The V-19 was a Torrent of bad decisions

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I don’t know how to phrase this any differently, but more moving parts are not better.

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43 thoughts on “The V-19 was a Torrent of bad decisions”

  6. It always bugged me that nobody uses raised bubble canopies in Star Wars. Yes, realistically, visibility would be less of an issue in space due to the sheer ranges involved, but Star Wars uses World War II logic, so being able to look behind you is kinda important. And it's not as if there weren't cockpits that provided good visibility in the Second World War.

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  14. This isn't at all consistent in Star Wars, but my pet theory as to why the chunkier, seemingly more complicated things are cheaper(besides the aesthetic) is because Star Wars has a pretty steep miniaturization cost.
    You can see stuff that has sleek compact forms or fits seemingly impossible amounts of stuff in a small package, so we know it's possible.
    But its stuff like the Queen of Naboos personal ship, Jango's super slim & minimalistic blasters, etc.
    So my contention is that a lot of ship design is about balancing the cost/difficulty of manufacturing versus 'can we get away with using this cheaper/easier thing even if it requires some foldy bits or excessive size?'
    I'm thinking of WW2 where the US had standardized on high-pressure steam turbines for pretty much the entire fleet in the 30s, but had a huge bottleneck when it came to the war years of the reduction gearing needed to make these plants actually work was crazily difficult to make right & was not scalable at all. So a lot of the emergency second line ships like escort destroyers & light carriers used an eclectic & ever changing set of alternatives like stuffing a bunch of locomotive diesels in them or diesel & turbo-electric drives to get around they gearing bottleneck. These alternatives were in a lot of ways both more complicated & less efficient, but worked well enough for what was needed RIGHT NOW.
    Or the US skipping turbo charging in their fighters early on because the cost & complexity issues would slow down production.
    Or US tanks both using plane engines for logistics reasons despite the downside of the size of the ones needed to meet the power to weight requirements leading to high profiles, & then later due to the demand for the Air Corp making them unavailable for tank production, doing things like welding a bunch of V6 car engines together because they had plenty of those & shoving this giant nightmare of pistons & spark plugs into them instead.
    In Star Warse verse it seems that for material or manufacturing reasons, it's easier to make a bunch of spinny bullshit & acres of surface area than get everything into nice compact simple form factor.
    The TIE fighter is an example in that Sienars ion engine design is said to be insanely efficient, reliable & powerful despite being so compact, but is only 'cheap' because the Empire bought millions & it benefits from economics of scale.
    I mean, the basic TIE is… well TOO basic, but using the exact same engine you can get Interceptors & the insanely OP Defenders.
    Meanwhile the X wing is this relatively huge thing that has a lot of unnecessary moving widgets & design inefficiencies but is stated to be this legendarily effective starfighter that is both high performance and incredibly rugged(like seriously in the books these things get 80% of the ship melted or disintegrated & the pilot survives & it gets repaired later. I think at one point a pilot got a kill with one that had 3 engines, both wings & most of the nose blown off but was able to still launch a proton torpedo and get a hit).
    And both the B-Wing & the Skipray Blasboat are these capitol ship fighting things that are built around these huge unnecessary spinning modules.
    The TIE Defender is supposed to be the equivalent to a B-Wing & other than the weird tri-wing design seems to fit most of it into a standard TIE cockpit, but is also so expensive they could have built a Super Star Destroyer with the money spent on the prototypes.

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  15. The V-19 was bad, to my mind, because the Republic hadn't been building starfighters at the scale needed for a galactic conflict in centuries. So it has some goofy design decisions made.

    The real reason, is probably because the artists weren't thinking about it that deeply, and wanted to make a ship with THAT profile, so they did it. Because Star Wars doesn't think all that practically about why it makes it's ships the way they make them, and forces us fans to rationalize it for them. It is very annoying

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  21. Oh my, SCS, I've caught a discrepancy in your history banks. These lovely fighters appeared in the 2D Clone Wars series where they were used in swarms against Geonosian fighters and vulture droids alike.

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  23. I like to think that the laser cannons on the end of the wings or strike foils, is a heating consideration (and subsequently that the TIE line's solar panels are actually radiators, massive and iconic because the laser cannons, power plants, and everything else is compacted into that central ball). This could be why an X-Wing won't fire with its strike foils in flight configuration, because doing so while also doing combat-speed maneuvers and working the shields would overwhelm the starship's cooling abilities.

