That certainly makes more sense than it being massed produced to kill their own soldiers.
Which would be an effect of deflector shields, strictly speaking. With computerized targeting that shouldn't really be a problem. The last TIE in particular is coming at the Falcon basically straight on and Han's blaster fire seems to graze it on all sides; that, to me, seems like an effect of good shielding, plus a TIE pilot who is used to enemy fire bouncing off his shields like spitwads and doesn't realize how much trouble he's in.Uh no. Every TIE we've ever seen shot down was pretty much a one-shot. The only reason it took Luke and Han so long to destroy a handful of them was because they had trouble targeting them.
Actually, it's comparable to a C-130 getting ambushed by four Me-109s (which is pretty much what that scene is supposed to imply) and fighting them off with a couple of .50 cal machine-guns. Add that the 109s have been specifically ordered not to destroy the ship but to simply chase out out of the area, and whose pilots probably don't even know the ship they're chasing is armed.Also, think about it for a second: a space tractor jury rigged with what are essentially a couple of light anti-aircraft cannons goes up against four military fighters and they best they can do is knock out the lateral controls while most of them are destroyed and one presumably retreated.
Not sturdy, just heavily shielded. It's also one of the reasons why any two TIE fighters that collide with each other tend to bounce away from each other rather violently (this happened in A New Hope AND in Empire Strikes Back). They're normally pretty good at handling low-speed collisions.Yeah, those things are hardly sturdy.
See, there's this incongruity when it comes to the Empire that's always bothered me.It does make sense if the Empire's ideas for space fighters is emphasis on number over quality and the economy of supplying easily expendable man power is cheaper than upgrading the fighters with shields and armor. You do have a similar scenario in WW2 where the Japanese having more manpower than planes (and a weaker war industry) built the A6M Zero.
tl;dr: the Empire isn't casing a particularly wide net. They look like they're trying to build the Master Race, which implies they're actually being picky. If they were just trying to fill as many cockpits as they possibly could, they certainly wouldn't limit their recruitment to humans.
That's an idea that doesn't really bear close scrutiny; humans would have to outnumber all non-human life in the galaxy by a factor of at least a thousand in order for their predominance in the Imperial War Machine to be justifiable on those grounds. If that were actually the case, the entire premise of the Clone Wars would be absurd; they wouldn't NEED to clone an army of Jango Fetts, they could have just recruited from all the human homeworlds in the first place.The thing is that the Empire doesn't seem to need to build a Master Race. The human species seems to be, by far, the most populous species in the Galaxy, sporting several dozen "homeworlds" and a large number of Core Worlds with populations potentially in the trillions are human planets. Most other species seem to have only one homeworld and are no were near as common as humans.
That's just it: they DID design new equipment. New armor, new fighters, new destroyers, new weapons. The argument goes that the equipment they gave their new army was just a cheap imitation of the gear the Clone Troopers were using; the Storm Trooper armor won't stop so much as a tightly balled fist, let alone blaster fire, and the TIE fighters are just flying lawn chairs with blasters attached to the seats. 90% of imperial troops are supposedly canon fodder and therefore given weapons and equipment that is at least as disposable as the soldiers who use them.Add to this the Empire also seems to have decided that it was best to just fill the human clone trooper ranks with human recruits since all their equipment was designed for human tolerances, making it so they didn't have to redesign their older equipment, nor design new equipment for other species requirements.
And yet we see in Clone Wars that Mandalore is basically a client state of the Empire, with various mandalorian warriors pledging allegiance to the Empire and fighting on its behalf using mandalorian-style weapons, armor, jetpacks, etc. This very same canon describes the wholesale enslavement and near-eradication of the wookies, the twileks and dozens of other not-exactly-human species that actually fought FOR the Republic during the Clone Wars.About the only major human population center that I recall being in the conflict (aside from Coruscant at the end) was Mandalore, and it was a neutral system for the majority of the conflict that eventually got caught up in a Civil War that resulted in Imperial occupation.
They got all four. Han got the 1st and 4th TIE kills, Luke got the 2nd and 3rd.one presumably retreated.
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