STAR WARS
Novel References


X-Wing: Wedge's Gamble

PAGE QUOTATION COMMENTS
14

[Reference to Imperial Victory-class Star Destroyer Exsanguinator]


16

Taking Coruscant would confer upon the New Republic a legitimacy it had not yet earned in the eyes of much of the Empire's citizenry. Those who were aware of the state of the Empire could find little to differentiate the Rebels from the Imperial warlords who were carving their own little realm out of the Empire. Though the might not believe assurances from Coruscant that the threat presented by the Alliance or people like Warlord Zsinj was minor, they did not yet see the Empire as a cadaver waiting for scavengers to carve it up.

Perceptions and status of the pariticipants in the Empire's downfall: the rogue Imperial warlords, the centrist Imperial forces of Ysanne Isard, and the Rebel Alliance.

30

"The leadership vacuum in the Imperial Navy post-Endor allowed [Zsinj] to rise further than was previously reasonable, then declare himself Warlord and begin his drive to take control of the Empire."

At the time of the Battle of Endor, Zsinj was an Admiral commanding a fleet led by the Iron Fist, a vessel which is believed to be an Executor-class command ship. Zsinj and Iron Fist feature in The Courtship of Princess Leia.

32

Doman Beruss, a flaxen-haired woman who represented the Corellian exiles on the Council...

This Doman Beruss is a female human from the Corellian system. Curiously, there is an old male human by the same name from the Illodian system in The Black Fleet Crisis novels. This Beruss is also a veteran politician within the Rebel Alliance.

32-33

"After the Emperor's death, a government was formed under the leadership of Sate Pestage. His suzerainty lasted six months until a coup by a coterie of other Imperial advisers forced him into exile. it appears that his ouster was organized by Ysanne Isard — she was definitely behind Pestage's hounding and death. She deftly undercut the bureaucrats she had used to vanquish Pestage and took control of the Empire for herself. While she maintains her title of Director of Intelligence, and has suggested she is holding the planet in stewardship, there is no doubt that she is in full control."

History of Ysanne Isard's rise to power on Coruscant. Sate Pestage went into exile on Byss, taking Palpatine's archives with him. There he was delighted to find that his old master in resurrected form. The later reference to Pestage's "death" probably just means that Isard sought or advocated his execution.

33

"Despite [Isard] not being from a military background, she has, in no way, allowed the defenses of the Imperial homeworld to slacken. Outermost we have Golan Space Defense stations. They are comparable in power to a Star Destroyer. They are not mobile, so eliminating them from a section of the sky over Coruscant will give us an area in which to operate, but eventually all of them will have to be neutralized."
"In addition to these defense stations, there are approximately seven Victory-class Star Destroyers on station at Coruscant. There are ground-based fighter groups as well as the fighter wings stationed in and around the ships, shipyards, and orbital factories. The orbital mirror stations and low-orbit skyhooks may have also been armed."
Ackbar clasped his hands behind his back. "As formidable as all that is, the primary problem in taking Coruscant is the overlapping defense shields."

New Republic intelligence about the status of Coruscant's defences prior to the planet's capture.

38

"You're on." Leia swept a hand out to take in the nearly treeless landscape. "Fey'lya arranged for this meeting to be held here, on Noquivzor. He is right at home here - these savannahs closely resemble his home range on Bothawui...."

locations: Noquivzor; Bothawui the Bothan homeworld.


Fay'lya was from a Bothan colony, not Bothawui proper.

According to A Guide to the STAR WARS Universe, he grew up on the Bothan colony of Kothlis. It says "grew up", so I suppose he might have been born on Bothawui.... or have spent the majority of his adult life there.

48

"Contruum's my homeworld. Naming conventions for ships restrict virtues to capital ships. Transports are named for beasts of burden and rivers."

location: Contruum.
Naming conventions of Contruum - it implies that transports and capital ships are mutually exclusive.

55

"...in the past Major Wortin would have been executed, but we cannot afford to squander our personnel with such abandon anymore. I have approved your suggestion that he be transferred to the Inexorable. Under Thrawn he will learn lessons he should already know, or he will die."

Other novels imply that Grand Admiral Thrawn was unaware of the fall of the Empire and the death of Palpatine until he returned from the Unknown Regions at about four or five years after the Battle of Endor. This quote by Ysanne Isard suggests that Thrawn is not completely incommunicado, and Isard is keeping Thrawn in the dark, perhaps because he would be a potential rival. In any case, perhaps Wortin's transfer is what preciptated Thrawn's return; the major could hardly keep Palpatine's fall secret from his new superior officer.

