Imperial Medic: Well, pilot, you've survived your first engagement in a TIE Fighter. Unfortunately, you were shot up pretty bad in the process. Imperial Pilot: So it's the walking ticket for me, eh? Imperial Medic: No, you'll continue to fly for the Empire. Walking, on the other hand, that's out of the question. Imperial Pilot: ....Wut?

The one thing a droid would be extremely suited for. I'm guessing the designer is Mandalorian.

The "Cruise Missile Trooper" is the Star Wars/Warhammer 40K crossover we were all waiting for.

I mean, Darth Vader was basically a limbless flesh nugget without his cybernetics. General Grievous was basically just a brain, a pair of lungs and some organs in a cyborg body. These just seem like suicide-aircrafts for crippled imperials in lieu of retirement.

This thing feels like something imperial Japan would create in order to utilise wound soldiers

One of the few instances where installing a servitor from 40k is probably the less horrifying option.

Kinda seems like the ship is some kind of human guided missile rather than an actual fighter.

Its like a 40k Penitent Engine with wings and torpedoes. Also the pilot is better armoured than having just prayers stapled to their body.

My own explanation: What’s the one thing a meat pilot brings that a droid doesn’t? The Force. Where would the empire get a small number of Force sensitive pilots missing hands and legs? Darth Vader’s Inquisitor training. Surviving failures got funneled to mad science projects.

So the Empire made a Sci-Fi version of the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka. It was a cruise missile airplane hybrid...with a cockpit... That only opens from the outside.

I'm 100% positive The Empire would physically graft cyborgs to a couple of engines with ridiculous weapons near at hand. But then again, I've all but lost faith in the Star Wars universe as it is.

Stormtrooper Dan Ain't Got No Legs!

I mean, having no legs solves rather well the issue of blood draining from the head and torso under extreme acceleration, I guess?

"... at Mach F*ck ..." 🤣🤣🤣 I was laughing so hard. Thanks!

Recall that a subset is squishies (Japan in WWII) built and fielded such masterpieces as the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka “manned missile” and the infamous modified Zero fighters intended to dive and impact American ships with a warhead built into the plane while the pilot was aboard. Another subset (Nazi Germany in the same conflict) designed but apparently couldn’t field a manned version of the V-2 “buzz bomb” intended to give it far better accuracy than the unmanned original, which while it technically provided for pilot exit before impact and even a parachute, the pilot would be fortunate to land and survive capture. The pilot was not going to be rescued and was effectively disposable. In other words disposable aircraft with disposable pilots are not unheard of in our real world. There have been rumors that both subsets contemplated training people with various physical disabilities including prior limb amputations as pilots, as the controls could be adapted for use only with the hands and arms, and the absent weight of the missing limbs would extend the range. As far as I know there was no serious discussion of intentionally amputating otherwise functional limbs for such purposes but given the moralities of those subsets of our total population at the time, I wouldn’t put it past them. And yeah, there are no good guys among the major contenders in The Galaxy.

Smart munitions I guess ? Stormtroopers can't shoot straight but maybe they excel at running into things ?

It seems like a sister program to the Dark Trooper program to me since the phase 2s were clones and Storm troopers who were injured in battle to the point of permanent debilitating disability

not even the Jedi were good guys, at least not before Luke revised the whole order in Legends.

Even in death, I still serve. FOR THE EMPEROR!

I realized that close range combat in space is roughly 100,000 miles or so.

I think wookiepedia was just... describing how the toy is, i don't think it's lore?

My personal speculation about TIE fighters is that they actually have pretty good pilot survivability. The... with want of a better word 'wings' are the most likely part to be hit, a hit there will probably disable the fighter but leave the cockpit unharmed and be a relatively quick repair. Depending on the writer, the phase of the moon and a dice roll, blasters might function like HEAT/high explosive or they might be armour-piercing, my interpretation only works if they're on the HEAT/HE end of the spectrum. If I could tweak the lore a bit I'd say that the panels are radiators rather than solar panels. Solar panels are going to be useless in most of the places a TIE will operate, at best they keep a disabled TIE's life support running indefinitely. Radiators would imply the craft is packing some pretty serious kit that a more traditionally-designed fighter would be incapable of keeping cool. To my mind, the massed waves of TIEs and stormtroopers are a display of excess, not a reliance on quantity-over-quality human wave tactics. Consider that stormtrooper armour is pretty decadent compared to everything else shown in the OT - rebels don't get face protection. TIEs are a high-end point-defence system that ends up getting horribly misused because of strategic and tactical failures on the Empire's part (like the Tarkin doctrine focussing so hard on big ships that they don't have an actual fighter-fighter for duties where an ISD is just too big and still using the TIE in those situations when it's horribly outclassed). Narratively, I prefer an Empire that has the tools to win but is held back by the its power structure where loyalty (or more accurately, controllability), not talent is what gets promotions and the entire apparatus of the state is both held together and destroyed by the culture of military worship (militaristic fervour may keep the party in-line but it leads to more and more spending that ultimately starves the population and stirs up unrest).

