And I like your take on the Red 3 Pyro as Red 9. Gonna keep the broken-off cannon tip?
Bandai 1/72 Red Squadron
- Thread starter Analyzer
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Analyzer
Master Member
Nah. I wonder if that was intentional or not since Red 3 hero has the cannon tip and this was just intended as a pyro
While I like copying the models closely, I do prefer things like actual cockpits, canopy glass and pilots over the studio model look. Like with the Falcon, I actually prefer the PG cockpit over trying to reproduce the filming model cockpit
Yup. Me, too. Why I asked. I didn't want to assume one way or the other. So this leaves just 11 and 12 to figure out...
Analyzer
Master Member
Wait... So they had a model for it, but showed the unnamed Red 12 pilot 'sploding with the detonating Red 10 model...?
Analyzer
Master Member
They had a lot of continuity issues. I guess the idea was no one would ever scrutinize things that much
LIke the Red 6 explosion, maybe the Red 12 was not good enough for on screen so they used one of those "stick" with wings models
IN many shots they used whatever they had on hand. Take this for example. That is two Red 5's with Red Leader
Then there is this food for thought... The Members of Red Squadron
what the author refers to as the "definitive" roster based on ANH, Rogue One and other sources
- Garven Dreis, Red Leader
- Wedge Antilles, Red 2
- Biggs Darklighter, Red 3
- John D. Branon, Red 4
- Luke Skywalker, Red 5
- Jek Porkins, Red 6
- Elyhek Rue, Red 7
- Zal Dinnes, Red 8
- Nozzo Naytaan, Red 9
- Theron Nett, Red 10
- Ralo Surrel, Red 11
- Puck Naeco, Red 12
- Harb Binli, grounded
- Bren Quersey, grounded
- Wenton Chan, grounded
And there is also this for Red 12 from Rogue One
Richard Glover Interview – The Actor Behind X-Wing Pilot Red 12 in Rogue One.
“Red and Gold Squadrons, attack formation. Defend the fleet.”―Admrial Raddus giving Red and Gold Squadrons their orders I was recently lucky enough to interview actor Richard Glover abo…
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Yeah, that's the sort of thing I refer to elsewhere on here as the people making the newer content not "doing their homework" -- or, rather, not doing it honestly. People who grew up with the EU as "their Star Wars" have a tendency to not think to question it, to ask whether those content creators back in the '90s were right or wrong, to go back to first sources and see what was what and go from there. See problems like Rogue "Squadron", five-mile-long Super Star Destroyers, crystal-focused optical lightsabers, nearly every minor character's name and rank, and so on. Due to VHS pan-and-scan copies of Star Wars being what people had on hand to watch, a lot of peripheral detail was "lost" until the '00s, when widescreen started to really be a thing...
The guy in the light jacket in the Death Star conference room was (re)discovered, and, since Heir to the Empire had come out prior, a lot of people went "ZOMG it's a Grand Admiral!", despite the fact that he wasn't and there was no such thing at the time the film was made. Even Kenner, shortly before Hasbro buying them, when they did the Death Star conference room set, depicted that character in an all-white standard-cut Imperial uniform, which was not what he was wearing in the film, either cut or color. That was the mid-'90s. As recently as Rogue One, the concept artist who designed Krennic wanted to hearken back to the "white uniformed Grand Admiral in Star Wars". ARG! And he's a Lucasfilm employee!
So I have a tendency, since Return of the Jedi, to at least partially disregard things as errors or sloppiness that are errors or sloppiness. And anything in the ancillary material -- and the newer films -- relies on the brains working on those things to get their information and interpretation of it correct. Any Red Group/Squad information produced after 1983 has to gibe with the OT that introduced it. From Star Wars/ANH, we can confirm the presence of:
• X-Wing Red 1/Red Leader
• X-Wing Red 2/Wedge
• X-Wing Red 3/Biggs
• X-Wing Red 4/John D
• X-Wing Red 5/Luke Skywalker
• X-Wing Red 6/Porkins
• Red 7
• Red 9
• X-Wing Red 10
• Red 11
• X-Wing Red 12
From ROTJ, we can confirm the presence of, then:
• X-Wing Red 1/Wedge
• Y-Wing Red 2
• A-Wing Red 3
• X-Wing Red 5/Luke Skywalker
All other names and ships are ex post facto, and this doesn't take into consideration that the pilot who answers to Wedge's good shot, Red Two" line is the same actor who called in earlier as Gray Leader. I just like the idea of a Red Group Y-Wing, like Red Jammer, and like the idea that RTOJ Red 2 is Red Jammer and that they were at Yavin. I honestly don't care all that much about the remaining pilots' names, not compared to consistent depiction. And Rogue One got enough other things wrong or... questionably right that I feel free to ignore the content that clashes, such as that Red 5 somehow getting brought back to Yavin along with the pilot's helmet for Luke to use three days later...? The stripes on Luke's ship were not freshly painted.
