The Wound In The Stars

The day before the departure, I arrange for more resources to be gathered so that I could collect them after a certain interval. The current resources should last me a little while, that is if I haven't under estimated the enormity of the project. For the next shipment I arranged to get as much planetary shield and orbital defense turret and tech as possible, and the usage of heavy bribes, blackmail and any 'means' necessary were also allowed. There was always a greedy Neimoidian or Hutt who would sell you the goods no matter how illegal, as long as you deal with them using the right methods. I also arranged for further investment in mining and trading companies, of the small and medium scale ofcourse. A steady resource flow is always paramount.

On the day of the departure me and Janak made our way towards the star port. The first thing we saw were the four large freighters, Coloured pitch black with green and golden accents, fully loaded to maximum capacity with cargo. These will be the life line for my hidden base. If everything pans out, more such heavily armed merchant vessels will join my merchant fleets. Plus buying them second hand is dirt cheap, and there are lots of those to go around. While not delivering cargo to my base or bases in the future, these ships will be doing jobs under

my company. When we reach the first ship we are greeted by black and green colour schemed B1 OOM security droids. All the droids I had bought or made for my use were of this colour scheme and had their programs highly modified. They are a whole lot better than the base models, they can fly, protect and maintain a ship to satisfactory levels, and my levels are quite high. The B1 in charge comes over and salutes "All cargo loaded and systems checked. We are green to go sir". Droids where more dependable for keeping secrets than organics, that's why I utilize them a whole lot. "Very well, double check that all the cargo is loaded and secure, sweep for tracking beacons and other subterfuge and do another system sweep just in case. We leave in one hour" was my orders for the B1. It nodded and gave it's iconic "roger roger" and strode off to pass on my commands to the other droids. Janak looks impressed. We enter the lead freighter and do a rundown ourselves, never a bad idea to check yourself.

An hour later we start our departure. The freighters slowly rise and fall into formation, outside you can see the city slowly receding. When we reach space, we move past other cargo freighter and slowly head to the outer edge of the system to make the jump. The other three ships in close formation with my ship in the lead. When the hyperdrive is fully charged I look at my cousin and ask, mainly for formalities sake, "ready?". He just shrugs and says "no going back now". I nod and launch us into hyperspace, followed by the other ships. The travel route is simple atleast on paper, we head down the Corellian trade spine to Yag'Dhul, from there via the Rimma trade route to Sullust, from there via the Sanctuary pipeline to Endor, and then straight to the unknown planet. The majority of the journey went off without a hitch. The only attack on us came when we reached the Endor system. I don't know what they were thinking, but a group of pirates using a couple of small ill-armed and armored patrol boats attacked us. From the transmissions we received demanding our surrender, it was quite clear that the attackers were likely a band of rookie pirates led by what sounded to be a Rodian, thinking that we were easy pickings. Them coming up against four of my ships was a bad choice. If they had proper and better armed ships, they have had a chance. Can't blame them though, usually these freighters are easy pickings, even for such a motley crew, what they didn't know was that these freighter's where highly modified. Atleast it was a good opportunity to test the modification. They made a quick pass and fired laser canons at us, which our shields easily absorbed. Then the quad laser canons on our ships opened up as they came close for another pass. Under such concentrated fire those small patrol boats where scrap piles in mere moments, we did quick systems check and made preparations for the jump to the coordinates I had obtained all those years ago. It took almost a month to reach the system from Endor.

The droids woke me up saying we will be arriving in minutes. I reach the bridge to find my cousin already there. After a few minutes we drop back into realspace with a shudder. What awaits us was a red planet covered for the most part by storms. My cousin quickly asks the droids to run a scan of the planet's surface. After a few minutes he turns to me with a raised eyebrow and asks "Really? Is this dust ball what we were looking for, because I can't even get proper reading with all those storms." I just shrug and reply "Well atleast we know this is a good place as any for a secret base. No one will spot us, atleast not until we want to be spotted.".

He just shakes his head "Atleast do you have a landing coordinate". I just sheepishly look away, to which he just grumbles some curses at me under his breath.

I observe the rough holo map of the planet we were able to obtain after a little while of orbiting and scanning the surface of the planet, well to my cousin's annoyance the "little" time needed turned out to just two days. While looking over our findings, I spot something peculiar.

