Argai-class battlebird

(+) Replaceable wings; learning from the failings of the Predator-class, each wing on an Argai-class was replaceable and a single unit comes with spares for each wing. Additional spares can be purchased and a salvage program existed where any damaged, defective, or faulty wing could be returned to the Santhe Corporation's distribution centers in exchange for a brand new replacement.

(+) Agile; the combined effort between the pilot, inertial compensator network, and both droid brains made the fighter extremely dexterous in and out of dogfights.

(-) Droid-driven; despite precautions existing to prevent the disruption of the sophisticated network of computers that made the craft operational, enough ionic damage could short out one or both of the droid brains and lock the fighter into its last used power distribution and wing posture; this could leave the fighter with most of its power dedicated to shields and less effective in combat, or, unable to vent enough heat when the weapons discharged.

(-) Landing Requirements; fighters hung inside hangars on specialized tracks or attached to the hulls of larger ships using magnatomic grips located on the wing tips.

It carried a higher than normal price tag for a fighter in the TIE line at 90,000 credits but bulk shipments received complementary landing tracks and additional spare wings. Crewing the craft was one pilot and two droid brains in a redesigned TIE cockpit that hoped to improve over the default TIE Predator grill while still retaining the characteristic look customers had come to know, this new viewport also served as the embarkation hatch for the organic crew member. Located around the pilot's seat were deployment hatches for the ship's survival capsule, though unable to carry any additional cargo, buyers were advised to outfit their pilots with weapons and emergency rations should they need to eject. Operationally, the craft utilized ionization reactors like its predecessors allowing it to operate indefinitely in space, however, onboard environmental systems were only designed to last a day at most.

Utilizing the same technology found in the Predator-class starfighter, the Argai-class starfighter had four wings capable of assuming varying positions to best optimize speed, profile, and heat-dispersion. These wings were controlled by an onboard droid brain due to the delicate nature of the wing attachment nodes and featured a network of inertial compensators rather than a centrally located one to prevent structural damage to the attachment nodes of the wings when performing complex maneuvers. A secondary droid brain was required in order to process and coordinate these systems and a number of other vital operations, having proven its capabilities in other starfighter models, the R9-series astromech was chosen to for these tasks and for its astrogation capabilities. There were reports from various pilots that their integrated R9s became increasingly bent on their own preservation, while initially thought of as a boon, often times these R-series droid brains would shunt power toward shields when in combat situations, it was for this reason that constant memory wipes were viewed as mandatory.

Defensively, the craft possessed higher than average defenses such as a reinforced shield generator to provide the craft with ray and particle shielding comparable to a Scimitar assault bomber and a reinforced duraplast hull that granted the craft a measure of damage resistance to both conventional weaponry such as laser cannons and ion cannons along with defense against kinetic weapons, electromagnetic weapons, small-end explosions, and even lightsabers should the pilot find themselves engaging a lightsaber wielder. Though used primarily in a singular one-on-one capacity or in hit-and-run tactics, the craft was equipped with a jamming suite capable of blinding enemy starfighters and disrupting enemy target locks; such a system did not discriminate between friend or foe and as a result did not see much use in large-scale battles unless the pilot sought to prevent an enemy from targeting them or a larger capital ship with torpedoes and missiles. It was in offense that the fighter featured some of the more notable SFS technologies, such as weaponry that could be fired in a pairs or quartets. Additionally, it was possible by assuming a higher heat dispersion posture to fire both the laser cannons and ion cannons simultaneously in pairs or as a full quartet barrage.