102

By circulating bacta throught a capsule, Rebel medics had been able to speed up the Gand's rather remarkable regenerative abilities - abilities noone in the Alliance had known Gands possessed.

aliens: Gand physiology. Ooryl regenerated an entire limb, and nobody knew Gands could do it.

106

"I meant ten million." She batted her eyes. "Is that enough?"
Wedge coughed into his fist. "I think it will do."
"Yeah, being able to buy a whole wing of snubfighters could be handy in a pinch." Corran shook his head.

Corran briefly touches on the cost of starfighters; He roughly estimates that ten million credits could buy a wing of snubfighters (I assume he means X-Wings because that's probably what Rogue Squadron thinks in, except when counting kills ) so, because a wing is 36 fighters (Defender Wing is composed of 3 squadrons) an X-Wing probably costs approximately three hundred thousand credits. Note that there is a difference between the size of an Imperial wing and an Alliance/New Republic wing. An Imperial wing is 72 fighters, double the size of the equivalent New Republic force.

119

Corran nodded. "So I was in for, what, a week?"
"Two days."
"What?" Corran frowned at the tech. "I should have been in there much longer than that for those injuries."
The tech lifted his chin and gave Corran an imperious stare. "You are used to dealing with export-quality bacta, and a Xucphran product at that, friend. The bacta here is much more potent."

'Export-quality' bacta? Why do they have 'export-quality' bacta and 'reserve' bacta? Why do Zaltin and Xucphra hoard their more potent bacta? Perhaps this grade of bacta is simply too expensive for most buyers to afford, and the Thyferrans invest some of their enormous wealth back into providing this high-grade bacta for their own use.

119

One of the most unnerving things about being in a bacta tank, with its temperature control and neutral buoyancy, was the feeling of floating in a void. If not for the touch of the breathing mask on his face, he would have no connection to the outside world.

Bacta tanks are not comfortable, as shown by Luke, Wedge et al. Aesthetics of bacta tanks.

134

"Paranoia has a way of colouring your thoughts about the world."
Wedge smiled as they moved out of the Galactic Museum's Sith artifact room. "Paranoia may be an effect of the things in that room. Ghastly stuff..."
"But seductively powerful." Iella glanced down wistfully. "Not as crude as a cubic meter of credits, but those things appeal to something even more base than greed."

The Galactic Museum still retains a hall of Sith relics, much as it did four thousand years earlier when Satal Keto stole the tome which eventually allowed him to lead the Krath into rediscovery of Sith power. Although left undescribed, the Sith artifacts renmain potent and appear to be distinctive in their aesthetics.

135

Several displays did provide notations that this plant or that animal had been made extinct on their native worlds by "outlaws and malcontents," and included among such beasts were Ewoks — and Imperial taxidermists had taken great pains to make them seem helpless and even more cute than they were in real life.

The Galactic Museum on Coruscant reveals the extinction of the ewoks in the aftermath of the Battle of Endor, a fact which is unfamiliar and unwelcome to the pilots of Rogue Squadron (who presumably were protected from information about the side-effects of their destruction of the Death Star II).

When a moon-sized metallic object in low orbit injects its debris and fallout into the atmosphere below, the result is an immensely potent "nuclear winter" effect which will last for years. Darkness enshrouds the ewoks' homeworld, killing plant life. Herbivore and carnivores starve in succession. A handful of ewoks seem to have been evacuated by the rebels, escaping the biocide, since they are seen briefly on Coruscant in Dark Empire. Nevertheless, there cannot be enough survivors to constitute a genetically healthy breeding population.

143

Coming to the Palace's Grand Corridor had been the final and crowning expedition in their survey of the upper, most public levels of Coruscant. At first Corran had balked at taking such a risk because he felt security there, in the heart of the building from which the government was run, had to be maintained at the highest level. ... He knew that any attempt to take Coruscant might well end up with a running lightfight through the halls and corridors of the Palace, so any information about its security would clearly save lives.
And in this place Rogue Squadron could have dogfights with a whole wing of TIEs.
The Grand Corridor had immediately impressed him with its scope and size. The corridor itself ran on for kilometres and the open areas at the floor level could easily have accommodated a Star Destroyer. Banners of all colours and designs hung from balustrades and arches. Each one represented a world in the Empire and there were more of them than Corran figured he could count in a lifetime

Corran Horn surveys the Grand Corridor in the Imperial Palace. His observations set a minimum limit on the size of the Palace at several kilometres wide and tall.

