Cloaking device/Legends

"They can't have disappeared. No ship that small has a cloaking device&hellip;"

- Captain Lorth Needa

While sensor jammers could leave a starship invisible to sensors, the cloaking device was a mechanism capable of rendering a starship or an object invisible to sensors and the naked eye.

Cloaking devices were once fairly common, based on stygium crystals mined on the planet Aeten II in the Dreighton Nebula. However, as the crystal supply dwindled, cloaking devices followed suit, until there were none left at all.

Before the Rise of the Empire, cloaking devices were virtually unknown. Sienar Design Systems developed and built one of the first cloaking field generators for Darth Maul's Sith Infiltrator, powered by stygium crystals. Emperor Palpatine's personal Lambda-class shuttle was also rumored to be equipped with a stygium cloak. By the time of the Battle of Yavin, Aeten II's reserve of accessible crystals had been depleted, making the manufacture of new stygium-based cloaks a virtual impossibility.

Grand Admiral Martio Batch managed to create a cloak based on hibridium obtained from Garos IV, but it was inefficient and suffered from double blindness&mdash;occupants of a starship using one could no more see the rest of the Galaxy than the rest of the Galaxy could see them. This double blindness limited its military effectiveness.

Batch sent the Tarkin to Aeten II, where it blew up the planet, exposing thousands of previously unreachable stygium crystals for Batch to use. He recreated the old stygium technology and applied it to the Phantom TIE project, but Rebel saboteurs completely destroyed the project, and Batch was forced to flee.



Palpatine also commissioned a second team to work on the Vorknyx Project, aiming to make improvements to the hibridium cloak under the supervision of Grand Admiral Zaarin. After Zaarin attempted to overthrow the Emperor, control of the Vorknyx Project passed to Grand Admiral Thrawn. The team successfully equipped the CR90 corvette Vorknyx with a hibridium cloak but were unable to overcome a problem which made the device unstable when entering hyperspace.

Knowing that Zaarin was obsessed with obtaining the best technology, Thrawn allowed him to capture the Vorknyx, which was destroyed when Zaarin attempted to flee into hyperspace while cloaked.

During the chaotic years of the Galactic Civil War, the gangster-turned-warlord Tyber Zann would utilize a fleet of frigates equipped with a form of cloaking device.



The original hibridium cloak prototype found its way to the Emperor's storehouse on Wayland, where it remained hidden until the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn. Thrawn used the technology in a number of creative ways, including hiding a shipload of TIE/ln starfighters and mole miners as "empty cargo" in the Battle of Sluis Van; using cloaked asteroids as a unique siege engine at Coruscant; and carefully lining up ships above and below a planetary shield (with the ones beneath the shield cloaked) so fire from the orbiting ships would appear to pass right through the shield.

After Thrawn's death, innovation in finding a use for the device focused on the Computerized Combat Predictor. Unfortunately, ten years after Thrawn's death, the Predictor still performed insufficiently to warrant further hope.

However, the clone Grodin Tierce, who had been created with some of Thrawn's own thought processes, found a new use for the cloaking device, hiding three Star Destroyers in the outskirts of the Bothawui system, guiding them in by use of a comet that barely grazed the cloaking field.

In 14 ABY, Jedi Padawan Jaden Korr went to Yalara on a mission of destroying the planet's cloaking device, to prevent the Imperial Remnant from laying hands on it.

Appearances

 * Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
 * Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
 * Starfighter: Crossbones
 * Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire
 * Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
 * Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
 * Star Wars: TIE Fighter
 * Heir to the Empire
 * The Last Command
 * Specter of the Past
 * Vision of the Future