I was scrolling through Reddit when I saw this post that got me thinking. Someone pointed out that the TIE Advanced and TIE Bomber technically shouldn’t be called TIE fighters. Their reasoning? TIE stands for Twin Ion Engine, and both of those ships have four nozzles in the back, not two. The OP even joked about calling them “QUI” fighters instead — Quad Ion Engine.
At first, I thought that kind of made sense. I’d always just assumed TIEs were named after their shape or had two engines, and that was that. But the more I looked into it, the clearer it became: the “twin” part of the name doesn’t mean what most people think it does.
So Why Are They Still Called TIEs?
Here’s the thing — all TIE variants use the same type of engine. It’s not about how many exhausts you see. What really matters is what’s inside. Every ship labeled as a TIE, whether it’s the basic fighter, the Bomber, or the Advanced X1, runs on a Twin Ion Engine system. That means one engine unit with two ion chambers working together.
So when the OP saw those four nozzles on the Bomber, he assumed it had four engines. But it doesn’t. It just has the output split across multiple thrusters. Someone in the thread compared it to the Harrier jet, which also has four exhaust ports but only one engine.
Even the TIE Defender, which is basically overpowered in every way, still uses a more advanced version of the same engine type. That’s why all these ships, no matter how different they look, are still under the TIE label.
Fun Fact: The Name Was About the Shape First Anyway
This part surprised me — the name “TIE Fighter” wasn’t originally about the engine at all. It came from the shape. The round cockpit with the big flat wings made the ship look like a bow tie. That’s where the name started. Later, the lore added “Twin Ion Engine” as a way to make the name fit better into the Star Wars universe.
Same thing happened with X-Wings and Y-Wings. They’re named after their shape, but in-universe, it’s explained as coming from the High Galactic alphabet. It’s one of those times where the in-universe reason came after the real-world design.