Just sitting here touching up my models. Does the two exhausts/turbines/reactors on the back of the Tie Bomber get coloured?

Hard to find a picture of an official studio model but it looks like it does.

I did some more research and found out the engines on the tie bomber should be located outside of the two pods, between the wing and the pods.

Great mate, thanks a lot.

Maybe the two pairs of "doo-hickies" on the back of the command and ordnance podes are the tail lights and turn signals

Chris

It seems to vary a bit, Some Bombers don't seem to have the engine on the pods.

Some like the FFG look like they have twin TIE engines. which is fine, there probably are multiple models of the TIE/SE

No glow on TIEs in any of the movies as far as I remember. So they are only painted as black holes.

No glow on TIEs in any of the movies as far as I remember. So they are only painted as black holes.

There are definitely glows, I spent quite a bit of time watching them when I started painting TIEs, especially the Advanced, because the model is missing two of it's engines.

There was glow, it's just highly directional. The LEDs they used have a ~15* viewing angle, which means any shot outside that angle would not show very much glow, if any. Here's a short sequence from ANH demonstrating this:

There was also a small amount of glow on the TIE Bomber, but it's very hard to make out because there are no back angles of the ship:

I found a good rear view picture of studio model.

They all look like just lights.. like a cars rear lights, though aircraft do have lights... distinguishing left, right, landing lights... perhaps a TIE doesn't have exhaust ports for the ION engine.. or possibly the panels give an exhaust for them... hard tomsay without knowing the original intent.. maybe they were just decoration.. lol

Just some thoughts...

It was always the intent for the red lights on the back of the TIE Fighter and Advanced to be ion engine outlets. First, the large round structure on the back was originally supposed to be the cockpit hatch:

Not to mention every other fighter and starship has glowing engine outlets.

If it does have ion engines, as indicated by the acronym Twin Ion Engine, then it must also have exhausts for those engines. Ion drives in any universe (including the Star Wars universe, as evidenced by the ion drives on all other ships) work on Newtonian impulse principles, with hot gases shooting out of the back to propel the ship forward. This being the case, it must have exhausts for those gases, or else the ship would explode from the pressure buildup, if the engines didn't shut off first from the back pressure. It also must have two such exhausts, as dictated by the name Twin Ion Engine Fighter.

Joe Johnston, who sketched up the first illustrations for the TIE Fighter says in "The Making of Star Wars" by J. W. Rinzler, "I came up with 'twin ion engine fighter'. There were other ideas, like 'Third Intergalactic Empire', but I thought 'twin-I-engine' made more sense."

This being the case, there should be a pair of devices somewhere on the back end of the ship to propel it forward.

There are three possibilities: the large wings, the wing pylons, and red glowing ports on the back of the cockpit ball.

The first presents a problem in that the largest surfaces face perpendicular to the direction one would wish to go, and if all four surfaces serve as propulsive surfaces then it would not be a TIE Fighter but a QIE Fighter (quadruple ion engine). Furthermore, there is no space for any mechanisms behind the grilles, and if the ions are traveling down the spokes and exiting out the "vents" it would waste a lot of energy in the direction changes the exhausts would make to create thrust, making little engineering sense. The edges of the wings of the TIE Fighter might produce some sort of thrust, of course. But then, no other TIE-series design shares the distinctive edge of the Line Fighter's wings. They have a pair of grooves running around the perimeter, but all other TIE ships have flat, featureless edges which would serve no purpose for providing thrust, and every other feature on the TIE-series ships are shared between the designs, unless the design calls for additional features (the large ordinance pods on the TIE Bomber, the large box containing the hyperdrive on the TIE Advanced x1, etc.). There is no logical reason the engine design should change drastically.

The wings are definitely not the source of thrust on a TIE Fighter.

What about the pylons? Well, apart from the obvious function of serving to mount and brace the wings, there is no other ostensible purpose for them. No vents or other mechanical doodads are on the surface. There can't be some kind of gravitic engine on them, because that would not only violate conservation of momentum, but it would also violate the acronym (twin- ion -engine).

The pylons are also out.

That leaves the two glowing apertures on the ship. This would not only fit in nicely with the fact that a Twin Ion Engine needs twin engines, but they also fall into line with the fact that every other system of sublight propulsion emits a glow in Star Wars: the ion turbines on the Star Destroyer, the Y-wing's ion drives, the Nubian Starship's engines, the Millennium Falcon's drive . . . every other sublight engine exhibits a glow of some kind. This is consistent with real life ion engines as well:

Furthermore, in movies you have to use visual cues to indicate things. Glows can indicate many things: high technology, windows, reactors . . . and engines. In the first Star Wars, they didn't have much budget for lighting, so they typically illuminated only the engines and laser cannons of their models, except for the Millennium Falcon and the Death Star. The MF had some rudimentary cockpit lights, which didn't really show up, and the Death Star had thousands of tiny portholes drilled into it to suggest a large size. Laser cannons were illuminated so that the animators who painted in the laser blasts had cues for the animations, and engines were illuminated to give the audience a cue as to where the ship's propulsion system was located. Why would the TIE Fighter be any different?

TL;DR, the TIE Fighter's glowing red apertures are obviously the engines.

TIE stands for Twin Ion Engine. Referring to a Tie twin engine is like referring to an ATM machine .

TIE stands for Twin Ion Engine. Referring to a Tie twin engine is like referring to an ATM machine .

and I always thought the TIE in TIE Fighter stood for T otally I neffective E conomical Fighter,

at least it's the role they are playing