TF Library - User contributions [en]

Gav Lucky

2026-04-19T11:53:23Z

Gav Lucky: /* Background */

{| class="infobox bordered" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="right" dth="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Gav_Lucky_ava.jpg|150px]]
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| style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Biographical Information'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Full Name:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Uglogavste Lukiil
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Aliases:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| ''Gav Lucky'' ''Dogbone'' ''The Space Pig''
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Homeworld:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Gentes
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Born:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Year -4 Day 143
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Physical Description'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Race:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Ugnaught
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Gender:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Male
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Height:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| 142 cm
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Colouring:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Porcelain
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Hair Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Brunette
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Eye Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Brown
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Trade Federation Service'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Status:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Active Duty
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Ministry:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| [[File:Moiseal.png|30px]] [[Ministry of the Interior|Interior]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Department:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| [[File:Operations-seal.png|30px]] [[Department of Operations|Operations]] - [[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Position:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"|
[[File:O-1.png|130px]] [[Chain of Command|Ensign]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Part-Time:
|style="padding-left:5px;"|
[[File:Archives-seal.png|30px]] [[Library_team|Library]] - [[Library_team|Archivist]] 
[[File:Tf-holotech-seal.png|30px]] [[Department_of_Holotech|Holotech]] - [[Department_of_Holotech|Developer]] 

|}

 

==Background==

[[File:Colossal-class_Heavy_Carrier_Ugnorgrad_I.png|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky's personal flagship the [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Ships&ID=253 Colossal-class Heavy Carrier] Ugnorgrad I]] 

Born beneath the heavy, sulfurous skies of Gentes, Uglogavste Lukiil came into the galaxy with a mind tuned for machinery and a soul already weighed by the oppression of his people. Like so many Ugnaughts before him, he escaped the drudgery of servitude, drifting to Bespin where the towering halls of Ugnorgrad hummed with welding arcs and the quiet desperation of survival.

On Bespin, he found refuge in the union workshops and data cores, refining not just his mechanical skill but a deep mastery of systems: computer networks, logistics algorithms, capital ship protocols. By day he labored quietly; by night, he studied power, watching how the flow of credits and contracts shaped destinies far more decisively than any hydrospanner.
[[File:Holochess_screenshot.png|left|200px]]

His true name, Uglogavste Lukiil, was a tangle to most tongues. Smirking at the galaxy’s discomfort, he offered a simpler handle: "You may call me Gav Luck." It was meant as a quick, memorable alias, something that sounded like "Give Luck" and carried a hint of charm and fortune. But in the cantinas of Bespin, the name began to evolve. Gav spent long evenings hunched over holochess boards and pazaak tables, usually walking away with his credits intact or only slightly lighter. Then, one night, he hit a small jackpot on the slots, the kind of rare win that cantina patrons remembered for years. From then on, the regulars started calling him "Gav Lucky" as a teasing nod to that single windfall and a name that, to his mild annoyance, stuck harder than the original. Yet beneath that easy nickname and easy grin lay a mind haunted by the fate of powerless workers, scarred by watching entire communities collapse under the weight of financial neglect. For Gav Lucky, money was not mere currency; it was armor, weapon, and salvation.

==Career Timeline==

===An OOC Introduction===

<blockquote>
Storytelling has always been the lens through which I experience Star Wars roleplay, and Star Wars Combine is no different. For me, the game isn’t just a set of mechanics, but rather a living galaxy, and every choice deserves to be remembered. My habit of chronicling in detail began during my work on [[Library Art Museum#The Wall|The Wall]], when I saw so many sparsely populated, outdated, or even empty service pages, alongside long-overdue Tour of Duty badge and member reward requests on the forums. All of these things require keeping good records which, at present, isn’t centrally tracked. I wanted to make it easier for future admins, but also to ensure that no moment of my own journey in the [[Trade Federation]] or SWC was lost to time. In both the game and real life, I think journaling is a vital tool for those suffering from the human condition, especially for someone like me who so easily forgets people, places, and events as the years pass. As [[Hartroff Parmenion]] once said to me after reading my Library works: ''Verba volant, scripta manent''—'''spoken words fly away, written words remain'''. Some say I have the “Gift of Gav,” a tendency to turn even the smallest update into a saga. I’ll take that as a compliment. After all, the fun of SWC is not only in what we do, but in how we tell the tale. — The Player
</blockquote>

===Cadet===

====Joining Up====

His path to the Federation began in the most unassuming of ways. He was standing in a dingy spaceport terminal, waiting for a delayed transport, when a Holonet recruitment broadcast flickered to life above the crowd. The advertisement was crisp, authoritative, and emblazoned with the seal of the Trade Federation Department of Admissions.

<center>[[File:Doaseal.png|200px]][[File:Samantha_dordoli_ava.png|200px]]</center>

Front and center stood [[Samantha Dordoli]], delivering a precise and confident appeal to those seeking opportunity, structure, and purpose. In her words, Gav heard not just an invitation, but a promise: that order and ambition could be harnessed to lift those who were willing to work for it. By the time his transport arrived, he had already filled out the enlistment forms.

Driven by a relentless need to rewrite his people’s story and that of his own, he set his sights on the Trade Federation: a colossus of order, profit, and prestige. With each promotion and each credit earned, Gav Lucky would step further away from the darkness of Gentes and deeper into the halls of influence, where he would secure not just personal wealth but a fortress of resources strong enough to protect any who still bear the scars of servitude.

In every deal, every convoy manifest, every whispered negotiation, echoed his core philosophy: power is the ultimate currency, and luck favors those who build it themselves.

