Twin Ion Engine starfighter



The Republic Sienar Systems Twin Ion Engine starfighter, or T.I.E., was the forerunner of the Imperial TIE fighter, created during 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 this 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 in 29 BBY. Designed to escort cargo freighters on the Outer Rim for corporate clients, these fighters were built to deploy into combat from tight-packed launch stacks in ordinary cargo-holds. Visually, they abandonned 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 were well-placed 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.

It may have been the ability to give a fighter capability to ships like Dreadnaughts and Carrack-class light cruisers 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 Interceptor and 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 TIE-like starfighters in a story set six months after the Battle of Naboo; however, these are seen alongside Acclamator-class assault ships, which should not see combat for another decade. While some fans are prepared to accept both the fighters and the cruisers as early variants of the later design, others wonder if the opening frames of the story might be read as views out across time and space from a narrative perspective in the further future, in which each frame is set a greater distance from the present day, and further back in time. This would resolve the apparent problem of integrating these fighters - for which there is no other context&mdash;into the established development of the T.I.E and TIE designs.

External Link
Sienar reveals the SIE-TIE engine