The Essential Guide to Warfare: Star Wars

By one estimate, at the height of the Galactic Civil War the spacegoing forces of the Rebellion amounted to just 7 percent of the Imperial fleet’s strength, while the total number of Alliance troops was just 3.5 percent of the New Order’s military forces.

Those numbers didn’t sound overwhelming, but they were the equivalent of Imperial occupation forces for fifteen sectors—and devoted almost entirely to offensive operations, not territorial control. Given that the Rebellion was in large part a clandestine insurgency, its strength was more impressive than a direct comparison with the Empire’s suggested. This was made possible by a key decision at the Corellian System Meetings in 2 BBY—the Alliance was to be a genuine alliance, a coalition among disparate groups opposed to Palpatine’s tyranny.

Each local component of the Rebellion was designated as a Sector Force, but in practice they had little in common. Some, such as the Airam Clans or the Karthakk resistance, were able to support respectable fleets and armies from their own resources. Others amounted to a few teams of saboteurs and agitators with some crates of blasters and detonators.

The Alliance’s initial war plan, Operation Domino, called for the stronger Sector Forces to defeat local Imperial Army garrisons in showpiece battles, then dig in behind their planetary shields—proving that planets could free themselves, and inspiring revolution across the galaxy. But most of these uprisings led to crushing defeats. There was no revolution; dozens of Alliance armies were destroyed, and surviving units fled.

Operation Domino taught Mon Mothma a valuable lesson. A hundred Sector Forces had mustered infantry brigades, but this was only part of an army—some lacked bases, others lacked air support or spare parts, and most lacked training. A centralized corps answering to the High Command was necessary, if only to provide them with the training and equipment they lacked.

Moreover, the Rebellion’s sacrifices provoked a surge of sympathy in the most unexpected place of all—the ranks of the Imperial Army. Top officers like General Kryll and Commander Harles defected mid-campaign and took command of battered Rebel brigades, reorganizing them into what became the Alliance Special Forces.

Optimized for commando warfare, and mustering barely one hundred thousand beings, the SpecForces became a flexible backbone for the entire Rebellion. Barracks regiments acted as specialist support echelons for other elements of the military, while the actual fighting was done by temporary task forces, with the size and mix of troops chosen for each individual mission. More often than not, both regiments and task forces were used to buttress Sector Forces’ weaknesses.

As ground tactics shifted, Starfighter Command came to the fore. This happened largely by accident—the Alliance needed an overall military commander who was well respected and could broker the three-way tensions among Corellia, Alderaan, and Chandrila. It found it in Commenor’s Jan Dodonna, who espoused the unfashionable view that starfighters should be a separate arm of the military.

Dodonna believed hyperspace-capable starfighters could undermine the Empire’s control of space, and demonstrate this to the galaxy by winning high-profile victories. Relying on hidden bases and converted cargo haulers for support, they could appear without warning and fight without the support of capital ships.

To prove his point, Dodonna’s Y-wings defeated Star Destroyer fleets at Denab and Tarawa, and staged a series of successful raids against Imperial convoys and bases. Finding targets for starfighter raids became the top priority of Alliance Intelligence, while the Support and Supply commands focused on giving Dodonna the men and matériel he needed.

As the Rebellion grew, starfighters became its primary combat force—but there were soon too many squadrons to coordinate them all from one command. While Starfighter Command still oversaw pilot training, fighter maintenance, and squadron deployment, it only retained tactical control over a few “rogue” units on special assignment. The majority of fighters were attached to various Sector Forces—or to the increasingly powerful Fleet Command.

In the Rebellion’s early years, the brunt of space combat had been borne by Sector Forces units—particularly the Corellians. Fleet Command was created to oversee a miscellany of cruisers that had escaped their home sectors—most notably the flagship Independence, which had escaped the occupation of Mon Calamari. Most of these old vessels were only suitable as depot ships and mobile headquarters, and the success of their own starfighter tactics led many Rebel commanders to distrust cruiser warfare. But Mothma insisted on building up a battle line, led by the ex-CIS battleships Rebel One and Fortressa.

A series of events in 0 ABY altered the character of the struggle—the withdrawal of the Corellian leadership, the loss of General Dodonna during the evacuation of Yavin 4, and the destruction of key parts of the Rebel fleet at Deepspace Besh.

The seeds for the disaster at Deepspace Besh were planted at Jabiim, where the Empire captured Jorin Sol, a mathematician who specialized in navicomputer encryption codes. Rebel agents led by Luke Skywalker rescued Sol from Kalist VI, but had no idea he had been reprogrammed as an Imperial agent. Cleared to return to duty, Sol gave the Empire the Rebel fleet’s current coordinates—code-named Deepspace Besh—as well as the escape algorithms that determined where the fleet would jump next. After a task force commanded by Darth Vader arrived, Sol managed to fight off his programming long enough to beg Alliance personnel to order the decimated remnants of the fleet to scatter instead of jumping into another trap.

Deepspace Besh might have been a mortal blow, but the Rebellion was saved by the Mon Calamari, who had ejected the Empire from their world in one of Operation Domino’s few victories.

After throwing off the Imperial yoke, the Mon Calamari had mined and disrupted existing routes into their sector while scouting new secret routes, ensuring that their territory couldn’t be reclaimed without a brutal struggle. The Empire was hesitant to engage in such a campaign, fearful that anything other than a speedy victory would embolden other rebellious systems. (The Calamarian Council wisely exploited those fears by officially declaring itself neutral.) Despite this face-saving declaration, the Mon Calamari had become an essential source of ships and supplies for the Rebellion; after the disaster at Deepspace Besh, they donated their entire naval strength to the Alliance and became the backbone of its rebuilt fleet, led by Admiral Ackbar.