====The Academy====

[[File:Forsetticapital.png|300px|thumb|upright=1.65|Aeriel view of the Viceroyal Palace, and the surrounding areas of the city of Forsetti.]]

Cadet life was a shock both in its rigor and in its order. Assigned to a small cohort of recruits from across the galaxy, Gav quickly learned that the Academy was more than drills and data entry. It was a crucible for loyalty, skill, and adaptability. His knack for pattern recognition and logistical problem-solving made him an asset in training simulations, where he could predict enemy maneuvers and optimize fleet positioning with uncanny accuracy.
He passed the [[Basic Training Standard Exam]] and on Y26 D205, Gav stood before the Federation banner, right hand raised, and swore the [[Department_of_Admissions#Oath_to_the_Trade_Federation|Trade Federation Oath]]. For the first time, the weight of service felt heavier than the weight of survival.

===Cadet First Class - The Savage Squirrels===

====First Asteroid Field Prospecting Mission====

Assigned to the [[Department of Operations]] under the [[Ministry of the Interior]], Gav found himself in the ranks of the Savage Squirrels Flight Team, a unit as eccentric as it was effective. Under [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]] and Operations Director [[Dak Ironfist]], the team’s operations ranged from precision transport runs to asteroid field prospecting. Day-to-day orders came from [[Chain of Command|Lt. Commander]] [[Heuk Gisa]], whose terse directives left no room for hesitation.

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| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:AF_tool_screenshot.png|200px]]
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In those days, Gav started to make a name for himself with his sustained, methodical work. His first deployment was to an asteroid field outside of [[Ktil]] where he was tasked with reprospecting it. Using a standard issue GPS, he was able to pull Federation mining data and see that 13 previous uncovered deposits were still active with varying stability. The scanner also detected 11 undiscovered deposits. It was rough in the beginning as he tried to get his bearings. From speaking to instructors at the Academy, asteroid field prospecting was more of an art than a science. After the first couple days, he thought that there had to be a better way. During sleeping hours, he would stay up in the bunk of his [[Y-8]] mining vessel and run thought experiments on his datapad. He programmed a game that would generate random asteroid fields and place random deposits. He would play this game all night trying different strategies and also updating an AI assistant to predict the next best possible asteroid to scan. After a couple nights, he started to see patterns and develop what he thought was a winning strategy. On the third day, he had played the game hundreds of times and essentially developed many years of prospecting experience in simulation. He ended up finishing the mission in nine days.

====First Holotech Assignment====

That performance did not go unnoticed. [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]], impressed by both the ingenuity and the discipline behind the operation, personally put in a recommendation to Kaire Nat-Sa, the [[Defense Minister]] and Main Administrator of the [[Department of Holotech]]. Soon after, Gav received a formal communication from Holotech headquarters.

Known as the Federation’s hidden engine for innovation, Holotech specialized in turning individual talent into institutional capability. Gav began working under Kaire’s direction outside of [[Department of Operations|Operations]] work on the Trade Federation Management System. Because of his interest in asteroid field prospecting tactics at the time, his first development task he was assigned was to integrate a prototype asteroid field deposit tracking system into the main Management System, which at the time was operating separately. It would be the first Holotech assignment of many.

====First Library Card====

[[File:TF Library Gav Lucky.png|250px|thumb|Gav standing in the Library in Forsetti admiring a statue of [[Kurner Dahtar]]]]

Working in Holotech meant many trips to the Federation Library, looking up protocols and technical blueprints. Because he spent so much time there, on Y26 D233 he volunteered as an archivist. Not only did he fall in love with library science and circulation, but it allowed him access to many of the more restricted sections of the archives. Not long after, [[State Minister]] [[Thion Roseland]], who was also essentially acting as interim Chief Archivist, stepped down from his post and relinquished all State and Library duties.

The Library grew even quieter in Thion Roseland’s absence. One evening, Gav found himself alone among the shelves, methodically replacing holobooks, the soft hum of the preservation systems his only company. In that stillness, the Library began to feel less like a workplace and more like a sanctuary. Feeling a flicker of mischief with no one watching, he wandered into the Chief Archivist’s chambers. Minister Roseland had spent little time there, preferring his office at the [[Ministry of State]], and the room bore the signs, with dust gathering on the desk, stale air, and shelves untouched for weeks.

Drawers yielded little of interest until he found it: an unmarked access key. Curiosity piqued, Gav experimented, discovering that the key granted him the ability to withdraw blank holobooks from restricted storage and, more importantly, to author new entries within the Library’s secure archive. It was an archivist’s dream and an invitation to shape history.

He knew exactly where to begin. Drawing on months of late-night reading and note-taking, he began work on a serialized chronicle he had long imagined: This Month in Trade Federation History. With unrestricted access to the Federation’s historical records, he could weave together recovered archives, oral histories, and rediscovered GNS clippings into a living narrative of the Federation’s evolution. On Y26 D233, he released the first issue, [[This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 26 • Month 8]], to wide acclaim among those who cared for the Federation’s legacy.

The project lit a fire. Gav started expanding other holobooks, merging details from cross-referenced sources and building comprehensive indexes. His work quickly caught the attention of senior officials, and before long, he was entrusted with the responsibilities of Interim Chief Archivist. In this capacity, he authored the [[Library Charter]], codifying the institution’s purpose and scope; documented the Modus Operandi for the Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative; and designed the Federation’s official [[Chain of Command]] diagram.

