AUTHOR: RYDER WINDHAM | ART: CHRIS REIFF, CHRIS TREVAS | PUBLISHER: J H HAYNES & CO LTD | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
The Star Wars Rebel Starfighters Owners’ Workshop Manual is a comprehensive technological guide to the various and disparate rebel starfighters in the Star Wars universe. The guide is a Haynes manual, and while these manuals were initially released to provide guidance to real-life machinery such as hot rod vehicles and motorcycles, they have lately become quite prolific in tackling everything from real-life spacecraft to historic ships, to comic book vehicles. They have also grown their market tremendously in reviewing Science Fiction vehicles.
The book chronicles the history and technology of starfighters belonging to the Rebel Alliance and the Resistance from the canon Star Wars franchise. It covers a wide variety of smaller spacecraft from all of the various official movies, television shows, and other media up to this point. It has a great deal of technological descriptions and endless diagrams, allowing the ready to study the ships from many different angles and in many different configurations. There are labelled diagrams of the ships and their various different parts; features on starfighter weapons, engines, cockpits, and much more. The book also goes into the various in-universe stories behind the starfighters, including corporate politics, galactic economics, and the impact that the practical operations of the Rebel Alliance and the Resistance have had on the operation of the starfighters themselves. There are also features on starfighter pilots and their operation of the craft.
It must be noted that it may not appeal to the general science fiction fan as much as some other manuals in the series, however. For example, the Haynes manual on the Death Star is a revealing look at one world-famous fictional weapons platform that fans have demanded to know about since their first introduction of it. The rebel starfighters, on the other hand, are so different and so disparate that it is difficult to find a common thread between them that will appeal to people outside of the target audience. Nonetheless, this book is still highly recommended for any Star Wars fan.