Ackbar had served aboard the Independence before Yavin, working closely with Mothma—and he shared the Chandrilan’s unease about the increasing reliance on raids by SpecForces and StarCom. Under his leadership, the fleet grew into a disciplined collection of ships and commanders. Now Ackbar and Mothma devised a new fleet-first strategy for the Rebellion—issued in the name of the Chief of State as an executive order, but in fact drafted by the admiral himself.

Despite the failure of Operation Domino, traditionalists in the Alliance still advocated reclaiming and holding territory, beginning with a move from Mon Calamari Space into the Tion and proceeding from there down the Perlemian to claim restive systems such as Roche, Contruum, and Kashyyyk. Mothma’s opposition to this plan was steadfast: It was a recipe for disaster, one that would end with another incarnation of the Outer Rim Sieges.

The traditionalists hailed Ackbar’s reorganization of the fleet into a single armada powerful enough to challenge any Imperial battle squadron. But its role wasn’t to fight campaigns. Rather, it would be a symbol of the Rebellion. By holding back from combat and building up its strength, the fleet became an ever-greater psychological threat, undermining the New Order’s power by simply continuing to exist. The actual Alliance fighting force consisted of small raiding flotillas rotated out of the fleet, with never more than 25 percent detached at a time.

After Ackbar’s reorganization of the fleet, the main subdivision for both fleet maneuvers and raids became the battle line—a group of two or more cruisers with a subordinate close support line of escorts and a picket line of starfighters. Even in the early days, the main fleet battle line always had at least eight heavy cruisers, but in practice a typical roving line had only two cruisers, a frigate and a corvette.

Under Ackbar, the rest of the Alliance military was increasingly subordinated to the fleet—Starfighter Command’s independence was diminished, while command of SpecForces was given to the Imperial defector Crix Madine, who preferred destroying targets to worrying about interservice politics.

But not all elements of the Rebellion fell into line so easily. The powerful Corellian and Bothan Sector Forces continued to launch high-profile raids, and the reputation of another Imperial defector, Admiral Adar Tallon, made it impossible politically to subordinate him to Ackbar. Meanwhile, the minister of supply, General Muvunc, created a powerful fleet of privateers, including several former Imperial frigates and light cruisers, with which he disrupted Imperial commerce.

When the Death Star was destroyed at Yavin, more than a few Imperial naval officers allowed themselves a smile of satisfaction. Yes, the Alliance had struck the Empire a grievous blow. But those ragtag pilots in their snubfighters had also eliminated a searing threat to the navy’s preeminence.

Men such as Grand Moff Tarkin and Admiral Motti had despised the navy’s generationals for their belief in such ancient values as stability and order: Rather than establishing peace, they had sought to rule through fear. Now Tarkin and Motti were dead, atomized in the explosion of the technological terror they’d constructed, and the navy would succeed where they and it had failed. The Death Star project had diverted untold credits and talent from the Imperial Starfleet, which had backed the creation of a new class of Star Dreadnoughts that would be a new pinnacle of capital ship power. The project had been plagued by delays, but now took on newfound importance to the Empire.

After the Death Star’s destruction, the Imperial Starfleet and the Rebels played a dangerous game, marked by symbolism and brinksmanship. The Empire expected the Rebels to flee Yavin 4, but that didn’t happen: Some heavy equipment and critical supplies were removed, but General Jan Dodonna realized that most of the Massassi base’s personnel and equipment could be hastily evacuated. He convinced Mon Mothma that keeping the base in place would be a powerful statement of defiance and a valuable recruiting tool.

To keep the Imperial Starfleet off balance, the Alliance launched large-scale raids on such targets as Reytha. That presented the navy with a dilemma. If they concentrated their forces on chasing the Rebels off Yavin, Mothma’s forces might launch a devastating raid somewhere else, making the Empire look impotent. On the other hand, if the Empire brought insufficient forces to bear, Mothma might intervene in force, winning a second Battle of Yavin and inflicting a fresh humiliation on the navy. The sheer size of the Empire made it vulnerable; even scattered Rebel victories undermined the belief that it was all-powerful. And now, with the Senate dissolved and the Death Star destroyed, such doubts were dangerous to the New Order.

The new Star Dreadnoughts could change that calculus, but the first of the line—the Executor—was still in the final stages of fitting out at Fondor, supervised by Darth Vader, who had returned from the Outer Rim. Vader was determined to lead the assault on the Massassi base in his new flagship: Having destroyed one symbol of Imperial might at Yavin, the Alliance would be driven from the system by another.

But the Executor wasn’t ready. Until she was, Yavin was blockaded by a task force assembled from capital ships earmarked for Vader’s task force, supplied by the Tagge family, and requisitioned from Nox Vellam, the luckless Grand Moff of the Bright Jewel Oversector that contained Yavin. Riven by infighting, the Yavin blockade was largely ineffective, a problem Vader had little interest in putting right, lest he be cheated of his revenge.

When the Executor finally joined the fight, fear of Vader silenced the squabbling commanders. Vader dealt brutally with the ambitions of Baron Orman Tagge, coerced the support of his more pliable younger brother Ulric, and awaited the fleeing Rebels on the trade route known as the Tertiary Feswe. But Admiral Amise Griff—a Vellam loyalist—rushed to engage the Alliance ships, only to come out of hyperspace and crash into the Executor’s shields. The Massassi leadership escaped.

Thwarted, Vader disbanded the blockade and took command of his own task force, Death Squadron, whose mission was to hunt down Luke Skywalker and the rest of the Rebel leadership. The squadron formally consisted of the Executor and five Star Destroyers—the Avenger, Conquest, Devastator, Stalker, and Tyrant—but Vader had the authority to attach other warships if he deemed it necessary.