“Turning out storm troopers without legs” Minefields, this screams minefields to me.

Like strapping Harpoon missiles to a jet ski

I’m not sure if this is purely Legends or was transported to Canon but TIE pilot training often involves some level of brainwashing the pilot into being near-suicidally aggressive where the only worth they have is the ship their flying. A good example is the differences between the basic TIE pilots and the pilots of more advanced Defenders and Avengers with the former being uncaring for their own survival much of the time and the latter mostly being as aggressive as their shields and armor allow. This is also the reason TIE Interceptors are feared because the pilots of those are an even mix between the guys who don’t care if they come back alive just as long as you don’t either, and the guy’s with actually good ships. But back on topic of this…thing. My best guess this is a predecessor, at least in principle, to the Legends Shadow Droid, aka a brain implanted into a star fighter. This thing likely takes the now self-destructively crazy pilots who for some reason or another can’t pilot normal TIEs and grafts them into a blazing fast weapons platform that’s sole purpose to exist is to fall from the sky like a bat out of hell, shooting everything in its way until they find the intended target at which point they use the torpedoes and if they aren’t enough or the pilot is angry enough, themselves. There won’t be any pictures of your pilots being brutally injured if there’s nothing left of your pilots.

This looks like the Star Wars version of a guy in a flatboat wielding a stinger missile launcher. And wearing concrete jeans.

Best possible use of an airlock. Bella Ciao

Imperial Healthcare and Unhealthcare at its finest lmao.

Sounds like a cheap later generation Cylon Raider

I can't remember the name of it, but the DOD wanted a deployment system to send troops anywhere in the world in hours using suborbital flight. This made me think about that

Strikes me as a funky mix of IJN minisub, Kaiten and Okha (Baka).

Imagine graduating from the academy, reporting to your commodore for assignment orders, and reading "Cruise Missile Trooper".

That is, very possibly, the most 40k thing Star Wars ever did.

Holy shit, I forgot all about that ship, I had one as a kid and it was probably the coolest action figure type toy I had ever owned.

I have an alternate theory about TIE fighters - specifically, their relatively low price compared to Rebel fighters. The low price isn't intended to make TIE fighters disposable, but rather to make them easy to hand out like party favors to pretty much every Imperial operation of any appreciable size. If it's big enough to have a ladder, there's a fair chance it will have its own personal air-support package. Everything from mile-long battleships and major starbases, down to clapped-out light cruisers from before the Clone Wars and remote listening posts at the ass-end of the galaxy, if it has the Imperial flag symbol stenciled on it, the roar of TIE engines probably isn't far off. As for this thing... Well, the Empire did get up to an awful lot of twisted shit, but this thing seems to require an awful lot of very specific WIAs to make them a routine part of Imperial Navy doctrine. I think it's more likely these are canon, but in terms of being Rebel propaganda about how awful the Empire is rather than actually being a standard practice. Besides which, it's an Imperial _Navy_ craft, but relies on a _Stormtrooper_ to pilot it? Yeah, I call BS on that. The Stormtrooper Corps isn't part of the Imperial Navy - or for that matter, the Imperial Army. The various branches of the Imperial military can conscript all they want, but they can't just poach already-recruited personnel from the other branches.

This is very clearly an offshoot of the Dark Trooper project where clones were turned into serivotors al la WH40k. Which only raises the question of how did that Magos' gahler field glitch to get them to such a wonderful place?

Oh hey, I had a Cruisemissile Trooper when I was a kid. I was always annoyed that the figure didn't come out of it.

Getting a strong "japanese special attack unit" vibe from this thing.

Someone said "Let's cross a Delta-7 with a Y-wing, but so small that the pilots would have to be Dugs". Never mind that the Empire doesn't employ Dug pilots.

18:17 Oops, you forgot all about Darth Vader. He was almost as much machine as human with all his limbs and a good bit of his torso cybernetic.

In the Pre-Disney cannon there was a race of lizard people who strapped prisoners into fighters to act as the “flight computer”.

Sounds like someone in the -toy department- empire had seen the movie mega force and figured “those flying bikes seem entirely too safe, let’s make a space to aerospace skiff version with the equivalent power to a PT boat and skip on the pilot comforts like a windshield”. Honestly tho it screams of leftover stock and some doofus throwing in an explanation that makes way too much sense given the big empire ships don’t even launch fighters until their anti-frigate/corvette/bomber point defence systems have been utterly crippled. No wonder ambush tactics were so effective. The empire would launch escape pods before they would ever disgrace themselves by putting their least cherished forces into the fight.

