Eclipse-class dreadnought

Eclipse-class Star Dreadnought "Wonderful name it has&mdash;Eclipse. Well, it certainly blocked out my view of the shipyards."

- Tyber Zann

The Eclipse-class Star Dreadnought, also known as the Eclipse-class Star Destroyer  or Eclipse-class Super Star Destroyer,  was a class of Imperial Star Dreadnought manufactured by Kuat Drive Yards and mainly used around six years after the Battle of Endor.

Characteristics


Perhaps the most deadly weapon carried by Eclipse-class ships was a keel-mounted superlaser that was as powerful as one of the component beams used in the Death Star's superlaser. This superlaser was the pinnacle of Imperial destruction in their fleets.

These weapons were capable of slashing through any planetary shield to crack open a planet's crust and sear entire continental landmasses. The massive superlaser was more widely used to destroy enemy capital ships and space stations during combat.

An Eclipse's superlaser also had the power to take down other Star Dreadnoughts, as the Annihilator found out when Tyber Zann seized the Eclipse's incredible power above Kuat.

In addition, the Eclipse-class was also more mobile and better defended than the Death Star, being equipped with both an enhanced hyperdrive and fast sublight engines, as well as the most significant weaponry-improvements of the last few decades. This included gravity well projectors and improved ion cannons.

Additionally, these behemoths were armed with hundreds of heavy laser and turbolaser mountings, along with 600 TIE Interceptors and 96 TIE Bombers, divided into 58 squadrons; for ground assault, they carried 150,000 Imperial soldiers, 100 AT-ATs, and five prefabricated bases. Each ship of the class was crewed by over 700,000 personnel, and Eclipse II also carried a compliment of Shadow Droid starfighters.

History


Eclipse began construction early in the Galactic Civil War, around 0 ABY.

By 4 ABY, the vessel had its superlaser main weapon installed and in functional condition. The crimelord Tyber Zann wanted to access records on the ship, so he attacked Kuat and took control of the ship, and used to it to damage an Imperial and rebel fleet. Afterwards, Zann had no further use for the vessel, and left it adrift.

Later on, this ship was completed and became the reborn Emperor Palpatine's flagship, and the only other ship of the class, Eclipse II, assumed the same role after the original's destruction.

Approximately 17.5 km long on the keel, these jet-black battleships were among the largest Super Star Destroyers ever built, and among the most heavily armed warships of all time. In terms of scale, they were the successors to dreadnoughts like Eye of Palpatine and the Kuati Star Dreadnoughts that preceded the New Republic era.



Eclipse took almost as long to construct as either of the Empire's Death Star battlemoons, and for most of her career, she served as an orbital battlestation at Byss.

She was destroyed along with the reborn Emperor in 10 ABY, during an Imperial attack on Pinnacle Moon in the Da Soocha system, when Luke Skywalker and his sister, Princess Leia Organa Solo, managed to disrupt the Emperor's control of a titanic Force Storm, a massive conflagration of dark side energy that the Emperor had summoned in order to wipe out the massed New Republic fleet.

Afterwards, a second Eclipse-class ship, dubbed Eclipse II, replaced the original. It was slightly different than its predecessor, with a different engine positioning. Above the planet Onderon, Lando Calrissian and Wedge Antilles led a small boarding party against the mighty battleship, and R2-D2 was able to override Eclipse II's computer banks. The astromech droid then sent Eclipse II hurtling through hyperspace on a collision course with the superweapon Galaxy Gun. Eclipse II rammed the Galaxy Gun, destroying the latter. One last projectile was pulled by Byss' gravity and impacted the planet, the resulting explosion annihilating Byss and taking Eclipse II with it.

Behind the scenes


The Dark Empire Sourcebook states that Eclipse was 17.5 km long; this contradicts the description given in Dark Empire, where the ship is said to reach "ten miles from stem to stern", or 16 km. The author of the Dark Empire Sourcebook has apparently suggested that an additional 1.5 km was added to the first ship of this class. This is supposed to indicate that particular ship's customization and personalization, with the standard design being only 16 km long. Alternatively, "ten miles from stem to stern" might be merely a vague, rhetorical figure, or the discrepancy may be the result of the long and spasmodic construction period, or it may represent a difference between Eclipse and Eclipse II.

There is also an apparent contradiction in the information on for Eclipse's construction. According to the Dark Empire Sourcebook, design work on Eclipse was begun after the Battle of Hoth, while Byss and the Deep Core claims that she was under construction for as long as either Death Star, hinting a timeframe of decades (it should be noted that, at the time Byss and the Deep Core was written, the timescale of Death Star construction was believed to be much shorter, on the order of years).



Byss and the Deep Core further hints that Eclipse was parked in orbit at Byss before the Battle of Endor, as it is only in this timeframe that she could have served as a rendezvous point for meetings of the Grand Admirals as claimed in the text (although the Grand Admirals referred to may be a new group that postdates the original 12); but The Essential Chronology says that she was built at Kuat and only moved to Byss four and a half years after the Battle of Endor, when she was stolen in a partially-completed state by Lira Wessex and her design team shortly before the shipyards surrendered to the New Republic.

There are several ways of explaining these perceived discrepancies, but it is possible that, as with Executor and her sister-ship Lusankya (also originally named Executor), Eclipse and Eclipse II were constructed simultaneously in two different shipyards, with the existence of each being kept secret from the people working on the other. The potential discrepancies in timeframe may be a matter of in-universe error, with the fictional authors who serve as the real-world writers' proxies being unaware of the true length of construction.

Some fans regard the stated power of Eclipse's superlaser as paradoxical. It is described as not powerful enough to destroy a planet, but as capable of overpowering planetary shields and as 2/3rds the power of the Death Star's prime weapon; but some fan calculations suggest that a weapon of such power would be more than sufficient to destroy a planet, and some fans believe that planetary shields are actually harder to destroy than planets. Those who wish to reconcile these beliefs with the canon statements suggest that the "2/3rds" figure refers instead to the magnitude of the energy release as opposed to the total value; this would put the main weapon below the threshold necessary to destroy a planet.



Another possibility, as the Death Star's superlaser consisted of eight (or, in the Death Star II, nine) individual beams which combined into a single larger beam after firing, is that the Eclipse-class' superlaser had 2/3rds the power of one of the Death Star superlaser's component beams. Alternatively, it may be that the fan-calculations are in error; the exact destructive mechanism of a hypermatter-fueled superlaser isn't fully understood other than it being a direct energy transfer weapon. With The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels mentioning it as being made to penetrate a planet's crust, this is still far less than what either Death Star was capable of, which was pulverizing an entire planet.

Some fans dislike the description of Eclipse-class ships as Star Dreadnoughts, feeling that the term "Star Destroyer" adequately covers all types of dagger-shaped warships and have questioned the necessity for any additional classifications (especially ones that fit into similar patterns of real navies). However, as many sources throughout the history of the Expanded Universe have shown, "Star Destroyer" is not the sole term available, and is often used interchangably with real-life terms. The Starship Battles Preview 1 article on Wizards of the Coast also confirmed that the use of "Star Destroyer" for larger vessels was mainly a product of popular slang. For more on the issue, see Super Star Destroyer and Star Dreadnought.

Appearances



 * Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
 * Dark Empire
 * Empire's End
 * Crimson Empire

Notes and references
Eclipse-class Star Dreadnought Eclipse-Klasse