Starswarm Cluster

"If we can get safely through the Starswarm Cluster, the Navagator's [sic] Guild will pay us a fortune!"

- Jori Daragon, to her brother Gav

The Starswarm Cluster was a cluster of stars located within the Deep Core region of the galaxy, at galactic coordinates L-10. A dense grouping of more than twenty stars, the cluster was located near the Koros system. By the year 5,000 BBY, the Starswarm Cluster was already known by the young and out-of-luck hyperspace explorers Gav and Jori Daragon of the planet Koros Major. In that year, the Daragon siblings were forced by their difficult financial situation to try to discover new hyperspace routes that would be useful for transportation out of the Koros system. To this end, the siblings executed a blind hyperspatial jump from Koros Major in their starship, the Starbreaker 12&mdash;a jump that led them to the vicinity of the Starswarm Cluster. Believing that they had found a shortcut and that the Hyperspace Navigator's Guild would reward them substantially for safe navigation of the star cluster, the young explorers attempted to pass through the densely-packed stars. However, the intense radiation of the stars at the core of the cluster proved to be too much for the starship's systems. With notable effort, the duo managed to navigate through the Starswarm Cluster with their ship intact, but the Starbreaker 12 had suffered critical damage, and therefore, with the realization that no-one would pay them for the discovered shortcut weighing heavily on them, the Daragon siblings had to return to Koros Major for repairs. Back on the planet, Gav told his Hutt repairman Aarrba that the stars of the cluster were too dense to safely navigate through.

Behind the scenes
To date, the first and only in-universe appearance of the Starswarm Cluster was in the first issue of The Golden Age of the Sith story arc of the Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi series of comic books. The issue was published on October 1, 1996 and was written by Kevin J. Anderson and penciled by Dario Carrasco, Jr.. Later, a grid location for the star cluster was provided in the Appendix section of The Essential Atlas&mdash;a reference book co-authored by Jason Fry and Daniel Wallace and published on August 18, 2009.

Appearances

 * Tales of the Jedi: The Golden Age of the Sith 1: Into the Unknown