THE E-WING STARFIGHTER
The FreiTek E-wing starfighter was introduced during Grand Admiral Thrawn's campaign against the New Republic. A year later, when the revived Emperor made his bid for power, the ship had become a key element of the New Republic's starfighter forces.
The E-wing was designed by the former Incom Corporation designers who created
the fabulously successful X-wing
starfighter. The E-wing gave
their new company, FreiTek, a design that ranked with the best fighters any
company was producing. Initial engagements with Imperial fighters convinced the
New Republic's pilots that they had an incredible ship at their disposal. The
E-wing was initially designed with the same mission profile as the older A-wing:
to protect New Republic convoys from Imperial raiding missions.
The ship provides respectable speed, but its greatest asset is firepower. The
primary weapons are fire-linked triple laser cannons: one cannon on the end of
each wing, with a third cannon directly above the cockpit.
The E-wing also serves as an excellent medium assault and close-support fighter because of its sixteen proton torpedoes. These heavy weapons can severely damage capital ships and reinforced military bases, giving New Republic strategists another option when B-wings are too slow for a mission.
The E-wing offers performance that until recently was thought to be impossible. FreiTek's engineers incorporated several remarkable advances in flight control and power regulation. The resulting ship is as fast and manoeuvrable as the TIE Interceptor, and its heavily reinforced hull allows the E-wing to absorb more damage than the New Republic's famed X-wing can.
Unfortunately, those advancements have come at a price. The E-wing's advanced computer systems have proved overwhelming for R2 astromech droids. The New Republic has had to switch over to the new Industrial Automation R7 astromechs, which were designed specifically to handle the more advanced systems and hyperdrive interfaces aboard the E-wing.
The E-wing has a reliable fixed-wing design. While some designers consider
movable wings essential to top combat
performance. FreiTek's
designers produced a ship that is superior to any movable-wing design. The
E-wing is easy to repair between missions; modular parts, from laser cannon
actuators to power couplings, enable New Repuublic technicians to strip and
rebuild an E-wing in almost half the time it would take to perform a similar
operation on an X-wing.
Initial battles showed that the laser cannons were under-powered because they
used synthetically spin-coiled Tibanna gas, which broke down quickly, greatly
reducing the fire range. Because of the Battle of Calamari, New Republic
technicians la
cked the time
to design a permanent solution, such as refitting the weapons for more suitable
blaster gas. Instead, they rigged the laser cannons to accept three times the
standard power feed, increasing the weapon range to acceptable levels but also
risking a terminal power overload. These modified ships have been dubbed E-wing:
Type B.
