Battle of Everything
TIE Fighter

Twin Ion Engine Fighter
Sienar Fleet Systems
Length: 6.3m (approx 20 Studs)

The cannon fodder of the Star Wars Universe.  IMHO one of the most distinctive ships ever designed in Sci-Fi.  
Probably a pretty dumb design when you think about it, as how do you see anything coming at you from the sides.  
Of course, the Empire's solution was that you throw a couply of hundred of these things into battle and you have to, 
eventualy, statistically win.

Lego's effort was pretty poor in this area, as I just don't get the dark blue colours used.  
The movie models do seem to be bluish, depending on the photo, but even less so in the movies.  
The databank does reference that the original prototype models where blue, but this was going to be too 
hard to use against the blue-screen special effect technology being used and were made 'greyer'.  For me I even 
thought about going with white (from Ep4) as I had a die cast toy as a kid which was white.  
They seemed to go greyer in the latter movies so I went with that for starters.

Once again, same problem as with the Interceptor is how do you make a sphere from square bits. 
Many, many efforts and we are getting close to something I think is pretty good.  The use of the facet peices 
on the rear is the key for me, and tracking down these pieces is getting hard.  If only Lego had used them, 
we would have many to choose from.

The Wings and getting the look of the panels was hard as I wanted to do something different from the 
Interceptor and using layers would be too heavy for my pylons.  I eventually have used the hinge plates 
on the edge, which serve to provide the border for both sides of the wing.

Now I am really happy with this model as it was the poor cousin to the others for quite a while.  
Just need to make a few thousand and the empire will reign supreme again...

David Low
dateman@optusnet.com.au

Copyright all respective owners.