>As fast as an X-Wing
>As cheap as a TIE Fighter
>Ion Canons
>Fuckhuge missile armament
>Easy to acquire, maintain and repair
Tell me why the A4 wasn't the best overall fighter of the Galactic Civil War. Sure the A-Wing is faster and the B-Wing carries more but there literally wasn't a situation you couldn't throw Y-Wings at with a reasonable chance of success.
>>44025349
>As fast as an X-Wing
Since when?
>>44025389
Since 1983
>>44025389
It's as "fast" because it can reach the same speed but it doesn't have anywhere near the same acceleration.
>>44025766
>Top speed
>In space
C?
>>44025349
>As fast as an X-Wing
Almost, the X-Wing had a slightly higher speed and more maneuverability, especially when turning, making the X-Wing a superior snubfighter.
>As cheap as a TIE Fighter
False, it was actually a little cheaper than the X-Wing, instead of being as dirty cheap as a TIE Fighter. However, it was a very commonplace fighter, easy to get your hands on. Many composite starfighters, "uglies" they were called, used by pirated were made up of Y-Wings and TIE Fighters, the two most common starfighters, for this reason.
>Ion Cannons
One of the options for its turret mount, but because of the cost of maintaining those turrets, they often didn't mount them, instead focusing on the advantages of its payload.
>Fuckhuge missile armament
The Y-Wing had two torpedo bays with a total capacity of 8 proton torpedoes, compared to the X-Wing's 6. It did hold the advantage in being able to carry proton bombs, though, making it more suitable to a fighter/bomber role.
>Easy to acquire, maintain and repair
Indeed, it was these things, but it was also showing its age. A dependable, common fighter with no shortage of surplus parts has many advantages, and it does fill a number of roles very well, but the advantages the X-Wing presented over it made it a much more powerful fighter overall, despite being more costly to produce.
>>44025349
>sitting in my A-wing
>press the right trigger
>WHOOSH
can't hit what you can't catch
Blind, wallowing pigs.
And slow.
>>44025908
Wait, in space, how would maneuverability, acceleration and speed even determined?
>>44027146
Look, Star Wars doesn't make any fucking sense with its space battles. It's fighters fight like WWII dogfighters and its capital ships fight like a WWII navy would.
If this was hard scifi, these fights would take place beyond each other's line of sight with projectiles hurtling at relativistic speed, no fighters to be found.
Essentially, you have to apply the logic of WWII fighter planes into how they function as starfighters or else you're going to have a hard time coming to grips with the whole setting. In that regard, acceleration, maneuverability, and speed would be determined the same way you would determine the specifics for aircraft.
>>44025349
The B-Wing is the best starfighter, mate.
>>44027146
Well, maneuverability and acceleration would be closely tied together, with the maximum thrust as a ratio to the ships mass.
Unless you start going relativisticly fast, there is no top speed for ANYTHING in space, just a matter of how long you want to decelerate before you stop.
But in Star Wars universe >>44027272 has got it.
>>44025349
>Tell me why the A4 wasn't the best overall fighter of the Galactic Civil War
Because its the Honda Civic of star wars.
Sure its a good and well rounded fighter. But its going to get out maneuvered by a lot of things.
If you were to ask me which fighter i would take in a dog fight most of the time i will go for speed and agility over heavy firepower and armor.
>>44025863
>thinking anything can reach c that didn't start at it
>>44025349
You failed to mention the actual selling point of the Y-Wing - its durability and capacity to suffer punishment.
That said, I'd prefer the S3 variant, so that those ion cannons had a 360' field of fire and I had a mate in the backseat watching my six for enemy fighters deciding to slot in behind me.
>>44027563
I meant "Arbitrarily close to, but not quite at, C" but didn't want to type all that.
>>44027649
You know how much energy that takes?
>>44027603
The S3 is 20% slower though. You're trading speed for the gunner and extra shield strength.
>>44027715
Lots. That doesn't change that it is the only "top speed" that really matters in space.
I SUPPOSE you could instead determine "top speed" as 'acceleration under most efficient burn X time until you run out of fuel/energy/whatever' But that is equally useless unless you are making an engine powered mass-based weapon.
The point is, talking about "top speed" in space makes no fucking sense, and that C is the only real number in that regards that really matters.
>>44027837
>c is the only number that really matters
A) The speed of light is lower-case c, not capital (which is mostly used as either the unit symbol for Coulombs, or the symbol for capacitance).
B) c, as a velocity, is not something any vessel can approach within a reasonable timeframe.
Let's take a look at the kinetic energy of at 10-tonne spaceship at 0.1c: K=(γ-1)m(c^2), where γ=(1-(v/c)^2)^-0.5
v=0.1c, therefore γ=(1-0.1^2)^-0.5=0.99^-0.5
We'll leave γ as 0.99^-0.5, because it's easier to use in the K formula.
Now K=(0.99^(-0.5)-1)m(c^2).
c=3x10^8 ms^-1, m=10^4 kg, so K=9(0.99^(-0.5)-1)x10^20 J.
K=~4.5x10^18 J
I'm going to use the engine output of a Supermarine Spitfire, because SW Wiki gives the output of the A4's engines in G, and converting between acceleration and dK/dt requires one to take the differential of the square of an integral.
Spitfire engines (Rolls-Royce Griffon): 1745 kW = 1.745x10^6 Js^(-1)
Assuming constant acceleration, it would take a 10-tonne spaceship powered by a Griffon 12.58x10^12 s = ~81800 years to hit 0.1c
c just isn't going to come into it unless you're hauling ass from one planet to another.
