The X-wing first flew in Star Wars in 1977, and it carries the film's ending: Luke Skywalker is in one when the Rebels go after the Death Star, and it is from that cockpit that the battle is won.
Inside the story it is an Incom Corporation T-65B, and the name is literal. Its wings are two pairs of s-foils — strike foils — that split apart for combat, and seen head-on in attack position they make an X. Opened out, they spread the four wingtip laser cannons across a wider field of fire. Behind the cockpit is a socket for an astromech droid, which is where R2-D2 rides.
Colin Cantwell sketched it and built the models that became the final design. The brief was contrast: the Rebel fighters were meant to look more traditional than the Empire's TIE fighters.
Industrial Light & Magic built the filming miniatures in several sizes, each around a hollow core of surgical tubing that carried the lights, the cooling and the wiring for the motors that moved the wings. The markings on the wings told the crew which pilot a given model was standing in for. For the Rebel hangar on Yavin 4, John Stears' crew built a single full-size X-wing and used cardboard cutouts behind it to turn one ship into a squadron. The script had called them Blue Squadron; they became Red because blue would not survive bluescreen compositing.
DeAgostini's partwork builds Luke's own Red Five from Lucasfilm blueprints, in metal and ABS plastic, over 100 issues. At 1:18 the finished model is about 74 cm long with a 65 cm wingspan. DeAgostini lists lit engines, LED and fibre-optic lighting in the laser cannons, a lit cockpit, S-foils that open and close by remote, and an R2-D2 whose dome turns.
This one is the UK edition, with its magazines in print. Issue 1 does not start with the fuselage: it starts with the canopy frame, the first laser cannon with its LED already inside, and R2-D2's dome.