He also transformed an unused section of the Library into a permanent Art Museum exhibit, curating a collection of recovered Federation visual history. This moved Captain Hartroff Parmenion and so he dug up his old findings from his Archeological Investigations in Federation History project, featuring former logos of past Operations [[Flight Team|Flight Teams]]. To Gav, this was preservation as strategy. Heritage and identity, he knew, were themselves forms of power, and a well-tended history could be as potent a weapon as any fleet.

====First Slabbing Mission - Kuna`s Tail VII====

=====A Blue Milk Run=====

It was Year 26 Day 248. Gav was looking through his standard issue flight team datapad searching for his next mission when he saw [[Kuna`s Tail Economic Development Project Year 26|an announcement about an economic development happening on Kuna`s Tail VII]]. For flight team members like himself, this meant a plethora of "slabbing" missions had been posted. What would happen is a TF service member would be assigned as the leader of a "slabbing squad"--a ragtag group of mercenary riflemen--and their mandate was to "clear" each planned city site of all hostile life forms. This ranged from groups of bandits to flocks of creatures. Anything that would interfere with construction that was not authorized by the Federation was to be removed by force. It was essentially a glorified pest control operation. There were rumors that many bandit groups of Diathim, Fosh, and Toydarian descent had been spotted, along with colossal sized [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=408 streaked velkers] and [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=451 purrgils]. Needless to say, it was not a mission for the faint of heart, but Gav was up to the task in hopes of rounding out his work experience. Corresponding with [[Alories Tanus]], a fellow service member he had met in his travels, about the potential dangers, Tanus replied to his holomessage:

<blockquote>
It's pretty easy! You won't die haha. Just watch your medical supplies, inspect your riflemen make sure they are equipped with their standard issue [[A280]], and keep at a distance of 7-8 clicks. Why don't you work on latitude 16? Start at longitude 19 and meet Captain Parmenion in the middle. I've mostly cleared that site already so it'll be a good way to ease into it.
</blockquote>

Mostly cleared... see a familiar face... Alories made it sound like a blue milk run. So he signed up for the mission and set his [https://guide.swcombine.com/wiki/NavComp NavComp] to Kuna`s Tail VII. It took him five days in hyperspace to get there, which he spent leisurely tinkering on holotech projects and scribbling in his holobooks.

=====A Rag-Tag Bunch=====

On Day 255, he exited hyperspace and arrived in orbit of Kuna`s Tail VII. He was to report to the Lucrehulk Battleship Basilisk to rendezvous with his slabbing squad. But the first thing he had to do was find a jetpack. He was told by Lt. Commander Gisa that there might be extras at the entrance of the ship, otherwise he would have to go to the outfitter on Dor. Well, there was not, but he decided to walk around the ship until finally he found an armoury that had an extra. ''That's why they call me Lucky,'' he chuckled to himself. The whole side mission made him quite late to the briefing...

He approached the lineup and introduced himself.

<blockquote>
Greetings! Apologies for the tardiness... My name is Cadet First Class Lucky. I will be leading the slabbing mission for the coming days...
</blockquote>

As he briefed the squad, he noticed mixed reactions. Amseth Onasi, a Hapan in some sort of uniform, listened respectfully. A pair of Gamorreans grumbled to each other, judging their leader and compatriots of varying statures, all dwarfed in comparison to their own.

<blockquote>
''At least he is Porcine, but barely clears 100cm...'' said the one Gamorrean.

''I heard it's his first slab mission, take orders with grain of spice... and why are Ewok and Aleena here? They can barely lift their rifle...'' said the other.
</blockquote>

The Ewok simply stood and tilted his head occasionally as Gav spoke, while the Aleena looked like someone who was trying to convince themselves, and others, that they were ready for something they were not.

Gav walked down the line and inspected each member of the squad, making sure each had a rifle and a jetpack. Unfortunately, one of the members did not have a jetpack. He had no confidence that there were any extra jetpacks on the ship, so he said they would have to sit out and maybe if there's a supply run at some point they could join in.

<blockquote>
''11 instead of 12, no biggie,'' he thought. ''Plenty of medical supplies, one can stay inside the ship in case we need to make a run for it. It'll be fine...''
</blockquote>

He had a slight feeling in his gut that things were not going as well as he had hope, maybe an even slighter feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn't put a finger on it. ''Too late now,'' he said under his breath. ''Too late now. We have to get moving.''

=====The First Encounter=====

[[File:Gav_Lucky_outfitted.jpg|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky, armed and ready for action]]

The crew loaded onto Gav's [[ATR-6]] gunboat and began their descent to 19-16. From the atmosphere the site looked acquiescent; not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Soon they arrived on the "surface", which, being that Kuna`s Tail VII was a gas planet, simply meant an altitude that was ideal for building a floating city; close enough to the gas to mine it without suffocating. Gav had spoken to some old Academy friends on best strategies. ''Hug the perimeter so you don't get ambushed- Move a couple clicks and then go outside and scan with your macrobinoculars- I bounce between the four corners- you should only need to go between two positions...'' Needless to say, he would have to see what worked best for him. Hopefully his squad wouldn't notice that he had no idea what he was doing...

He decided to try the outskirts idea. He started in a corner of the site and started going around the outside. He would move a couple clicks, very cautiously, and get out to check with his macrobinoculars. After a while, his squad started getting restless, which he took as a sign that it was normal to move a bit quicker. So he moved about 6 or 7 clicks and got out of the ATR.

