>Basically, what happened was this: Rayna Tangril, a GENOM fighter
>pilot with an engineering background, looked at the state of the art
>in GENOM's space fighters fairly early in her career, around 2350, and
>saw that there was a better way to do things. The problem was, her
>vision was something more along the lines of the TIE Advanced, and she
>couldn't get a project as bold as that approved in the corporate
>climate at the time. She had to keep refining her proposed fighter
>type, stripping it down, until she finally arrived at the
>no-frills-at-all T.I.E. type. It wasn't what she wanted to build, and
>it wouldn't improve a GENOM pilot's chances much, but the Lancer II
>was so old and outclassed at that point that the T.I.E. wasn't a step
>down, anyway.
>
>The TIE/ln was an improved T.I.E., introduced as much to test the
>waters for the possibility of refining the series as to actually
>improve the breed. She got it through without much trouble, and her
>influence within the Military Arm was growing. The TIE/i
>(Interceptor) was the next step, and was actually a fairly large leap
>toward what she was after. It was a fairly capable starfighter,
>pretty fast, very agile and decently armed, though it still lacked
>shields. It was the standard GENOM fighter by the War of Corporate
>Occupation, and the TIE/a (Advanced) was in the prototype stages,
>though not well-funded.
>
>After that, it took a couple of years for things to settle, which is
>why she was still flying the TIE/a x1 prototype in Twilight.
>In the new GENOM climate, her ideas met with a much more receptive
>audience, and the Military Arm had standardized on the TIE/a by 2396.
>
>In 2405, they're still standardized on an improved version (Mark III),
>but the next generation is rumored to be on the drawing board.

Ah, excellent! Thanks for the information, I appreciate it. I should go back to TIE Fighter and see exactly whether it was TIE/In or TIE/ln...it has, after all, been a while. Since you're not using Assault Gunboats and there's only one more generation of TIE Fighters to go (the "man, Rayna must have been on the GOOD stuff when she designed this, but damn it still rocks" TIE Defender), I imagine we'll be in Advanced revisions for a while yet. Hopefully they'll get better shields. The ones they had were very flimsy...A-wing level, certainly.

--"I invoke the rites of fiery Muspelheim, and give thy soul up to the inferno's embrace..."