Death Squadron soon became the terror of the Outer Rim. It assembled at Centares, then traveled along the Triellus Trade Route, joined by warships contributed by regional governors as it went. In every sector, Death Squadron left ruin behind it: Smugglers’ hideouts were erased by orbital bombardments, pirates’ bolt-holes torn apart by TIE squadrons, and shadowports destroyed by Imperial ground assaults. Those fleeing ahead of the campaign were snapped up by Interdictor cruisers and interrogated.

The plan, masterminded by Grand Admiral Thrawn, was to disrupt the Alliance’s supply network by displacing or capturing the smugglers and shady free traders whose shipments wound up in Rebel hands. Tracking and interrogating smugglers would uncover Rebel cells and bases—including, it was hoped, the Rebel fleet.

Imperial slicers and strategists pored over transcripts of interrogations and the hints and rumors turned up by Death Squadron’s operations, with Thrawn’s uncanny ability to discern patterns proving vital in sorting through the evidence. An Imperial blitz in the Ulkantha asteroids tipped Death Squadron off to a Sakiyan smuggling ring operating out of the notorious shadowport of Syvris, near Hutt Space. Death Squadron all but obliterated Syvris, capturing key members of the Sakiyan ring, whose operations extended from Corellia to Terminus. While Death Squadron continued its deadly cruise along the Triellus, Thrawn uncovered a Corellian operation running war matériel up the Hydian Way, and ordered the interception of a key Rebel convoy at Derra in the Expansion Region.

Between Vader’s firepower and Thrawn’s deductive skills, High Command sensed a noose was closing: Rebel forces in numerous Outer Rim sectors fled their bases, resistance cells dispersed for fear of being uncovered by Imperial agents, and Mothma and Ackbar moved the fleet repeatedly.

Vader finally discovered High Command’s hideout through luck. The Derra convoy’s supplies had been ticketed for Hoth’s Echo Base, located on a little-traversed bypass of the Corellian Trade Spine. The Derra ambush didn’t uncover Echo Base’s location, but it gave Death Squadron enough of a lead to order patrol craft and probe droids to blanket the Outer Rim sectors of the Western Reaches. One of those thousands of probe droids landed on Hoth, from which it transmitted images of a shield generator and other fortifications to the Executor at Qeimet. Admiral Ozzel dismissed the report, weary of operations against smugglers’ nests, but Vader’s intuition told him the probe had found Skywalker’s hideaway.

The Alliance began a hasty evacuation of Hoth, but Death Squadron arrived before it was complete, its already formidable numbers strengthened by a quartet of Star Destroyers borrowed from Juris Sector Forces. The Rebellion was dealt a terrible blow: Of thirty transports fleeing Echo Base, seventeen were destroyed or captured. Death Squadron’s Star Destroyers then pursued the Millennium Falcon into the Hoth system’s tumbling asteroids. Han Solo eluded capture, attaching his ship to the Avenger—but the bounty hunter Boba Fett figured out what Solo had done, and calculated that the crippled Falcon was headed for Bespin. When the freighter arrived, the Executor and Death Squadron were hiding in the system—and Darth Vader awaited the Falcon’s passengers on Cloud City.

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THE EXECUTOR

The Executor and the other ships of her class were the product of a long-running, fabulously expensive effort to create a massive capital ship so powerful that the mere threat of its vengeance would pacify multiple sectors.

The first warship accorded the Anaxes War College designation Dreadnought was the eight-kilometer-long Mandator, built by Kuat Drive Yards two decades before the Clone Wars as the centerpiece of its sector defense fleet. While Ruusan regulations limited the Mandator’s speed and armament, the humpbacked battleship was still a formidable vessel, and the galaxy’s wealthiest sectors clamored for similar warships. By the Clone Wars, seven of what KDY called Star Dreadnoughts were in service: Three defended Kuat, while the Azure, Ixtlar, Alsaka, and Humbarine sectors had one each. During the Clone Wars, KDY unveiled the Mandator II class, offering heavier armor and weapons and better hyperdrive capabilities. Three new Mandator IIs were built, while three earlier Mandators were uparmored and refitted. All wound up in Republic service, defending the Core against Separatist incursions.

THE EXECUTOR

The Empire was just weeks old when it ordered Kuat Drive Yards to begin design work on an even larger dreadnought—one twelve kilometers in length. Lira Wessex designed the new warship, which took shape as Project Sarlacc, a secret effort pursued on Kuat, Coruscant, and ultimately Byss. Rebel agents destroyed the prototype before it left dry- dock. But that was time enough for the Empire to decide to build on Wessex’s work, ordering the creation of four new dreadnoughts, each nineteen kilometers long.

Navy traditionalists were aghast, fearing that further efforts could bankrupt the Empire. Fleets of patrol boats, frigates, and cruisers struck the traditionalists as much more effective for policing the vastness of space. The Empire already had a vast collection of such warships inherited from the nationalized Planetary Security Forces; to those, it could add the ever-growing numbers of Star Destroyers, which boasted firepower that few could match. To those who thought the Star Destroyer sufficient for policing the galaxy, battlecruisers and dreadnoughts—lumped together under the derisive tag “Super Star Destroyers”—seemed like sops to the bottomless egos and ambitions of Moffs and Imperial advisers, not pieces of any coherent military strategy.

But that was before the Death Star emerged as an even greater threat to the navy’s prestige. Given that alternative, the navy reluctantly embraced the Super Star Destroyer as a lesser evil. The Executor was largely built in the Scarl system, then completed at the great starship yards of Fondor. The massive warship was the culmination of some two decades of astonishing expense—and nothing in the galaxy could hope to survive an encounter with her.

