Novel References

Dark Force Rising

PAGE QUOTATION COMMENTS

1
...the late Emperor had seen fit to make Thrawn one of his twelve Grand Admirals...

The total number of Grand Admirals was twelve.

3
"Acknowledged, Chimaera," General Covell said into his helmet comlink, careful to keep the quiet scorn in his gut from getting to his voice. It was typical--typical and disgustingly predictable. You scrambled around like mad hellions, got your troops and vehicles on the ground and set up...and then you stood around waiting for those strutting Fleet people in their spotless uniforms and nice clean ships to finish sipping their tea and finally get around to letting you loose.

12-13
With their four huge gravity-wave generators capable of simulating planet-sized masses, Interdictor Cruisers were the Empire's weapon of choice for trapping enemy ships in normal space while TIE fighters pounded it to rubble. But coming in fresh out of lightspeed itself, the Interdictor would need another minute before it could power up those generators.

14
[Mara Jade] wasn't a serving girl in a Phorliss cantina this time, or a come-up flector for a swoop gang on Caprioril, or even a hyperdrive mechanic stuck in the backwater of the Ison Corridor. She was second in command to the most powerful smuggler in the galaxy, with the kind of resources and mobility she hadn't had since the death of the Emperor.

14
[Imperial Interdictor Constrainer]

17
This wasn't Wayland, which he'd wrested from the Dark Jedi whom the Emperor had set to guard his Mount Tantiss storehouse.

38
"I had a thorough search made of the Imperial records when we first took Coruscant back from the Empire. There's nothing there but a list of the Grand Admirals' names and a little about their assignments."
"Erased before they pulled out," Han growled.
"Or perhaps never there to begin with," Leia suggested. "Remember that these weren't just the best and brightest military leaders the Emperor could find. They were also part of his plan to bring the Imperial military more personally under his control."
"As was the Death Star project itself," Ackbar said. "I agree Councilor. Until the Grand Admirals were fully integrated both militarily and politically, there was no reason to publish details of their identities. And every reason to conceal them."

Ackbar, Solo and the Princess discuss the poverty of information regarding the Grand Admirals of the Imperial Navy, and the Emperor's motivations in appointing those men. It is implied that Palpatine's power-hungry plans had not yet reached full fruition at the time of Lord Vader's rebellion.

44
...not only had C'baoth once been an adviser to the man who would someday declare himself Emperor, but he'd also been part of the attack against those Dark Jedi from the Sluis sector that Leia had told him about. One of whom had survived long enough to face Master Yoda on Dagobah.

58
"Have you ever heard of the Katana fleet?"
She had to search her memory. "That was the group also called the Dark Force, wasn't it? Something like two hundred Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruisers that were lost about ten years before the Clone Wars broke out. All the ships were fitted with some kind of new-style full-rig slave circuitry, and when the system malfunctioned, the whole fleet jumped to lightspeed together and disappeared."
"Nearly righy," Karrde said. "The Dreadnaughts of that era in particular were ridiculously crew-intensive ships, requiring upwards of sixteen thousand men each. The full-rig slave circuitry on the Katana ships cut that complement down to around two thousand."

78
[Imperial Star Destroyer Bellicose]

81
...Chewbacca maneuvered the Falcon into his precisely selected orbital slot above the lush green moon of Endor.

This descrition is extremely puzzling. The moon inevitably underwent a global mass-extinction event when fallout from the exploded Death Star settled in the upper atmosphere. The majority of the local plant life should be dead. If this passage is not to be interpretted as an error then it is most likely implying that the world is green with primitive mould or algae (either airborne above the fallout layer, or on less inhospitible sites in the wastelands on the ground). Or, it could be simply a global layer of copper salts.

143
[Imperial Star Destroyer Relentless]

This destroyer has a long history. It was first described in the SWRPG adventure Tatooine Manhunt, when it was commanded by a Captain Parlan.

147
"I'll want a troop shuttle and double squad of stormtroopers ready to accompany me, plus two flights of Scimitar assault bombers to provide air cover."

Does this mention of bombers refer to the Scimitar-class TIE or to the Scimitar bomber wing which was formerly assigned to the regional fleet of the Hook Nebula? In any case, it seems as if this is the reference which gave rise to the new bomber design in the Dark Force Rising Sourcebook.

