Primary starfighter of the Votainion Armadas at the start of the Great War. The Eight-wing earned it’s name from the shape of the cut outs on it’s wing. The wing is a cooling surface for the ion engine as well as a lifting surface for atmospheric flight. The reason for the cut outs is to reduce the overall mass of the fighter. Communications antennas are strung over the gaps in the wings and appear as fine wires that cross the openings.
The Votainions call this fighter v’tak, which is a large, carnivorous bat-winged mammal found in the caves of Voton. Strangely, the Votainions have a similar expression to our “bat out of hell”, “V’tak dar a kholm”. The fighter reminded pilots of the attacks by v’tak deep in the cave dwellings of their ancestors. The Engineers refereed to the fighter as v-066-909, or simply the 909 variant.
The Eight-wings are highly maneuverable in the vacuum of space but not so much in the heavier atmospheres of planets. They have very little protective armor. A well placed shot can split open an Eight-wing like a seed. The weapons pods are on the tips of the wings and are usually explosive canons. Some variants are know to have projectile firing guns mounted under the nose.
A typical Eight-wing pilot is shown wearing an environmental suit and breath mask. All pilots are officers and thus are allowed to wear their kastra or family falchion.
Top view of the Eight-wing starfighter. The yellow stripes on the fuselage and wing tips mark this fighter as a squadron leader.
The Eight-wing fighter design was one of the earliest things my two best friends and I came up with when we first dreamed up the story that would become Starstrikers. Back then it was called Galaxy Collision. This would have been the mid to late 1970’s. Yeah, I’m that old. The batches of drawings that Ed and Jay and I drew during this time frame looked silly to us by the time we got into High School, so we wound up drawing newer designs.
Much later, when I realized the story would be set in three distinct time frames with three different levels of technology, the old drawings made for a perfect fit for the tech of the First Generation. This would be the time frame that Starforgers and Tales From Ocherva are set in.