"Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures: Weapon Sizes?" Topic

This may have been discussed before so I may be late to the party.

But the weapon sizes on some of the ships make no sense to me. The guns on the rebel blockade runner and the new YT-2400 freighter look fine.

But the guns on the Falcon and new Decimator look comically small. I fully understand that this is a matter of scaling the ships. But this is one instance in which I wish the designers took some liberties with the models. The Decimator is especially comical since the marketing text makes it sound so dangerous. And yet its guns are pipsqueaks compared to those on the YT-2400 and blockade runner which represent very different sized ships too.

As a result we've purchased both the blockade runner and YT-2400 but have given the Falcon and the Decimator a miss as they look so odd compared to the fighters and to the two aforementioned large ships.

Does anyone else find them off-putting?

The Falcon's top and bottom turrets are basically infantry-packed small arms, aren't they?

Not sure. But the Decimator's guns appear to be the same size as the Falcon's and the Decimator is supposedly some sort of powerful ship.

The other odd thing about the ships is the cockpits. They're all over the place in size. The Decimstor's windows make the ship look relatively small but the guns indicate that the ship's much larger.

Part of the problem can probably traced to the original source material art work and the subsequent `official` technical manual write-ups that everything else is based on.
Several of the original movie ship designs like the Tie fighters or the blockade runner for example have been effectively `rescaled` a couple of times over in different publications going right back to when the original fims were made.

With other EU derived ships like the YT-2400 the model, like every other representation of this ship is based on Dash Rendar`s `Outrider` which was, I think supposed to be massively overgunned compared to a standard model of its class.

FFG`s fighters are supposed to be more or less in scale with each other though the blockade runner and rebel transport are stated as being to a somewhat smaller one for practical reasons.
Not sure about the Decimator as, as far as I know its a new design done by FFG, presumably the `fighter style` nose window opens onto a multi-crew bridge rather than a small cockpit and it actually is a lot larger, just the work of the same contractor that builds the Empire`s fighters!

Anyway, when is comes to models where the `originals` only exist as illistrations in books and comics or worse, movie effects models where several different examples exist which don`t agree with each other as to size and proportions then you just cant take whole scale issue too seriously.

And generally speaking with a space combat game I take the view that if it looks ok on the table then just go with it as strictly speaking everything is going to be massively overscale anyway.

And generally speaking with a space combat game I take the view that if it looks ok on the table then just go with it as strictly speaking everything is going to be massively overscale anyway.

This is also how I look at it and I guess it's why these differences in the guns and cockpits bother me. And it's why we've taken a pass on some of the models. They just "look" out of scale with the others.

As I stood in Barnes and Noble last night I compared the Decimator and YT-2400 to various fighters and the blockade runner. The guns on fighters such as the E-wing and Z-95 looked right next to those on the YT-2400 and blockade runner. Same goes for the cockpits and "bridge" on the corvette.

When I compared the Decimator in the same way the relative size of the cockpits made the Decimator look like it needed to be shrunk significantly to fit in with fighter like the TIE bomber. But the tiny little gun made it look like it needed to be enlarged. In some ways the Decimator's features are out of scale with themselves and the other vehicles. That's too bad since otherwise it looks pretty cool.

If you shrink the Decimator model to the point that the cockpit looks in scale with the similar cockpits such as those on the TIE series and then enlarge the cannon so its tubes appear similar to those on the YT-2400 and fighters such as the Z-95 you'd have a really neat looking "super heavy fighter". If this is pure creation of FFG I wonder why they didn't take such an approach.

I did a bit of browsing and came up with this bit of background info about the Decimator.
So its in the same class size as the Falcon and Outrider and again the problem seems to be down to older info rather than FFG who have got its depiction about right according to the existing background.
That front window must be somewhat bigger and open onto a two or three person flight bridge rather than a single-person cockpit.
swg.wikia.com/wiki/VT-49_Decimator

Yes, the decimator dates back to the old SW Galacies game, so FFG is again somewhat tied to what came before.

-Will

The guns on the falcon are supposed to pretty powerful military grade replacements for the original civilian cannon

The Falcon's guns are supposed to be powerful and unobtrusive, because they're ILLEGAL. Han is a smuggler, after all. But if we use a WWII analogy, where the X-Wing's guns are meant to be 20mm cannons, then the Falcon's are a quad-.50. Of course, the game's stats are pretty light-weight so any "real-world" differences between them vanish.

The Decimator is a transport ship, so it makes sense that it would also be relatively lightly armed, with a weapon that is essentially a point-defence gun. The Decimator, as noted, was created well after to be an "Imperial Millenium Falcon." I like to think that it's the ship the guns Han "acquired" came from.

The YT-2400's model is for Outrider, and the gun there is meant to be a Heavy Laser Cannon, not a standard weapon.

Anyway, your opinion is of course your own, and if you don't like the look fair enough. For me, though, the YT-2400 (and the HKW-190) have ridiculously oversized guns that look like something from Final Fantasy…

I like the .50 cal and 20mm comparison. But oddly enough the X-Wing game gives both the Falcon and the X-Wing the same firepower values.

At the end of the day I suppose FFG is stuck with what the artists and authors have produced over the years which isn't based on real-world physics and mechanics. The drawings, descriptions, and ship models are made up over time, usually without reference to an official technical background.

It reminds me of the reason given for the transporter on the original Star Trek series: it was cheaper than showing a shuttle going back and forth between ship and surface.

Recently I read that Lucas Films has taken another whack and "bringing order to the galaxy" by defining official canon as the 6 (soon, 9) movies, Rebels, and another recent cartoon series about the Jedis.

Everything else will be called something like "Legends" IIRC and not officially considered part of the Star Wars canon/universe. It's not quite an alternate reality, just not canon either. The non-canon stuff includes PC and console games, books, miniatures games, etc.

The YT-2400 just arrived in the mail.

The ship's firepower value is lower than that of the Falcon despite the guns being so much larger.

8-O

And looking at images of the Decimator X-wing cards online it has the same firepower as the Falcon (3).

So it really is somehow scale-related which still doesn't quite make sense.