160
[PB]

At maximum hyperspace speeds, a Dreadnaught achieves a hyperdrive rating of "point four".

172
"[The Jedi] were hunted down by the Emperor and Darth Vader."
"And one or two other Dark Jedi with them," C'baoth said grimly, his gaze turned inward. "Dark Jedi like Vader. I fought the last of them on--" He broke off, shaking his head slowly. "So long ago."

182
"...after the Battle of Endor, I was able to see not only Ben but Yoda and my father too. Though the other two never spoke, and I never saw them again."

185
"What happened at Tangrene?" Han asked.
"We blasted a major Ubiqtorate center into fine powder," Bel Iblis told him with obvious satisfaction. "And then waltzed out right under the collective nose of the three Star Destroyers that were supposed to be guarding the place. I think that was when they finally woke up to the fact that we were more than just a minor irritant. That we were a group to be taken seriously."
"I'll bet they did," Han agreed, shaking his head in admiration. Even getting within sight of one Imperial Intelligence's Ubiqtorate bases was a tricky job, let alone blasting it and getting out again.

location: Tangrene, Imperial stronghold planet and site of an important Imperial Intelligence centre (destroyed by Senator Bel Iblis' rebels).

198
"To put it bluntly, Mon Mothma began to take over," Sena said. "Senator Bel Iblis was far better at strategy and tactics than she ever was, better than many of the Rebellion's generals and admirals in those early days. But she had the gift of inspiration, the knack of getting diverse groups and species to work together. Gradually, she became the most visible symbol of the Rebellion, with Organa and the Senator increasingly relegated to the background."
"Must have been hard for someone like Bel Iblis to take," Lando murmured.
"Yes, it was," Sena said. "But you have to understand that it wasn't just pride that drove him to withdraw his support. Bail Organa had been a strong moderating influence on Mon Mothma--he was one of the few people whom she respected and trusted enough to pay serious attention to. After he was killed in the Death Star's attack on Alderaan, there was really no one of equal status who could stand up to her. She began to take more and more power to herself; and the Senator began to suspect that she was going to overthrow the Emperor only to set herself up in his place."

Early history of the Rebel Alliance. Garm Bel Iblis' response to the growing extremism and personality cults surrounding Mon Mothma.

205
Thrawn looked back at the reader. "Endor," he murmured, half to himself. "Why Endor?"
"I don't know, sir," Pellaeon said. "Perhaps they were looking for another place to hide."
"Among the Ewoks?" Thrawn snorted derisively. "That would be desperation indeed."

Suggests that by this time at least one small band of Ewoks have been resettled with survival gear in the bleak Endor wastes.

210
[Imperial Victory-class Star Destroyer Adamant]

212
...from the labored sound of the engines, [Mara Jade] could guess they were pushing uncomfortably far past a Victory Star Destroyer's normal flank speed of Point Four Five. Possibly even as high as Point Five, which would mean they were covering a hundred twenty-seven light-years per hour.

Characteristic maximum speed of a particular naval hyperdrive: over a million times the speed of light.
Implies that speed increases when the "point" hyperfactor increases, the reverse of the interpretation used by West End Games. Perhaps there are two different kinds of hyperdrive performance factor?

214
"All right, then," Mara said. "We met once, during the public dedication of the new Assemblage wing of the Imperial Palace on Coruscant. At that ceremony the Emperor introduced me to you as Lianna, one of his favorite dancers. Later, during the more private ceremony that followed, he revealed to you my true identity."
"And what was that private ceremony?"
"Your secret promotion to the rank of Grand Admiral."

217
"The differences between regular and slave-rigged Dreadnaughts are subtle, but visible enough when you know to look for them."

266
"I don't imagine that the Emperor was pleased," Luke murmured.
"No, he wasn't," Mara said, her voice dark with memories of her own. "Vader nearly died for that blunder." Deliberately, she looked over at Luke's hands. "That was when he lost his right hand, in fact."

Mara Jade tells Luke Skywalker a little bit of his father's history.

287
"If there was one thing Thrawn had over all the other Grand Admirals, it was a knack for predicting his enemies' strategy."