The Executor boasted more than five thousand turbolasers and ion cannons, and carried two full wings of TIE fighters and as many as two hundred small armed star-ships such as gunboats and attack shuttles. A full stormtrooper corps served on board, along with thirty-eight thousand other ground troops, ready to deploy with twenty-four AT-ATs, fifty AT-STs, and three prefabricated garrisons.

As Darth Vader christened the Executor with a devastating raid on the Rebel base at Laakteen Depot, three other ships of the same class were nearing completion. The second and third, the Reaper and the Aggressor, were taking shape at Kuat, while the secret construction facilities at Scarl were busy working on the Brawl.

The Executor served as Darth Vader’s flagship, leading the attack on Hoth, but was overwhelmed by Rebel fire and collided with the second Death Star at Endor in 4 ABY.

The Aggressor saw extensive service in the Inner Rim before becoming the centerpiece of Grand Admiral Grunger’s forces; she was destroyed at Corellia in 5 ABY.

The Brawl anchored the fleet units of the Quelii Oversector and was renamed Iron Fist by Zsinj, who emerged as one of the more formidable warlords of the Imperial Fragmentation. She tormented New Republic forces before being destroyed, along with her master, at Dathomir in 8 ABY.

The Reaper served as Ardus Kaine’s flagship, becoming a cornerstone of the Pentastar Alignment’s military defenses and later those of the Imperial Remnant. She was destroyed at Celanon in 13 ABY.

But these four were not the only members of their class. It was thought that more than twenty were ultimately built, with an exact count proving fiendishly elusive for New Republic asset trackers. On the one hand, evidence suggested the Emperor and his top advisers had ordered the construction of a number of Executor-class ships off the books, holding them in reserve at secret Imperial bases, dispatching them into the Unknown Regions, or concealing them for Palpatine’s own dark purposes. (Those arguing that more dreadnoughts were out there inevitably noted the concealment of the Executor II—later dubbed the Lusankya—beneath the Coruscant cityscape.) On the other hand, there was evidence of dreadnoughts budgeted but never built, phantoms to hide other plans of the Emperor’s and keep his servants guessing at one another’s resources. Moreover, several other classes of dreadnoughts were built, ranging from the Mandator III to the massive Sovereign, Eclipse, and Vengeance classes.

BATTLECRUISERS

Informally, battle cruiser has been used for eons to refer to massive, heavily armored battleships designed for a single purpose: the destruction of other capital ships. Formally, the designation was reserved for capital ships measuring between two thousand and five thousand meters and designed for long-range independent operations.

While some military historians insist that a few legendary ships of the ancient galaxy—such as Xim’s Eibon Scimitar or the Alsakani Bloodshield—would qualify as battlecruisers under the Anaxes system, most agree that the first warship deserving formal recognition as such was the Procurator, constructed by Kuat Drive Yards two centuries before the fall of the Republic. Bristling with weapons, the twenty-five-hundred-meter Procurator was the template for a series of ever-larger KDY battleships, nominally built to protect Kuat sector but really aimed at attracting contracts from wealthy Core planets, sectors, and powerful mercantile fleets. By the time of the Clone Wars, dozens of battlecruisers defended Core and Colonies sectors. The Procurator-class Star Battlecruiser was refined several times before being supplanted by a four-thousand-meter descendant, the Praetor class, though the Ruusan Reformations limited both classes’ hyperdrive capabilities and armament.

The majority of these great ships found their way into Republic service during the Clone Wars. Most served as a line of defense against big Separatist warships such as the Bulwark Mark I and Mark II battleships (technically Star Destroyers according to the Anaxes system) and the massive flagships Malevolence and Devastation. Other battlecruisers were uparmored, fitted with powerful new hyperdrives, and became the spearpoints of task forces sent against key Confederate worlds. The Quaestor, a Republic Praetor-class battlecruiser, led a raid against the Separatist shipbuilding facilities at Pammant, where her hyperdrive was damaged by torpedo droids. The Quaestor’s hyperdrive engaged, rocketing the great ship into the planet. The impact scattered radioactive particles through Pammant’s atmosphere and frac-tured its core.

After Palpatine became Emperor, KDY unveiled the Praetor Mark II, at forty-eight hundred meters the largest battlecruiser yet seen, but the Empire commissioned relatively few of these ships, seeing them as more expensive and less versatile than Star Destroyers while not instilling the same terror as dreadnoughts. (Smaller models within the Battlecruiser class were known as Star Cruisers, though few recognized this as a formal capital ship class.) The Empire primarily used battlecruisers to defend key areas in the Core, though some anchored armadas undertaking dangerous missions on the fringes of Imperial space. Admiral Mils Giel requisitioned the Helmsman, a Praetor Mark II, to transport the mysterious life-form known as the Teezl from the distant Valtha Divide to Coruscant.

THE HELMSMAN

Two years before the Battle of Yavin, Emperor Palpatine’s New Year’s Fete–week appearance on Imperial Center included an unexpected announcement: The Emperor had elevated twelve military commanders to a new rank, making them Grand Admirals of the New Order and parading them in white dress uniforms decorated with gold epaulets. Palpatine’s announcement surprised the navy’s top brass, who immediately fell to guessing at his motives.

Four of the new Grand Admirals—Josef Grunger, Miltin Takel, Osvald Teshik, and Rufaan Tigellinus—were respected strategists with years of service as fleet admirals, and their appointments brooked little argument. But many an admiral in the starfleet’s ranks could claim service records comparable with those of Nial Declann, Octavian Grant, Afsheen Makati, and Peccati Syn, making them odd candidates for such a lofty promotion. Two other new Grand Admirals—Mario Batch and Demetrius Zaarin—were better known for supervising military research than for battlefield successes. And Ishin-Il-Raz and Danetta Pitta were New Order zealots notable only for the ferocity of their politics. (The Empire did name a few Grand Generals, but the rank was largely honorary.)

