Anakin Skywalker earns his wings above Naboo (John VanFleet)
“Preparing for war is science. Prosecuting it is chance.”
—Mon Mothma, chief of state, Alliance to Restore the Republic
The Trade Federation began in 350 BBY as a Republic-chartered organization tasked with mediating disputes between the galaxy’s merchants and its shippers—at the time, transportation megacorps such as Pulsar Supertanker, Quasar Cargo, Ororo Transportation, and Red Star Shipping were choking off commerce by shutting out competitors from Rim spaceports and refusing to share navigational information.
The Federation helped curb such abuses, and over its first century evolved into a shipping cartel in its own right, with members banding together to negotiate more favorable rates and policies and then contracting with Hoersch-Kessel to build a new fleet of Federation freighters. By 250 BBY the Trade Federation had left its original mission behind and become a powerful association working to advance trade interests in the Senate.
The Trade Federation wasn’t just a lobbying group, however. It also worked to open up new regions of the galaxy for commerce, establishing a network of brokerage houses, retail outlets, depots, way stations, and landing fields in thousands of backwater systems. Such efforts culminated in the creation of the Trade Explorer Corps, which blazed many new routes into the Rim and beyond the frontier.
Inevitably, the defense of transports carrying raw materials and finished goods became part of its purview. Federation companies often found themselves relying on indifferent, corrupt, or nonexistent Planetary Security Forces for protection. The Federation contributed funds to improve sector fleets, but eventually its members decided to take matters into their own hands, voting to establish the Trade Defense Forces.
The Trade Federation of the late 200s BBY was hailed as an ideal Republic institution. It represented its members’ interests capably and fairly on Coruscant, made investments that advanced commerce across the galaxy, augmented the power of Judicials and local forces with a well-regarded military arm, and was run by a diverse group of species and interests. But as the Trade Federation grew in power, it became the very thing it had been created to oppose: a cartel that dominated trade and ruthlessly eliminated competition. By the 150s BBY trade between the galaxy’s central and outlying worlds was once again drying up. In an effort to jump-start commerce, the Senate wound up handing the Trade Federation even more influence.
The declaration of the Outer Rim as a free-trade zone in 124 BBY exempted the Federation from the growing snarl of taxes levied by system, sector, and regional governments. Much-reduced levies now flowed directly to the Republic, which promised to apportion them more equally. (Some Mid Rim sectors were exempted in 118 BBY.) Along with the establishment of the Free Trade Zone, the Senate extended its definition of functional constituencies eligible for Senate representation to include the galaxy’s most powerful guilds and megacorps.
Granted a seat in the Senate, the Trade Federation soon became enormously powerful. The cartel moved swiftly and ruthlessly into the new Free Trade Zone, crafting agreements with impoverished sectors that effectively handed over their representation and votes in the Senate. Other Rim sectors preserved their political independence but not their economic self-determination, becoming virtual thralls of the Federation. Within two generations, the Trade Federation controlled enough Senate votes to hamper competitors, influence courts, and stall legislation it opposed.
The Stark Hyperspace War of 46 BBY marked a turning point for both the Federation and its foes in the Senate. After the disruption of the bacta shortage and the war, the Federation began campaigning for the right to greater military capabilities, citing not only the danger posed by raiders such as Iaco Stark and the Nebula Front terrorists but also renewed factionalism in the Republic. Meanwhile, the Federation’s opponents were pushing the Senate to take firmer control of galactic commerce and security in the outlying sectors.
And though few knew it, the Trade Federation had acquired a powerful new ally and patron: the mysterious Sith Lord Darth Sidious. Sidious—who first declared himself to high-ranking Neimoidians on the organization’s seven-member directorate—held many levers of power in the Republic, able to manipulate the Senate, courts, and Republic bureaucracy. Under his influence, the Federation stepped up its secret military buildup, bought up more and more votes, and became far more aggressive in pursuing its policy goals.