My take is that since there is no dialogue, no narrative callouts, and no model, pyro or hero, for Red (Blue) 8, there wasn't one present at the Battle of Yavin. I'm going to go back tonight and re-watch the Battle of Scarif to see what the ships and dialogue show before I comment further. But I regard the Visual Guide info as being as iffy as the older EU stuff, in that if it contradicts primary source material (the original film in 1977), I dismiss it. That means I don't feel beholden to there being a Red 8 present, nor to Reds 7, 9, and 11 being X-Wings.
The guy in the light jacket in the Death Star conference room was (re)discovered, and, since Heir to the Empire had come out prior, a lot of people went "ZOMG it's a Grand Admiral!", despite the fact that he wasn't and there was no such thing at the time the film was made. Even Kenner, shortly before Hasbro buying them, when they did the Death Star conference room set, depicted that character in an all-white standard-cut Imperial uniform, which was not what he was wearing in the film, either cut or color. That was the mid-'90s. As recently as Rogue One, the concept artist who designed Krennic wanted to hearken back to the "white uniformed Grand Admiral in Star Wars". ARG! And he's a Lucasfilm employee!
So I have a tendency, since Return of the Jedi, to at least partially disregard things as errors or sloppiness that are errors or sloppiness. And anything in the ancillary material -- and the newer films -- relies on the brains working on those things to get their information and interpretation of it correct. Any Red Group/Squad information produced after 1983 has to gibe with the OT that introduced it. From Star Wars/ANH, we can confirm the presence of:
• X-Wing Red 1/Red Leader
• X-Wing Red 2/Wedge
• X-Wing Red 3/Biggs
• X-Wing Red 4/John D
• X-Wing Red 5/Luke Skywalker
• X-Wing Red 6/Porkins
• Red 7
• Red 9
• X-Wing Red 10
• Red 11
• X-Wing Red 12
From ROTJ, we can confirm the presence of, then:
• X-Wing Red 1/Wedge
• Y-Wing Red 2
• A-Wing Red 3
• X-Wing Red 5/Luke Skywalker
All other names and ships are ex post facto, and this doesn't take into consideration that the pilot who answers to Wedge's good shot, Red Two" line is the same actor who called in earlier as Gray Leader. I just like the idea of a Red Group Y-Wing, like Red Jammer, and like the idea that RTOJ Red 2 is Red Jammer and that they were at Yavin. I honestly don't care all that much about the remaining pilots' names, not compared to consistent depiction. And Rogue One got enough other things wrong or... questionably right that I feel free to ignore the content that clashes, such as that Red 5 somehow getting brought back to Yavin along with the pilot's helmet for Luke to use three days later...? The stripes on Luke's ship were not freshly painted.
My take is that since there is no dialogue, no narrative callouts, and no model, pyro or hero, for Red (Blue) 8, there wasn't one present at the Battle of Yavin. I'm going to go back tonight and re-watch the Battle of Scarif to see what the ships and dialogue show before I comment further. But I regard the Visual Guide info as being as iffy as the older EU stuff, in that if it contradicts primary source material (the original film in 1977), I dismiss it. That means I don't feel beholden to there being a Red 8 present, nor to Reds 7, 9, and 11 being X-Wings.
Analyzer
Master Member
For sure is a lot of retconning going on and in many ways I am glad the EU was set aside as non-canon.
I also agree with the sentiment of not having a Red 8 present, nor to Reds 7, 9, and 11 having to be X-Wings.
It very might well be possible to have a Red "X-Wing" Squadron that is part of a Red Group or whatever
to your earlier point
In the United States Air Force, the squadron is the principal organizational unit. An aggregation of two or more USAF squadrons will be designated as a group and two or more groups will be designated as a wing.
USAF squadrons may be flying units composed of pilots and flight crews, with designations such as fighter squadron, bomb squadron, or airlift squadron. Fighter squadrons may support between 18 and 24 aircraft, while larger aircraft flying squadrons (e.g., bomber, cargo, reconnaissance) may support fewer aircraft. However, non-flying units also exist at the squadron level, such as missile squadrons, aircraft maintenance squadrons, intelligence squadrons, aerospace medicine squadrons, security forces squadrons, civil engineering squadrons and force support squadrons, as well as numerous other examples.[
*nod* I've had all that in mind at least since high school. My granddad was a B-17 pilot in WWII, so I grew up internalizing the structure. The problem we face is George's weird combination of utterly useless information he feels it important to impart... and potentially useful information he never clarifies (or contradicts in one or more interviews).