300
Forty-four years. Not the five or even ten that she'd assumed. Forty-four. "[The destruction on Honoghr] didn't happen during the Rebellion," [Leia] heard herself say. "It happened during the Clone Wars."

chronology: The Honoghr holocaust supposedly happened 35 years before A New Hope. According to recent interviews with George Lucas, Episode I takes place 32 years before A New Hope and Anakin Skywalker was only about nine years old at the time. These dates are inconsistent.
Update: The Essential Guide to Alien Species offers a correction: the Noghri year is roughly half the standard year, and an average Noghri generation is only about ten years. A revised date is given: approximately twenty-eight years before the time of the quotations in EGtAS.

317
...if the Imperials got their hands on the Katana fleet, the balance of power in the ongoing war would suddenly be skewed back in their favor.

353
[Imperial Star Destroyer Peremptory]

371
Through the Judicator's side viewport Captain Brandei watched in stunned disbelief as the Peremptory died its fiery death. No--it couldn't be. It simply couldn't. Not an Imperial Star Destroyer. Not the mightiest ship in the Empire's fleet.

This passage indicates the depths of desperation to which the Imperial remnants have sunk, at least in the portions of the galaxy under the sway of Grand Admiral Thrawn. They have no access to ships larger than the common mile-long star destroyer. All of the serious cruisers, battlecruisers, heavy fleet carriers and command ships must be in the hands of other warlords or secretly secluded in the Deep Core.

375
"It won't be long until they're at that choice. Main propulsion's been knocked out, and they're developing microfractures in their hull seams. Computer projects that if they don't surface in ten minutes, they won't be able to."

Captain Pallaeon, informing Grand Admiral Thrawn of the status of the Coral Vanda.
According to Michael Wong:
The Chimaera was in orbit, and the Coral Vanda was underwater (I figure it probably tried to go deep, to get away from the TL impacts, until it developed hull fractures and had to surface). Even at moderate pressure, low-viscosity liquids like uncured thermoset plastic can flash in less than .002" (trust me; I work in the plastic injection moulding business). Water has similar viscosity to heated, uncured thermoset plastic. Therefore, the Coral Vanda would start taking on water with cracks as small as .05mm (particularly considering the water pressure deep underwater).
The important thing to note here is that the Chimaera was able to detect these tiny cracks in a ship which is underwater, even though it had to see this from orbit.

