>>I mean, I don't like the whole retro-tech thing in general...The result,
>>by all logic, would be a tortured creation of 'modern' technology
>>forced into ancient forms, like building a modern warship in the shape
>>of one of Nelson's Ships of the Line. It would be either a cripple, a
>>joke or a monstrous money pit.
>
>Consider your typical fighters built by spacefaring races, accustomed
>to set-piece battles between fleets fought in the voids between
>worlds. They'd be highly optimized for fighting in a vacuum, with just
>enough atmospheric capability to usually avoid crashing when landing
>on a planet.
>
>Then along come designs optimized, in the pressure cooker R&D
>environment of Earth's Cold War, for atmospheric combat. With
>appropriate tech upgrades, they can hold their own in vacuum--after
>all, in space nobody cares if you're a cube--but down in the soup,
>nothing built primarily for space can touch them.

What. What the hell is this idea, where does it come from. You have a gods damned starfighter, and it is riding a nuclear pulse thruster at minimum. You are project goddamn Pluto, you do not need to slow down to deal with these plebians, and measly forces like drag and lift scarcely matter at all in the face of the raw power that you can throw at them. If you can't SSTO at least twice without refueling in your starfighter, how exactly do you intend to get home from the most basic of attack packages? After all, every starfighter needs to leave it's mothership, accelerate to attack, then reverse acceleration and head home, before finally killing velocity relative to the mothership. Everyone says that the TIE has problems banking in atmosphere because of it's big cross section-nobody ever asks if it has the power to just muscle the air out of it's way in a supersonic fireball.

>An in-story parallel would be the steam technology of Ishiyama, where
>they've taken something largely abandoned on Earth by the late 20th
>century and advanced it to the point where it can power starships.

*twitch*
I'm going to permanently block this statement from my memory. I mean...no, I won't tear this concept the hole it deserves.

>That's how I envision the whole "RetroTech" thing springing to life.
>"Y'know, those crazy Earthers did things with aerodynamics that nobody
>else thought to do, simply because nobody else thought it was
>important. Maybe we can, um, 'borrow' some of that work."
the idea that you can't do better with six months of modern models and a couple thousand rented 3PO units slaved together like the supercomputers made of XBOXs, makes me sad. The dream of progress is dead. The design of anything that fights in the air or in space stopped for all intents in purposes in 1970.