Kamino uprising

"Officially, there was never a 'Clone rebellion' on Kamino. Unofficially, approximately twenty years after we were created, a special detachment of the Imperial 501st Legion was dispatched to Kamino with orders to eradicate an army of clones that had been bred to take arms against the Empire."

- Entry from the Journal of the 501st

The Kamino uprising was a conflict in 12 BBY on the aquatic planet Kamino, the origin world of the Grand Army of the Republic during the waning days of the Old Republic. After having spent the better part of the last couple decades growing clone troopers for the Old Republic and stormtroopers for the Galactic Empire under Emperor Palpatine, a group of Kaminoans went rogue, using their cloning resources to grow an army with the intent of combating Palpatine's New Order. The Kaminoan resistance once again utilized the Grand Army of the Republic's template, Jango Fett's DNA and equipped their soldiers with phase one clone trooper armor.

Upon learning of the insurrection, the Galactic Empire hired renowned bounty hunter Boba Fett, himself a clone of Jango Fett, to penetrate and sabotage the cloning facilities of Tipoca City. Fett's childhood spent in the city granted him intricate knowledge of the facility's layout, and he led the Imperial army to a crushing defeat of the "anti-clone" army. The Kaminoan leadership themselves were destroyed when their escape transports were shot down as they attempted to flee. Before the battle's end, Fett extracted a sample of the Jango Fett DNA and delivered it to his Imperial clients. The uprising led to a restructuring of the Imperial cloning policy; the previous model of centralized cloning sources was abandoned in favor of having a wide variety of cloning centers and genetic templates.

Background
"So Palpatine has a new army. I have no doubt he'll find our cloning operations a threat one day very soon, and seek to destroy our capabilities. But he's a fool if he believes we handed over all the combat-trained Fett clones to him."

- Lama Su, Kaminoan prime minister, on discovering Palpatine's new Imperial Army.

In the years following the rise of the Empire, the planet Kamino was kept under the watchful eye of Emperor Palpatine, in order to ensure that the planet's cloning technology remained under Imperial control. A small group of Kaminoans known as Clone Masters, resentful of the Empire's presence, began to grow an army of clone troopers to use in order to fight against their oppressors. These rogue clone troopers were called clone anti-Imperial troopers because they were created to fight against the Empire. They wore Phase I clone trooper armor and were mostly Jet Troopers and Rail ARC Commandos. The conflict pitted these Kamino-grown troops against their own Imperial brothers: members of the 501st Legion of stormtroopers, who were led by the bounty hunter Boba Fett, since he had been "born" and raised on Kamino and had a great knowledge of the facility.

The battle
"Remember leading an Imperial force against clone troops on Kamino? You didn't feel that we were family then."

- Jaing Skirata, to Boba Fett

The Imperial forces landed in the city in a Sentinel-class landing craft. Boba Fett destroyed a locking mechanism to the upper cloning center, allowing him to infiltrate the cloning facilities. Inside, he acquired several canisters which contained samples of Jango Fett's DNA. Fett then wiped out the life support systems located in the lower cloning center, ending any chances of more anti-Imperial clones being grown. Meanwhile, his fellow Imperial stormtroopers fought the enemy clones on the numerous platforms of Tipoca City.

After Fett finished his work in the cloning facilities, he met up with the troopers outside and aided them in the battle. Mere moments after the clone life support was destroyed, the last of the anti-Imperial troopers were pushed back onto the landing platforms and finally destroyed. With the traitorous clones exterminated, Kamino remained under Imperial control and the rogue cloning facilities were commandeered unto Imperial rule. The leaders of the Kaminoan rebels attempted to escape in two LAAT/is, but were brought down by rockets fired from Imperial shock troopers and from lasers fired by ground turrets.

Aftermath
"The bounty hunter left after the battle was over, he said something about tracking down a smuggler on Tatooine. After the Kamino uprising, the Emperor decided that an army of genetically identical soldiers was too susceptible to corruption. Future troopers would be cloned from a variety of templates. Though the 501st itself remained pure, the rest of the Imperial Army gradually became more and more diverse. We never really got used to the new guys."

- Entry from the Journal of the 501st

Although the clone rebellion was soundly defeated, this incident convinced Emperor Palpatine to commission the creation of new clones from different templates and the recruitment of birth-born soldiers to fill the ranks of the Stormtrooper Corps. Although the Jango Fett template would still be used, none of the Fett clones, especially the members of the 501st who defeated the rebel clones, would ever get used to the increasing diversity in the army ranks that they once filled as a whole.

Behind the scenes
The Kamino uprising first appeared in the 2005 LucasArts videogame Star Wars: Battlefront II as the fourth mission in the Empire section of the "Rise of the Empire" campaign. The event was later mentioned a few times during the Legacy of the Force novel series.

Appearances

 * Star Wars: Battlefront II
 * Bloodlines
 * Sacrifice