He specifically stated he liked the sounds of certain words and used them wherever they felt appropriate to him. The three that have made my life most difficult have been "group," "squad," and "commander." He throws them around so much they're practically white noise -- imparting almost no useful data. In Star Wars, the pilots and base command staff refer to each of the fighter units as "group" and "squad" interchangeably. And when Red Leader calls for the check-in, it's with the line, "All wings, report in." What the hell are we supposed to do with that? In Empire, one of the deck officers in the hangar tells another, "Groups seven and ten will stay behind to fly the speeders" -- of Rogue Group. Two groups together make a group? *headdesk*
The thing I noticed with the visual storytelling over the course of the OT, PT, and EU has been the blue-red-yellow hierarchy. Imperial rank badges, Rebel fighter "groups", Mandalorian Protector proficiency grades, clone trooper ranks... Everywhere, yellow (or gold) is superior to red is superior to blue. But all together are part of a larger whole. What always made the most sense, to me, was that, in the Rebellion, Gold, Red, and Blue squadrons (even though the word never appears in the films) make up each Group, which has a name rather than a number (Rogue or Renegade, for instance). Maybe at one time, the squadrons were stratified by craft type and mission rôle, but by the time we get to ANH it's more catch-as-catch-can. Maybe they try to have as many of one type in a squadron as possible, but don't begrudge this or that oddball if pilot preference and experience would enhance survivability. And many of the helmet markings seem to be more unit markings than personal deco, given their re-use in Empire and Jedi. Even Han's blast-shield helmet showed up again in ROTJ on a Rebel pilot, albeit with amber lens so she could see. And given they're kind of scattered all over the place in the organization, I take that to mean they were more concerned with filling table-of-organization holes than keeping some particular fighter group together.
Related, one of the other things we as fans now just have to deal with is George foreshortening his own timeline out of filmic necessity, when he cut the Obi-Wan films from six to three. Now, to tie everything up, the Clone Wars end, the Jedi are exterminated, Anakin becomes Vader, the Skywalker twins are born, Padmé dies, and the Empire is declared, all on the same day. At the time Star Wars was written, it was a more spread-out process, with the Empire being, at that point, five to ten years old, max, with many in the Rebellion being Republic veterans, despite being young-ish. Biggs wasn't the Imperial fighter pilot the EU portrayed him as. He went to an Outer Rim merchantmarine-equivalent academy, came back to see Luke as the newly-commissioned second mate of a freighter, but said he was going to jump ship and try to hook up with the Rebellion, rather than wait around to get drafted into Imperial service. Warned Luke that the Empire was nationalizing trade int he core systems and it was only a matter of time before they turned their attention to the Outer Rim. So Red 12 in Star Wars and Janson in Empire both having the same helmet markings, even though they were both young-ish, didn't mean to me they hadn't served in the Republic Navy prior to the Empire.
So I don't know what to do about all of that lore. If "groups seven and ten" were a couple of squadrons, part, but not all, of Rogue Group, of which Luke was CAG, what would be the third squadron if there are two numbers between seven and ten? Are the squadrons numbered differently, and then combines into whichever Group? Later inconsistencies aside, the Imperial 181st was a three-squadron Starfighter Group. The Imperial scheme was a two-letter wing/posting code, the Group number, and the ship within the Group, irrespective of squadron, which seemed to get shuffled from time to time, probably to prevent developing close friendships or, worse, conspiracy. The Empire seems to have just numbered the Groups as they were formed. I wonder if Rebel squadrons are numbered thus, and non-consecutive squadrons end up in the same Group.
I know, I know. It's all a lot of noodling for stuff that ultimately probably doesn't matter to building plastic model spaceships. I don't know how much context you want to include in your display. I do know if you want to display them in flight, that sorta requires knowing what the pilots and droids look like, so there's that. I toss all this in as grist for your mill. Look forward to seeing what you do with it.
Analyzer
Master Member
I find it all fascinating and I love deep dives like this...I know, I know. It's all a lot of noodling for stuff that ultimately probably doesn't matter to building plastic model spaceships. I don't know how much context you want to include in your display. I do know if you want to display them in flight, that sorta requires knowing what the pilots and droids look like, so there's that. I toss all this in as grist for your mill. Look forward to seeing what you do with it.
