I'm definitely also going with Y-wings and Scyks, but I'm keeping my Z-95s, as I never had any of the rebel ones, and it might be fun to play with them. I want to get them repainted though. The Black Sun scheme is okay, but I want my own space pirate outfit.

Buy Scyks. Lots of them. Then have a good time.

I can't believe nobody added Dos Gringos to this thread sooner, but here it is: NSFW or children, but the song was written by a couple Viper drivers, called "I wish I had a gun just like the A-10"

I find that killing Han with Scum swarms involving A4 Y-wings and Scyks with cannons is pretty effective. He just can't deal with that kind of damage output, especially when you're target locking every turn. With A4 Y-wings you get your main attack, a target lock reroll, an ion turret attack that only has to score one hit to ionize, and then you get another of those with the second Y-wing. Throw in 3 Scyks with Manglers, which allow you to turn hits to crits and reroll all 3 attack dice with target locks at range 3 with no evade bonus, and things look pretty good.

Good. This is what my experience has been as well, though I've only had two games to test it out. I love my Warthogs though. I need to custom paint my Y-wings.

Which Y-wings do you find more dangerous - the ion turret variety or the auto blaster variety?

Those assault carriers look badass!

Look at the battle damage! The A-wing has always been my favorite ship in the Star Wars universe and you did it full justice with this paint scheme. I absolutely love the way it turned out. It is just the right amount of grit on an otherwise sleek, high performance starfighter. You are super talented at painting. If you didn't live in France, I'd want to mail you all my minis to paint too.

Yeah, and I think this is hugely problematic. B-wings shouldn't have a turn tighter than a red 2 turn, and most of their white should be 3 turns, considering their huge mass and poor maneuverability in all of the available information we have about them outside of this game. That may be, but I'm glad it's not that way. In game B-wings have stood the test of time, unlike most other rebel fighters which are often lackluster compared to where imperial ships are at. Yeah, but I think if all ships were set up in a logical way regarding their dials, this issue might not be there either. Also, it seems to me that in the tournament scene rebels have always dominated. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the results seem to tend towards rebel ships winning championships.

Yeah, and I think this is hugely problematic. B-wings shouldn't have a turn tighter than a red 2 turn, and most of their white should be 3 turns, considering their huge mass and poor maneuverability in all of the available information we have about them outside of this game.

I'd put Warthogs and Mangler cannon Scyks up against Fat Han and 3 Zs. Go for the Falcon first, take it down quickly, and then the Zs are easy enough to mop up.

You are correct, but actually it's a bit worse than that. Here's a bit more trivia for those that are interested: -The gun is only fired at a max of a 10 second burst. Even with both engines running, the recoil of the gun is strong enough that >10 seconds will stall the aircraft. -The rounds are so large the change in weight from ejecting casings would shift the center of gravity too far back. This would make the aircraft unstable (a non-good.) Therefore, all spent casings stay within the aircraft and it is emptied upon landing. -The gun came first. This is not an exaggeration. How I like to envision the conversation went is "Wow, that gun is awesome. How can we make it more awesome? I agree, let's make it fly." Proof of this can be found by looking at the landing gears. The nose landing gear had to be offset from the center, or else there wouldn't be room for the gun. -Not gun related, but if you were ever wondering why the engines are mounted so awkwardly high it is because they ingested too much FOD when they were lower. Source: Personal research over many years, best friend is an A-10 pilot, and college teacher was the lead test engineer for the A-10. My fighter pilot Yoda was also an A-10 driver, before he was an F-16 and F-117 driver. My favorite thing was the impression he would do of the sound of the gun firing from the cockpit "Waaaaanh!"

That's really awesome! I love the design. Very Star Wars, nice twist on the old one. I especially like the engines. Seems very cobbled together.

Good point!