That's why I like that theory about the humans in star wars actually being bees so much. It makes so much more sense for the empire to fight like that if that's the case. Because that's what bees do, they literally swarm their enemies, sending as many of their soldiers as they can, while fully expecting most of them to die in the process, until they overwhelm their enemy. And it works. It works so well in fact that bees don't have to come up with tactics or strategy. They just send more bees until the threat goes away. And that's exactly what the empire does. But the rebels are composed of multiple alien species and so they all add their own ways of fighting into their combined military forces

maybe turning the storm trooper into a cruise missle is cheaper than the batha tanks

Considering how they recycled Vader into a Sithborg, I guess it makes sense.

Asteroid Petes tip of the day: Any buerocratic polity of one million members or more is best interacted with from a distance of lightyears.

I had one of those toys it was fun to play with and I gave it custom battle damage

Clicked this video because I vividly recall having this toy as a child.

Maybe the cruise missile trooper corps is an enlistment option for paraplegics?

The vehicle itself is the 3rd missle.

Anyone else think the main section looks vaguely like the Jedi starfighter?

The thing that caught my eye on the toy was the dorsal panel behind the cockpit. Looks like an F-35 with the cockpit at the wrong end.

After seeing what that A-Wing did in the Battle above Endor, I was expecting something similar from this craft.

Sounds like injured troops being given a new role like the shadow droid fighters from legends (where they kept just the brain and discarded the body)

Its for all the stormies injured on planets with small inhabitants. Also known as ankleshark worlds.

It's certainly not out of character for the empire. Given their express origins as a nazi analogue, consider the real-life Fieseler Fi 103R. Just a straight up proto- cruise missile with a guy inside to pilot it on a one-way trip. As to good guys... , it was pretty obvious what you meant. The earlier writers kept thinking they wrote unambiguously good guys, and just failed to think half the things they introduced through at all. Legal slavery and child abduction means you aren't good guys. Could be the best person in the room, but you're not good. The new stuff at least occasionally notices that it's "obvious good guys" have been pretty bad at the whole "good" thing.

Beautifully done as always. Looking at the design of the Cruise Missile Trooper here, I have to wonder if it isn't designed as a kinetic kill weapon once the Protons have been deployed. "One last service to the Empire" has kind of a ring to it.

I had this toy. I was getting a little old to play with toys, but we were in the middle of a Star Wars revival and toy collecting was becoming a thing. I thought this ship looked cool so I bought it with my own money for $10 or so. I instantly regretted it because the pilot wasn't removable. It wasn't even a complete dude. I felt ripped off because I was more interested in the unique figure than the little space plane. If they couldn't include a removable pilot then they should have put some droid body in there. Paint an R2 or C3PO black and glue it in, I don't care. It would have looked better than half a Stormtrooper in an open cockpit space ship, Red Baron style.

I remember a short story that was published in my literature textbook when I was in 4th grade or so. It was about a future society where no one knew how to do math anymore, because calculators exist. Well, mankind was in a long range ballistic space missile war with some obvious soviet stand ins, and missiles are getting expensive. Well, the main character started doodling around with math, and started discovering it all over again. Clearly, the government put him to work on a secret military project, with the eventual goal of replacing all those expensive computer guided missiles with MANNED MISSILES! Our protagonist then kills himself. That's how dumb this is.

So that's what that thing was. I had that toy lying around for the longest time, trying to puzzle out what was going on there.

Becasue most people still cant understand the word "context"

Dear god, i remember owning that toy. 90% sure it's still somewhere in my parents attic.

I had one of these as a kid! Awesome to see you talk about it. Definitely a strange craft.

I can't find a video anywhere, but I remember a cutscene in Front Mission 3(?) where a mech was carried by 2 cruise missiles and detached before they hit their target. That seemed like a really neat way to combine a weapon and troop delivery system. This abomination, not so much.

WOOO! A video made off my Twitter post to the SCS Dockmaster!

Trooper Missiles? _Tanya von Degurechaff has entered the chat_

"OH so we're with the good guys"! "We don't do that here".

And Tie Fighters are a CLEAR Example of how DISNEY Doesn’t UNDERSTAND Star Wars…

Imperial Kamikazes are what keeps the rebels awake at night. I would imagine this thing is meant to severely damage a Rebel Alliance warship.

Mwa-hahahahahahaha! "I can't breath, I can't BREATH!"

The Cruise Missile Trooper toy, i use to have that when i was a kid!

