The War of Darkness pt.1
The War of Darkness was the conflict that gave name to the entire Hundred Year Darkness. The actual origin of the war's name is unknown, but according to legend, on the day of the first battle, the Jedi Uro Koo was reported to have said that he felt a great and overpowering darkness rising.
The war began in 6910 BBY when Pall's forces, led by Dreypa, attacked the fragile Republic using ships and war droids obtained from the newly discovered Star Forge. Soon after the war began, Pall's forces were named the 'Black Legions' by the Republic, a name which the Dark Jedi soon took up. The name came from, first and foremost, the color of their unknown ships, but also because of their armor colors. In fact, all throughout the ranks, black was the new orange when it came to armor color. Another possible reason that the name caught on was because of the Jedi labeling them as followers of the dark side. This army did not spring up overnight, but had been gathering strength for over a year in advance.
The logistics and exact numbers are very up in the air both due to errors as well as historical unreliability in this area, but we can make some hypotheses as to the size of each side as well as each side's advantages. The Star Forge could produce, on average, a three hundred or so cruisers per year. This number could be scaled up or down depending upon what other items were being produced and at what efficiency ratio these items were produced at. Because of this, at the start of the war Pall had just over five hundred cruisers in the Black Legions.
Now, even in the Republic's weakened state, this number is laughably small. Many historians estimate that the Republic Navy outnumbered the Black Legions fleet somewhere in the range of fifty to one. However, there were several reasons why the Legions still stood a chance.
Pall's Legacy:
The main reason why the Black Legions were able to gain momentum was because Pall utilized what came to be known as the 'Star Forge Strategy' by later historians. This strategy was called such due to its almost identical execution and success by the fallen Jedi Darth Revan almost three thousand years later. In fact, it was the almost identical execution that caused later historians to note the massive similarities between Revan and Pall, and these connections will be touched on later.
The reasons that these connections exist is because while Pall did not leave behind any surviving holocrons, he was still a prolific writer who left behind a massive cache of work. His magnum opus was a twelve hundred page book titled The Ethics of War, but he also left behind hundreds of papers, dozens of journals, numerous commentary on famous works of Jedi philosophy, and even a romance novel about two padawans falling in love titled Across the Stars (which is still a good read seven thousand years later).
This massive cache of work was discovered on Corbos roughly two hundred years after Pall's death. While it was an important archaeological find in it's day, a variety of reasons ensured that Pall's work was suppressed and subsequently pigeonholed. First of all, the Jedi Inquisition was the first organization to recover the information and as they were trying to suppress all memory of the Hundred Year Darkness, the manuscripts were never published at first and almost destroyed. Following this, they were kept under lock and key for the next nine hundred years until the Jedi Order finally decided to recover information from the ancient and long forgotten inquisitor safehouses. The manuscripts were then placed in the Jedi archives storage section right next to Remulus Dreypa's tax returns and who knows what else. They remained in this state for the next three hundred years. It was only much later that someone decided to go through all these old manuscripts.
Much of Pall's work was finally published circa. 5,500 BBY, and by then he was a distant memory. Nobody except the occasional historian on the Hundred Year Darkness actually cared that his work was published, least of all the Jedi. However, it was not just age that prevented people from deciphering his thought. First of all, there was the massive bulk of it. When it was published, only the most expensive and thorough libraries bought a copy due to its sheer size, and the works were rarely if ever reprinted for anybody. Second, the manuscripts were never meant to be published. As a result, they are all over the place in their contents and subject matter. Even The Ethics of War has this issue. Finally, when people saw that one of the most terrifying ancient Dark Jedi had also written a romance novel, they laughed and considered Pall to be some crazy old kook unworthy of serious scholarly consideration.
It is really quite a shame considering that in Pall's notebooks and journals, he lays out explicit instructions on what the Star Forge is, how to find it, what it can do, and how to take over the Galaxy with it. In fact, it seems that the only person who read Pall's work with any attention to detail at all was Revan. Yet another reason why we need to learn from history, not ignore it.
The Ethics of War:
As mentioned before, The Ethics of War is Pall's twelve hundred page magnum opus written mainly in aphorism and anecdotal form rendering it obscure unless one knows exactly what to look for. Three hundred pages are devoted to a choppy narrative of specific points in Pall's life. The next seven hundred pages are devoted to a massive philosophical work addressing almost every ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological question out there, oddly enough, without building a complete system. Only a hundred pages are devoted to warfare as they are mostly built upon the philosophical observations that came before, and the final hundred pages are other random tales and observations only vaguely on topic. The Ethics do not contain much information on the Star Forge, but treat the matter of war and strategy in very general terms.
The Star Forge Strategy:
The Republic has numbers on its side. In addition, it was huge and had the industrial and population advantages. However, the conditions into which Pall was born into could not have been more perfect for the strategy to work. After a series of gruesome civil wars, the Republic's fleet was drastically reduced in size and in a constant state of disrepair. The Republic could not simply recover by taking advantage of its workforce and size due to a series of economic slumps caused by collateral damage and shifting corporate alliances during the war.
People were tired of the Republic and its problems. There was very little patriotic energy. Companies couldn't invest and jump start the economy as the shifting political alliances made any investment risky, and the Senate could not pass legislation to solve these problems as the only measures that would be successful required a strong military to protect assets. Without the economy, there was no capable military; without the military, there was no stability, and without any stability, the economy could not recover. Additionally, the Republic was huge. It's military was stretched thin across its territory, and this military constantly faced threats from the frontier as well as from rebellions.
