At the Emperor's insistence, Vader sent me to Fresia to tour the Incom facility. They're the guys that designed the ARC-170 years ago, and they had some new starship they were eager to demonstrate.
The T-65 "X-wing" is only in the prototype stage, but it looks like a pretty neat ship--what I saw of it, anyway. It's based largely on the Z-95, and uses a nice little GBk-585 hyperdrive unit, along with some KX9 laser cannons. Somehow, they even squeezed some proton torpedo launchers in there too--once I saw those, I was really glad that we're the ones evaluating this, and not the Rebels. Whenever I see a starfighter with proton torpedoes, I think of that thermal exhaust port on the Death Star, with its thin veneer of ray shielding, and shudder.
Oh, speaking of shields, the X-wing's got a shield generator as well, which makes it preferable to the TIE fighter (which I've heard the pilots call the "space coffin").
I told Incom we'd need all the plans, blueprints, and the four working prototypes before deciding if the Empire was going to make this the new starfighter of the Imperial fleet, and they all got pretty snippy about it and refused to hand anything over.
Stupid--I told Vader about it when I got back to the Death Star, and he agreed that we couldn't possibly make that big of a decision without all the data.
I told him about some of the things I'd seen there, how badly organized they were, all the money getting wasted, that kind of thing, and told him, half-jokingly, that the Empire should just buy the company and make it part of the Imperial family.
He went away actually mulling that one over.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment