Ion Propelled Tie Fighter Now Has A Laser!

ion

[Steven Dufresne] has been playing around with ion propulsion using high voltage lately, and he’s added another spaceship to his experiments — Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter — and as an added bonus, he’s thrown on a laser too!

We originally covered his Ion Wind Propelled Star Trek Enterprise a few months ago, after someone had mentioned that the ion winds he was generating in experiments kind of looked like the warp drives on the Enterprise. Well, someone else pointed out that a TIE Fighter was an even better candidate for this. After all, TIE stands for Twin Ion Engines. So he decided to build one too. The ion winds look even better on this one as he’s turned the entire back of the fighter into the electrode, which creates a wide and very visible arc.

Oh, he also decided to add lasers to it for some extra flare — unfortunately TIE Fighters used green lasers — not red ones. Stick around for the following videos to see the TIE Fighter in all its ionic glory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD_8_NZJF48H
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD_8_NZJF48 link if embed is not working)

9 thoughts on “Ion Propelled Tie Fighter Now Has A Laser!

    1. Capital ships between $Trek and $Wars are severely mismatched. A Galaxy class starship – pretty much the biggest in the fleet – is about 650 meters long. An Imperial I-class Star Destroyer (the *small* star destroyer seen in the intro of episode IV) is 1600 meters long. The $Wars ships go up to an Executor-class (two kilometers long) and of course the Death Star (160 km for the first, and much more than that for the second).

      A better comparison would be between weapons systems. Unfortunately there’s not much information on this, but I’m betting between tri-cobalt devices and some sort of Omega particle-based weapon, the only resistance $Trek ships would face would be the super laser on a Death Star. A Death Star that can, of course, be taken out by a piece of crap one-man fighter and an ancient Correlian light freighter.

      If you want to make a diorama to scale with Vader’s TIE (9.2 meters), you’re better off going with a Type 5 shuttle (Gallieo from TOS, 9.1 meters, and also sub-warp), or Type 9 (Cochrane from VOY, 8.5 meters, Warp 4). Even the Delta Flyer would be too big at either 21 meters (official) or 15 meters (able to fit into its shuttlebay).

      TL;DR: In a fight, Trek would beat Wars.

      1. All the numbers I’ve seen on star wars ships had shields and weapons with power levels multiple orders of magnitude higher than the biggest baddest Trek ship. Of course, it’s kinda dumb to try to compare even the hand-waviest science fiction to full-on science fantasy.

    2. I thought about it but I think more people know what the “I” in TIE fighter stands for than know that the destroyers use ion propulsion for non-lightspeed travel (at least according to the inline Star Wars encyclopedia I read.)

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