Maybe somewhere between a Dreadnaught from 40K and the reuse-p system from the Gundam Thunderbolt timeline.

After seeing its design when opened up, especially from the top. I think I see how Lucasfilm probably used this crafts design for the Jedi Starfighter. Other than the additional wings and missing cockpit canopy, it looks like an early prototype of the Jedi Starfighter years before the prequels.

Love. This!! I had this toy when it first came out. And my head canon at the time had all sorts of crazy (meaning nightmarish) scenarios on why this thing exists. Bravo on this episode!! Seriously, it shocked the heck out of me when I saw the thumbnail! (A small note, turn this over, keep the trooper shielding/wings closed, open the "Proton Torpedo" launchers, and I had a "stealth starship" from Star Trek... 😁 )

I have that toy. I usually kept it folded up so it looked more like a SD variant lol

"Wouldn't be the first time so step on up." Wiser words are few and far between. 100%.

Irony is these things actually do serve a valid strategic/tactical use when attacking planets. They could theoretically be so small and have some sensor-baffling tech to keep planetary sensors from detecting them in time, allowing them to zip in and take out planetary shield generators or other key targets before said planetary shield can get raised. This, if successful, would be a significant benefit since once that kind of shield goes up you basically have yourself a siege unless there's a death star handy.

Quick question, what microphone do you use?

Clearly it is a craft intended for a one way trip. Maybe as punishment?

Its a good thing this came out before the Holdo maneuver.

I remember owning one of these back when Star Wars was good.

Genreal Grievous and Dart Vader are both cybernetic organisms, just like the Cruise Missile Trooper would be. Though the Cruise Trooper is defintely more Hororific.

Kelkars of any stripe are all absurd. If you don't get the reference, return to Burroughs.

Reminds me more of those gretchin guided missiles rather than a dreadnaught.

There was a purpose built aircraft in we humies second global kerfluffle that was similar. The allies of the USAans called them Baka, the Japanese word for fool. This was called by the Japanese as the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka (Cherry Blossom). The craft depicted seems similar in function to that one.

Looks more like a Cruise Missletrooper.

3:28 thanks for correcting my usage about the 'Hakenkreutz' rather than the Hindu symbol.

i would switch the pilot out for a dark trooper

OH MY GOD, the Cruise Missile Trooper, I completely forgot about this toy! I must've had at least two of them. I totally forgot it existed. Seriously, where did this thing even come from? It sure didn't appear in the films.

Vaguely remember this toy, didn't have it myself though. Toy lines often exemplify the "Rule of Cool", but for ten year old boys. Toys being canon can make things very weird. Also still hoping for a video about the durable old workhorse, the Carrack-class light cruiser. The ship was viable in the Star Wars universe from before the Clone Wars through the Galactic Civil War but seems to have been overshadowed by the Arquitens-class (also a good ship) in newer media and half forgotten.

Yay the intro is back!🎉

I fully agree on the point that real life politics should only be on this channel if they are used to illustrate whatever in universe example is in need of a more relatable explanation. Otherwise nice vid and I´m pretty sure that unlike with Ties, the trooper here is "bolted" to the craft instead of being able to climb in and out by himself. Sounds a bit more like a 40k version of those japanese kamikaze flying bombs from WW2 ported over to SW. And considering how much WW2 "nostalgia" contributed to utterly fucked and retarded pseudo tech and tactics in SW (big reason why the entire franchise sucks ever since they started to "explain" crap) I´m not even suprised someone managed to recreate that particular piece of horrible technology there as well.

8:15 clearly labeled $16.99

Star Wars-Hammer 40,000? For WHICH Emperor? That is sooo 40K. Meld a wounded soldier that still wants to serve, or a "volunteer" into it. What greater sacrifice is there? Human Fodder Corp.

Oh man, I actually remember my brother and I having these as kids and the best we could make sense of them were to be like surgical insertion troops or something. Didn't think they'd be kamikazi cyborgs on a one way trip to hell. Also notice the sawtoothed edges on the folding wings and cockpit hatch. This was clearly inspired by the Stealth Fighters of the 80s and 90s.

65how dos a starwars meeting begin? With the first order on the agenda.

Drop pod for scouts? But then why integrate the pilot? And if not why not a droid brain that’s loyal enough to suicide crash?

I've always pronounced the GAT-12 as "Skip Ray" but now I wonder if I was wrong this entire time.

Why? Tie bombers exist! Also the Tie saber! Though that might be a fan creation. The thing is a b wing and tie mashed together....

I could see this as a product intended for the Kenner "G.I. Joe" product line ... Cobra Commander is screeching "Where the FRACK are my Cruise Missile Troopers" Because some corporate drone misfiled a product proposal....