A giant plateau, surrounded by arid land and some mountain clusters some distance away. It was 50 Kilometers on the longest side and nearly 45 kilometers on the shortest side, forming a weird polygon shape. That is not what caught my attention though in the middle of this the was a perfect square cavity of almost 25 kilometers on each side15 kilometers deep. Such perfect squares don't form by natural causes, it must have been carved out and shaped artificially. Seeing this as the only possibility I order the ship down towards it. On nearing the mouth of the cavity what I see is spectacular. The entire square area was comprising of docking areas, dockyards for freighters and ship yards, atleast three shipyards big enough to produce cruisers, and on one side a large shipyard which could be used to build multiple smaller ships at one time or one massive 15 Km long ship. And another thing that catches my attention are the enormous generators housed around the large shipyard. From initial scans, they seem to be meant for powering some sort of large repulsor lifts, which if I had to guess are meant to bring the massive ships built in the large shipyard into space or bring such large ships down to the shipyard for repairs and retrofits, like a giant space elevator for ships. This one shipyard occupied a complete side of the cavity including the full height of that wall. For now, I don't have the resources for building such a behemoth, but that will be something for the future. Even the cliff faces where dotted with hundreds upon hundreds of hangars. If I can get all of this set up, we could have an army hidden here and no one would know, until it's too late to do anything about it. And that wasn't the best part.

I turn to my cousin with a shitty grin and say "well looks like we found it and me spending all those credits was worth it".

We set the ships down at dockyards that looked the most stable and easy to get operational. The first thing I did was get the repair droids get the cranes and loader at the docks working. That took an hour even with both me and my cousin pitching in. Then I had the container containing the droids unloaded mainly a few B1 detachments and the rest where construction and maintenance droids along with a few squat droids. First, I Had a few dozen squads of B1 and scout droids head into the base to scout it out. While I gave the other droids except the B1s, a set of orders , first to get the resources unloaded, Second to get the docks and power generators running again, and lastly I ordered a quarter of them to get the shipyards operational while the rest would go and repair the rest of the base and get it functional. This would take a long time, so might as well get started now.

After about a weeks' time the entire Dockyard area was operational. We had the Generators up and running so was most of the dock. The scouting done by the droids revealed that most of the plateau was hollowed out to form the base. There were even two exits on the outer perimeter of the plateau, on two sides, they were currently sealed by their large reinforced blast doors. There were also large garages near the doors, which were filled with all sorts of transports, heavy duty mining equipment and trucks.

The areas near the docks had large, and I mean huge spaces, which were used as warehouses. They also came with large amounts of stored resources, this along with the resources I brought in and will bring in the future, will help me get this base up and running. Which by all estimated will take atleast a year. I also got my hands on some shipping manifests as well. There were tons and tons of resources like metals and rare metals (like Beskar, Phrik and Cortosis). There was even a significant stockpile of even rarer things like stygium and hibridium, along with a crate full of kyber crystals. Whoever the Eternal alliance where they intended this to be a significant fallback base.

Something else the droids found where a few of droid forges with a few large storage areas filled with Bipedal droids and a comparatively smaller one filled with the droids looking similar to the other ones but clearly different. They called them skytroopers. There was also an area that had factories, that could help me produce vehicles and tanks. There was also a lab area, a large medical center, armory with weapons, fabricators and metal smelters which will to forge armor and weapons. This place has so much potential. Well before I can do anything, I have to get this place fixed up, beefed up and running and that's going to take a long time …...

(Time Skip- 6 months)