Frogfoot ... Sturmovik ...Before the BTL-A4 card I would have said the Y-wing was the Bolton-Paul Defiant of the Rebel Alliance.Mossie's pretty appropriate actually considering Lucas used films like Dambusters and 633 Squadron as inspiration for Star Wars, right down to copying sequences from 633 Squadron (trench run, anyone?)Ouch, comparing it to the Defiant really hurts the Y-Wing. That was a really useless plane with a complicated and even more useless turret, right? With a really bad combat record too...It may well be that the Mosquito inspired the mission profile of the Y-Wing, but the comparison is pretty bad. The Mossie was an extremely fast plane for its time, while the Y-Wing is not, The Mosquito also had no turret (well in the BTL version the Y loses his too), and it looked pretty sleek and finished, not like the Y-Wing that constantly flies without it's hull plating and looks like a half-finished design bodged together hastily! Also were there also dam buster missions flown by Lancasters? I think there were. Not sure anymore and too lazy to google now! In those regards the A-10 really is the fitting comparison. Rugged, slow, an attack aircraft with a huge loadout of weapons. And by now an old and venerable, but very effective design! And in the BTL version huge forward firepower like if it had an Avenger cannon too... When did the A-10 come out? Must have been in prototype stage when the first Star Wars came out, no? If yes they even share the same age, which would really be cool! Edit: It seems i hit the nail on the head. New Hope and the A-10 came out the same year, 1977! Interestingly, the Defiant actually did stellar service over Dunkirk in its first combat deployment, which gave the British false hopes concerning it. Its performance during the Battle of Britain was terrible and it had to be retired. But when it worked as intended, as it did at Dunkirk, it was pretty great. The concept was that it was a bomber killer, and it excelled at this when it was able to target the bombers alone while the Spits and Hurris kept the 109s and 110s busy. Unfortunately, while this was possible over Dunkirk due to the nature of the Luftwaffe's missions and the prevailing weather, it didn't happen during BoB.

Thank you so much for the detail on that, I really appreciate it. I'm nowhere close to being able to replicate that sequence, but it's nice to know the technique for starters.

I feel like the more often I say the word Dunelizard in a thread, the more likely it becomes. Yay internet voodoo...

I bought 4 Bombers when they went on sale last year on MM thinking there'd be a fix for ordinance (silly me, right?). But I have to say, this spread sheet is really handy. I'm so happy to have pretty much everything I want and I haven't crossed the $500 threshold yet. I'm right with you - just barely. Sitting at $491.00, though I got some discounts, so I'm probably sitting at around 475 total investment. Still...holy cow...

Almost all of the cool interesting background stories and society stuff that was hinted at, glimpsed, and mentioned in the original trilogy was SCUM-Suff. What's not to love right. Yeah, I totally agree. The first universe of the first three movies is totally scummy.

Whether or not that's true, surely disputing the idea he proposes is a far more reasonable course of action than disputing the relative integrity of the individual in question. I also have to say that if my turn circle dial advice mentioned in my post were followed, ships wouldn't be needing "fixes" and power creep wouldn't be a thing, because ship turn circles would remain relative to mass and engine power, and thusly new ships wouldn't necessarily be superior to older ships in terms of their capabilities.

Can we not destroy a thread with reasonable ideas on the basis of name-calling?

Nice repaints. What is the base color you used on the Scyks?

Can't stop looking at those Z-95s. I think I'm in love.

Frogfoot ... Sturmovik ... Before the BTL-A4 card I would have said the Y-wing was the Bolton-Paul Defiant of the Rebel Alliance. Mossie's pretty appropriate actually considering Lucas used films like Dambusters and 633 Squadron as inspiration for Star Wars, right down to copying sequences from 633 Squadron (trench run, anyone?) I wish I could like your post more than once for mentioning the Bolton-Paul Defiant. Such a good point!