One of the benefits of being Emperor is never having to explain yourself, and so the conspiracy theories flew whenever officers of the starfleet gathered—and intensified after the traitorous Zaarin was killed and replaced by the mysterious Chiss known as Thrawn. Curious officers noted that only Grant, Grunger, Syn, and Tigellinus continued their regular naval service, and of those four, only Tigellinus benefited substantially from his newfound rank, becoming a Core Worlds Grand Moff. The other Grand Admirals were tasked with special projects, or given missions outside the naval ranks. Some of the Grand Admirals espoused the values of the navy’s generationals—Teshik had dwelled in Anaxes’s Sirpar Hills for centuries—while others were the worst sort of High Human Culture bigots. And yet the alien Thrawn had been elevated to their ranks, and rumors circulated freely about Pitta’s bloodline.

When Palpatine died at Endor, the Grand Admirals became wild cards in the struggle that consumed the suddenly rudderless Empire. Declann had been killed at Endor; Teshik had been captured; Thrawn was thought dead; and Batch was in hiding after the failure of his TIE Phantom project. Makati, Syn, Takel, and Tigellinus continued to defend their areas of operations while waiting for guidance from Palpatine’s successor; Grunger and Pitta set themselves up as warlords; Grant supported the breakaway Grand Moff Ardus Kaine; and Il-Raz went mad, attacking Outer Rim worlds seemingly at random.

As the New Republic exploited the Empire’s fragmentation, it kept careful track of the Grand Admirals and their fates. But only three of the Grand Admirals would die at New Republic hands: Teshik was executed, Syn died in the liberation of Kashyyyk, and Makati was killed trying to keep the Corporate Sector an Imperial possession. The others died by other means: Batch’s crew killed him and backed Warlord Harrsk; Il-Raz plunged his Star Destroyer into the heart of the Denarii Nova; Grunger and Pitta killed each other fighting over the Corellian sector; and Takel and Tigellinus were killed by potential Emperors who doubted their loyalties. When Grant defected to the New Republic two years after Endor, he was allowed to retire to Rathalay as the “last Grand Admiral.”

But one Grand Admiral remained alive: Thrawn had watched the Empire’s disintegration from the Unknown Regions, disgusted at how the New Order had torn itself apart. He vowed that when he returned, things would be different.

After the Battle of Yavin, Red Squadron was reconstituted as a pair of flights, dubbed Renegade and Rogue. Commander Arhul Narra tapped Luke Skywalker to lead Rogue Flight, with Wedge Antilles as a second in command. The Rogues’ early missions included assisting with the evacuation of Yavin 4; fighting at Barkesh, Gerrard, Jabiim, and Vactooine; and aiding Crix Madine’s defection on Corellia.

After Renegade Flight was destroyed at the Battle of Derra IV, Skywalker and Antilles decided to expand Rogue Flight into a full-fledged squadron serving High Command. Their plans hadn’t progressed beyond poring over lists of pilots when Skywalker was injured and General Rieekan ordered the evacuation of Echo Base. Members of Rogue Flight and Blue and Green squadrons were pressed into service as Rogue Group, doubling up as pilots and gunners for the Alliance’s T-47 airspeeders, which had been converted for the frigid conditions of Hoth just days before.

Rogue Leader: Luke Skywalker, Tatooine (pilot), and Dak Ralter, Kalist (gunner). Commander Skywalker had barely emerged from a bacta tank when he led Rogue Group against the AT-ATs of Blizzard Force. Ralter grew up in an Imperial penal colony, escaped and joined the Rebellion. He served with the Tierfon Yellow Aces before joining the Rogues. Shot down; Ralter killed in action.

Rogue Two: Zev Senesca, Bestine (pilot), and Kit Valent, Huulia (gunner). Senesca grew up on Kestic Station, a depot on the outskirts of the Bestine system. His parents were free traders with Rebel sympathies who encouraged him to join the Alliance. After a year with the Rebellion, Senesca learned his parents had been killed in an Imperial raid. Blaming the Alliance, he abandoned the Rebel cause for life as a free trader—but learned the raid had originated with his own careless talk about his parents’ activities. Senesca rejoined the Rebellion, vowing to atone for his terrible mistake. Valent grew up as a roughneck spaceport kid on Huulia, hiring on to freighters and transports in his teens to see the galaxy. What he saw convinced him that the Empire had to be overthrown, leading him to join the Rebels. Shot down; Senesca and Valent killed in action.

Rogue Three: Wedge Antilles, Corellia (pilot), and Wes Janson, Taanab (gunner). Antilles and Janson became friends while serving with the Tierfon Yellow Aces. Antilles was transferred to Yavin Base, while Janson was placed on a list of pilots to be transferred in case of emergency. When the request came through, Janson was ill with Hesken Fever. His friend Jek Porkins went instead, and died above the Death Star—a substitution that haunted Janson for years. He joined the Rogues soon after Yavin, rekindling his friendship with Antilles, who was also haunted by what he thought of as his failure at Yavin. T-47 intact.

Rogue Four: Derek “Hobbie” Klivian, Ralltiir (pilot), and Kesin Ommis, Coruscant (gunner). Klivian trained with Tycho Celchu and Biggs Darklighter at the Prefsbelt Naval Academy, and after receiving his commission led a mutiny aboard the frigate Rand Ecliptic, joining the Rebellion with his fellow mutineer Darklighter. He was too ill to fly in the Battle of Yavin, and his spot in Red Squadron went to Skywalker. Klivian survived a number of horrific crashes, resulting in bacta sessions and the replacement of parts of his body with cybernetic parts. Ommis joined the Rebellion soon after the Death Star’s destruction; he and Klivian were pulled from starfighter duty to pilot snowspeeders shortly before the Imperial ground assault began. Shot down; both survived.