In 33 BBY, with the Federation at the apex of its political might, Supreme Chancellor Valorum sought to bring the organization to heel. Prodded by Naboo’s Senator Palpatine, Valorum pushed the Senate to do away with the Free Trade Zones while granting the Federation additional defense allowances. That drove the Federation into an alliance with the InterGalactic Banking Clan, Corporate Alliance, and Techno Union, which would also be hurt by renewed taxation. And in a direct strike at the Federation, four members of the directorate were killed at a summit on Eriadu organized by Valorum.
The attack on the directorate and Sidious’s warnings convinced the directorate—now controlled by Neimoidians—to intensify the Federation’s military buildup. Companies such as Baktoid and Haor Chall received gigantic contracts for the rapid creation of new warships and droid armies. War was coming.
Darth Sidious gives orders to Nute Gunray and Rune Haako (Tommy Lee Edwards)
Upon its establishment in 274 BBY, the Trade Defense Force’s initial responsibilities were to escort convoys and maintain spaceport security, with dues paid by member firms funneled to regional sectors to beef up their Planetary Security Forces. Those Sector Forces didn’t answer to the Trade Federation, but the TDF did—and over time its units became critical to ensuring security in poor Rim systems.
The bulk of the TDF’s capital ship assets were corvettes, frigates, and gunships—fast attack craft intended to drive pirates away from slow-moving bulk freighters. The TDF acquired its warships from a number of shipbuilders, and later supplemented them with several new designs from Kuat Drive Yards: the Auxilia-class pursuit destroyer, Lupus-class missile frigate, Munifex-class light cruiser (known colloquially as the “Class 1000” after the TDF’s initial order), and Captor-class heavy munitions cruiser. Meanwhile, TDF marines—trained on Balmorra according to that ancient world’s proud traditions—defended freighters against boarders in space and bandits in port.
While the Federation’s new fleet disturbed some in the Core, the TDF proved effective in a number of early engagements with pirates and raiders, and the Federation worked closely with the Judicials against bigger threats. Moreover, the TDF’s assets were constantly spread across the galaxy’s network of trade routes, arguing against the idea that they would be useful for direct military action. By the 200s BBY, the TDF had its own proud traditions, attracting talented naval officers who otherwise might have sought a career in the Planetary Security Forces or the Judicials.
But like its parent organization, the TDF changed. As the Trade Federation became more ruthless in exploiting outlying sectors, the TDF became an implement of the organization’s will, with its turbolasers forcing concessions from backwater systems and driving non-Federation transports away from ports. And the Kuati and Balmorran traditions that had helped shape the TDF faded as first Gran and Sullustans and then Neimoidians took over key roles in the Federation. As the Federation pursued rapid militarization, the TDF’s marines were largely replaced by battle droids, and converted Lucrehulk battleships increasingly enforced the Federation’s policies.
Trade Defense Force crewers reunite with their families after a long cruise (Jason Palmer)
Naboo’s Gungan Grand Army won renown for its exploits at the Battle of the Great Grass Plains, with military historians marveling at the chance to study a traditional land battle fought at close range between armies largely composed of infantry—the kind of confrontation rarely found in modern galactic society.
Amid such accolades, much is forgotten. For one thing, the battle was a diversionary tactic intended to give Naboo strike teams time to sneak into occupied Theed and capture the Trade Federation viceroy. For another, the Federation’s own fears allowed the battle to unfold as it did: The Naboo blockade had been reduced to a single droid control ship, and the Neimoidians kept their droid starfighters in orbit because they feared the ground assault was a diversion for an attack on the blockade.
The Gungan Grand Army is a curious institution. The Gungans protect and police their territory by calling on militiagungs, able-bodied Gungans who provide their own uniforms and weapons. Each Gungan settlement is required to maintain combat readiness and conduct annual drills, ensuring that the Grand Army can be assembled in less than thirty-six hours.
