T.I.E. Starfighter
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The Republic Sienar Systems Twin Ion Engine (T.I.E.) starfighter was the forerunner of the Imperial TIE starfighter and its variants.
The T.I.E. starfighter was the first fighter to utilize the famous "ball-shaped cockpit flanked by vertical wings" design, and seemed very similar in terms of shape to its descendants.
History
The Advanced Project ship, a starfighter prototype which Sienar was building in 29 BBY, was designed to escort cargo freighters on the Outer Rim Territories for corporate clients. These fighters were built to deploy into combat from tight-packed launch stacks in ordinary cargo-holds. Visually, the T.I.E. had broad vertical cooling vanes at either end of a twenty-meter wingspan, and a compact, sphere-shaped crew-compartment in the center: the essence of the T.I.E. design had arrived. Some early Advanced Project ships might have flown as early as the year following the Invasion of Naboo, as several ships with ballshaped cockpits and vertical wings were observed at that time in an important Republic system along with different types of warships. It would be another seven years, however, before Sienar revealed the final component of the T.I.E. design, the SIE-TIE twin ion engine, a powerful and highly-innovative propulsion unit which was officially endorsed by Republic Sienar Systems shortly before the Battle of Geonosis and the outbreak of the Clone Wars. This paved the way for the final starfighter design, and it meant that Republic Sienar Systems was well-prepared when the Republic called for a new, standard mass-production starfighter during the Clone Wars. The Kuat Systems Engineering's rival designs, the Eta-2 Actis-class interceptor and Alpha-3 Nimbus-class V-wing, looked suspiciously like knock-offs of Sienar's technology and designs by their leading corporate rival. Although these rival craft gained fame during the Clone Wars, they became increasingly marginalized in the years that followed, It may have been the ability to give a fighter capability to ships like Dreadnaughts and Carracks that ensured that the T.I.E. won the design contract and in 9 BBY, Sienar bought up the remnants of the entire production series from Kuat.