Rogue Five: Tycho Celchu, Alderaan (pilot), and Tarn Mison, Las Lagon (gunner). Celchu graduated from Prefsbelt as one of Soontir Fel’s more impressive cadets and distinguished himself as a TIE pilot aboard the Star Destroyer Accuser. On his twenty-first birthday, he was speaking to his family and fiancée via the HoloNet when the transmission cut off. When Celchu learned Alderaan had been destroyed by the Empire, he deserted and joined the Rebellion. Mison grew up as a superb bush pilot and became a smuggler working the Shipwrights’ Trace, with his interests revolving around credits, not politics. He took a job running supplies to a colony of conscientious objectors on Farbinda III and arrived to discover that an Imperial strike team had rounded up the colonists; though they offered no resistance, the Imperials killed them all. After several months of struggling with what he’d seen, Mison brought his skills to the Rebellion. T-47 intact.

Rogue Six: Samoc Farr, Chandrila (pilot), and Vigrat Pomoner, Iotra (gunner). Farr grew up in a family loyal to Mon Mothma and staunchly opposed to the Empire; with help from sympathetic Chandrilan authorities, the Farrs and several other families faked a transport crash in which a number of their children were reported killed, among them Samoc and her sister Toryn. Samoc and Toryn were spirited offworld and joined the Rebellion, with Samoc becoming a superb pilot. Both were assigned to Echo Base. Pomoner, a hulking Iotran, was the only nonhuman Rogue, and joined the Rebellion after an Imperial Army unit sent his Iotran Police Force into an ambush because nonhumans’ lives were expendable. Shot down; Pomoner killed in action.

Rogue Seven: Nala Hetsime, Pa Tho (pilot), and Cinda Tarheel, Socorro (gunner). The dour, laconic Hetsime was a mystery to his fellow pilots, who failed to draw more than the most basic personal information out of him, but couldn’t argue with his skill and bravery in the cockpit. Tarheel was the opposite, a fast-talking, quick-shooting former smuggler whose superb reflexes allowed her to escape her own rash combat decisions. T-47 intact.

Rogue Eight: Zev Kabir, Ahakista (pilot), and Stax Mullawny, Corellia (gunner). An older man, Kabir worked with resistance groups on his homeworld before concluding that the Empire could only be defeated by striking closer to the source of its power. The scarred, sardonic Mullawny was an inveterate tinkerer who knew a tremendous amount about the weak points of Imperial warships and garrisons. Shot down; Kabir and Mullawny killed in action.

Rogue Nine: Stevan Makintay, Hargeeva (pilot), and Barlon Hightower, Lantillies (gunner). Born into royalty on Hargeeva, “Mak” Makintay at first welcomed the Imperial annexation of his planet, as it allowed him to trade expertise with a sword for pilot training. But his father used his new position as Imperial governor to oppress the Hargeevans and disinherited his son, shipping him off to a penal colony. Makintay escaped and returned to Hargeeva to lead a revolt, which was brutally suppressed. Hightower spent years as a transport pilot for various Lantillian guilds, during which he became convinced that there was no place for neutrality in the Galactic Civil War. After narrowly evading arrest, he joined the Rebellion. T-47 intact.

Rogue Ten: Tarrin Datch, Duro (pilot), and Hosh Hune, Fondor (gunner). Datch grew up on Pellezara Station, where he was piloting tugs and freighters before his teens and quickly demonstrated that he could fly anything spaceworthy and more than a few things that didn’t quite meet the definition. While servicing a freighter, he discovered stolen fuel slugs and a wounded Rebel agent named Jan Ors. He helped her escape and joined the Rebellion, where his piloting abilities proved invaluable. The bald, grim Hosh Hune was a low-caste Fondorian given an apprenticeship in that planet’s Guild of Starshipwrights as a reward for generations of his family’s guild service. Hune soon discovered he was working on weapons systems for the Executor; after agonizing over wasting his family’s efforts, he deserted his post and joined the Rebellion. Shot down; T-47 salvaged; Hune killed in action.

Rogue Eleven: Tenk Lenso, Glova (pilot), and Jek Pugilio, Glova (gunner). An expert gunner, Lenso was the lone survivor of the Deretta Destroyers, a mixed squadron of X-wings and Y-wings ambushed at Tarabba. The experience haunted Lenso, who suffered flashbacks and found himself unable to serve as a gunner. Hoping to salvage Lenso’s promising career, General Rieekan made him a pilot in Rogue Group and asked a fellow Glovan, the soft-spoken Jek Pugilio, to try to help him. Lenso and Datch brought Han Solo and Chewbacca to Echo Station 3-8 to investigate transmissions made in Imperial binary code. Shot down; Lenso and Pugilio killed in action.

Rogue Twelve: Dash Rendar, Corellia (pilot). Rendar’s parents owned a lucrative Corellian shipping company, and won Dash a commission to the Imperial Naval Academy. But a competitor sabotaged one of their freighters, which crashed into the Imperial Museum on Coruscant, killing Dash’s brother. Furious over the loss of valuable artifacts, the Empire seized the Rendars’ company, exiled the family, and expelled Rendar from Carida. Dash became a pilot-for-hire, professing to care only about credits. His ship was on Hoth when the Empire attacked, and Han Solo convinced Luke Skywalker to give Rendar a temporary place in Rogue Group. Despite not having a gunner, he managed to down an AT-AT. T-47 intact.

