[zookeeper]

What the...

I'm sure it'd be possible somehow, but... I think we'll skip that. Unless someone comes up with a particularly good gameplay reason for it.

[Cobra]

Suddenly the word "Starlancer" comes to mind.

[Dain]

That seems daft :/ I trust there is a rationalisation for why they aren't doing that left right and centre at Endor.

Quite like the paintjob though. I'm a sucker for repaints.

[Kiloku]

That's the "Blade-Wing", a prototype developed (I **** you not) a year before Ep IV.

The Star Wars Rebels series is all kinds of wonky.

[Dain]

Someone in a comment section said that the rationale given by the producers is that this particular rebel cell uses A and B wings while the rebel cell we see in the first film uses X and Y. By the time of Return of the Jedi all the rebels are working together.

That's fine. The old games never cared about the development order of ships so much and people jumped through all sorts of hoops to explain it. In many ways it's a lot better than "ah well it looked like an A-wing, but was actually a totally different ship".

Oh, and that the A and B wing never got much to do, so give them some more exposure. That sounds fine too.

Superlaser is silly though.

[Vector Leader]

Yeah, I saw that clip a couple days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdj4teY5gik

You know, LFL/Disney wiped the EU slate clean to start over fresh, but they're making the same mistakes all over again. What a mess... what's really disturbing is how they're rewriting info that was technically non-EU related canon levels. I can't believe what's going on here.

[chief1983]

Marketing wants to be able to sell new toys.  I'm 99% sure that's exactly why all these things happens.

[StarSlayer]

Kinda reminds me of when the Battlestar Galactica prequel miniseries decided they need to add an uglier version of the Viper and graft a crap load of extra guns on the Bucket.  Just unnecessarily adding tripe for the sake of it.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Marketing wants to be able to sell new toys.  I'm 99% sure that's exactly why all these things happens.

http://tfwiki.net/wiki/To_sell_toys

[Trivial Psychic]

Spoiler:

Perhaps they couldn't solve the shorting-out-the-hyperdrive problem shown in the episode, and decided that maximum firepower was too high a price to pay for limited combat deployment.  They didn't want to be limited to launching from a capital ship directly into combat like the Empire has to with Ties, so production models delete the blaster-convergence and the rust paint scheme, and focus on exploiting its specialist firepower package of ion cannon, 3x blasters, and proton torpedoes.  That said, one could still foresee having a small production of blaster-convergence-enabled versions without hyperdrive, exclusively for defensive roles at key facilities.

[headdie]

I thought in the EU convergent energy weapon systems while immensely powerful had a nasty habit of being very inaccurate, hence why the original DS could only target planets, moons and similar scale objects.

[General Battuta]

Do we know if the first Death Star couldn't target warships? Without going to the EU?

[AdmiralRalwood]

Do we know if the first Death Star couldn't target warships? Without going to the EU?

Without going to the EU, we never have the first Death Star in weapons range of capital ships, so no.

[Cobra]

I don't believe the EU ever had the Death Star within range of any capital ship. Its prototype, the one kept behind the black holes in Maw Installation, was capable of targeting capital ships. I think the Rebels knew this as well, because they explicitly state the weapons systems are not operational (or so they thought). Either they assumed the Death Star could target capships or had reason to believe this was the case.

Someone in a comment section said that the rationale given by the producers is that this particular rebel cell uses A and B wings while the rebel cell we see in the first film uses X and Y. By the time of Return of the Jedi all the rebels are working together.

That's pretty much the case, though the cells exclusively using certain fighters might be a bit of a stretch.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I don't believe the EU ever had the Death Star within range of any capital ship.

It didn't, but the EU separately establishes that the second Death Star's targeting systems had been improved to allow it to target capital ships, in addition to allowing it to recharge fast enough to make this a viable combat strategy. Nobody makes any comments about targeting systems (that I can recall) in the films themselves (the closest we get is Lando's "That blast came from the Death Star! That thing's operational!").

[Vector Leader]

The problem is Base One was intended to be the heart of the Alliance. That was the whole point of ANH and why the Empire was determined to find it and destroy it. Base One was where most, if not all, the Alliance was stationed. It was not originally referenced as a mere rebel cell for good reason - it'd undermine the plot.