>>44027429
>Fast as an A-Wing
>Shielded like a B-Wing
>Nearly as maneuverable as an X-Wing
>Ordnance like an entire WING of bombers
>Nevermind the A-Wing, SLAM. Left it in the dust.
>Beam generator for tractors and jamming
Friend, you misspelled Missile Boat
>>44028607
Okay, you out nerded me over the casing of a letter, good job.
The rest is basically my point?
That "top speed" in space is meaningless unless you are getting up to relativistic velocities.
And yes it takes stupid amount of energy to get to those speeds, but the basic point is that the speed limit of space is still "close enough to the speed of light that it is hard to tell a difference", it might take impossible amounts of energy to get there, but I was never talking about feasibility, just the "top speed" of an object in space
>>44026680
Actually the Y-Wing as seen in the movies is a pretty decent fighter. We see a few of them do pretty decent at Endor.
Its only the EU (especially video games) where they start developing a reputation for sucking.
>>44028798
You left out "Price tag equal or greater than a Star Destroyer"
>>44029295
Great things come in horrifyingly expensive packages.
>>44029295
They were.
They're pretty much at the end of their useful life at this point, but not past it. They've started being outgunned and outmaneuvered by newer models, their age is showing, but a solid "second-line" fighter is still a solid fighter for quite some time.
>>44027272
>projectiles hurtling at relativistic speed
Yes, because missing every shot because you're a minute off makes so much strategic sense.
>>44028607
>>44028924
Well, you say fractions of c are unachievable...
Assuming m and a are constant solves the integral problem. K=0.5m(a^2)(t^2)=(0.99^(-0.5)-1)m(c^2)
t=(2((c/a)^2)(0.99^(-0.5)-1))^0.5
a=2700 G = 26487 ms^-2
t=1137 s = ~19 min
Them R200s, man.
Interestingly, SW Wiki claims the max speed of the R200 is 1000 km/hr.
>>44029498
It does when your enemy is moving at 0.2c.
>>44027272
Which is why the new movies will never have the magic of the original ones.
We don't think about war in terms of WW2 battles anymore. No war movie looks like that. Even war movies about world war 2 don't look like that anymore.
>>44029561
>moving at 0.2c
Why though, especially in a setting where you have ftl for long range propulsion
>>44029778
>Why though,
Because, as the original post said, that would happen in a hard SF setting, where you don't have FTL.
>>44025349
>TIE Fighter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN_CP4SuoTU
>>44029878
I don't see what's hard about this though. Hard SF tends to not extrapolate on technology that much that you'd have anything allowing reliable 0.2c speeds unless you accelerate for a really huge ass time.
>>44030489
>you accelerate for a really huge ass time.
Or you have hugely grunty engines, like the R200 >>44029528. In a hard SF game, those same engines might be huge things propelling a whole capital ship through the cosmos.
>>44030547
The amount of reaction mass that requires is absurd though.
>>44030595
That's why part of your ship is just a giant hole full of reaction mass.
Alternately, SW engines are stupid powerful.
>>44030434
That was some dope imperial propaganda.
>>44029743
They said there's been a lot of return to the original ideas and influences. Looking through, you see a whole lot of TFA images looking like the were taken right out of the concept art Lucas never had the budget to put into the films.
Still, we shall see in a couple of weeks what it does do, even if it can't recapture the feeling of the originals.
That one mission in Rogue Squadron when you're flying them through the canyon, that was pretty fun.
It's a shame they were super slow in that, though.
Fair to say that the Y-wing was to the Galactic Civil war that this was to WWII?
>>44031480
Shouldn't it have a turret mount and extra bomb capacity? Would a torpedo bomber from the Pacific Theater be more appropriate?
I feel like the X-Wing is more of a P-51 analogue. No idea what A and B wings would be.
>>44031517
Well it started as fighter then as it fell behind as a frontline fighter it was regulated to bomber-killer, then ground-attack and tank busting, recon, and all sorts of shit.
>>44031565
That works.
>>44030434
The guy in the TIE Fighter actually being competent broke my suspension of disbelief.
>>44031966
Interceptor pilots have to come from somewhere.
>>44031966
>>44030434
>Dat Bonus Objective Shuttle
Longprobes have to be my favorite variant, mostly due to the comfy factor of sitting all snug, sipping on juri juice while getting lost in the walls of the hyperspace tunnel, until exiting to scan an Imperial deep space resource dump for the Ass-wings to raid it later. I just love ISR platforms.
>>44030780
They can't return to the original ideas though, because those ideas were references to other movies that were contemporary to the 70s and early 80s.
To manage the sake effect now they would have to figure out a new set of references to a whole different generation of movies.
>>44032238
There's an X-Wing variant for recon as well. Recon versions just look neat with their sensor suites. Y-Wing probably has more room, though, plus a copilot to shoot the shit with, unless you've got a talkative astromech installed.
>>44032623
You know, sometimes cultural references can last longer than a generation, you don't have to start over every few decades.
Fuck, we're still referencing the Bible, The Iliad, Shakespeare, and a hundred thousand classic authors, fairy tales, ancient tropes, humanity's primordial epics, and a million other sources that run deep within a dozen dominant cultural veins and hundreds of smaller ones. WWII is relatively recent compared to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and we're still referencing both. You don't have to reference something else because someone else referenced it already.
>>44032623
The thing is, they don't NEED to reference contemporary movies of either period, or be recognizable in how they do it. People have gotten used to the idea of flying battles of any sort being a bunch of metal lumps swooping around each other bobbing and weaving. It's just a matter of speeding that up, making it flashier and fancier, and boom, people will be in awe of the flying circus, even if it isn't entirely realistic.