Dark Force Rising
PAGE	QUOTATION	COMMENTS
1	...the late Emperor had seen fit to make Thrawn one of his twelve Grand Admirals...	The total number of Grand Admirals was twelve.
3	"Acknowledged, Chimaera," General Covell said into his helmet comlink, careful to keep the quiet scorn in his gut from getting to his voice. It was typical--typical and disgustingly predictable. You scrambled around like mad hellions, got your troops and vehicles on the ground and set up...and then you stood around waiting for those strutting Fleet people in their spotless uniforms and nice clean ships to finish sipping their tea and finally get around to letting you loose.
12-13	With their four huge gravity-wave generators capable of simulating planet-sized masses, Interdictor Cruisers were the Empire's weapon of choice for trapping enemy ships in normal space while TIE fighters pounded it to rubble. But coming in fresh out of lightspeed itself, the Interdictor would need another minute before it could power up those generators.
14	[Mara Jade] wasn't a serving girl in a Phorliss cantina this time, or a come-up flector for a swoop gang on Caprioril, or even a hyperdrive mechanic stuck in the backwater of the Ison Corridor. She was second in command to the most powerful smuggler in the galaxy, with the kind of resources and mobility she hadn't had since the death of the Emperor.
14	[Imperial Interdictor Constrainer]
17	This wasn't Wayland, which he'd wrested from the Dark Jedi whom the Emperor had set to guard his Mount Tantiss storehouse.
38	"I had a thorough search made of the Imperial records when we first took Coruscant back from the Empire. There's nothing there but a list of the Grand Admirals' names and a little about their assignments." "Erased before they pulled out," Han growled. "Or perhaps never there to begin with," Leia suggested. "Remember that these weren't just the best and brightest military leaders the Emperor could find. They were also part of his plan to bring the Imperial military more personally under his control." "As was the Death Star project itself," Ackbar said. "I agree Councilor. Until the Grand Admirals were fully integrated both militarily and politically, there was no reason to publish details of their identities. And every reason to conceal them."	Ackbar, Solo and the Princess discuss the poverty of information regarding the Grand Admirals of the Imperial Navy, and the Emperor's motivations in appointing those men. It is implied that Palpatine's power-hungry plans had not yet reached full fruition at the time of Lord Vader's rebellion.
44	...not only had C'baoth once been an adviser to the man who would someday declare himself Emperor, but he'd also been part of the attack against those Dark Jedi from the Sluis sector that Leia had told him about. One of whom had survived long enough to face Master Yoda on Dagobah.
58	"Have you ever heard of the Katana fleet?" She had to search her memory. "That was the group also called the Dark Force, wasn't it? Something like two hundred Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruisers that were lost about ten years before the Clone Wars broke out. All the ships were fitted with some kind of new-style full-rig slave circuitry, and when the system malfunctioned, the whole fleet jumped to lightspeed together and disappeared." "Nearly righy," Karrde said. "The Dreadnaughts of that era in particular were ridiculously crew-intensive ships, requiring upwards of sixteen thousand men each. The full-rig slave circuitry on the Katana ships cut that complement down to around two thousand."
78	[Imperial Star Destroyer Bellicose]
81	...Chewbacca maneuvered the Falcon into his precisely selected orbital slot above the lush green moon of Endor.	This descrition is extremely puzzling. The moon inevitably underwent a global mass-extinction event when fallout from the exploded Death Star settled in the upper atmosphere. The majority of the local plant life should be dead. If this passage is not to be interpretted as an error then it is most likely implying that the world is green with primitive mould or algae (either airborne above the fallout layer, or on less inhospitible sites in the wastelands on the ground). Or, it could be simply a global layer of copper salts.
143	[Imperial Star Destroyer Relentless]	This destroyer has a long history. It was first described in the SWRPG adventure Tatooine Manhunt, when it was commanded by a Captain Parlan.
147	"I'll want a troop shuttle and double squad of stormtroopers ready to accompany me, plus two flights of Scimitar assault bombers to provide air cover."	Does this mention of bombers refer to the Scimitar-class TIE or to the Scimitar bomber wing which was formerly assigned to the regional fleet of the Hook Nebula? In any case, it seems as if this is the reference which gave rise to the new bomber design in the Dark Force Rising Sourcebook.
160 [PB]		At maximum hyperspace speeds, a Dreadnaught achieves a hyperdrive rating of "point four".
172	"[The Jedi] were hunted down by the Emperor and Darth Vader." "And one or two other Dark Jedi with them," C'baoth said grimly, his gaze turned inward. "Dark Jedi like Vader. I fought the last of them on--" He broke off, shaking his head slowly. "So long ago."
182	"...after the Battle of Endor, I was able to see not only Ben but Yoda and my father too. Though the other two never spoke, and I never saw them again."
185	"What happened at Tangrene?" Han asked. "We blasted a major Ubiqtorate center into fine powder," Bel Iblis told him with obvious satisfaction. "And then waltzed out right under the collective nose of the three Star Destroyers that were supposed to be guarding the place. I think that was when they finally woke up to the fact that we were more than just a minor irritant. That we were a group to be taken seriously." "I'll bet they did," Han agreed, shaking his head in admiration. Even getting within sight of one Imperial Intelligence's Ubiqtorate bases was a tricky job, let alone blasting it and getting out again.	location: Tangrene, Imperial stronghold planet and site of an important Imperial Intelligence centre (destroyed by Senator Bel Iblis' rebels).
