Eclipse (Eclipse-class)

"The hyperspace tunnel opened and this black thing came crawling out from between the stars&hellip; We thought it was a ghost ship, until it opened fire."

- New Republic information officer Nara Dun

Eclipse was the first Eclipse-class Star Dreadnought ever constructed and lead ship of her class.

History
The vessel was designed and began construction following the Battle of Hoth in 3 ABY. It was coveted by the crimelord Tyber Zann, who sent out agents to investigate the warship.

The Eclipse was absolutely massive and boasted a planet's worth of weaponry. However, her most impressive feature was her main coaxial super-laser cannon which could rip enemy capital ships apart in one blast. The laser did suffer from constant breakdowns, so she was periodically without its advantage.

Zann wanted to steal the vessel for the valuable information stored inside its computers. After hijacking it in orbit around Kuat in 4 ABY, Zann used it during the ensuing battle against both the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire.

Around the end of the conflict, an Imperial fleet commanded by the Executor-class Star Dreadnought Annihilator entered from hyperspace to aid the thinning Imperial forces after the Rebel Alliance forces retreated. Their reinforcement was short-lived as Zann's boarding party onboard the near-completed Eclipse activated the superlaser main weapon and utterly destroyed the Executor-class command ship in one blast, followed up by the Consortium fleet mopping up the rest.

Although Tyber had full control of the most powerful ship in the galaxy, he only stole the information stored onboard and abandoned it for the Empire to retake. Although a questionable maneuver, Tyber knew it was too big of a target for the leading factions to bypass, leaving it to the Empire to complete its construction.



In 8 ABY, the half-completed Eclipse was used to evacuate the KDY staff to Byss following the fall of Kuat.

Eclipse took almost as long to construct as either of the Galactic Empire's Death Star battlemoons, and for most of her career she served as an orbital battlestation at Emperor Palpatine's secret throneworld of Byss in the Deep Core. Palpatine planned to use it to personally lead the final attack on Mon Calamari.

She was destroyed along with the reborn Emperor in 10 ABY, during an Imperial attack on Pinnacle Moon in the Cyax system, when Luke Skywalker and his sister, 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.

Appearances

 * Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
 * Dark Empire