Nah, Thrawn isn't that petty. He'd only want Kallus back if he would be of some use to his agenda, which I seriously doubt. That said, while Kallus has no value to the bad guys, he's obviously found some place with the Rebellion and I'm looking forward to exploring his story as it comes to an inevitable conclusion this year. Mark
The Rogue One Visual Guide says it is an early Empire era fighter, and it was designed as a fighter for the Empire. For what it's worth, this time the subtitles said 'Doom' not 'Dume' when the wolf spoke.
The planet? We have not seen it in Rebels. We've seen one or two Mon Calamari in the show, and we likely saw Home One prior to her combat refit when the various Rebel cells answered Mon Mothma's call to unite. As for building fighters and the like. All they need it for it to be a small operation, like Cloud City's mining operations were small enough to not really be noticed and fall outside the control of the Mining Guild and the Empire. At least for a while. It has been suggested that Lando was selling weapon's grade gas to the Rebels on the side.
I'm not an expert of off-screen canon, but when it comes to on-screen canon, it hasn't been established what all of the critical raw materials are to manufacture a fighter, especially a hyperspace-capable fighter with deflectors such as those that the Alliance depends upon. This point has basically been made by others within the last few days in-thread. Deny any one of those, and you have no fighter up to specs. The idea that all you need is one small operation is pretty far-fetched.
Size is relative. If an operation is small in a system that no one pays attention to it, than your faction has access to any and potentially all the resources within a single star system. You probably can't strip mine anything there, but you can go about whatever without the Empire really noticing. Getting the materials in to make the factories and mining equipment might be the biggest risk. But if your faction can setup shop in a place where you have access to basically all the materials you need to craft your goods, than the only time the Empire will even see your operation is when the fighters jump out of hyperspace and attack. You can make it small in scale to not attract attention. All sorts of small industries to form a line of fighter production in the dozens per year. Less than a hundred fighters a year....it isn't much in the grand scheme of the Civil War, but it is something. Enough to outfit a few fighter bases, or a few capital ships with fighters every year, or just to replace fighters lost in combat or other loses over the course of a year. No where close to even a single Imperial factory world's level of production, much less the total output of the Empire....but it would be something.
Semantics. The difference between the two can be a matter of days. Obviously the intent is that it was at least conceived during the war. A real world analogy would be something like the Lockheed P-80, which was conceived, designed and built during the last years of WWII, but was delivered just a few weeks before the Japanese surrender and never really saw service in that conflict. Of course the difference being that the P-80 continued in service during the Korean War, while the T-65 was presumably crated up and mothballed. Not a terribly likely option as Hera is *way* more valuable to them than Kallus. Any Imperial secrets he may have had would already have been shared with the Alliance and there's no way he even knows one hundredth as much about rebel operations than Hera. Indeed, the only person worth more is probably Mon Mothma (or Bail, but Thrawn doesn't know that.)
And if it takes rare minerals that are usually imported from key systems to make critical components?
Considering the numbers of fighters there are, it seems unlikely that the materials are quite that rare. At least not in terms of within the whole of a single star system. It isn't like they are trying to outfit their fighters with cloaking devices. These were likely suppose to have been mass produced space superiority fighters. Even the Empire doesn't try to make their mass produced stuff out of rare minerals even though they hold the majority of the known galaxy. Only the later First Order does that, and that's because they have, basically, all the time in the universe to build up because no one is paying attention to them.
Thirty fighters were all that the Rebels had to throw into their life or death battle at Yavin 4. That's vanishingly small compared to the number of stars in a galaxy. Something must be quite rare and scarce and under Imperial control that's essential to fighter construction.
That is of course only a matter of days after another major battle were they lost at least a full squadron of X-wings, if not a lot more than that, of fighters along with several capital ships. Plus we've been seeing loss after loss for the Rebels when it comes to fighters since the second season of this show. They lost a lot of A-wings the last two seasons, and have started to lose a lot of Y-wings last season and this season. Now they just lost a squadron of X-wings on top of that. And yet they still have more and continue to still have more even when it seems like they shouldn't have anymore. The Rebels threw 30 fighters at the Death Star. Three came home. The rest of the Rebel fleet was nowhere to be seen. They were launching two fighters at a time to protect transports at Hoth three years later. They had several X-wings and Y-wing escorting the fleet while Luke was getting his new hand installed. They seemed to have a lot of starfighters at Endor six months to a year later and at Jakku a year after that. That reminds me....the B-wing should probably make one more appearance in this show before the end.