143

Purple and green ch'hala trees lined the main floor and each of the upper levels. ... ch'hala trees had been a favourite of the Emperor's and placed here at his specific request. though he hated everything the Emperor had stood for, Corran had to admit that the ch'hala trees were what truly made this place grand.

The trees are a vital but secret element of the Palace security system, as revealled in The Last Command.

144

The upper galleries of the Grand Corridor appeared to be alien free, yet the mechanism for maintaining them that way was remarkably unobtrusive. Side passages leading to stairs or lifts narrowed considerably, forcing individuals to move through them no more than two or three abreast. Guards wearing a more stylised and aesthetically pleasing form of stormtrooper armour maintained posts at these passages and gently redirected anyone who appeared to be lost. They did respond to questions, but only with directions to the nearest visitor and information kiosks where the questions could be asked again.

Distinctive stormtrooper guards in the public regions of the Imperial Palace. They may be the Coruscant Guards known in Shadows of the Empire, or Imperial Royal Guards, or another variant of armour which hitherto unseen.

148

"[Tycho Celchu] had graduated from the Academy and was assigned to a Star Destroyer — the Accuser."

Accuser was a destroyer which was eventually captured by the Rebel Alliance at the Battle of Yavin.

153

... the vast scale of the invasion needed to wrest the planet from the Empire began to press upon Gavin. The planet had billions upon billions of people. The force needed to pacify the populace and maintain order while fighting against Imperial stormtroopers would have to be incredibly huge.
It would take more troops than the Rebellion has under arms. The shields make this a tough nut to crack, but chewing the meat isn't going to be any easier.

Gavin Darklighter contemplates the scale of Coruscant. The eventual conquest was more circuitous and indirect than Gavin imagines, and much of the local costabulary and government was adopted by the New Republic.

163

"Rescuing the man, getting him medical help, rehabilitating him, and getting him back into combat all require more resources than a memorial service."

Kirtan Loor ponders the importance of attrition and medical resources in the galactic civil war.

165

"You're afraid of Corran Horn finding you, yes? ... But the chances of your running into him here, on Imperial Centre, are what, one in trillions?"

Ysanne Isard indicates the scale of Coruscant's geography and population.

226

He watched that until one advertisement showed a Gamorrean digging a paw into a bowl of something pink that pulsed, at which point the need for locating food become moot.

aliens: Eating habits of Gamorreans - they use their hands and eat pink pulsy things. At least, they like to.

The pink substance may be one form of ambulatory fungus which is prized by the Gamorreans on their homeworld. [Refer to Murder in Slushtime, if I recall the title correctly, in STAR WARS Adventure Journal.]

237

"Each night clean new memory cores are placed in the computers and trillions of exabytes of transactions are transferred to the new cores."

Winter describes the memory systems of computers on Coruscant. The size of the unit of memory capacity "exabyte" is undefined, but it presumably is vastly greater than the Gigabytes and Terabytes familiar to our society. In the standard nomenclature for the formulation of measurement units, the prefix "exa-" means 1018. Therefore an exabyte is probably equal to a million terabytes.

247

"... We didn't have a school the way you did on Corellia, see, we all took lessons via a local HoloNet and sent lessons in on datacard, you know ..."

Education system on rural Tatooine. The HoloNet was used, this was apparently before the Tarkin Doctrine. (Restricting HoloNet access to the use of the Imperial armed forces and government officials only.)

247

The majority of these were set by official Imperial policy - a policy CorSec officials had called "look but don't touch."

Official Imperial policy regarding inter-species relations.

253

"The reason the lucky charm Corran wears is on a gold chain because his sweat is acidic enough to tarnish something like silver. It's within normal range for a human, mind you, but just on the acidic end. And that was sufficient to get through the waxy surface on Chertyl's fur and irritate her skin. ..."

aliens: Selonian physiology. Corran's sweat is acidic, Selonians have a waxy surface on their fur and acidic sweat irritates their skin.

270

The bike roared forward and Corran knew the man intended to impale him on the spikes that jutted forward of the speeder bike's vector-control surfaces.