Analyzer
Master Member
For most people I am sure it is the same. It is/was for me
But I guess it is akin to being a programmer and seeing how hacking is portrayed in movies. It is ridiculous
or playing guitar and seeing someone "playing" one in a movie and it drives me nuts because they clearly are not playing or moving their fingers and hands anything remotely like a guitar player would
Too much familiarity with a subject can snap you out of a movie when it is butchered or done badly by people who don't really know or understand the subject
I never noticed an issue with the group, squadron, wing hierarchy in general before, but I can see now how they kind of just used those terms without understanding them and why it would it would bother some with the inconsistency
Maybe in a galaxy far, far, away the terms have different meanings than those in the US military.
After all, wing and group in Commonwealth countries have different implications than in the US. Clearly "wing" is supposed to mean "pilot and vehicle" in Star Wars as they "report in" in strange random order so that the audience can get a sense of who is who.
(I mean, obviously the correct answer is that Lucas and the other script writers weren't experts in military history, but that's a whole other thing!)
After all, wing and group in Commonwealth countries have different implications than in the US. Clearly "wing" is supposed to mean "pilot and vehicle" in Star Wars as they "report in" in strange random order so that the audience can get a sense of who is who.
(I mean, obviously the correct answer is that Lucas and the other script writers weren't experts in military history, but that's a whole other thing!)
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Analyzer
Master Member
There is always that as wellMaybe in a galaxy far, far, away the terms have different meanings that in the US military.
After all, wing and group in Commonwealth countries have different implications than in the US.
(I mean, obviously the correct answer is that Lucas and the other script writers weren't experts in military history, but that's a whole other thing!)
Yup. If it weren't for group and squad getting used interchangeably, I'd almost say the order was reversed -- wings in a group in a squad. But George always went with what looked and sounded best in the moment, never mind consistency. Even as late as ROTJ, VCRs were uncommon and expensive, never mind laser discs. The movies were made by people who never imagined anyone would ever do more than see them a few times at the cinema and then move on to other things in their lives. It was how George edited the space battle in ROTJ -- what worked best for the moment. This is how Gray Leader was also Red 2. From watching the BTS footage and outtakes, with a few exceptions, he'd give the same list of lines to all the background pilots and film their takes on them, and then use the ones he liked, never mind continuity.
It's left to us poor schlubs to wring some consistency from it all.
It's left to us poor schlubs to wring some consistency from it all.
Fantastic, sir. I am caught in the frustrating place of wanting you to take your time because the results are so worth the wait... and wanting you to get everything done NOW.
thud83
New Member
I love your work on Red 6! Very nice!
I am enjoying the discussion about starfighter battles. My day job is heavily involved with military flying, and one of my hobbies is military (specifically aviation) history. For the last several years, I've been trying to come up with a narrative that describes the Battle of Yavin that coincides with what we see on screen, and yet makes sense of the things that seem not to make sense.
I haven't been successful.
The main problem is that the script of ANH for the battle used a lot of dialogue directly ripped from the WW2 movies that Lucas enjoyed. During the editing process, any sense of order was sacrificed for a narrative which flowed on screen without getting wrapped up in details. The same can be said for the Battle of Endor in RotJ. I recently discovered a youtube video showing the performances of three female pilots (all of which were cut). It shows all three reciting the same lines; lines we heard other pilots say in the version of the movie we ended up with.
For better of worse, I think we are all stuck with our individual head canon
If anyone is interested, PM me or reply here and we can discuss how we think it SHOULD have been. I've got pages of completely unimportant supposition that I'm willing to share
I am enjoying the discussion about starfighter battles. My day job is heavily involved with military flying, and one of my hobbies is military (specifically aviation) history. For the last several years, I've been trying to come up with a narrative that describes the Battle of Yavin that coincides with what we see on screen, and yet makes sense of the things that seem not to make sense.
I haven't been successful.
The main problem is that the script of ANH for the battle used a lot of dialogue directly ripped from the WW2 movies that Lucas enjoyed. During the editing process, any sense of order was sacrificed for a narrative which flowed on screen without getting wrapped up in details. The same can be said for the Battle of Endor in RotJ. I recently discovered a youtube video showing the performances of three female pilots (all of which were cut). It shows all three reciting the same lines; lines we heard other pilots say in the version of the movie we ended up with.
For better of worse, I think we are all stuck with our individual head canon
If anyone is interested, PM me or reply here and we can discuss how we think it SHOULD have been. I've got pages of completely unimportant supposition that I'm willing to share