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WAR PORTRAIT: ADMIRAL PIETT

Born on Axxila in 39 BBY, the teenage Firmus Piett wanted nothing more than to go to war. After the corporate interests that controlled the Ciutric Hegemony supported the Separatists, Piett and his family relocated to Halmad, along with many other so-called Free Axxilans. He graduated from the Quelii Sector Academy, just days before the war came to an end.

A young man with few connections, Piett found himself patrolling the backworlds of the Ciutric Hegemony with veterans of the Ciutric Planetary Security Forces, now wearing the uniform of the Imperial Navy. For decades such patrols had made tidy sums by ignoring smugglers and pirates, but Piett refused to do so—and he had the good fortune to enter the service shortly after the reform-minded Moff Pensar Luc became the Hegemony’s governor. Luc assigned Piett to a new task force staffed by officers he felt he could trust, and directed them to clean up the Ciutric space lanes.

Piett made many arrests and seizures and rose rapidly through the ranks, assuming the leadership of Axxila trade enforcement operations. He also carefully cultivated his contacts elsewhere in the navy, going as far as to reshape his Rimmer accent in favor of the clipped tones of the Core Worlds.

Piett’s record and experience rooting out smugglers and pirates caught the eye of Darth Vader, who appointed him captain of the Accuser, one of Death Squadron’s Star Destroyers. Piett’s unflappable demeanor and no-nonsense approach won him a promotion to captain of the Executor shortly after the Rebels evacuated Yavin 4—an important post but one without real command duties, as the Executor was the flagship of Death Squadron’s admiral, Kendal Ozzel.

Piett soon discovered that Ozzel was alternately impetuous and languorous, and automatically ridiculed underlings’ ideas and findings to protect his position. Ridding the galaxy of Rebels—whom Piett saw as next-generation Separatists—was too important to be left to such a man, and Piett began thinking about how to engineer Ozzel’s downfall.

After a probe droid transmitted video of a suspiciously large shield generator on the ice plains of Hoth, Piett waited until Vader was on the Executor’s bridge to tell Ozzel. Ozzel dismissed the report, but Vader overheard, and overruled the admiral. When Ozzel then brought the Executor out of hyperspace too close to the Hoth system, alerting the Rebels to Death Squadron’s imminent attack, Vader had had enough. As Piett watched with a queasy mix of satisfaction and horror, Vader strangled Ozzel with the Force and handed command of Death Squadron to Piett.

Death Squadron tracked the Millennium Falcon to Bespin, and Piett’s men sabotaged the freighter’s hyperdrive after Cloud City’s mechanics repaired it. The Falcon rocketed away from Cloud City, but the Executor was waiting. As the great battleship closed on the doomed freighter and the boarding party prepared for action, Piett allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. His squadron had crippled Alliance High Command, and would now take custody of Leia Organa, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca—three of the Empire’s most wanted war criminals. But then, somehow, the Falcon vanished into hyperspace.

Piett expected to die—but Darth Vader swept by him in silence and headed for his own quarters. By surviving, Piett became a navy legend—the man who had proven so valuable that he was above even Vader’s wrath.

Piett sensed he had lived not because of his battlefield successes, but due to something at work in Vader’s own dark mind. After Bespin he treated Vader with deference and respect, but never with fear, serving ably as Death Squadron’s admiral until the Battle of Endor. After a barrage of Alliance fire damaged the Executor’s guidance systems and brought down her forward shields, a Rebel starfighter smashed through the command bridge’s viewports, killing Piett instantly.

Piett addresses two captured smugglers (Jason Palmer)

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WAR PORTRAIT:
GENERAL RIEEKAN

Many of the Rebels at Echo Base found Carlist Rieekan hard to love: The general seemed unrelentingly grim, a man who thought disaster was lurking everywhere and couldn’t fathom why everyone wasn’t preparing for it as meticulously as he was. Princess Leia didn’t disagree that Rieekan was hard to understand, but when she overheard griping about him, she tried to explain what had made him that way.

Born in 47 BBY, Rieekan grew up on Alderaan and enlisted in the Republic’s Judicial Forces at seventeen, fighting for the Republic Army during the Clone Wars. After the Declaration of the New Order he returned to Alderaan to serve House Organa, and soon became one of Bail Organa’s inner circle, advising the viceroy on how best to give covert aid to Rebel freedom fighters.

Rieekan was inspecting a satellite transmission station orbiting Delaya, Alderaan’s sister planet, when the Death Star arrived in the system. Rieekan knew what the massive battle station was and what it was capable of, but he ignored the frantic calls for advice and help from Alderaan. If transports began lifting en masse from the planet, he reasoned, Grand Moff Tarkin might think his station was being attacked—and at the very least, he would have proof that Organa had told others about the battle station. Besides, it seemed inconceivable that Tarkin would dare turn the Death Star’s superlaser on one of the eldest of the Core Worlds—some ultimatum would be forthcoming.

Rieekan was still convincing himself that he’d made the right decision when the battle station fired on his home-world, destroying it in an eyeblink. Despite assurances from Alderaanian refugees that nothing could have been done, Rieekan would brood over his inaction for the rest of his life.

Rieekan became a general in the Alliance, setting up bases for High Command and the Rebellion’s most important cells. After Jan Dodonna was believed killed in the evacuation of Yavin 4, Rieekan was appointed commander of Alliance operations.

The general had his doubts about Echo Base from the start. Its location just off the Corellian Trade Spine was advantageous for operations, but the Ison Corridor was a decaying bypass that was difficult to navigate to Rimward and had only two exits, making it easy to trap Alliance forces within it. And Hoth itself troubled Rieekan: It was freezing, pelted by meteorites from the asteroid belt, and had no other sentients to mask the Rebels’ presence from Imperial patrols.