    Of course, I'm a weirdo who also likes to headcanon blue-tinted lasers not as soaked with "ion energy", but just higher-temperature gas bolts (perhaps the high-temp blue bolts are better at armour piercing, and the lower-temp red ones impart more kinetic energy).

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  25. Two thoughts occur:

    Firstly, the V-19 technically debuted in the Genedey Tartovsky “Clone Wars” animated mini-series before the 3rd Movie, which was awesome.

    Secondly: I feel like it’s notable that the V-19 is called that rather than the V Wing, because arguably the V Wing is the better implementation of “have a distinctive shape but foreshadowing the TiE” design brief. I guess you could call the V-19 a “W Wing”… but no one ever does. It’s a cool design but falls apart under logic.

    For my credits, I think I’ll take a Z-95! Or maybe a Y Wing if I want to bring along a friend.

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  28. In the later seasons of the Clone Wars (S4 onward) the V-19 is replaced by the older Z-95. I am unsure if there is a canon source backing this up, but the Separatist introduced the Tri-Fighter around the same time as the swap from the V-19 to the mothballed Z-95. My headcanon explanation is that since the Tri-Fighter was the first Droid Fighter to be able to think, its gunnery computers were having a field day with the large rear profile of the V-19. To compensate, the Republic brought the Z-95 out of retirement, gave it an upgrade, and sent it to the front because it has a smaller profile and similar capabilities to the V-19; at least until the V-wing was ready.

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  29. If I remember right the V-19 first appeared in the Star Wars Clone Wars animated series from around 2002-2003.

    In terms of design the V-19 was the first in a chain leading to the TIE Fighter. The V-Wing shown in the Revenge of the Sith film was the middle stage. The theme of them is cheap, mass produced mook vehicles. The Venator class star destroyer could carry nearly 200 of them.

    The V-19 was better than those, so it had to be downgraded to be the V-Wing which has lighter laser cannons and optional Concussion Missile Launchers. That got downgraded so you end up with the TIE Fighter which has less of everything. You think the V-19 is bad? Think of how the TIE Fighters large wings block the pilot's view, the wings are easy targets, and doesnt even have life support.

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  33. I kinda feel like the emergency landing would consist of touching the tip to the ground then pivoting forward and slamming the cockpit several feet into the earth. Repulsor lifts or gravity generators or whatever stability system might be able to keep that thing upright, but thats a lot of torque to counter when the tip digs into the ground.

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  36. Been awhile SCS. Ah, the V-19 Torrent, despite it's design is probably one of my favorite and Iconic Clone Wars Era Republic Starfighters. As others in your comments have already pointed out actually debuted in the 2003 Clone Wars Mini Series made by the Legendary Genndy Tartakovsky. I personally have a Lego version, it is the one that has the internalized gears so that all three wings move at once into folded and unfolded positions with internal landing gear that also dropped with them in folded mode.

    I personally wasn't aware it didn't have Shields or a Hyper Drive in it's first versions. Honestly to me the thing always seemed like a storage and logistics Nightmare, You would always need a hangar with large enough head room clearance, not that the Venators or Acclimators seemed to ever have that issue. But the same could be said for the ARC-170 with it's wide wing profile, but in contrast the ARC-170 could still be easily hung from the ceiling of a hangar due to it's thin profile. The V-19? Nope not possible, at best you'd have to stack them side by side.

    The only thing I can say for it is that it seems to be a sort of call back to WW2 again with a lot of Star Wars Ships, like how back on USS Carriers many of the Prop Plane Fighters would have foldable wings to make storage easier. But you're right in saying the third wheel of a wing would make for a terrible crash landing friend, personally if I was on the design team I'd make it so the wing had an emergency detach in case of crashes, but I doubt with how cheap it was they thought that far ahead, after all it did have an Engine cell on it.

    Certainly not the best fighter of the Republic Era, but considering it was part of the First Gen Rollout of the GAR I'd bet it was made quickly in a similar fashion to all the Rothana Heavy Engineering tech the Kaminoans ordered. But this is also why it was quickly replaced by the V-Wing and the ARC-170 in the later stages of the Clone Wars.

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  39. As far as simpler craft getting more expensive: supply and demand driven, or quality driven? You got something like the Jedi whatever whatever star fighter made with much more sense which saves money so they pour that savings into the quality of what’s on board: better flight control, better weapons, better overall material?

    Then you got the Torrent: perhaps an experiment that was supposed to take the galaxy by storm…turns out it’s crap and they need to get rid of them: cut the price waaaay down. “Oh they keep buying them?? F**k it, put them back on production.”

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