The Grand Army draws its strength from two Gungan characteristics: their bond with Naboo’s native animals and their curious technology.
Animals play key roles in the Grand Army. Giant fambaas carry its shield generators into battle, falumpasets drag catapults and battle wagons loaded with energy balls, and kaadu serve as rapid-response cavalry units. All Gungans respect and revere kaadus, but the bond between Gungan soldier and kaadu is particularly strong. When a Gungan becomes an officer, he or she receives a personal kaadu in a public ceremony, and will only ride another if the original kaadu should die or become too old for battle. Officers and their kaadus seem to share a telepathic bond, with the kaadu anticipating the officer’s orders and alerting him or her to trouble that it spots.
The Gungan shield generators were originally used to keep giant swamp creatures and sea monsters away from settlements, but they are portable—provided something as big as a fambaa is available to move one. In battle one fambaa carries on its back a shield generator, which fires an arc of plasma into a capacitor carried by another fambaa. The resulting plasma shield is 150 meters in diameter, and typically calibrated to repel small, fast-moving objects that generate heat, as well as big, slow-moving objects. At Great Grass Plains, it protected the Gungans against the Trade Federation’s artillery and tanks, forcing individual battle droids to engage the Gungans. The two-part dynamos overheat quickly, and are typically among the first units targeted, giving the cockpit of the shield generator the grim nickname “suicide seat.”
Gungan foot soldiers are organized into command units, each led by a general appointed for the battle. They wear armor of leather and metal and carry personal defense shields that protect against both blaster bolts and particle weapons—a technology that proved of great interest to the Republic in the aftermath of the Naboo invasion. (Republic scientists found the technology promising, but noted that the energy field generated considerable heat; the shield generator typically overloaded within fifteen minutes.)
Militiagungs typically carry cestas, atlatls, or arbalests, with some using electropoles. Typical Gungan ranged weapons are designed to fling energy balls—thin, super-charged organic membranes encasing unstable plasma energy. This “energy goo” is extracted from Naboo’s core, either by deep-crust mining or by harvesting it from plasma-hungry plants known as locaps, and used to power many Gungan devices. Direct contact with this plasma stuns or electrocutes organic beings, and shorts out the circuitry of Droids and vehicles.
Battle droids attack Gungan forces at the Battle of the Great Grass Plains (Darren Tan)
B1 BATTLE DROIDS
Clone troopers dismissed B1 battle droids as clankers, blasting the spindly-legged mechanicals by the dozens in engagements from one side of the galaxy to the other. And from a military standpoint, B1s were worthy of their contempt: They were poor shots, they were thinly armored (particularly at the electromagnetic joints), they had lack-luster audiovisual sensors, and their cheap cognitive modules struggled to process any strategy handed down from central control computers that was more complicated than marching in one direction firing blasters.
But battle droids weren’t made to be smart. They were made to be cheap, and they were. That allowed Separatist factories to produce them in staggering numbers—Republic citizens believed quintillions had been made. What B1s lacked in brains, they more than made up for in numbers, battering down planets’ defenses.
The first B1s produced by Baktoid Combat Automata weren’t meant for war, but for defending Trade Federation cargo haulers against pirates and bandits. At the Battle of Naboo, Anakin Skywalker’s destruction of the orbiting Droid Control Ship eliminated the droid army’s central control computer, forcing the army into hibernation mode. The sight of Gungans kicking motionless battle droids embarrassed the Trade Federation, which ordered many of its first-generation B1s retrofitted with cognitive modules that would allow for independent thought. That prevented remote shutdowns, but making B1s smart or truly combat-effective would have been prohibitively expensive. Instead, the Separatists built new generations of war droids with much-improved mechanical minds and muscle.
The B1s’ squeaky, modulated voices may have seemed more comical than frightening, but many beings found their skeletal limbs and bleached coloration disturbing. Neimoidian crewers spread the rumor that the droids’ elongated faces had been modeled after Neimoidian skulls. The truth was more mundane: The B1s were designed in imitation of their Geonosian builders.