There it was. Hovering with his jetpack, he saw it with his very own eyes: a bloodied, half shot-to-death streaked velker. It was massive, but injured badly, presumably the blue milk run Alories left him. ''Thank You Alories!'' He thought confidently. He popped his head back inside the ATR and said, ''Alright crew, pile out!''

They began to open fire on the poor velker, its screeches terrifying yet muffled by several clicks of gas, but he knew it was for the greater good. He looked upon his crew and felt a sense of pride seeing them in formation hovering in the air, rifles pointed in the same direction, except... ''Wait a minute,'' he thought to himself as he noticed a gap in the line of rifles. There hovered the Aleena, Alsten Endel, without a rifle! Just kind of flailing his arms around to make it look like he was doing something, fooling around with his equipment, as if he wouldn't be noticed!

[[File:Alsten_flailing.png|500px]]

<blockquote>
Gav: ALSTEN, WHAT IN THE VICEROY'S NAME ARE YOU DOING!? WHERE IS YOUR STANDARD ISSUE!?

Alsten: SIR! I WAS WORRIED ABOUT MY JETPACK--BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!--CORRECTLY AND--SCREEEEEECH!--SURE IT--

Gav: ENOUGH! I CAN'T HEAR A KRIFFING THING YOU'RE SAYING! JUST STAND BACK AND--

Alsten: WHAT SIR? WHAT DID YOU SAY?

''Gav flew over to him and pulled him behind the firing line before grabbing him by the pack straps and yanking him up close face to face.

Gav: STAY! PUT!
</blockquote>

Eventually the screeching died down and the velker slowly fell out of the air into the gassy abyss. Turns out Alsten had lost his gun on the Basilisk, or someone took it thinking it was their issue, who knows. Thankfully, Gav had an extra emergency A280 in the cockpit.

<blockquote>
Gav: This is my only extra A280. Use the strap, do NOT drop it or I will drop YOU off on this surface without propulsion! You got that?

Alsten: ''*gulp*'' Yes sir!
</blockquote>

=====Return Fire=====

Once the city construction was under way, Gav and crew were on to the next spot. They proceeded as before, moving a couple clicks and going out to check. Eventually they came upon not one, but two velkers. Even from a distance they looked humongous. But they were just as skittish as the last one despite being in perfect condition. Without knowing where the attack was coming from, all they could do is fly around, to no avail. Eventually, both velkers succumbed to the rifles and the gas beneath them.

''Another slab cleared,'' said Gav to himself. As they all started heading back to the ATR-6, they heard someone exclaim...

<blockquote>
Alsten: SOMETHIN' BIT ME!
</blockquote>

They all turned around to see Alsten holding his rear and groaning loudly. All of a sudden, the ATR-6 started getting pelted with projectiles. "AAaaAAh!!!" screamed Amseth, gripping his left shoulder. "TAKE COVER!" shouted Gav. They all retreated to the opposite side of the ship that was being peppered, mounted their rifles onto the roof of the ATR, and began to return fire. Gav went around and tended to Alsten and Amseth's wounds. "Hang in there!" he told them. Amseth was taking it well, as if he had seen action before. Alsten, on the other hand, was not so composed.

<blockquote>
Alsten: MY ARSE IS ON FIRE!!

Gav: Hang in there Alsten! It looks like it went straight through, it's just a flesh wound!

Alsten: IT STINGS! I'M GONNA PASS OUT!
</blockquote>

Gav grabbed Alsten and guided him back into the ship before returning to the fight. It was a long battle, but eventually Gav confirmed the last bandit had fallen using his macrobinoculars.

When they got back inside the ship, Alsten was crying.

<blockquote>
Alsten: Sir... you saved my life... ''*sniffles*'' how can I ever repay you...

Gav: Alsten, I didn't save-- ''Gav paused...'' you can pay me back by getting back out there and helping us finish this mission.

Alsten: Yes sir! I just need a minute for the meds to kick in...
</blockquote>

=====There She Glows!=====

Kuna's Tail VII had a way of making even the most hardened sentients feel small. Despite this, the crew was beginning to move like a proper unit and the work they were doing began to feel routine. The gunboat drifted along the perimeter lights-out, quiet under a lid of pale cloud, the gas below moving like a slow ocean with no waves. Gav felt that chill go up his spine again. What was a whisper before was now a pounding in his chest, but there was no stopping the gunboat. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

They touched down at the next marker and fanned out. The whole crew now had their macrobinoculars up, but no one detected any movement. It was so eerie that even the Gamorreans stopped grumbling. Gav raised a gloved hand and the unit slid forward in twos, jetpacks feathering over the gas. The site's construction pylons stood like toothpicks stabbed into mist. They were a reminder that there ''was'' something here, otherwise the city construction would be underway; it was a reminder that battle was inevitable.

The first bandit group caught a bug and broke the quiet from the west scaffolds. HB-5s and BT 500s hammered the ATR's plating and sent sparks across the viewports. Amseth barely flinched, took a round across the pauldron, planted his A280 on the gunwale, and answered with neat, surgical bursts. The Gamorreans roared like someone had insulted their ancestry and hosed the scaffolds. Gav cut the air with his hand, called the ranges, and walked the fire in. Between the experience of the squad members and the power and range of their A280s, once they realized they didn't stand a chance, the west side folded fast.

Then the second group lit up from the south cranes. This position was a bit smarter due to the elevation. Shots licked the top of a Gamorrean's pack and sent him pinwheeling. Alsten yelped and threw himself under the ATR's wing, then popped back up, white-knuckled but determined, and for once remembered to check his safety before pulling the trigger. Eventually, one last quiet thud echoed and the return fire stopped.

