Star Wars: Squadrons

[Raid]

-Vader's TIE from New Hope is now referred to as the TIE Advanced x1 (and the reason why the game's TIE Advanced was renamed to the TIE Avenger, to avoid confusion). There's also a TIE Advanced v1, which is the curved-wing one piloted by the Inquisitors in Rebels. Every variant here has a hyperdrive.

-The TIE/ln is the basic flat-sided TIE Fighter from New Hope. No, they don't have a hyperdrive, which is why fans were annoyed by the fact that Ben Solo uses one to travel to Exegol in Rise of Skywalker.

[Alan]

Ah, the interceptor is tie/ba now, not /in because that’s too easy

[Raid]

The Imperial TIE Interceptor is the TIE/IN. The TIE/ba is the First Order version (it's short for Baron) that appeared in the Resistance animated series, which I still haven't bothered watching.

[Alan]

Is this new Disney cannon? So the interceptor is the one that can’t intercept? Acht, I gave up on absorbing incidental Star Wars “facts” about 20 years ago.

In my brain it’s
Fighter - no hyperdrive straight wings
Interceptor- hyperdrive bent wings
Bomber - fatboy
Vader’s - I seem to remember this being a prototype interceptor from maybe one of the books or something
….and sweet FA else!

[Raid]

It's both pre-Disney and post-Disney canon. None of the original TIE series (Fighter, Bomber, Interceptor) have a hyperdrive for cost reasons. In TIE Fighter that meant that you always deployed from a capital ship. The Assault Gunboat, Missile Boat, TIE Advanced and TIE Defender all had hyperdrives so the mission could start with you jumping into the mission area.

There may have been a campaign where one of the traitor admirals (Zaarin I'm guessing) fitted his TIE Interceptors with shields, they may also have had hyperdrives.

[Snowy]

Canon can lick my cannon (actual size may vary)

[Raid]

So I gave the TIE Fighter Total Conversion a go. Firstly, it's an absolute pain to set up for someone with a flight sim setup as complicated as mine. X-Wing Alliance, on which the game is based, only allowed one game controller with 10 buttons, which wasn't unusual at the time, and while the modders have added a joystick configurator that overcomes this limitation, it's not exactly user friendly to set up. Firstly my throttle controller has 6 axes on it, and the configurator refers to them just by number, which makes choosing which one to bind to the game's throttle a total crap shoot of picking a number, launching the game, loading a mission, launching your fighter, and then finding out whether it's correct. The buttons aren't much better, but at least they conform to the order they're listed on Windows' game controller panel. You have to pick a function for each button from a drop down menu... but TIE Fighter has a hundred different controls, and they're ordered by keyboard key rather than alphabetically - if you don't know the original's key bindings off by heart, you just need to scroll through a hundred options until you find the one you want. For each button you want to bind. I think this is all forgivable given it's a free mod, but it's worth mentioning - this game probably takes more than half an hour just to set the controls up.

Then, I'm running this in a Reverb G2 (comparable to a 4k monitor in terms of system overhead) and it runs like crap, to the point where it makes my eyes ache. I appreciate this is a game engine first built in the early 90s, and the fact that it has VR support at all is incredible, but I think I'll have to try dropping the Steam VR rendering resolution and see if it helps.

The game is... hard. I think playing this in VR explains why a plucky gang of misfits with mostly outdated equipment managed to take down a galaxy-spanning superpower. TIE pilots simply couldn't see them to shoot at them, because the cockpit window is just terrible for situational awareness. Jek Porkins was clearly an awful pilot to die to standard TIEs in the Battle of Yavin. You *can* turn the cockpit environment off, but then why bother with VR at all. I literally couldn't finish the first tutorial mission because one of the enemy Z-95s was killing me within two seconds of spawning. I mean I literally went through 20 TIE Fighters trying to kill the guy. You can't tell where shots are coming from if you can't see the enemy, so you can't dodge them. You can see where the enemy is on the radar, but in the time it takes for you to work out spatially where that little dot is, you're dead. It's a problem in the mission design really, the enemy can just hang around your spawn point like the very worst COD player, and frankly you don't get the option of respawning in real missions anyway, so I just skipped it.

I'll try it another day once I can see straight again.

[Wrathbone]

I’ve been meaning to give the TIE Fighter conversion a go, though not in VR. The original game was incredibly tough, especially in a basic unshielded TIE, but I’d never considered the fact that the lack of peripheral vision would be a factor if you were a real TIE pilot. The radar is definitely where your eyes rest 90% of the time in the game and it does become second nature after a while. The early game tactics I tend to deploy are simply survival and calling for assistance, because most of the ships you fly against until you get shields or more weapons are far superior.

[Sly Boots]

I’ve been meaning to give the TIE Fighter conversion a go, though not in VR. The original game was incredibly tough, especially in a basic unshielded TIE, but I’d never considered the fact that the lack of peripheral vision would be a factor if you were a real TIE pilot. The radar is definitely where your eyes rest 90% of the time in the game and it does become second nature after a while. The early game tactics I tend to deploy are simply survival and calling for assistance, because most of the ships you fly against until you get shields or more weapons are far superior.

Is the Empire's flight school called the Twenty Minuters?

[Wrathbone]