system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Star Wars] What practical purposes do the wings of TIE Fighters have?

I was recently examining the design of the standard Imperial TIE Fighter when the thought came to me. How could vertical "wings" be practical in combat situations? They seem to eliminate a significant portion of peripheral vision, and as far as I'm aware, there is no window in the back of the cockpit so they're constantly prone to attacks. The "wings" don't seem to protect from lasers or artillery, in zero gravity the maneuverability is irrelevant to the design, and they don't seem to have visual camouflage capabilities in any environment including space. Perhaps they have a stealth element? Surely this is a design flaw, unless there is something I'm overlooking. Why did the empire commission that design for their TIE Fighters? 

Edit: This is further proven to be a design flaw during the first battle of the Death Star when Darth Vader and his wingmen were ambushed by the Millennium Falcon from an angle which may have been visible and preventable had the design of the TIE Fighters been different.
gpt
They're heat radiators. With as small as a TIE is, and as much horsepower as is packed into it, it needs some serious heat dissipation capacity. That's what they're there for. The whole "solar panels" bit is nonsensical; please disregard it.

This is, pretty much, the entire purpose of "wings" on Star Wars starfighters in general. X-wings and B-wings both open their "strike foils" before combat, which increases the radiative surface area they've got to bleed off excess heat from their shield heatsinks, weapon discharges, and increased reactor output to support both. TIEs don't bother with strike foils because they're pretty much only ever deployed for combat and don't have a "low power consumption" travel mode (e.g. long hyperspace flights) to worry about.