Plasma-Jet Mole Miner

"Fifty-one of my best reconditioned mole miners [taken]!"

Slayn & Korpil Plasma-Jet Mole Miners (also called drill-jets or mole miners) were large mining devices that could be used in vacuum. Lando Calrissian used mole miners when he created Nomad City on Nkllon.

During his campaign against the New Republic, Grand Admiral Thrawn stole a complement of mole miners to be used at the subsequent Battle of Sluis Van, where they were used to attack the New Republic Defense Fleet stationed at the Sluis Van shipyards.

Thrawn used these mining vessels as makeshift boarding craft, to drill into New Republic capital ships, and deliver boarding parties of spacetroopers and stormtroopers. As most of the ships were undergoing repairs, they only had skeleton crews, meaning that the small number of troops who could fit into the miners could easily take them over. This combined with the surprise of the unconventional use made the tactic highly effective.

However, the plan to steal the ships failed when Han Solo remembered that the mole miners had been remotely controlled and realized that the Imperials were not blocking comms. Han had Lando use his override codes to simultaneously activate their drills. This depressurized the ship's bridges, killing most of the standard stormtroopers, while New Republic starfighters killed the Spacetroopers. Although this further damaged the ships, it did prevent their total loss to the Imperial Remnant, which only escaped with a small number of vessels before the code was enacted.