The problem with looking at the movies to determine who gets a barrel roll and who doesn't is that barrel rolls in the game don't work the same way as barrel rolls in real aerial combat. Barrel rolls in air combat maneuvering (vs. pure stunt flying) are used as "lag rolls" or "displacement rolls." The goal of a barrel roll is to utilize the vertical component of your maneuverability to deliberately fly a longer path through the sky without losing airspeed in the process. This is useful in a couple of situations. For a ship chasing another ship, you can use it to stay behind an enemy who is slower than you are, thusly allowing yourself to take a second pass at him without slowing down to his speed (which is dangerous in aerial combat). Secondly, they're used offensively in the displacement or lag capability, to counteract a tighter-turning but slower opponent. The fast, heavier ship which doesn't turn as well, uses the barrel roll to offset his turn circle to the outside, thereby allowing him to pull lead despite the fact that he doesn't turn as quickly as the opponent. This aspect of the barrel roll is closest to what we see in the game, because it allows you to offset your turn circle. The third use of a barrel roll is to slow down to force an enemy aircraft to overshoot. If an opponent is making a hard turn against you, pulling lead, you can pull into him hard to set your lift vector towards his six, and then barrel roll in the opposite direction. This causes you to essentially fly around him, letting him spit out beneath you, and you find yourself trading places with him, ending up on his six o'clock. This has always been my favorite go-to defensive maneuver, as most new pilots love to fly HUD BFM, and that gets you killed in a hurry if your opponent knows how to "worm" or to use lag rolls effectively. For the game, it's two-dimensional, so it will always be a somewhat poor representation of combat in three dimensions. Secondly, it's supposed to be space, which works quite a bit differently from battles in the atmosphere (though in Star Wars this is less so). Also, there is a game balance issue. Moves like boost and barrel rolls give different ships different flavors, which encourage variety in both starfighters and play style. There is no reason an X-wing can't do a barrel roll (or any other ship for that matter), but if it does get a barrel roll, the set-up of the game makes it so that this, in-effect, discourages the use of other ships which have the barrel roll as a proxy for maneuverability. The proxy for maneuverability aspect is important, because the game uses the same maneuver templates for all the ships (though their dials are different). Practically speaking, however, the templates should be different for the different ships, because they describe a turn circle. Also, practically speaking, the ships like the A-wing and the TIE Fighter, and the TIE Interceptor and the Scyk should have the tightest turn circles. They should, effectively, be able to make white hard 1 turns, and no other ships in the game should be able to make hard 1 turns. The X-wing should be able to make hard 2 turns, as should ships like the Phantom. The Y-wing and B-wing should be able to turn no more tightly than a hard-3 turn, and the Millennium Falcon and large ships should be able to turn no more tightly than say a hard 4 turn. The reason for this is physics - bigger, heavier ships have more momentum, and therefore their turn circles are larger than smaller, lighter ships. The failure of the game designers to design things in this way makes dogfighting in X-wing very different from dogfighting in reality, or in other tabletop games like Wings of War (which utilizes unique turn circles for each aircraft). In X-wing, you don't typically see turning fights where ships are chasing each other's tails, like you get in real dogfights, or in the movies. The reason for this is that no ship really has an understandable turn circle relative to its maneuvering capability. All ships can, on some level, make turns which cross over the turn circle boundary of other ships, and therefore there is no way to get in on someone's six o'clock and stay there with a turning advantage. Likewise, you can't simply turn hard to defeat an attack. In my opinion, dials should have been designed such that ships had three levels of turn circle - green, white, and red, and each turn lower than the "ideal" turn circle should be green, the "ideal" should be white, and they should have the option to pull a harder, tighter, "red" turn, but they add stress which means they can't do it more than once. This would be perfect from a dogfighting standpoint, because real aircraft can pull hard to gain angles quickly, but if it is a harder turn than their best sustained turn rate, they bleed off energy, so they can't keep it up for very long, and eventually have to let off below the ideal turn (IE a green maneuver) to get their energy back up. With the green, white, and red system, this would be perfect. So, you could imagine for an X-wing, they should have White 2 banks and turns, Green 3 banks and turns, and Red 1 banks and turns (or maybe just red 1 turns, depending on how strict you want to be). Whereas an A-wing would have White 1 turns and banks, Green 2 turns and banks, green 3 turns and banks, and so on. If this were the maneuvering set-up for the game, then an argument could be made for giving every ship barrel roll, because then it would be an ability to tactically offset your turn circle to make a better entry on an opponent, or to stay behind an opponent and get a good shot, even if they're a tighter-turning ship than you are. However, as it stands, maneuverability in the game makes no sense and is done by proxy to boost and barrel roll actions, and as such I think those abilities should be limited to the more maneuverable ships to give them that flavor.