"Hold your fire!" said Gav, holding up a closed fist.

Gav took a slow lap with the macros. The slab returned to that library hush he was starting to think was worse than noise. He opened his mouth to call it clear... when the shadows moved.

Shapes the size of frigates turned inside the fog, low and patient, as if the whole world were a lagoon and they had just surfaced to breathe. They came on without hurry, the way big things move when they do not need to prove how big they are.

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| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000"| [[File:Purgills.png|200px]]
|}

Purrgils--you hear about them, you see holos. None of that prepares you for a living wall of muscle and light deciding your city site is now a mating ground, or your hyperlane is now a migratory path. Even at a distance their presence pressed at the chest. The nearest drifted across a bank of cloud and the entire squad went still, rifles aimed at the beasts but not quite aware that they might not fire even if Gav gave the word. But Gav knew the damage these creatures could cause and, unfortunately, it was their job to make sure the citizens of the Federation who started a life here did not have to worry about it. It was his job to make the tough calls, and it was the crew's job to follow orders. His next order was spoken in a monotone voice, to let the crew know that he knew the gravity of his call, and that it was okay that it did not feel good, but it was not him, but the Viceroy which was the decider, he a marshall of that will, and the crew an extension of him.

''Fire.''

The squad answered as one. A ragged volley of red lanced through the haze, striking along the purrgils’ flanks. The giants shuddered, not with fear but irritation, rolling in slow arcs as if to show just how little their rifles meant. Then the light began.

It started deep under the skin, a pulse of violet swelling into indigo, crawling the length of their bodies like lightning trapped under ice. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. Gav knew what was coming next. He had read reports, heard the stories, and in that moment, he understood why spacers dreaded this sight more than the creatures themselves.

The nearest purrgil blurred at the edges, its bulk dimming until it simply was not there anymore. The second followed, vanishing into the mist.

“High sky, reacquire!” Gav called.

Minutes later, the shapes resolved again, farther out. Another volley. Another bloom of violet. Another blink into nothing. The third time it happened, the glow rolling up the spine of the larger beast, Alsten’s voice cut through the comms:

“There she glows!”

Half the squad groaned, the other half laughed, and Gav could only shake his head. The name stuck instantly, repeated every time the halo began to build. The fight turned into a deadly game of dejarik... move, fire, vanish, repeat... each exchange drawing more from the crew’s dwindling reserves of patience and bacta.

They tried to box them in toward the pylons, tried to flank and drive them east, tried holding fire until they crossed the open lanes. None of it worked for long. Every time the light appeared beneath that thick hide, they were gone before the next breath.

On the sixth pass, the pair did not return. Whether they had decided to leave or had simply moved beyond the slab’s perimeter, Gav could not say. The mist closed behind them, leaving only silence and the faint shimmer of heat along the barrel of his rifle.

He scanned one last time with the macros, seeing nothing but the skeletal frame of the city-to-be. Then he slung the rifle and keyed the comm.

“Form up. We’re done here.”

As the ATR-6 lifted away, the crew settled into the familiar quiet that came after hard work without celebration. Their medkits were light, their packs lighter. Gav’s ribs ached where the bacta patch clung, and he could feel the sting of every bruise through his armor.

Time for that supply run, rearm, and rethink the plan. Maybe he could research what technology was available there come up with something before they got back. But he had to think fast...

=====Resupply, Regroup, Rethink=====

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|}

Gav set course for Dor, more specifically, the Endor Palace Member Outfitters, where even the most battered field team could walk away looking parade-ready.

The resupply run was deliberate. Fresh A280s with factory calibrations. Replacement armor plates. Macrobinoculars that didn’t lag. Jetpacks with more thrust than wheeze. And pairs of multisensor packs to try something Gav had read on his datapad while studying equipment holorecords... When they lifted again to return to the next slab, the crew looked sharper, heavier, and, Gav hoped, ready for a different style of fight.

This time, he planned to put eyes where the enemy didn’t expect them.

The east side got Alsten. At 17,11, the ridge ran close to where velkers had been spotted earlier, and the little Aleena’s discomfort was obvious.

:Alsten: Sir, this is awfully close to them.

Gav shoved a multisensor pack into his chest.

:Gav: That’s the point. You’ll be fine. Keep low, stay sharp, and if anything moves that shouldn’t, call it in.

Leaving him there felt wrong, but having a live scout in place could save the squad from being ambushed and get them all home sooner. From there, Gav moved the ATR-6 along the western perimeter, working toward 4,11. When the moment felt right, he brought the ship down and dropped another scout to cover the gap, an Ewok named Wolam Highwind, who took the multisensor pack and jumped out of the gunboat without so much as a word.

For a while, it worked. The east and west placements gave them early warnings and cut down on ambushes. But the gaps still showed. Gav had fallen into the same trap he had once mocked in others; he assumed the hostiles would stay to the middle because that’s where most of the fighting happened. That’s how you learned the hard way about the corners: you didn’t need to check them... until you did. And when the enemy slipped into that blind space, the range rings meant nothing. They could vanish completely, only to reappear where your lines were weakest.

The first warning came from the west. The Ewok posted there, who was armed and out in the open, suddenly lit up on sensors. Bandits had come out of nowhere, closing to within a click before anyone could react. The Ewok returned fire immediately, but the flash of his blaster only drew more rounds his way.

Gav didn’t think. He dove in with the squad, A280 singing, cutting down the closest threats before they could finish the job. By the time he reached the Ewok, the little scout was down, armor dented, weapon still gripped in one limp hand. The medics worked fast, but it was too late. The lesson to Gav was clear.

