Indeed (though I was a big fan of the X-Wing flight sim games in the 90s, and I remember him well). I’m not sure that his identity has ever been given in movie-level canon; I think that all of the Y-Wing pilots who were specifically shown in the film itself were also depicted as having been blown up.
There’s not precisely how the movie goes. TIE fighters are actually deployed twice.
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Some fighters launch to oppose the Rebel fighters. When an Imperial officer informs Tarkin there is “a threat,” the implication is that someone realizes they might be trying to take a shot at the ventilation shaft. Tarkin brushes this off, but someone made the decision to launch fighters before Vader goes out.
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After the initial engagement is well underway, Vader goes to the hangar - seemingly on his own - and tells two pilots that some Rebel fighters have split up from the main group, and to come with him. So he is alarmed as to what’s going on. It’s not explained if he was told of the weakness that Tarkin was informed of, of if it’s just his Force sense telling him there’s a danger.
In a recent episode of Rebels, the Mining Guild seems to be using a variant of the TIE as patrol ships.
Ah yes, came up on google
So, slower and less maneuverable than the standard TIE fighter. But if they are being used as patrol ships, that makes sense.
Max speed 1,200 kph??? Ok, seriously, that isn’t sufficient to reach orbit around anything much larger than a baseball, and it is orders of magnitude slower than you’d need for movement between planets in a system.
No, no. Kaleths per hour. Different system of measurement entirely. Means it’s as fast as the plot needs it to be.
Ok so nobody wants to see an astromech droid with an eHarmony account. They clearly have the ability to understand human speech, and since c-3po can translate is boops and beeps it is clearly communicating in some form of complex language. Why not include the text to speech program that I had on my 286 computer running MS-DOS? Seriously having it speak is trivial in comparison to having it understand human speech.
Nobody wants to argue with an astromech. They don’t really need to be able to speak.
A protocol droid like C-3P0 needs to be interacted with, that is pretty much why it exists.
I feel compelled to point out that you just argued that R2-D2 should have been able to speak in the movies, by pointing out instances of him speaking in the movies. C3PO speaks six million languages, because he was built to speak to a huge variety of different aliens. R2-D2 speaks one language, because he was built to only speak to other machines.
EU note, but the note earlier about TIE fighters not entering the atmosphere and them doing it anyway in SW:TFU is a bit misunderstood. In the EU they do feature extensively in atmospheric conditions, but as raiders and ground support only. They are not air-superiority fighters because the drag on their wings makes dogfighting maneuvers risky.
So, can enter atmosphere, yes. Just a bad idea if the skies are contested.
Always possible that it was just a fan abbreviation expansion, the same way TARDIS started out.
I don’t know how many things I believed because some friend told me, or how many times I got people to believe things I didn’t really know.
Are you nuts ? That’s like saying nobody wants to argue with their GPS. But when that stupid fucking thing is WRONG, it demands to be told ! 
Yes, and the good part is that it can’t argue back in english!
Must have been some really forward-looking fans, considering the acronym was given in the first episode.
R2-D2 can communicate.–Via text screen.
… And the meaning (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space) had been decided on well before that.
Cool. I didn’t know that.
although it’s unclear how much of the translation ability is R2’s, and how much is the X-wing’s flight computer.
When you argue with GPS, it don’t change your flight plan to directly throw you into the nearest star, black hole, or other astonomical no no. Let the astromech win.
Perhaps, but I’m not sure how I would have heard of it, since I didn’t read any fanzines or anything like that. I guess it just made its way through the Fan Grapevine, that someone I knew knew someone else who knew someone else who actually did read the fanzines.