Rieekan did everything he could. He restricted traffic in and out of Hoth to the bare minimum. He requisitioned and installed a planetary-class shield generator and an ion cannon capable of damaging orbiting capital ships, then ringed the base with trenches and laser turrets. Rebel scouts were constantly sent out on tauntaun patrol, and evacuation drills were routine. Rieekan insisted that Echo Base be ready to pack up and go with just minutes’ notice, and have sufficient defenses to engineer a fighting retreat.

When Han Solo and Chewbacca destroyed an Imperial probe droid, Rieekan ordered an immediate evacuation, overruling objections that the Empire would merely conclude the probot had discovered a smugglers’ nest, or send a patrol. Rieekan had paid the price for underestimating the Empire’s murderousness once already. Despite the Rebels’ best attempts, the Empire did indeed arrive before Hoth could be left behind. Playing for time, Rieekan sent snowspeeders and soldiers to defend against a ground assault while Echo Base’s starfighters and ion cannon guarded transports running the gauntlet of Star Destroyers closing in on Hoth. Rieekan escaped on the last of the transports. Hoth had been a costly loss, but without Rieekan’s careful preparations and quick action, things would have been much worse.

After the Battle of Endor, Rieekan helped plan the drive to Coruscant, and later served as the New Republic’s minister of state and director of Intelligence. He retired in 17 ABY, but returned to active duty during the Yuuzhan Vong War, working to defend Coruscant against the extragalactic invaders.

Carlist Rieekan with Leia Organa and Han Solo (Tommy Lee Edwards)

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THE MILLENNIUM FALCON

Luke Skywalker called her a piece of junk. Lando Calrissian amended that slightly, saying she was the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy. For years Han Solo and Chewbacca called her home.

The Millennium Falcon began life as a stock Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 transport, one of millions sold over more than a century after the model’s introduction in 72 BBY. The freighter’s first owner was a shipping firm called Corell Industries Limited, which named her the Corell’s Pride; she would bear many names and pass through many hands over her first several decades. She was given her permanent name in 10 BBY by a Rebel agent named Quip Fargil, and wound up in the possession of Lando Calrissian five years later. Calrissian’s friend Han Solo took a liking to the battered freighter, and won her in a sabacc game on Cloud City in 2 BBY.

MILLENNIUM FALCON

Solo loved to tinker almost as much as he loved to fly, and he outfitted the Falcon with whatever gear he could get his hands on, paying no mind to Imperial regulations. A customs official on Byblos once said the Falcon had so many illegal systems that it would have been easier to list the legal ones—a remark Solo took as a compliment once he and Chewbacca had escaped custody.

Calrissian replaced the Falcon’s mandible-mounted blasters with CEC AG-2G quad laser cannons, but Solo made further modifications. The cannons packed a greater punch after he increased the size of each barrel’s energization crystal to allow for greater beam intensity, then supported those modifications with enhanced power cyclers, high-volume gas feeds, and custom laser actuators. Concussion missile launchers were hidden above and below the freight loading doors, and Han added a BlasTech Ax-108 “Ground Buzzer” repeating blaster that could drop from the ship’s belly and be fired from the cockpit.

When Solo won her, the Falcon already had illegally augmented shields; Solo acquired shield generators from the Myomar shipyards that boosted her shielding to military grade. He also added an oversized rectenna sensor dish linked to high-grade sensor suites and powerful sensor jammers.

Perhaps the Falcon’s most surprising system was her hyperdrive, which made her one of the fastest ships in the galaxy. Her customized Isu-Sim SSP05 hyperdrive was twice the size of a stock freighter’s, giving her a 0.5 hyperdrive class—twice the speed of Imperial warships. Solo credited the outlaw tech Doc Vandangate for modifying the hyperdrive to streamline the Falcon’s mass profile in hyperspace, but Han himself had installed her Quadex power core and the jury-rigged components that cut her jump sequence to a baseline of three minutes. The Falcon’s Girodyne SRB42 sublight engines were nearly as impressive, allowing the freighter to maneuver like a starfighter—and at near-starfighter speed.

A ship cobbled together from so many systems was inevitably subject to malfunctions, burnouts, and other problems. Making all these systems work together was a job not just for the pilot, but for the Falcon’s rebuilt Hanx-Wargel SuperFlow IV computer and its three subsidiary droid brains, scavenged from a military-issue R3 astromech, a V-5 transport droid, and a corporate espionage droid of uncertain origin. R2-D2 found the Falcon a grouchy but intriguing conversationalist, and was amused by the droid brains’ ceaseless arguments. But C-3PO found the freighter’s peculiar dialect and foul language appalling.

Solo resisted the New Republic’s entreaties that he retire the Falcon to a museum and choose a safer craft to fly, but never passed up a chance to add the kind of military components he’d dreamed of as a down-on-his-luck smuggler. After the Battle of Endor, he replaced the Falcon’s quad cannons with light turbolasers, upgraded the power generators to top-of-the-line military models, and overhauled her propulsion systems. But in 16 ABY, a well-meaning New Republic yard boss went too far for Han’s liking; despite promising Solo that he’d touch nothing, his techs gave the Falcon a thorough overhaul. Nearly 15 percent of the ship’s structural parts and the escape pods were replaced; the weapons, shields, and propulsion systems were upgraded and recalibrated; electronics were properly grounded and pulse-shielded; cables were bundled and tagged; the acceleration couches were recushioned and the crew quarters recarpeted.

Chewbacca liked the rebuilt Falcon better than ever, but Solo was horrified: Not that he minded the drive matrix’s new Sienar Systems augmenter, but the Falcon now flew too smoothly for his taste, with nary a shudder or creak, and he vowed to take a hydrospanner and loosen every fastener he could find so he’d feel at home again.