Quote:
Originally Posted by Locke
As I recall...weren't X-Wings a fairly old model? An improved version of the Z-95 Headhunter? Just upgraded because thats all the Alliance could afford and then they realized how tough and well-built they were and they upgraded them?
They are pretty awesome.
They're fast, they carry missiles, they have shields and a hyperdrive and an astromech and they have 4 lasers!
X-Wings are pretty bitchin'!
|
I don't think the lore has changed with Disney EU.
But the X-Wings were a prototype fighter by X-Com, and designed as the successor to the Arc-170's that we saw in the Prequels.
When Incom was about to be nationalized by Palpatine, the designers and engineers stole the X-Wings and their plans and gifted them to the alliance.
It was again according to the Lore a design that Palpatine didn't really buy into because its combination of weapons, shields, super fast hyper drive and high performance engines made it really expensive compared to the Tie Fighter, They were 3x more expensive. Palpatine saw pilots as disposable anyways so he went with the idea of a high number of high speed unshielded lightly armed tie fighters.
The Y-Wings more closely follow your concept. They were very active during the Clone Wars as the primary fighter bomber of the Republic. When the war ended and the Imperial fleet rose, they thought that the Y-Wings were obsolete and began to dispose of them, as we saw in the show Rebels, the Rebellion started stealing them from the decommission yards, and modified them removing their armor and replacing their manned turret with an automated forward firing ion cannon. They stripped off the armor because it made them slightly faster and easier to maintain.
When the X-Wing took the battlefield it was vastly superior to the original tie fighter, it was faster and more heavily armed and had a hyper drive for hit and run strikes. The Empire responded with the Tie Interceptor which became the fastest and most manoeuvrable fighter in the galaxy until the A-Wing came along. The interceptor was also more heavily armed carrying 4 blasters instead of 2 and it could be fitted with a missile launcher. But the X-Wing still had a key advantage with its shielded nature. That's when Thrawn started pushing the Tie Defender (Rebels) and super fast and manoeuvrable fighter with a heavy sunday punch of weapons, a hyperdrive, extremely good shields which if mass produced would have probably turned the tide against the Rebellion. But the Emperor decided to invest that money into the Death Star project so very few defenders were made.