Martio Batch

Martio Batch was one of the twelve original Imperial Grand Admirals appointed by Emperor Palpatine two years before the Battle of Yavin.

An engineer at heart, Batch was nowhere near as well known as Rufaan Tigellinus or Danetta Pitta, as he preferred keeping a low profile aboard his research station, Imdaar Alpha, earning him the nickname "invisible admiral".

Biography
His largest success was with developing a novel cloaking device which used hibridium&mdash;unfortunately, this new cloaking device had the distinct disadvantage of working both ways: It was double-blind in that the cloaked ship was invisible to outside observers, but the outside observers were invisible to the cloaked vessel as well. Deeply frustrated at what amounted to failure, he took another path to a useful cloaking device. Batch's original cloaking device plans would not be lost, however. They would be stored in the Emperor's private warehouse at Mount Tantiss, where many years later, Grand Admiral Thrawn would recover them and make brilliant use of them despite the double-blind drawback.

Batch turned to older designs, such as those used on Darth Maul's Scimitar. Those devices relied on stygium crystals mined from the planet Aeten II in the Dreighton Nebula, the supply of which had been mined out decades prior to his research. The Grand Admiral took the Tarkin superlaser testbed platform, and in an ironic fulfillment of the Death Star's official justification, blasted the planet into shards, freeing thousands of the crystals.

With a large, assured supply, Batch began experimenting in cloaking all sorts of vehicles to see which combination would maximize combat effectiveness, as his supply of crystals was large but not renewable. Eventually, he settled on outfitting modified TIE Fighters with them, which he dubbed TIE Phantoms. He killed two birds with one stone when he requisitioned the Super Star Destroyer Terror under Admiral Sarn to both guard the rubble of Aeten II and act as his TIE Phantom production facility. The Phantom was developed near the planet Dreighton, under the personal supervision of Darth Vader himself; in combat tests, they acquitted themselves extremely well, defeating almost all their enemies and suffering no casualties. The new starfighters possessed slightly more firepower than production TIEs, and they had a unique feature in that they automatically cloaked in between firing their laser cannons, rendering them invisible during most flight operations. These preliminary successes came to the attention of the Rebel Alliance, and they sent a task force to destroy Terror and end the new threat to the Alliance. Aided by the sabotage of the sole B-wing pilot to face the Phantoms and survive, Terror was successfully destroyed. The Alliance also managed to steal a prototype, although it self-destructed shortly thereafter, rendering it useless.

After this colossal failure, Batch stole the remnants of the forces attached to Terror and fled to the Outer Rim in his personal Imperial-class Star Destroyer. Eventually, his executive officer, blaming him for the loss to the Rebels and the subsequent death of Admiral Sarn, betrayed and executed Batch. The second thereupon joined "Supreme Warlord" Harrsk's fleet deep in the Deep Core.

Behind the scenes

 * Who's Who: Imperial Grand Admirals co-author Daniel Wallace has unofficially suggested here that Batch's personal Star Destroyer was named Meniscus.