[M4-22 - Alphabet Fighter] R-Wing Starfighter

[Mandalorianknight]

@kritch beat me to the punch for making an R-wing, but luckily our ships are pretty different in shape. Anyway, here it is:

R-wing in attack position. First time trying to do a special background and lasers. Looks good, right?

The R-wing starfighter was developed by the incom corporation and began production shortly after the battle of Endor. Designed with the help of the Mon Cala known as "Quarrie", the R-wing combines aspects of the B-wing starfighter with a more conventional starfighter design. The ship was armed with 2 rotating, double barreled blaster turrets and a small pair of blaster cannons in front of the cockpit. What it lacks in heavy weapons or fast speed, it makes up for in shielding. The R-wing's distinctive "legs" are filled with powerful shield technology, allowing it to not only soak up incredible punishment for a ship of it's size, but to extend it's shield radius to cover a starfighter or warship segment behind it when the "legs" are rotated vertically.

Here's the R-wing in cruising/landing position. It rotates via a reinforced 4x4 turntable located in the LBG area between the cockpit and "legs".

The R-wing was able to rotate it's "legs" from attack mode for cruising and landing purposes. The turrets were placed at different heights in order for, in emergency situations where the ship is unable to rotate the legs, the turrets can fire forewords without the rear turret firing upon the front one.

Here's the back of the R-wing. It doesn't have the most powerful engines, but they can get the job done. Also note the bulge in greenling towards the end of the straight leg, that'll be explained momentarily.

The R-wing was equipped with 4 engines behind the astromech socket. The ship is able to reach top speeds comparable to an X-wing and is fairly maneuverable. Due to it's shape, it is extremely cumbersome in atmosphere, to the point that R-wings taking off from in-atmosphere bases were seen as sitting ducks by imperial pilots and gunners.

Lots of space was originally taken up by 2x4 bricks within the R-wing, so I carved out a segment for storage. I figure it's small enough that there's still a lot of room for the shielding technology.

The R-wing, while a single-seat fighter, did contain a small storage space towards the end of the back leg of the craft. 

Here is the cockpit and astromech seat. Note the equipment storage behind the seat.

The R-wing, like most starfighters, was a single-seater craft with an astromech slot behind the cockpit. Astromechs were uncharacteristically apprehensive about flying in R-wings, supposedly due to the stress on their systems caused by managing and maintaining the craft's shields.

Here is the angle where it looks most like the letter R. I tried to keep it where it definately looks like the letter R, but doesn't look so much like it that it fails to look like a starfighter.

The designers of the ship, in accordance with unofficial incom nomenclature policy, named the R-wing after it's resemblance to the high galactic letter R. One incom employee was quoted as saying "No, we're not trying to make them look like the high galactic alphabet. We don't know why this keeps happening." Nonetheless, the incom corporation has no fewer than 5 other ships named after high galactic letters available for purchase from their facilities.

And one last image, this one with some small modifications:

The Rebel Alliance's Pink Squadron used the R-wing's reputation as a sitting duck in atmosphere to their advantage in some scenarios. Imperial troops would let their guard down seeing R-wings take off from atmosphere and move in for the kill, before being torn apart by the seeking missiles embedded in Pink Squadron's R-wings, placed specifically to be fired from the cruising position. As this armament required removal of the shielding technology required to extend shield power to defend ships behind them, this modification wasn't often used in R-wings, but in character with Pink Squadron's infamous bloodthirst, they not only created but were the only full-squad users of this modification.

Hope you guys like this one, I think it's my favorite submission so far. I might buy the parts for it.

Edited June 27, 2022 by Mandalorianknight

[CrappyMocMaker]

The ship looks great! I like the in universe descriptions, and the second color scheme.

Edited June 26, 2022 by CrappyMocMaker

[Mandalorianknight]

18 hours ago, CrappyMocMaker said:

The ship looks great! I like the in universe descriptions, and the second color scheme.

Thanks! Here's a render of all my -wing mocs (except my Y-wing, can't find the file for some reason) in the pink squadron livery, because I was bored and only figured out how to colorswap stud.io builds in the past month.