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A few months ago, I saw a production sketch used by ILM to determine speeds of various spacecraft for Return of the Jedi. It broke down the speeds as follows:

B-Wings, Millennium Falcon are drawn as the slowest, followed by
X-Wings, Y-Wings, TIE Fighters; then the Interceptor, then the A-Wing. In the movie, you can see a Y-Wing running down (and gunning down) TWO TIE Interceptors.

Where does the notion of Y-Wings being clunkers come from?

I think it's a brainbug. They might be less agile, but the huge differences in the games (particularly Rogue Squadron, where they're basically A-10s) isn't seen in the movies.

People assume that Y-wings are slow because they look slow. There's really no other reason for it. If Han Solo didn't say that the Falcon was unusually fast, fans probably would have pegged it as a slow-as-molasses junker.

Darth Wong wrote:People assume that Y-wings are slow because they look slow. There's really no other reason for it. If Han Solo didn't say that the Falcon was unusually fast, fans probably would have pegged it as a slow-as-molasses junker.

My friend Ray has always hated the way Y-Wings are portrayed as slow bombers. EArly on, they were described as stripped-down racers, and precursors to X-Wings.

Elfdart wrote:A few months ago, I saw a production sketch used by ILM to determine speeds of various spacecraft for Return of the Jedi. It broke down the speeds as follows:

B-Wings, Millennium Falcon are drawn as the slowest, followed by
X-Wings, Y-Wings, TIE Fighters; then the Interceptor, then the A-Wing. In the movie, you can see a Y-Wing running down (and gunning down) TWO TIE Interceptors.

Where does the notion of Y-Wings being clunkers come from?

The chart lists Y-Wings as the same as X-Wings:-

SWTC

The X-Wing as you can see is marked by an asterix to give it "medium" maneuverability. I don't know why.

Personally they always struck me as being somewhat F-111 like in their speeds, capabilities.

Well, I have to admit, I used to think of the Y-Wings as slow as hell bombers, because I played the old SW games where all you really did was fly around in the ships, and Y-Wings were usually used as bombers. And in games, you really cant have your bombers be as fast as you "agile fighter" units.

This notion, of course, started to slowly fade away as I got more into SW, and read that Y-Wings were once used before X-Wings by the Rebellion. And of course, in the movies the Y-Wings keep pace with the X-Wings.

It may have to do with the fact that most people dont assosciate bomber type ships with speed?

It's funny, but Y-wings aren't even that slow in the official EU books. The EGTVV describes them as multirole fighters with a secondary role as light bombers.

I think the idea that Y-wings are slow-as-shit pure bombers comes directly from the PC games. The games take a lot of liberties with the ships, and they probably decided that they needed to slow down and beef up the Y-wing to better differentiate them from the other Rebel starfighters. Unfortunately, this became a brain bug that has spread to not just fans, but also later EU writers.

Yes, I think you're right about that, Jim.

Oh, and according to Rinzler's Making of Star Wars, Lucas first envisioned the Y-wing as an equivalence of WWII torpedo bombers, but later during production they were referred to as "old stock space fighters".

It's probably a game thing, to make a balanced Rebel fleet - the A-wing is fast and weak, the Y-wing strong ans slow with the X-wing somewhere inbetween. It's even explicitly said in the RS1 tech briefing.

Darth Wong wrote:People assume that Y-wings are slow because they look slow.

I don't know how people get that impression. They have those huge engine pods, the ratio of engine mass to rest of vehicle mass actually looks comparable if not higher on the Y-wings compared to the X-wings. Vaguely like an SR-71 in fact. If I hadn't read all the fluff I'd guess they were faster than an X-wing (but probably less maneuverable due to the higher moment of inertia).

I blame it entirely on X-Wing. Maybe it didn't start with that game, but I'm willing to bet it was popularized there. I think what happened is the stats for an unmodified Y-Wing with all the armor plating got mixed up with the version we see in the movies, with the hull plates stripped off and the engines upgraded. So now we have these slow clunky Y-Wings with marginally larger torpedo magazines (that fire from the wrong spot, usually), but have their innards on display yet are rated with great armor.

Starglider wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:People assume that Y-wings are slow because they look slow.

I don't know how people get that impression. They have those huge engine pods, the ratio of engine mass to rest of vehicle mass actually looks comparable if not higher on the Y-wings compared to the X-wings. Vaguely like an SR-71 in fact. If I hadn't read all the fluff I'd guess they were faster than an X-wing (but probably less maneuverable due to the higher moment of inertia).

They're also blocky and wide. Compared the the X-wing, which is really a dart with wings, I can certainly see why someone could think of the Y-wing as slower. I know I did.

Starglider wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:People assume that Y-wings are slow because they look slow.

I don't know how people get that impression. They have those huge engine pods, the ratio of engine mass to rest of vehicle mass actually looks comparable if not higher on the Y-wings compared to the X-wings. Vaguely like an SR-71 in fact. If I hadn't read all the fluff I'd guess they were faster than an X-wing (but probably less maneuverable due to the higher moment of inertia).

Yes, but they don't look as sleek, which is what people subjectively associate with speed.

I've always assumed Y-wings were fast as hell in straight lines, but unmaneuverable. That's the impression I got from the huge engine pods: You can go really fast, but Force help you if you need to turn at full speed.

I always figured they had low agility, not low speed

I always figured they had low agility, thanks to the massive proton torpedo armament and its magazine, not low speed.

At any rate "speed" is something of a meaningless concept in space combat maneuvering when deprived of context. The most important factor, as John Boyd would have it, is the ability to accelerate. The Empire Strikes Back showed that a "speedy" vessel like SS Millennium Falcon can easily be run down by a much larger "lumbering" warship like HIMS Avenger, thanks to the latter's far more powerful engines and greater power supply. Nevertheless the tramp freighter also demonstrated the advantage of maneuverability over "speed"; the Falcon's effortless dive along the Z-axis proved to be impossible to match by the much more massive Star Destroyers (with all the momentum to which their great mass pertains).

It is possible, of course, that due to the Y-wing's greater mass, she has less maneuverability than her engines alone would imply; she may be "faster" than an X-wing or T/I, but less able to maneuver due to greater physical strains created by her greater mass and momentum. Alternately, it could be that the Y-wing is a relatively nimble fighter, but when converted to bomber duty is either underpowered or overloaded (or possibly even both).

When I first saw a Y-Wing, I knew nothing about it, including the name. I thought it looked really fast with those elongated engine pods, a kickass design that seemed much more prominent than the tiny silly A-Wing (which I also didn't know anything about). Then I found out that it was supposed to be slow old junk, basically. But the EU doesn't really mark Y-Wings as very slow, ponderous, or outdated, aside from, I believe, the games. They're decent stuff in novels and RPG. One should also remember that the Y-Wings came off a slight worse than the X-Wings back when we first came to know about them, the battle of the Death Star. But they were also only flown by [then] no-names, unlike the X-Wings which got screen time and named pilots.

Well technically the X-Wings fared worse, since there were a dozen or so of them and only two got away, while out of around four Y-wings, one got away (this is on-screen I'm talking about, maybe the novelisation says there were shitloads of Y-wings too...).

As far as I can see, the standard assumption is:

Bomber = teh slow
Fighter = teh fast

The games built on that, but I find it hard to think of whether the perception that Y-wings are slow came from the films, games, or X-wing books (which describe them as slothful).

There were 10 Y-Wings and 20 X-Wings.

So the Y-Wing appears to be the Star Wars equivalent of the Hawker Hurricane or P-40 Warhawk - suffering from a shitty reputation compared to other aircraft when in reality, they were well built, fast, durable, and powerful medium fighters.

Well Y-Wings I think are more like the Avenger replacing the Dauntless then the P-40. They were suppose to be better then clone war era fighters but newer fighter pushed them back into the fighter-bomber role.

Perhaps they are like the Wildcat and the Hellcat, the Hellcat being the X-Wing.

That's really strange that you should say that. I've *never* thought of a Y-wing as a slow bomber type craft. It doesn't look like it could carry much in the way of Payload, not much more than the X-wing, anyway.

I'll take yuou back to when I Was a kid watching star wars over and over and over again on HBO. I would look at the X-wing and think to myself that it was a really cool looking space ship, looked fast, has four guns. I looked at the Y-wing and thought, that they looked TOUGHER, but not necessarily slower, and had less guns (Honestly, at Yavin, does it ever show the Y-wings as been slower or even less manuverable, despote the "Toughness" difference?).

So, if I had to make a replacement in my mind back when I was a kid, I would have to say that the Xwing was an F-15 and the Y wing was the F-4.

Does that make sense?

Chardok wrote:(Honestly, at Yavin, does it ever show the Y-wings as been slower or even less manuverable, despote the "Toughness" difference?).

They're never in a situation where less manueverability was shown. Sure, they get run down by Vader no problem, but everyone did. ANH gave off the impression of complete Imperial military superiority.