DESTROYER DROIDS
Nicknamed destroyer droids, death balls, or rollies, droidekas were among the deadliest infantry units deployed by the Separatists during the Clone Wars. The droids’ double-barreled blaster cannons could take out light vehicles, while their deflector shields made them virtually immune to small-arms fire and were polarized to allow the droideka’s own laser bolts to penetrate the shield. A droideka’s shield was less powerful to the rear, but its tough bronzium armor offered substantial protection. Their keen sensor packages could detect enemies through sound, vibrations, or radiation, and they could curl into wheeled mode to pursue their quarries, snapping out of wheel mode onto their three pointed legs, powering up shields and opening fire before foes could react. Even Jedi Knights hesitated when faced with these powerful, ruthless killing machines.
Before the Clone Wars, the Trade Federation contracted the Colicoid Creation Nest to build initial allotments of droidekas; the delivery of fifty bargeloads of exotic flesh won the cartel a substantial discount on a license to build more units. To save credits and guard against Colicoid treachery, Nute Gunray insisted that the Colicoids ship droidekas without individual intelligence matrices, slaving them to guidance signals from a central control computer. This made the destroyers less effective in combat, a shortcoming remedied after the disaster at Naboo, when Separatist foundries began turning out self-directed units.
The Colicoids built droidekas (a name that combines the Basic word droid with -eka, Colicoid for “hireling” or “drone”) in their own image. They built several other models of war droids as well. The Separatists used spindly, hook-armed infiltrators to cut through hulls and take over starships, while the Colicoids defended their homeworld with dreaded Scorpenek annihilator droids, encountered when the Republic stormed Colla IV late in the Clone Wars. Baktoid produced a droideka variant, the Mark II, in its Hypori foundries, but the Mark II’s development came too late to be a factor in the Clone Wars.
AAT (ARMORED ASSAULT TANK)
The armored assault tank was the warhorse of the Trade Federation: a machine built for pitched battle, designed to break enemy formations with a shoulder-to-shoulder charge. As the invasion of Naboo showed, this tactic could prove decisive against both high-tech defense forces and primitive alien hordes.
The AAT’s armored fuselage was narrow, with a crew cockpit at the front and an engine unit behind. The bow rested on a wide, shovel-shaped repulsorsled, while the main gun turret overhung the engine block at the rear, extending the total length to 9.75 meters. The vehicle was capable of speeds up to fifty-five kilometers per hour, and the turret gun provided long-range artillery fire against any ground target within visual range—normally enemy armor, light deflector shields, or large troop formations. To defeat scout vehicles and infantry, secondary weapons included twin repeating blasters flanking the hull, and two short-range blast cannons in front of the cockpit.
The repulsorsled also con-tained six missile launchers, normally armed with short-range energy flechettes to break up infantry formations. These launchers could also fire armor-piercing shells against enemy vehicles or heavy rounds to smash through reinforced emplacements, although these systems were hard to aim in battle.
The AAT was crewed by three pilot droids and one commander. They were simplistic drones who produced predictable tactics—but the vehicle’s effectiveness wasn’t diminished by their lack of initiative while part of a close-formation armored assault. When the Trade Federation was able to force a pitched battle, the AAT’s only serious limitation was its inability to penetrate deflector shields—a drawback common to all repulsorlift vehicles.
SPEEDER BIKES AND STAPS
Speeder bikes are single-seat repulsorcraft, usually consisting of an open-air pilot’s seat astride an engine block, with steering vanes in front. They are also known as “swoop bikes,” a name originally applied to lightweight racing models with an improved flight ceiling, but now used indiscriminately for any bike with sports pretensions. Panniers and postilion seats provide some models with the ability to carry minimal cargo and a single passenger; in military configurations, armament is usually restricted to a single light blaster.
