Twin Ion Engine starfighter



The Republic Sienar Systems Twin Ion Engine starfighter, also known as T.I.E. starfighter or simply T.I.E., was the forerunner of the Imperial TIE/ln starfighter and its variants, created prior to the Clone Wars as part of a drive by the Republic Navy to standardize their starfighter capability and create fighters that could deploy in the limited space available aboard existing warships, like the Dreadnaught-class and Carrack-class cruisers.

The origins of the T.I.E. design with its ball-shaped cockpit flanked by vertical wings can be traced back to a courier design produced by Raith Sienar's Sienar Design Systems before 32 BBY, the ship which became Darth Maul's Scimitar&mdash;although Scimitar was a large, sophisticated runner rather than a compact, mass-produced starfighter.

The next stage was the Advance Projects ship, a starfighter prototype which Sienar was developing by 29 BBY. Designed to escort cargo freighters on the Outer Rim Territories for corporate clients, these fighters were built to deploy into combat from tight-packed launch stacks in ordinary cargo-holds. Visually, they abandoned the blade-shaped forward hull of the Scimitar, and had broad vertical cooling vanes at either end of a twenty-meter wingspan, and a compact, sphere-shaped crew-compartment in the center: the essence of the T.I.E. design had arrived.

It would be another seven years, however, before Sienar revealed the final component of the T.I.E. design, the Sienar Advanced Systems Twin Ion Engine, or SIE-TIE, a powerful and highly-innovative propulsion unit which was officially endorsed by Republic Sienar Systems shortly before the Battle of Geonosis and the outbreak of the Clone Wars. This paved the way for the final starfighter design, and it meant that Republic Sienar Systems was well-prepared when the Republic called for a new, standard mass-production starfighter during the Clone Wars. Although the new engine design was incompatible with established hyperdrive, life-support and shield systems, the T.I.E. was incredibly cheap, insanely fast, and could stack tightly in converted cargo holds or external launch-racks aboard the Navy's existing line-combat ships. By the first weeks of the New Order, T.I.E. fighters, already known to front-line personnel as "TIE fighters", were deployed aboard ships, such as the Victory-class Star Destroyer Strikefast.



It may have been the ability to give a fighter capability to ships like Dreadnaughts and Carracks that ensured that the T.I.E. won the design contract; but at the same time, it can be noted that Kuat Systems Engineering's rival designs, the Eta-2 Actis-class interceptor and Alpha-3 Nimbus-class V-wing, looked suspiciously like knock-offs of Sienar's technology and designs by their leading corporate rival. Although these rival craft gained fame during the Clone Wars, they disappeared from sight in the years that followed, and in 9 BBY, Sienar bought up the remnants of the entire production series from Kuat.

By this time, the original T.I.E. was evolving into the TIE fighter, the dominant starfighter of the Galactic Empire, and although TIEs proved vulnerable to shielded and hyperdrive-equipped Rebel snubfighters during the Galactic Civil War, the design proved to have immense capacity as a platform for modification and upgrades: advanced variants of the basic T.I.E. technology, such as the Clawcraft and TIE Defender would still be among the most potent and capable starfighters in the Galaxy fifty years later.

Behind the scenes
The opening frames of the story Nomad in Star Wars Tales #21 shows a TIE-like ship as part of a military presence in a "grand and important" system, in a story set six months after the Battle of Naboo. The ship has notably eight sides to each side-panel, as opposed to six on a TIE fighter.

It is not easy to integrate these ships into the known evidence for the backstory of the T.I.E and TIE designs, which begins with the Advanced Projects ship several years after Naboo - and moreover, the TIE-like ship shown here is seen alongside capital ships similar to Acclamator-class assault ships, which are otherwise first recorded a decade later.

With the scene being shown in real colors, as opposed to color-tinted panels (blue or grey, used in flashback sequences), it's more than likely taking place in the time-frame of the story. The only flashback sequence shown in real colors takes place in the issues following this, and have no connection with this scene. Interestingly enough, that flashback featured Kuati-style warships similar in appearance to Acclamators, so this type of ship-design was present at some time before 32 BBY.

Moreover, it would not be unreasonable to have an Acclamator predecessor present as well, since the class was meant to be a military transport, and Rothana Heavy Engineering could easily have decided to upgrade a tried and true transport-design for the Acclamator-project, rather than spend money and resources coming up with a radically new design.

Another important flashback shows an interstellar Jedi transport nearly identical to the LAAT gunship, further solidifying the presence of vehicle-designs that would play a role on a galactic scale decades later.

It is then quite believable that a T.I.E. fighter predecessor, or possibly even an early Advance Projects ship-design, was performing test runs years before being officially unveiled (it would be a logical company decision when dealing with a risky endeavour).