up with K-Wing fixes. I think sometimes our knowledge of the meta changes our perception of the ships' aesthetics.

I'd assert you're in a pretty small minority.

And the Punisher's fugly as well. It's just a shame that ikt's underpowered, and that it wasn;t the Gunboat at the time which is a prettier mini that fits basically the same roles.

You guys know that, had they used K-wings, instead of B/SF-17 bombers at the start of TLJ they probably woulda won that dreadnaught fight without a single casualty right?

Rookie mistakes.

4 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Water landings?

I don't know, the whole design of the K Wing is an ugly mess. The giant shovel head on a spindly neck, the giant wings in a world where aerodynamics are irrelevant, the tacked-on turrets with godawful sightlines, the massive weapon racks in a world where very few ships carry external munitions, the skis, etc etc.

It looks like it was designed by someone with only a passing, cargo-culty understanding of both military design and star wars aesthetics.

Which given that it was designed by a 90s eu comic book writer, is... you know, true.

I hate the K wing for 2 reasons: 1) Miranda 2) it is fugly and stupid looking.

32 minutes ago, Gibbilo said:

You guys know that, had they used Y-Wings , instead of B/SF-17 bombers at the start of TLJ they probably woulda won that dreadnaught fight without a single casualty right?

Rookie mistakes.

Fixed it for ya.

#BattleOfScarif

Where else would the hero hang for his life as the K-Wing takes of?

1 minute ago, gjnido said:

Where else would the hero hang for his life as the K-Wing takes of?

Perfect! The front ball turret rotates and fires but misses the Hero (an Honorable Imperial no doubt) and detonates ordnance. The Rebel Scum ship goes down in flames as the Hero tucks and rolls to freedom. The hero is saved from having to take out the ship by hand.

23 hours ago, Kieransi said:

I guess I'm the only one here who thinks the K-Wing is kinda cute?

Like, if it weren't some stupid overpowered grudgefest, I'd probably fly my K-Wings a lot. I think if the TIE Punisher was the stupid broken ship of that wave, we'd all be sitting around saying how ugly the Punisher is and how cool the K-Wing is and trying to come up with K-Wing fixes. I think sometimes our knowledge of the meta changes our perception of the ships' aesthetics.

I’m not afraid to join you, I like it too. Not my favorite ship but not the abomination some people make it out to be. I do think most scum ships look like total crap though so I further minority myself.

Just now, LordFajubi said:

I’m not afraid to join you, I like it too. Not my favorite ship but not the abmination some people make it out to be. I do think most scum ships look like total crap though so I further minority myself.

Yeah, maybe it's just me, but I can much more easily look at a 90's comic book thing and say "oh yeah, that's Star Wars" than I can about pretty much all the Galaxies stuff.

1 hour ago, Kieransi said:

I guess I'm the only one here who thinks the K-Wing is kinda cute?

Like, if it weren't some stupid overpowered grudgefest, I'd probably fly my K-Wings a lot. I think if the TIE Punisher was the stupid broken ship of that wave, we'd all be sitting around saying how ugly the Punisher is and how cool the K-Wing is and trying to come up with K-Wing fixes. I think sometimes our knowledge of the meta changes our perception of the ships' aesthetics.

I like it, especially flying in formations, but cute is not the word I'd use

That dorsal turret is a complete disaster, tho.

4 minutes ago, eMeM said:

I like it, especially flying in formations, but cute is not the word I'd use

That dorsal turret is a complete disaster, tho.

I mean, lots of WWII planes had the same problem. You just have to know not to shoot your own ship. Did you ever see the third Indiana Jones movie?

Great gif though.

I'll join the minority too. I love the K-Wing. Big, honking bomber that looks a thousand times better than the crap Disney invented. More of a B-24 or Lancaster bomber than a B-29, but still awesome.

As for the turret hitting its own engine.... we've had interrupter gears in machine guns for aircraft use since the First World War. Why can't SW have a interrupter program that cuts off the blaster if it would hit its own engine?

6 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Water landings?

I don't know, the whole design of the K Wing is an ugly mess. The giant shovel head on a spindly neck, the giant wings in a world where aerodynamics are irrelevant, the tacked-on turrets with godawful sightlines, the massive weapon racks in a world where very few ships carry external munitions, the skis, etc etc.

It looks like it was designed by someone with only a passing, cargo-culty understanding of both military design and star wars aesthetics.

Which given that it was designed by a 90s eu comic book writer, is... you know, true.

The K-wing was created by Kube-McDowell, who wrote the Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy (so novel, not comics). This design for the K-wing was dreamed up by Wizards of the Coast when WEG lost the license for the Star Wars RPG several years AFTER the books were published (although specs for the ship were listed in Cracken's Threat Dossier for the WEG RPG, the book was rushed and the artwork was never completed, so a visual depiction wasn't included in CTD). And the WotC artists either didn't bother with reading the book's description (AND McDowell's notes on his website), or if they did just plain ignored him and did their own thing. This design for the K-wing looks NOTHING like what McDowell described.

2 minutes ago, Alpha17 said:

I'll join the minority too. I love the K-Wing. Big, honking bomber that looks a thousand times better than the crap Disney invented. More of a B-24 or Lancaster bomber than a B-29, but still awesome.

As for the turret hitting its own engine.... we've had interrupter gears in machine guns for aircraft use since the First World War. Why can't SW have a interrupter program that cuts off the blaster if it would hit its own engine?

I'm more concerned about the field of view of that turret being extremely limited by both the engine and the thick "wing", also directly behind it.

Probably not skis, just landing pads.

2 minutes ago, eMeM said:

I'm more concerned about the field of view of that turret being extremely limited by both the engine and the thick "wing", also directly behind it.

With that in mind, it was likely intended to fire forward or to the sides. K-Wings are supposed to be fast enough to get the **** out of Dodge if anything gets behind them.