Cloaking device/Legends

"You can't fight what you can't see."

- Tyber Zann

The cloaking device was a mechanism capable of rendering a starship or an object invisible to both sensors and the naked eye.

Description
While sensor jammers could leave a starship invisible to sensors, such devices generated cloaking fields that completely absorbed all incoming sensor scans while shielding the host ship's emissions and reflected energy, thus rendering the starship invisible to both sensors and the naked eye. A single cloaking device unit towered over the average Human with a balloon-shaped computer core standing over a series of cloaking field antennas. Below lay the the power cells, which were connected to the cloaking field matrix by a series of wires.

The only sensor capable of sensing a "cloaked" vessel was the expensive and rare Crystal Gravitational Trap, which tracked the gravitational fluctuations created by a large mass in space. Thus, any cloaked vessel was unable to hide from the CGT. However, such cloaking shields also came at a disadvantage to their users because they drained a large amount of energy from the starship's power plant, and a single unit cost over a billion credits.

The cloaking device's worse drawback was perhaps the "double-blind" nature of the cloaking shield, which also blocked the host ship's scanners and communication systems. Crews and passengers on cloaked ships were unable to peer beyond the cloak's shround. Since visual navigation was impossible, any other form of navigation could only be exercised by preprogramming astrogation routes. The vessel was thus effectively isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Communications, combat operations, and sensor sweeps could only occur when the cloaking field was lowered or disabled. The cloaking device did nothing to impair senses dependent on the Force, however, and trained Force-users could direct even cloaked ships in battle with ease.

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

- Captain Lorth Needa, talking about Millennium Falcon

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 Galactic Empire, cloaking devices were virtually unknown. Around 32 BBY, Sienar Design Systems developed and built one of the first cloaking field generators for Darth Maul's Scimitar, powered by stygium crystals. Boba Fett also had one, which had been added onto Slave I by Mentis Qinx, a dockyard owner on Tatooine. During the Clone Wars, Separatist Spelunker probe droids were also equipped with cloaking devices.

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.



Several weeks before the Battle of Endor, a Rebel task force led by Rogue Squadron destroyed a cloaking device project to be implemented on an Executor-class Star Dreadnought at Fondor. Wedge Antilles, piloting a captured TIE Hunter, flew into the vessel's trenches and destroyed the three cloaking relays. The resulting explosion not only destroyed the Star Dreadnought, but also the Imperial shipyard in which she was housed.

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; however, they had the unfortunate side-effect of causing shields not to work. He and his lieutenant Urai Fen were also equipped with their own personal cloaking devices.



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. This tactic led to the conquest and occupation of several New Republic member worlds including Sluis Van and Ukio without the heavy damage to lives, industry, and resources sustained during most conventional planetary invasions.

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. The Empire Reborn used a shuttle that was equipped with a one-way cloaking device. 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.

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.

Appearances

 * Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
 * Star Wars: Darth Maul
 * Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
 * Starfighter: Crossbones
 * Boba Fett: A New Threat
 * 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
 * Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike
 * Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
 * Heir to the Empire
 * The Last Command
 * Specter of the Past
 * Vision of the Future
 * The Final Prophecy
 * Tempest