Dude, that's like missing the point. If X-wings could be entirely made from commonly available materials, there could be millions and millions and millions of them. Not dozens and dozens and dozens of them.
Since we don't actually know what these things are made of, much less where the materials come from or even how many X-Wings were fabricated, we really can't have an intelligent discussion about the ins and outs of this. All we do know is that the Alliance managed it *somehow*. Probably took a lot of doing to keep the supply chain secure, but they did it. They're scrappy like that.
They do. Even if they could build in large numbers, that would be noticed and being noticed is the Rebellion's largest problem when it comes of bases, means of production, and safe houses. They could have an entire Industrial or Atomic Age planet co-opted into building weapons for them by introducing modern or even selectively modern technology to the planet and have all that planet's versions of Douglas, Lockheed, Bell, Mitsubishi, Dorner, Hawker, and all that making Starfighters and such for the Rebel Alliance, but that would probably attract attention with the thousands of fighters built a year and the Empire taking more effort to track down where the fighters are coming from. We know of at least one, possibly two places that are building ships and fighters for the Alliance. One is a Mon Cala colony world that the Empire missed during its occupation of Mon Cala following the Clone Wars, and is likely defended by a large number of warships and fighters, making taking it a large problem for the Empire....one that would require a significant part of the Imperial Fleet, or the Death Star, to neutralize. The other is a Verpine colony asteroid that's probably building the B-wings. The A-wings and the U-wings were purchased (under the table) by Alderaan. The X-wings might have also come this way, or else they were liberated from some mothballed yard, a scrapyard like some of the Y-wings, or someone is building more X-wings. Given that the X-wing seems to be the most common of the Rebel Starfighters from Scarif onwards, it seems likely they are building them. That or someone found a huge cache of them mothballed from the end of the Clone Wars, which seems weird to me, since they wouldn't have been built in large numbers at the end of the war if the Empire abandoned that design styling in favor on the cheap TIE Fighters. Unless the Republic has been working on replacing its fleet of Z-95 Headhunters with T-65 X-wings and they just never got to the front line because they wanted to surprise the CIS with the new fighter. But even then, there just should be a lot of the X-wings, yet that's what we see the most of in the Star Wars films. Out of 30 fighters, the majority were X-wings at Yavin. At Hoth and post-Hoth, most of the fighters were X-wings with a few Y-wings still around. At Endor, even with the added A-wings and B-wings, the majority of the attack force was X-wings. Post war, the T-70 and other X-wing designs seem to be the New Republic's standard fighter style.
The way that it's phrased in the TFA crosssections book which says the old X-Wings were constructed in "secret hangars", suggests to me that the production was spread across the galaxy, with one or two hangars sequestered off at otherwise legitimate civilian, or even Imperial fleetyards. That would simplify the supply chain problem since the Empire is delivering all the raw materials you'd ever need so then it's just a matter of fiddling the books so nobody spots the telltale discrepancies. I mean it may seem like a lot to hide, but at a yard that's outputting hundreds of thousands of TIEs and who knows how many Star Destroyers every month, a dozen or so snub fighters' worth a month per yard could be chalked up to production wastage, misplaced or spoiled stock, loss through workplace accidents and forged requisition orders from other shipyards who are also doing the same thing. You get a specially reprogrammed inventory droid on that (maybe even a re-purposed super-tactical droid!) and they can shuffle the numbers around so much it'd take a small army of auditors to untangle it all. It would be amusing if most X-Wings left these yards crated up and labelled as something innocuous like "medical droid components" before being "stolen" en-route.
The next two episodes, from https://jedi-bibliothek.de/2018/01/daten-titel-details-neue-star-wars-rebels-folgen-usa/ 4×10: "Jedi Night" (US: February 24, 2018) The Ghost crew infiltrates Imperial Headquarters on Lothal to rescue one of their own people. 4×11 "Dume" (US: March 3, 2018) After a shattering loss, the Ghost crew bundles their forces to find new meaning and regain courage.