Starfighter

Starfighters were a type of starship and flying fighter craft designed for combat in the vacuum of space, though many were also designed to be capable of operating within planetary atmospheres. Such craft were characterized by being small and highly maneuverable, with small crews often of only one or two. For many millennia such ships also typically lacked hyperdrives and were bound to much larger carrier vessels for interstellar transit, something which only began to change during the waning years of the Galactic Republic.

Starfighter piloting was a notoriously perilous occupation, as pilots were essentially strapping themselves into small metal boxes hurtling through space at incredible speed with relatively little protection. Even with the advents of technologies such as integrated life-support, inertial dampening equipment, sophisticated sensor arrays, ray shields, and atmospherically sealed ejection pods, starfighter piloting remained inherently dangerous.