Pride of Tarlandia/Legends

Pride of Tarlandia The Pride of Tarlandia was a battlecruiser that served as a communication and coordination unit in Imperial fleet operations.

Characteristics
The Pride of Tarlandia was of a different design than the Imperial-class Star Destroyers, having reactors positioned just inside a cargo bay, instead of in isolated, separate chambers, as on the Imperial-class. It also had extensive jamming capabilities.

The vessel also stood out in a fleet consisting mostly of Imperial-class Star Destroyers, as Rebel starfighters singled it out as one of the larger Destroyers and the main communications ship.

History
The ship was present during the Battle of Endor, where it was found to be the main communications ship used by the Imperial fleet. It was aided in its communications role by the Star Destroyers Chimaera and Avenger.

The ship went into a rough battle with a Mon Calamari Star Cruiser and emerged victorious, having destroyed the other ship. Because of the damage it had sustained during the duel, Lando Calrissian decided to attempt a fighter run while it was still vulnerable and its shields were weakened enough.

Millennium Falcon, Wedge Antilles, Merrick Simms, and Green Wing went in low enough to avoid the ship's bigger guns, did a high-speed power-dive perpendicular to the ship's long axis, and raced along the hull while under heavy fire. Green Wing was hit and crashed into the front batteries on the port side of the vessel, allowing the other fighters a chance to hit the power reactors located inside a cargo bay.

Pulling out of the bay after a heavy strike, the surviving Rebel fighters escaped as the ship was destroyed in a series of increasing explosions. The ship's destruction greatly hampered the operations of the rest of the fleet and caused the scanner jamming of the Rebel fleet to stop.

Behind the scenes


The communications ship appeared in the Return of the Jedi novelization (p. 191), and was described as "one of the larger Destroyers", indicating a heavier class of Star Destroyer or a light Super Star Destroyer.

It's possible that the communications ship appeared in the film itself, due to one scene showing a starfighter attack on an Imperial command tower that had one main bridge and at least five other similar viewports, visually dissimilar from the ISD-I and ISD-II towers seen elsewhere in the original trilogy. A larger blob visible in distant views of the battle is also a possible representation of this vessel, though that angle could simply have been showing two ships overlapping.

Behind-the-scenes shots reveal that the bridge tower shown in this shot was a detailed stand-alone FX model of a command tower rather than part of a larger ship model. Shots of the Millennium Falcon passing by the tower also showed it as a bigger structure compared with the Avenger ' s tower, which the Falcon perched on in the previous film.

Appearances

 * Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
 * Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (novel)