As far as the ships go, it was originally stated the whole reason why the A-wing was developed was because the Alliance recognized the need for a high speed starfighter after analyzing the results of the Battle of Yavin. General Jan Dodonna and engineer Walex Blissex designed the A-wing to meet that need. The B-wing was designed to give the Alliance that extra punch it so needed against Imperial capital ships, and that happened sometime after the Battle of Yavin thanks to Admiral Ackbar and the Verpine manufacturer Slayn & Korpil. Then of course, there's the Y-wing and how it predated the X-wing by several years (not 20).

Game developers didn't pay much attention to Star Wars canon back in the day (and this actually goes for a lot of the comics and novels). They threw anything they thought would be cool into their game (like Rebel Assault including the A-wing in pre-BoY events) and LFL/LA didn't bother to make sure they adhered to established lore. So down the road round-about explanations were devised to "fix" discrepancies (like the prototype R-22 Spearheads as the preceding "A-wings"), but using this kind of method as a solution caused everything to get convoluted and messy real quick. Now LFL & Disney have wiped the slate clean in an effort to clean up and fix the situation, only to start making the same mistakes all over again AND they're re-writing canon that would've been better off left alone.

I can't believe the people that are running things now. They've thrown the baby out with the bath water. Seems like nothing's sacred anymore.

[Cobra]

Nobody makes any comments about targeting systems (that I can recall) in the films themselves (the closest we get is Lando's "That blast came from the Death Star! That thing's operational!").

To quoth the Mon Calamari: "Although the weapon systems on this Death Star are not yet operational, it does have a strong defense mechanism. It is protected by an energy shield generated from the forest moon of Endor."

I think something somewhere stated that the first Death Star probably could target enemy capital ships, but it likely wasn't very accurate.

Game developers didn't pay much attention to Star Wars canon back in the day (and this actually goes for a lot of the comics and novels). They threw anything they thought would be cool into their game (like Rebel Assault including the A-wing in pre-BoY events) and LFL/LA didn't bother to make sure they adhered to established lore. So down the road round-about explanations were devised to "fix" discrepancies (like the prototype R-22 Spearheads as the preceding "A-wings"), but using this kind of method as a solution caused everything to get convoluted and messy real quick. Now LFL & Disney have wiped the slate clean in an effort to clean up and fix the situation, only to start making the same mistakes all over again AND they're re-writing canon that would've been better off left alone.

The problem with your statement is that there was no set canon for any backstory before the prequels. It was all open to interpretation. The universe was pretty much "Hey, this ****'s happening. There's an evil GALACTIC EMPIRE, the good guys are the REBEL ALLIANCE, the JEDI are all but gone and the DARK SIDE rules, yo."

It wasn't until after the Thrawn trilogy (I think?) was released that a coherent timeline was set in motion and things started to come together.

[Dain]

I don't know, aside from the superlaser thing it all seems fairly reasonable to me.

There are A wings and a B wing prototype around.

We don't see them in the first film because that particular group of rebels didn't have them yet.

Seems straight forward enough to me. It seems likely that there would be more than one rebel group in a big galaxy.

That's not "making the same mistakes again", that's just how it is now. Although I suppose if you were particularly attached to the EU..

Kinda reminds me of when the Battlestar Galactica prequel miniseries decided they need to add an uglier version of the Viper and graft a crap load of extra guns on the Bucket.  Just unnecessarily adding tripe for the sake of it.

I'd tried to forget that :/ Now that is an example of something that really makes no sense in relation to the original. A different weapon system on a prototype fighter is easier to explain away than removing all the guns and completely reworking the internals of an established ship.

[Erkhyan]

I don't believe the EU ever had the Death Star within range of any capital ship.

In the EU, the Death Star’s very first kill is a Rebel Lucrehulk-class battleship that was attempting to destroy it before it became operational.

As for the B-Wing, I don’t see the problem. The one-off prototype is overpowered but also unstable and unpredictable. It makes sense that they later decided to downgrade to a still powerful but much more stable production variant.

[headdie]

on the accurecy thing
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Concave_Dish_Composite_Beam_Superlaser
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Double_blaster