Torpedo Sphere/Legends



Torpedo Spheres were powerful Imperial siege platforms, essentially miniature Death Stars, and armed with heavy batteries of proton torpedoes. Similar torpedo platforms date back to the Clone Wars, predating the development of high-powered beam-weapon technology which was first perfected with the Eye of Palpatine, but the term "Torpedo Sphere" most commonly refers to the 1,900m diameter battlestations built by the Loronar Corporation, which Bevel Lemelisk only began to design shortly before the Battle of Yavin, as work on Grand Moff Tarkin's Death Star neared completion.

Torpedo Spheres were massive battlestations, several times the tonnage of an Imperial-class Star Destroyer, with a crew of 63,275 and 8,540 troops. Due to their large size, they were equipped only with Class 3 hyperdrives. They were shaped like slightly flattened spheres, with the lower half of their hulls covered by 500 proton torpedo tubes, arranged in an inverted conical formation. Surrounding these proton torpedo tubes was a ring of 10 turbolaser batteries.

Ostensibly, these platforms were useful only for the specific purpose of bringing down planetary shields. Torpedo Spheres took advantage of the fact that planetary shields were not uniform, and experienced anomalies and fluctuations. Using thousands of Dedicated Energy Receptors (DERs), a Torpedo Sphere could find a shield's weak spots. Although these weak spots were rarely more than 20% less powerful than the rest of the shield, this drop in power was enough for the Torpedo Sphere to work with. Numerous proton torpedoes were focused on a single weak spot, in order to temporarily open up a small hole in the shield. Once a hole was opened, a carefully timed turbolaser blast was used to destroy the shield generator, bringing down an entire section of a planetary shield.

The process of analyzing a shield, bombarding it with torpedoes, and destroying a shield generator was extremely difficult and complicated. Weak spots were rarely more than 6 square meters in area. It took hundreds of technicians to properly coordinate the torpedo tubes. Holes in the shielding usually lasted mere microseconds. Even the location of a shield generator was not immediately apparent. Because full planetary shields could block sensors, the crew of a Torpedo Sphere had to study a shield's power waves in order to discover the location of a shield generator. Once a generator and weak spot was found, the Torpedo Sphere had to be maneuvered into position so that it was aligned with both of them, allowing it to fire upon the generator with its turbolasers. If the calculations and timing of the attack or the aim of the gunners was just slightly off, the entire process had to be repeated again.

In reality, Torpedo Spheres were also intended to carry out Base Delta Zero operations&mdash;as battle stations rather than true combat warships, they were probably much less expensive to construct and operate than Star Destroyers, but they seem to had fallen from favor after the death of Grand Moff Tarkin. Although it was initially projected to assign several to every Sector Group, only half a dozen were known to have been completed. One was destroyed by the commandeered cargo ship Black Ice, one was converted while under construction into a research space station and placed in orbit around the planet Tshindral III, while, by the time of the Battle of Endor, two of the surviving ones were being used defensively to guard the major shipyards at Tallaan and Corellia. The Tallaan platform was apparently destroyed by the Rebel Alliance when they liberated the sector, while the one at Corellia was rammed by the Super Star Destroyer Aggressor at the end of the Battle of Tralus.