Every placement, every piece of kit, every decision had weight. Get it wrong, and you didn’t just lose your position; you risked sending someone home in a body bag.

Gav stood over the body bag as the medics loaded him aboard. As he entered the gunboat behind them, the crew stared at Wolam's body. They knew it was a risk they all understood when they signed up, some thought they would have made a different call or tried something different, some thought nothing at all. Whether they were mad, scared, or simply didn't want to feel the guilt that Gav was feeling, they couldn't look him in the eye. He knew he had to say something.

:Gav: I know what you're all thinking. I made a bad call, and got Wolam killed. And you'd be right. This one's on me. And I don't know how I'm ever going to sleep again, or how I'm going to knock on his family's hut and give them the news. But if he hadn't have alerted us to the ambush, it may be more than just him laying there. But it's on me... it's on me... and I have to live with that... be thankful you don't...

His eyes started to water, but he held it back and got into the cockpit, set the autopilot to the next slab, and started scribbling in his holobook again. Going over all his notes, he had an epiphany, something became very clear... it was even riskier than the last idea... but if it worked, they would never lose the upper hand again. He heard the voice of Minister Oodoov in his ear, who had visited the Academy once to give a lecture on the scientific work that the Interior is responsible for...

''...This is the dark art of experimenting; the field guides, the holorecords, the technical specifications... are sometimes a lie.''

=====Castling Ewoks Formation=====

The next slab was to be run with the so-called "Castling Ewoks Formation," a peculiar formation Gav had concocted during his journaling session. The tactic was simple on paper: place two ''unarmed'' Ewoks, each fitted with multisensors, at fixed positions 1,21 and 20,21 on the slab grid. From these back-corner perches, their overlapping sensor fields made it nearly impossible for hostiles to slip away unseen. Why it worked so well was anyone's guess. Some swore it was the Ewoks' size and unarmed status that kept them invisible to the enemy’s targeting logic, their naturally good perception allowing them to setup sensors in just the right position; others claimed the bandits simply refused to acknowledge being threatened by something knee-high, unarmed, and furry.

The formation worked surprisingly well and the unit made quick work of the found pests, the Ewoks sensors preventing the enemy from evading their forces. It didn't make up for Wolam's death, which Gav would have to explain for when he got back, but he felt they were safer and more effective now than ever before.

Just as planned, Gav and crew linked up with Captain Parmenion on the way to the next site. He and the Joint Defense Fleet had been orchestrating the broader clearing effort. From here on, they would be working in conjunction with something they called the Gambit Maneuver, a "precision assignment protocol" designed to keep pressure on the remaining gaps in the planet’s defensive perimeter. Gav's role was to start in the middle of the planet at longitude 14, latitude 10, then head westward to support Director Minwolf and Crewman Goriski where the line stretched thin.

The first contact came quickly: a bandit group holding the approaches with a velker flock drifting just behind them. The initial exchange went badly. Their fire was heavy, the supply of bacta patches less effective than they had hoped. Shots burned through Gav's pauldron and left a dull ache in his side. He toggled comms to Minwolf for advice.

:Gav: Director Minwolf, please advise, this isn't holding. The bacta is not working fast enough.

:Minwolf: You need refills, not patches. And don’t use Ryfills unless you want to spend the next day poisoned.

He logged the warning. Survive the slab first, worry about the outfitter later.

The bandits continued to ignore the Ewoks, even as the little scouts relayed exact firing coordinates to the squad. Whether they could not detect them on sensors or simply could not bring themselves to target them, Gav didn't know. But their presence was decisive. With their eyes guiding the team, he kept the squad at the optimum range of nine clicks, far enough to blunt the worst of the incoming fire, close enough to land clean shots and conserve medical supplies. Within two controlled exchanges, the bandits were broken.

With that threat dealt with, their focus shifted to the velkers. According to his field notes, he had observed that they favored the far corners once disturbed, and the northeast quadrant was unnaturally quiet. If his calculations were right, moving to 12,7 would put then at exactly nine clicks from them. As he eased the ''ATR-6'' into position, he pulled one of his last bacta patches and pressed it over the burn along my ribs. The cool sting was a small comfort.

Somewhere ahead, hidden in the shifting gas, the next fight was waiting.

===Flight Sergeant - The Savage Squirrels===

====Borrowed by the DoR====

Mammoth mission

====Operation '''REDACTED'''====

==Service Record==

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Directorate
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
! style="text-align:center;" | Work Experience
|-
| Y27 D15 - Present
| [[File:O-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Ensign</center>
| 
|-
| Y26 D358 - Present
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Archivist</center>
| 
* Published issues for the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series

|-
| Y26 D272 - Y27 D15
| [[File:E-4.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Flight Sergeant</center>
| 
* Transported x4 Mammoth loads of Meleenium from an asteroid field depot to a main depot logging over 110 flight hours in 5 days (Year 26 Day 269-274). Mission required to execution of microjumping in order to avoid asteriod field damage to the rig exiting hyper on the wrong side of the field due to Endor's Gate X-1 as opposed to the desired Y+1 location of the depot.
* For Operation Durelium Storm, constructed x3 Durelium Mine Cities and prospected 22 quadrants on a Vex II in 9 days, discovering x9 Tibannagas deposits.
* Conducted research on asteroid field prospecting for the [[Directorate of Resources|DoR]] and compiled recommendations to improve the [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]] Asteroid Prospecting Tool
* Conducted research on terrestrial prospecting for the [[Ministry of the Interior|MoI]] and compiled recommendations for general policy and strategies for finding specific raw materials
* Planetary prospected Dorriella II and III
* Slabbed and constructed x11 Mine Cities in 14 days