198	"To put it bluntly, Mon Mothma began to take over," Sena said. "Senator Bel Iblis was far better at strategy and tactics than she ever was, better than many of the Rebellion's generals and admirals in those early days. But she had the gift of inspiration, the knack of getting diverse groups and species to work together. Gradually, she became the most visible symbol of the Rebellion, with Organa and the Senator increasingly relegated to the background." "Must have been hard for someone like Bel Iblis to take," Lando murmured. "Yes, it was," Sena said. "But you have to understand that it wasn't just pride that drove him to withdraw his support. Bail Organa had been a strong moderating influence on Mon Mothma--he was one of the few people whom she respected and trusted enough to pay serious attention to. After he was killed in the Death Star's attack on Alderaan, there was really no one of equal status who could stand up to her. She began to take more and more power to herself; and the Senator began to suspect that she was going to overthrow the Emperor only to set herself up in his place."	Early history of the Rebel Alliance. Garm Bel Iblis' response to the growing extremism and personality cults surrounding Mon Mothma.
205	Thrawn looked back at the reader. "Endor," he murmured, half to himself. "Why Endor?" "I don't know, sir," Pellaeon said. "Perhaps they were looking for another place to hide." "Among the Ewoks?" Thrawn snorted derisively. "That would be desperation indeed."	Suggests that by this time at least one small band of Ewoks have been resettled with survival gear in the bleak Endor wastes.
210	[Imperial Victory-class Star Destroyer Adamant]
212	...from the labored sound of the engines, [Mara Jade] could guess they were pushing uncomfortably far past a Victory Star Destroyer's normal flank speed of Point Four Five. Possibly even as high as Point Five, which would mean they were covering a hundred twenty-seven light-years per hour.	Characteristic maximum speed of a particular naval hyperdrive: over a million times the speed of light. Implies that speed increases when the "point" hyperfactor increases, the reverse of the interpretation used by West End Games. Perhaps there are two different kinds of hyperdrive performance factor?
214	"All right, then," Mara said. "We met once, during the public dedication of the new Assemblage wing of the Imperial Palace on Coruscant. At that ceremony the Emperor introduced me to you as Lianna, one of his favorite dancers. Later, during the more private ceremony that followed, he revealed to you my true identity." "And what was that private ceremony?" "Your secret promotion to the rank of Grand Admiral."
217	"The differences between regular and slave-rigged Dreadnaughts are subtle, but visible enough when you know to look for them."
266	"I don't imagine that the Emperor was pleased," Luke murmured. "No, he wasn't," Mara said, her voice dark with memories of her own. "Vader nearly died for that blunder." Deliberately, she looked over at Luke's hands. "That was when he lost his right hand, in fact."	Mara Jade tells Luke Skywalker a little bit of his father's history.
287	"If there was one thing Thrawn had over all the other Grand Admirals, it was a knack for predicting his enemies' strategy."
300	Forty-four years. Not the five or even ten that she'd assumed. Forty-four. "[The destruction on Honoghr] didn't happen during the Rebellion," [Leia] heard herself say. "It happened during the Clone Wars."	chronology: The Honoghr holocaust supposedly happened 35 years before A New Hope. According to recent interviews with George Lucas, Episode I takes place 32 years before A New Hope and Anakin Skywalker was only about nine years old at the time. These dates are inconsistent. Update: The Essential Guide to Alien Species offers a correction: the Noghri year is roughly half the standard year, and an average Noghri generation is only about ten years. A revised date is given: approximately twenty-eight years before the time of the quotations in EGtAS.
317	...if the Imperials got their hands on the Katana fleet, the balance of power in the ongoing war would suddenly be skewed back in their favor.
353	[Imperial Star Destroyer Peremptory]
371	Through the Judicator's side viewport Captain Brandei watched in stunned disbelief as the Peremptory died its fiery death. No--it couldn't be. It simply couldn't. Not an Imperial Star Destroyer. Not the mightiest ship in the Empire's fleet.	This passage indicates the depths of desperation to which the Imperial remnants have sunk, at least in the portions of the galaxy under the sway of Grand Admiral Thrawn. They have no access to ships larger than the common mile-long star destroyer. All of the serious cruisers, battlecruisers, heavy fleet carriers and command ships must be in the hands of other warlords or secretly secluded in the Deep Core.
375	"It won't be long until they're at that choice. Main propulsion's been knocked out, and they're developing microfractures in their hull seams. Computer projects that if they don't surface in ten minutes, they won't be able to."	Captain Pallaeon, informing Grand Admiral Thrawn of the status of the Coral Vanda. According to Michael Wong: The Chimaera was in orbit, and the Coral Vanda was underwater (I figure it probably tried to go deep, to get away from the TL impacts, until it developed hull fractures and had to surface). Even at moderate pressure, low-viscosity liquids like uncured thermoset plastic can flash in less than .002" (trust me; I work in the plastic injection moulding business). Water has similar viscosity to heated, uncured thermoset plastic. Therefore, the Coral Vanda would start taking on water with cracks as small as .05mm (particularly considering the water pressure deep underwater). The important thing to note here is that the Chimaera was able to detect these tiny cracks in a ship which is underwater, even though it had to see this from orbit.

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