I mean, yeah, OK it's a movie with guys who can throw stuff with their mind and use swords made of lasers.

But the solar panels are stupid af. For starts, there's really no way a solar panel can be used to power much of anything in real time. They're usually used to charge a battery or capacitor. That's how a house that runs on solar can still have lights at night.

And we're talking about a space fighter with lasers and avionics and all kinds of shit. I can't imagine any of those would use a small amount of power, so the battery would have to be huge. Like "maybe we should just replace the battery with a nuclear reactor" huge.

The TIEs are mostly used in ship-to-ship combat, in deep space, where there's surprisingly little light. Solar panels are only effective at certain angles to a solar source. Maybe, maybe, they've invented a negative-index material allowing the panels to be effective at any angle to a light source.

but they'd also have to have designed a solar panel that is like super duper effective in a complete-defiance-of-physics kind of way because there's no way a panel of that size could power a ship without being "a wizard did it" effective.