Things have progressing steadily, with all the resources available to us currently. Half of the base repairs are done. Key among which are the three medium scale shipyards and much of the smaller ones, they were brought online three months into the reclamation of the base, the gigantic shipyard was last on the priority list. The company had sent over two more shipments of resources including power and shield generators and the planetary defense guns. The company had bought and retrofitted dozens of Baleen class freighter into heavily armed and armored ones, and sent them filled with the more resources to get the construction of the crusaders and other ships under way. I had the company invest in the market heavily, and gave them the goal of reaching an above medium level company and also increasing their footprint in the black market. I wanted them to spread their influence in the black market and information trade business. One thing I have not and will not ever condone is slave trade, and the ones I strongly pushed for instead was to increase our footprint in the smuggling and trade of weaponry, food, medicine and other such goods, there will always be war, famine and a profit to be made. Plus, it will help in the future to gather resources and information for ourselves. I was planning to build three of the improved crusader corvettes, but only one will be expedited the others will be built later on as there was no rush to have them now. They were there to act as backup ships or to step in when necessary. You can never have too many backups in this universe where there are Sith running about plotting doom and destruction. But the schematics for the ships had to be tweaked a little bit, as the presence of hibridium and stygium crystals, changed the game plan a bit. The scimitar did a lot of damage due to its cloaking and stealth tech, imagine what fully armed corvettes and fighter can do with that tech. Imagine the damage small stealth strike groups can do. It took a while but, I was somehow able to squeeze in the stealth tech and cloaking field generators into the design, the downside was less cargo space as I had to add in more power generators. A worthy sacrifice if you ask me.

I was also working on new armor designs which incorporates personal shielding tech and cloaking tech into it and also fit micro power cells to power it. The ship, fighters and armor have been pumped up to the top of the priority list. I needed them done before the squad ȧssembles.

For this I had Havar purchase large quantities of Mandalore centric special weapons like micro missile systems (whistling birds) or their schematics from the forge masters, wrist mounted grapple hooks, wrist mounted flame throwers, schematics for the latest jet pack systems and such. I also had him collect high end microprocessors for the suits and a pet project I had running. A wrist mounted computer (think of the omni tool from mass effect). There was also an order for a pair of machines that will help fabricate Jump suits and other such gear and even clothing by interweaving Beskar and Cortosis fibers, this will increase the survivability in battle substantially. I will have to finish all these as quickly as possible. I also used this to improve the design of a few other sips with me the first was the starviper class heavy starfighters, which I modified into serving a heavy attack bomber variant with more torpedo/missile tunes and added provision for bombs (Starviper-B). The second was a frigate model, I basically enlarged the crusader corvette and gave it more shields, more weapons basically more of everything, and called it Crusader-F. The last project was the Keldabe class battleships( Specs-1100 meters long , heavily armored hull, turret mounted heavy dual turbolasers-5*dorsal,10*starboard,10*port sides; Heavy ion canons-5*ventral,5*port,5*starboard side; 2*forward facing mass driver missile lanchers;5*forward facing heavy tractor beams; point defense canons-3*dorsal,3*ventral,5*starboard,5*port sides. Class 2 hyperdrive with a class 10 backup. 2000 crew and 1000 passengers. Reduced cargo capacity to 10,000 tons and increase hangar capacity with additional power and shield generators. Has a compliment of 50 starviper-Bs and 100 fang fighters, it also has 4 shuttles and 4 light freighters). This remained a while elephant dream project of Mandalorian ship builders. The damn ship was perfect as is. Only modifications I had to make was reduce cargo space and add more hangar space, more power and shield generators and automated as much as possible without making its full-on droid ship and reduced the required number of crew. I also did the same thing I did with the crusader design to this model as well and made a dreadnaught model from it. Basically, enlarged the current design as well and gave it triple of everything it currently had (just multiply all the specs 5 times, but with a crew of just 4000 and 5000 passengers). I am planning on having my own variation of this super dreadnaught. Its still in the finishing stage of design and it will need a few more resources which I will have to 'acquire' later on, and I will have to find a large Rakatan space station. (AN: Means I will create a monster later on, first I will have to steal a lot of stuff)

As the saying goes, ain't no rest for the wicked.

Usually Crusaders are predominantly play an anti-starfighter role. But I redesigned them to be heavy hitters in ship to ship combat as well as have adequate anti-fighter weaponry. The same principle goes for my frigates, battle ships and dreadnaughts. I don't want my ships to be picked apart by fighter just because they didn't have point defense weapons and stronger armor and shielding. The Shev'la and her sister corvettes play the role of special operation ships. And another thing I learned was that compared to other metals Beskar was the easiest for me to source, especially through my uncle. Making the outer armor plating of my ships( the double layer design similar to Bismarck). I am also able to layer my tanks and defense emplacements with a layer of Beskar as well. This will make sure my ȧssets are harder to take down. This will be the basic out lay of my future fleets and defenses.