[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

It seems to me that most of the designed ships are meant to emulate something out of fiction, either a hard postulation of what a ship might look like, or whooshy space opera.

For example, the Starhawk is clearly an X-wing. It has four forward-fixed blasters, wings a missile launcher and an engine room (with a robot in it, usually). Why? Because x-wings have wings, four forward fixed blasters and a missile launcher (which fire proton torpedos, of course). The Typhoon is clearly a tie-fighter, so it has two blasters (which really should be fixed, but isn't, for some reason), is highly agile, and lacks shields. It's light, small, maneuverable and disposable.

But what actually happens in a fight? Do they circle around one another trying to shoot each other? Nope. The fight comes down to whether or not the Tie fighter uses up its weapons in point-defense or not, because if it doesn't, the x-wing WILL hit it it with that missile, and it will kill the tie-fighter. The only reason NOT to do this would be to save ammo.

It's a good reason, mind you. Spend your missiles on Typhoons and you have little way to hurt the bigger ships the missiles are actually for. Although in the actual Star Wars paradigm you wouldn't use the torpedoes against tie-fighter any way because because you can't hit tie-fighters with torpedoes