"Now, is it just me, or does that seem like a particularly stupid thing to do? Wouldn't you be much better off just firing the underslung blaster cannon? As I recall, loss of the vector-control surfaces has a nasty effect, and impaling a corpse on them wouldn't be much better." - B. Carletti.

316

Winter slowly straightened up. "You breathe it in, it gets into your bloodstream and binds to neuroreceptors, preventing nerves from passing information. If you get a strong enough dose your automatic nervous system shuts down and you stop breathing. You suffocate."

weapon: Description of the effects of Fex-M3d, a nerve gas used by the Empire.

317

"Yes, Inyri Forge, but respiration is not required for speech. Ooryl's body has a muscular gas bladder that allows Ooryl to, among other things, draw in gases and expel them at a controlled rate through pieces of Gand exoskeleton that vibrate and approximate speech. Ooryl gets the metabolic ingredients Ooryl needs through ingestion, not respiration. Fex-M3d will not affect Ooryl."

aliens: Gand
Gands do not breathe, but they have a method for speech. This tends to conflict with the observation that all other known Gands (eg. Zuckuss, Vytor Shrike) wear special breathing gear to supply their natural methane-rich atmosphere and protect them from oxygen. In Tales of the Bounty Hunters, Zuckuss has had his lungs partially burnt by oxygen, and they did not regenerate naturally. However the same book explains that Gand have the option of refraining from breathing; they breathe when they have a convenient opportunity, like humans taking food.

331

The chief benefit of computers is that they can automate boring and routine jobs that need not concern a human. If an X-wing fighter needed to be moved from a landing pad to a hanger position, or on into maintenance, the R2 unit assigned to that X-wing could perform that simple task without the need to trouble the pilot. Since TIE fighters do not use R2 units, other programs had been created to supply travel routes, coordinates, and speeds to a TIE fighter so it could be moved about without a pilot.

In this case, the couse supplied to the Interceptor on Corran's tail was the course the missile was travelling. The destination was the missile's target coordinates and the speed was as close as the fighter could manage to approximating the missile's speed. The implementation of such programming required an override code, which had been supplied. Because of the potential problems caused if such codes were to fall into enemy hands, the pilots could override the automatic programming, provided they hit the correct console buttons in the appropriate order.

Doing that required approximately 2.5 seconds of the pilot's undivided attention.

"Description of the autopilot functions of TIE fighters, and the manual override. Personally, I'd have a big red flashing button with "MANUAL OVERRIDE" written on it, not a sequence of console keys taking 2.5 seconds of undivided attention!" - B. Carletti

" In my opinion that may not be such a good idea. Just about everything you do as a fighter pilot is a sequence of console keys or buttons to press. When a pilot has to be notified of something he is alerted by sounds and flashing lights, this would either distract him orhe might confuse it with another warning. Also, the pilot should be trained in the use of the craft, and know where the keys are. If someone attempted to steal the craft and the manual override were obvious then what chance would they have of stopping them? " - K. Leichtentritt

343

Originally the Rebels had expected two or three times more by way of Star Destroyers than had appeared to defend Coruscant. That only Triumph and Monarch remained to oppose them surprised him because neither ship had a particularly illustrious reputation or crew. At last reports Emperor's Will and Imperator had also been part of Coruscant's defence force as well, and their participation in the battle would have made things much more difficult.

Isard's forces at the Battle of Coruscant were much weaker than anticipated. Imperator is known in other references as the first of ship built in its class.

345

Commander Sirlul reached over and tapped a command into the keypad on the arm of Ackbar's command chair. A holographic schematic of Triumph appeared before him. Multiple systems were outlined in red, including the bridge. "Triumph has lost power and is beginning to slide back into the atmosphere."
Ackbar hit his comlink. "Ackbar to Onoma."
"Onoma here, Admiral."
"Cease firing on Triumph. use your tractor beams to pull Triumph along and accelerate its orbit so it won't decay. We want to save the ship if we can." Ackbar looked at Monarch and could see it taking as much damage as Triumph had. Between it and Triumph, we might be able to salvage most of a Star Destroyer.
...
Sirlul glanced over at Ackbar. "Captain Averen of Monarch has sent a truce-byte out to everyone."

Conclusion of the naval part of the Battle of Coruscant. Admiral Ackbar has a wise eye for the acquisition of equipment.


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