Cloaking device/Legends

A Cloaking device is a mechanism capable of rendering a starship invisible.

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.

Grand Admiral Batch managed to create a cloak based on hibridium obtained from Garos IV, but it was inefficient and suffered from double blindness - 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 superweapon 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.

The 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 fighters 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.

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.

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.