The X-wing starfighter is a name applied to a family of fictional spacecraft manufactured by the Incom Corporation from the Star Wars franchise. Named for the distinctive shape made when its s-foils (wings) are in attack position, the X-wing was a class of starfighter used by the Rebel Alliance in their conflict with the Galactic Empire. It made its theatrical debut, as the T-65B model, in Star Wars (1977) as the spacecraft piloted by Luke Skywalker and the Red Squadron when Luke destroyed the Death Star. The starfighter featured extensively in the Star Wars original trilogy and in the Expanded Universe that followed, and has been merchandised as a variety of toys and models.
Aerobatics is the practice of flying maneuvers involving aircraft attitudes that are not used in normal flight. The term is a blend of "aerial" and "acrobatics". Aerobatics are performed in airplanes and gliders for training, recreation, entertainment, and sport. Additionally, some helicopters, such as the MBB Bo 105, are capable of limited aerobatic maneuvers. An example of a fully aerobatic helicopter, capable of performing loops and rolls, is the Westland Lynx.
A dogfight, or dog fight, is an aerial battle between fighter aircraft conducted at close range. Dogfighting first occurred in Mexico in 1913, shortly after the invention of the airplane. Until at least 1992, it was a component in every major war, despite beliefs after World War II that increasingly greater speeds and longer-range weapons would make dogfighting obsolete.
Red Baron is a combat flight simulation video game for MS-DOS created by Damon Slye at Dynamix. It was published by Sierra On-Line in 1990.
The Split S is an air combat maneuver mostly used to disengage from combat. To execute a Split S, the pilot half-rolls their aircraft inverted and executes a descending half-loop, resulting in level flight in the opposite direction at a lower altitude.
Blue Max is a multi-player board game of World War I aerial combat over the Western Front during 1917 and 1918. Each player is a fighter pilot of the British, French, American, or German air service. Each game is a single dogfight, in which players try to shoot down as many enemy planes as possible without being shot down themselves. There is no limit to the number of players in a single game. It was first published by Game Designers Workshop (GDW), in 1983. The game is named after the prestigious German order Pour le Mérite, informally known as Blue Max.
Basic fighter maneuvers (BFM) are tactical movements performed by fighter aircraft during air combat maneuvering, to gain a positional advantage over the opponent. BFM combines the fundamentals of aerodynamic flight and the geometry of pursuit, with the physics of managing the aircraft's energy-to-weight ratio, called its specific energy.
Nexus Editrice was an Italian game publisher founded in 1993.
Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) is a game company based in Roseville, Minnesota, United States, that creates and publishes role-playing, board, and card games. As of 2014, it is a subsidiary of Asmodée Éditions.
The term Immelmann turn, named after German World War One Eindecker fighter ace Leutnant Max Immelmann, refers to two different aircraft maneuvers. In World War I aerial combat, an Immelmann turn was a maneuver used after an attack on another aircraft to reposition the attacking aircraft for another attack. In modern aerobatics, an Immelmann turn is an aerobatic maneuver that results in level flight in the opposite direction at a higher altitude.
War of the Ring is a strategy board game by Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello, first produced by Nexus Editrice (Italy) and currently published by Ares Games.
Andrea Angiolino is a game designer. Among his last boardgames, Dragon Ball - Alla ricerca delle sette sfere, Ulysses, Wings of War, Battlestar Galactica: Starship Battles, Isla Dorada, and the card game Obscura Tempora. He wrote several role-playing games: among them Orlando Furioso, written with Gianluca Meluzzi, published by the City Council of Rome to be distributed in schools and public libraries. He also created games for radio and TV, magazines, training, advertising, festivals and shows.
Air wargaming, like naval wargaming, is a niche specialism within the wider miniatures wargaming hobby. Due to the relatively short time over which aerial combat has developed air wargaming periods tend to break down into three broad periods:
First Eagles: The Great War 1918 is a PC game that focuses on World War I between 1917 and 1918.
Snoopy Flying Ace is a dogfighting video game based on Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts franchise and developed by WildWorks for the Xbox Live Arcade service on the Xbox 360. It was announced on November 10, 2008 and released on June 2, 2010. An unofficial sequel to the 2006 video game Snoopy vs. the Red Baron, it features a similar World War I setting. Snoopy is tasked with defeating several members of the Flying Circus, a special flight squadron in the Luftstreitkräfte, and its commander, Manfred von Richthofen, also known as the Red Baron.
Down in Flames is a computer video game for Microsoft Windows, developed by American studio Dan Verssen Games and published by Battlefront.com in 2005. Closely based on a card-driven tabletop game of the same name, Down in Flames is a turn-based simulation of dogfights between World War II fighter planes. Some parts of the game also involve escorting and intercepting bombers.
Group Captain Gerald Ewart Nash was a World War I flying ace who went on to high command during World War II.
Star Wars: X-Wing is a miniature war game designed by Jay Little and produced by Fantasy Flight Games that was released at Gen Con during August 17, 2012. It features tactical ship-to-ship dogfighting between various types of starfighters set in the fictional Star Wars universe. The game is said to be easy to learn and quick to play taking anywhere between 15 and 60 minutes from first set-up to battle's end. Each round both players give all their ships movement orders without knowing what their opponent is doing before resolving these orders while trying to shoot down enemy craft. On May 1, 2018 FFG announced X-Wing Second Edition, to be released on September 13, 2018. Although the physical models are transferable, an entire new set of rules, templates, and markers have been produced and are available through a new core set, waves, and conversion packs.
Star Wars: X-Wing Second Edition is the second edition of the miniature war game designed by Jay Little and produced by Fantasy Flight Games that was first announced on May 1, 2018, with the first release on September 13 of the same year. On November 16, 2020, Atomic Mass Games announced that it would be responsible for X-wing and its two sister games, Legion and Armada.