Speeder bikes and swoops have been around for millennia, and entered military use through mercenary groups, acquiring a new popularity with regular light cavalry units under the “flying force” doctrine of the last decades of the Republic.
The Single Trooper Aerial Platform, or STAP, was the Trade Federation’s version of the military speeder bike. It uses an unconventional configuration known as an airhook, consisting of a vertical repulsor keel with the pilot standing upright at the rear, feet placed wide apart to allow engine exhaust to discharge between the legs. This design originated with civilian speeder makers Longspur and Alloi, but when Baktoid acquired the license, they slashed the production cost, boosted the top speed to four hundred kilometers per hour, and armed the STAP with twin repeating blasters on the control yoke—an unusually heavy armament for a bike. Military STAPs are almost always operated by battle droid pilots—unlike organic pilots, their metal bodies were unaffected by the dramatic acceleration or the powerful exhaust jets.
STAP bikes were designed to be used in far larger numbers than most other military swoops, but their roles remained the same: scouting ahead of a campaign army, pursuing retreating enemies on the battlefield, and anti-insurgency patrol. They were among the most effective units of the droid army in the Naboo campaign.
LUCREHULK-CLASS BATTLESHIP
After the Trade Federation won the right to better defend its convoys, shipwrights licked their chops in the hope of huge new contracts. But the cartel’s executive board never believed in spending a credit it didn’t have to: It decided to refit a number of its Lucrehulk-class cargo freighters, made centuries before by Hoersch-Kessel, into warships. Besides saving credits, the conversion program allowed the Trade Federation to hide the extent of its military buildup—a course of action recommended by Darth Sidious.
Even as a cargo hauler, a Lucrehulk was an intimidating hulk more than three thousand meters in diameter. Now Baktoid Fleet Ordnance added new armor plating, beefed-up shields, and quad laser batteries that could rotate inward when not in use, concealing the battleship’s offensive capabilities. Baktoid also reconfigured the hauler’s innards to carry landing ships, AATs, multitroop transports (MTTs), and as many as fifteen hundred droid starfighters. While the laser cannons weren’t terribly effective—their limited fields of fire betrayed the design’s mercantile origins—Baktoid assured the Neimoidians that the clouds of vulture droids would make for a more than sufficient defense against any attacker.
The modular nature of the Lucrehulk allowed the Trade Federation considerable flexibility. The heart (and brain) of each Lucrehulk was its core ship or centersphere, which housed a huge central computer and power systems. Core ships could detach from the near-ring of cargo holds and engines, using their ion drives to descend to planetary surfaces and dock in repulsorlift cushions. Before the Federation’s military buildup, it used core ships at the center of various freighter and tanker configurations; after the Battle of Naboo, the centerspheres became the heart of a number of different warships, including cruisers with improved weaponry and speedier destroyers.
At the urging of Sidious, the Federation responded to the Republic’s decision to reinstitute taxes on Rim trade routes with a blockade of Naboo, the homeworld of Senator Palpatine. The Federation assembled a fleet of battleships led by the Saak’ak at its distribution center on Enarc, whose skies were often thick with Lucrehulks, and sent them to nearby Naboo.
While the battleships supplied the blockade’s teeth, the most distinctive ship dispatched to Naboo was the Droid Control Ship Vuutun Palaa, a Lucrehulk variant bristling with antennas and signal receiver dishes. The droid control ship’s massive central computer was programmed to command not just vulture droids, but the army of battle droids sent to take over the planet. When Anakin Skywalker fired a pair of proton torpedoes into one of the Vuutun Palaa’s reactors, the chain reaction destroyed the ship and the droids shut down.
The Empire nationalized the Federation after the Clone Wars and sold off the Lucrehulk fleet, including decommissioned battleships. Most were used by galactic shippers, but some wound up in the hands of Rebels or criminal organizations, and were turned back into warships. One converted Lucrehulk, the carrier Fortressa, was destroyed by the Death Star at Horuz in 0 BBY.