The Black Legions' strategy was to rely on the Star Forge. While the Forge produced resources at a relatively slow rate, its advantage lay not in its rate of production, but the fact that anything produced was almost completely free. While the Republic struggled to crank out ships due to costs, the Legions could roll them out for next to nothing. At first, the Legions even sold some of their warships to get money to hire a mercenary army. The second advantage came with the fact that the Star Forge was in the middle of the unknown regions. A twisted maze of hyperlanes protected the location of Rakata Prime so it could serve as a secret command base. A third advantage was recruitment. The lack of patriotism made few eager to sign up for the Republic military. Meanwhile, due to monetary resources from Dreypa, XoXaan, and the warship sale, the Legions could hire mercenaries who worked for cheap thanks to the economic hardship. Finally, and perhaps their biggest advantage in the conventional sense, was that the Legions, at first, had no state. They were just a rogue fleet striking from the unknown regions.
However, the Legions had one terrifyingly effective unconventional advantage. A technological advantage. Primarily, the Legions had access to blaster and shield technology.
A History of the Blaster:
Everyone knows what a blaster is. In fact, it's almost impossible to imagine warfare without them. In reality, for much of the Galaxy's history, blasters didn't exist and soldiers would have to fight with projectile weapons. However, these projectile weapons, for one reason or another, were gradually displaced when blasters came about.
The earliest use of blaster-like technology not including the technology of the Rakata, was used in the Tython system. In the later days of the Je'daii, a peculiar weapon known as a powder-blaster was invented. These weapons took a gas similar to tibanna which was mined on the gas giants Orbi and Mawr, compressed this gas into canisters, and uses this gas as ammunition for plasma weapons, much like the modern blaster. However, the similarities end here. Powder-blasters had more in common with traditional projectile firearms, which they are descended from, than with modern blaster pistols.
The powder-blaster has a chamber with bullet-like cartridges. In each cartridge, was a small pinch of a special 'powder' which would fuse with the gas under the influence of an electric current, was stored. When the gas and the powder united, plasma would be created, and the 'head' of the cartridge would be ejected at a high velocity surrounded by a cocoon of plasma. This plasma bolt was very similar to the plasma bolts fired by a wookiee bowcaster in that it consisted of a solid projectile surrounded by plasma.
These weapons had the advantage of being able to pierce enemy armor that would normally stop a solid high-velocity projectile. However, they often took even longer to reload than said firearms and had bad range and accuracy. As a result, many still considered it more effective to use rapid fire projectile weapons.
Another ancestor of the blaster was the beam-tube. These weapons consisted of a massive tube connected to a power source. The tube would generate a beam of high energy particles which would be fired at the enemy. These tubes were extremely powerful, even by today's standards, and could pierce projectile resistant armor like tissue paper, but they were large and unwieldy. These weapons were often used as heavy support from 25,000-8,000 BBY.
However, during these years, the primary weapons of most soldiers was a rapid-fire high velocity projectile launcher. In these years, each side would build strategies to be more and more resistant to these projectiles. New armors and power suits were developed as an arms race in armor overcame every side. However, there was no steady technological development. Armies from different time periods were a sabacc game of different combinations. Some soldiers wore massive suits that could barely be moved, others wore lighter and faster armor. Some wore expensive powersuits, other wore pads only covering vital parts. The one pattern was that armor evolved to counter projectiles, not plasma.
Beam-tubes were replaced by pulse-wave blasters mostly after the Waymancy Storm of 7811 BBY. Pulse-wave blasters were the closest of the early blasters to the modern blaster as they operated in much the same way. However, they wasted most of their energy in an expanding cone of charged particles that spread out with the central bolt. This cone was powerful enough to vaporize some targets, but it had terrible range. Plus, the central bolt, while it could fly farther, had terrible range. Pulse- wave blasters existed long before the Waymancy Storm, but they were very expensive. Their main advantage was that they could pierce most armor like tissue paper without being as bulky as a beam-tube. It was only after the Republic reverse engineered the Sif-Alulan process in the aftermath of the Waymancy Storm that pulse-wave weapons became cheap and easy to make. As a result, they began to take the job of projectile weapons. However, the expanding cone of particles was still a massive waste of energy.
One method to get around this was the 'triple blaster, developed not too long after the Waymancy Storm. They had a device that could channel the energy that would be projected in the beam's cone back into two auxiliary blasters. This charged particle exhaust would then be fed more gas and the entier weapon would fire three bolts at once without any dangerous cone. The benefit was efficiency and volume fired. The drawback was terrible accuracy.
The actual blaster proper was developed in the aftermath of the Hundred Year Darkness. This technology is able to use short bursts of energy and a focusing emitter to create a single, precise, energetic bolt without any wasted cone. This technology was originally used by the Black Legions exclusively, until the Republic was able to reverse engineer it. These weapons originate from the Star Forge. The Rakata had designed and built the technology long ago, but with the fall of their empire it was lost. When Pall discovered the Star Forge, he reintroduced it to the Galaxy at large.
After the war, these weapons were so effective that they eventually replaced most standard projectile weapons, although for a while pulse-waves and triple blasters were still used alongside the new blaster. They became so effective that the Jedi Order was almost hunted to extinction until they were able to develop what would come to be known as the Soresu form of lightsaber combat, a fighting style specifically designed for blaster bolt defense.