|-
| Y26 D207 - Present
|
| <center>[[File: Tf-holotech-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Developer</center>
| 
* Integrate existing Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool into [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]], incorporating database driven persistence and existing permissions system
* Spearheaded the initial Member Module and Automated Payroll features for [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]]
* Enhanced the Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool with pre-prospecting features and auto-assist technology

|-
| Y26 D233 - Y26 D358
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Chief Archivist</center>
| 
* Began publishing the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series
* Envisioned and authored the ''[[Library Charter]]''
* Spearheaded the ''[[Chain of Command]]'' Project
* Launched the [[Library_Charter#Continuity_Restoration_and_Standardization_Initiative|Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative]]
* Launched the [[Library Art Museum]]

|-
| Y26 D205 - Y26 D272
| [[File:E-2.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Cadet First Class</center>
| 
* Prospect asteroid field with 13 revealed/11 unrevealed in 9 days averaging 5-6 scans a day for a total of 48 scans
* Transported x3 MC-30b to new system w/ G-1A taxi
* Cleared 15 slabs on Kuna`s Tail VII in 13 days

|-
| Y26 D205
| [[File:E-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Doaseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training]] Cadet</center>
| 
* Passed the ''[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training Standard Exam]]''
* Took the ''[[Department of Admissions|Trade Federation Oath]]''

|}

==Awards and Commendations==
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
! style="text-align:center;" | Reason
|-
| [[Image:Op kunastail.png]]
| Kuna`s Tail Mission Ribbon
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
|
|-
| [[Image:DSM-L1.jpg]]
| [[Distinguished Service Award|Distinguished Service Award - Level 1]]
| [[Minwolf Kandar]]
| Y27 D15
| We also have another member who wears multiple hats in the Ministry of State. Until my last announcement, Gav Lucky has served as the Chief Archivist. He was responsible for getting the organizational ball rolling and moving forward with uncovering the history that all of us share as citizens of the Trade Federation. What many of you do not know is that he has worked tirelessly over the past few months in the background. He has worked as an assistant to Kaire Nat-Sa in helping to develop experimental tools and code that all of us will benefit from when we use TFMS. For his dedication to his work and the people of the Trade Federation, I present to him the First Level of the Distinguished Service Award.
|-
| [[Image:PC.png]]
| [[Prospectors Cross]]
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
| For his ongoing work in demystifying Asteroid fields and Asteroid Field Prospecting in particular.
|-
| [[Image:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty Medal - Viceroy Vas Felix]]
| Automatic
| Y26 D205
|
|}
 

[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T15:23:24Z

Gav Lucky: /* DarkClaw's Shadow */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

[[File:HapesCluster.jpg|200px|thumb|Hapes Cluster geographic map]]

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

[[File:Andrew Starfyre Portrait.png|200px|thumb|King Andrew]]

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== The Road Less Traveled By ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet Hapes—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the Hapan Naval Academy nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

=== The Great Escape ===

The Transitory Mists do not care why you are leaving.

They do not distinguish between the deliberate versus desperate departure, between diplomat traveling to Lorell on a sanctioned vessel with filed flight plans and the man trying to move through them in the dark on a ship that had no business being in space at all. The gravity wells do not care. The ion storms do not check credentials. The concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace navigation through the Mists nearly impossible are not a policy that can be appealed or a border agent that can be persuaded. They are astrophysics. And astrophysics, unlike Hapan law, cannot be defied by conviction alone.

There were two ways through.

Lorell and Roqoo. The transit points—the gaps in the Mists where the gravity wells thinned enough to make hyperspace navigation possible, where the ion storms were sparse enough that a ship with functioning shields had a reasonable chance of emerging intact on the other side. Every sanctioned departure from the Hapes Cluster moved through one of them. Every diplomatic vessel, every trade convoy, every authorized traveler with the correct paperwork and the correct contacts and the correct understanding of what the Hapan border authority required—they all went through Lorell or Roqoo.

Which meant the border authority watched Lorell and Roqoo.

The Hapes Consortium had maintained its isolation for three thousand years. The infrastructure of that maintenance—the patrols, the checkpoints, the sensor arrays, the chain of command that connected a ship moving through the transit point to the ministry that would decide what to do about it—was not improvised. It had been built and refined and institutionalized across centuries. It knew what a sanctioned departure looked like. It knew, therefore, what an unsanctioned one looked like too.

Jacob Jansen had resigned his commission. He had a mark on his record and no allies left inside the institution that had produced the mark. He had whatever credits remained after the ship purchase—not many, and certainly not enough to bribe his way out of the Cluster. He had naval training that was now technically the property of a government he was in the process of defecting from, applied to a vessel that the government he was defecting from would, if it found him in the transit point without authorization, have every legal and institutional reason to stop.

But for some reason that didn't stop him. It didn't make him wait a little bit longer, save up a few more credits, or buy a better ship. In his mind, he had felt the pressure of Hapan isolation, its culture amplified inside the Academy—he couldn't stay another day. Another hour, or minute.

Being torn apart by the Mists sounded less painful than another debate in the mess hall. But if we know anything about Jansen, he had been thinking about this for a long time. And he had a good idea at this point how to get out.

