Hi there,
this is a very interesting looking project and I hope that it's going well.
I have two questions on design decisions, though. Please don't yell at me, I saw from the FAQ that you probably get a lot of nitpickers. These are just questions.
1. I saw this on the wiki: "Each fighter will stay as close as possible to its canonical statistics stated in various sources, but the final authority is the original trilogy movies themselves, and thus many attributes may be contrary to other published materials due to their divergence from the original trilogy."
I applaud this decision, but don't you kinda contradict it by making an X-Wing sturdier than a TIE-Fighter? This is well established in SW gaming, but not in the movies were both fighter models only take one hit.
Technically maybe, but the "as close as possible" means more like "as close as possible, while still providing fun gameplay and meeting at least the most basic assumptions the player would have". Shielded fighters being able to take more hits than non-shielded TIEs is something we pretty much just need to do for various reasons, most importantly because TIEs are supposed to rely on numbers more than individual strength (the movies don't prove that, but it's a very established idea), so rebel fighters need to be tougher individually to counteract that.
Also, as niffiwan pointed out, in this case what you see in the movies actually gives quite a bit more leeway than you suggest. There's several X-wings which were able to take multiple hits (and you can't know whether they had already sustained damage or not), but every TIE either vaporizes or goes into a death spin when hit. We strive for accuracy, but what we see in the movies is often up for interpretation and of course we'll try to pick an interpretation that we think makes for a better game.
At the moment, without shields, our basic TIEs has "only" 30% less hitpoints than X-wings, and even that could still change.
2. Will the HUD design and keyboard controls follow the Freespace model, the Lucasarts model (as in XW, TF, XvT, XWA), or will you come up with something entirely new?
There's been debate about what the default control scheme should be, but there will be at least two built-in presets to choose from, FS-style and a WASD-based mouse+keyboard one. Could be a third Lucasarts-style one too, but I don't think anyone's planning on that.