What that passage actually looked like—the specific route he took, whether he went through Lorell or Roqoo or found some other way through the Mists that the border authority had not fully accounted for, whether he was detected and ignored or simply lucky or simply better at this than anyone had reason to expect—is not recorded in any document that has survived. The Hapan census records on the Jansen family, Hapan Intelligence would later insist, had been lost more than a decade ago. What sparse records existed had been supplied by Jacob himself. He was not, in other words, a man who left a detailed account of how he got out.

What is known is that he got out.

He got out on a ship he had spent nearly everything he had on—the only vessel on the lot he could afford that had a reasonable chance of getting off the ground. But it was not cut out for long voyages. It was not built for the Galactic Core, which had been the original plan—the logical destination for a young man with naval training and something to prove, the center of everything the Cluster had spent three thousand years declining to engage with. The reprimand had shortened his runway. The ship had shortened it further.

He went where the ship could take him.

The Glythe Sector. Home of the Trade Federation—an institution that had, among the Hapan people, a reputation for trustworthiness that most outside governments did not. It was not a warm reputation exactly. Hapans did not do warm reputations for outsiders. But trustworthiness was a specific quality that the Cluster's long experience of being betrayed by the outside galaxy had taught it to notice and remember when it found it. The Trade Federation had earned that notation, which was enough for Jansen.

He was traveling to a sector he had never been to, in a ship that may or may not survive the journey, with a few credits in his pocket, and the naval training that no one outside the Cluster had yet decided was worth anything.

The Mists fell behind him.

He did not look back. Or if he did, there is no record of it.

Outside the Cluster, he was no one.

Not yet.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T15:23:10Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Final Curtain */

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T15:22:53Z

Gav Lucky: /* Tenacity */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

[[File:HapesCluster.jpg|200px|thumb|Hapes Cluster geographic map]]

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

[[File:Andrew Starfyre Portrait.png|200px|thumb|King Andrew]]

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== The Road Less Traveled By ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet Hapes—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the Hapan Naval Academy nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

=== The Great Escape ===

The Transitory Mists do not care why you are leaving.

They do not distinguish between the deliberate versus desperate departure, between diplomat traveling to Lorell on a sanctioned vessel with filed flight plans and the man trying to move through them in the dark on a ship that had no business being in space at all. The gravity wells do not care. The ion storms do not check credentials. The concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace navigation through the Mists nearly impossible are not a policy that can be appealed or a border agent that can be persuaded. They are astrophysics. And astrophysics, unlike Hapan law, cannot be defied by conviction alone.

There were two ways through.

Lorell and Roqoo. The transit points—the gaps in the Mists where the gravity wells thinned enough to make hyperspace navigation possible, where the ion storms were sparse enough that a ship with functioning shields had a reasonable chance of emerging intact on the other side. Every sanctioned departure from the Hapes Cluster moved through one of them. Every diplomatic vessel, every trade convoy, every authorized traveler with the correct paperwork and the correct contacts and the correct understanding of what the Hapan border authority required—they all went through Lorell or Roqoo.

Which meant the border authority watched Lorell and Roqoo.

The Hapes Consortium had maintained its isolation for three thousand years. The infrastructure of that maintenance—the patrols, the checkpoints, the sensor arrays, the chain of command that connected a ship moving through the transit point to the ministry that would decide what to do about it—was not improvised. It had been built and refined and institutionalized across centuries. It knew what a sanctioned departure looked like. It knew, therefore, what an unsanctioned one looked like too.

Jacob Jansen had resigned his commission. He had a mark on his record and no allies left inside the institution that had produced the mark. He had whatever credits remained after the ship purchase—not many, and certainly not enough to bribe his way out of the Cluster. He had naval training that was now technically the property of a government he was in the process of defecting from, applied to a vessel that the government he was defecting from would, if it found him in the transit point without authorization, have every legal and institutional reason to stop.

But for some reason that didn't stop him. It didn't make him wait a little bit longer, save up a few more credits, or buy a better ship. In his mind, he had felt the pressure of Hapan isolation, its culture amplified inside the Academy—he couldn't stay another day. Another hour, or minute.

Being torn apart by the Mists sounded less painful than another debate in the mess hall. But if we know anything about Jansen, he had been thinking about this for a long time. And he had a good idea at this point how to get out.

What that passage actually looked like—the specific route he took, whether he went through Lorell or Roqoo or found some other way through the Mists that the border authority had not fully accounted for, whether he was detected and ignored or simply lucky or simply better at this than anyone had reason to expect—is not recorded in any document that has survived. The Hapan census records on the Jansen family, Hapan Intelligence would later insist, had been lost more than a decade ago. What sparse records existed had been supplied by Jacob himself. He was not, in other words, a man who left a detailed account of how he got out.

What is known is that he got out.

He got out on a ship he had spent nearly everything he had on—the only vessel on the lot he could afford that had a reasonable chance of getting off the ground. But it was not cut out for long voyages. It was not built for the Galactic Core, which had been the original plan—the logical destination for a young man with naval training and something to prove, the center of everything the Cluster had spent three thousand years declining to engage with. The reprimand had shortened his runway. The ship had shortened it further.

He went where the ship could take him.

The Glythe Sector. Home of the Trade Federation—an institution that had, among the Hapan people, a reputation for trustworthiness that most outside governments did not. It was not a warm reputation exactly. Hapans did not do warm reputations for outsiders. But trustworthiness was a specific quality that the Cluster's long experience of being betrayed by the outside galaxy had taught it to notice and remember when it found it. The Trade Federation had earned that notation, which was enough for Jansen.

He was traveling to a sector he had never been to, in a ship that may or may not survive the journey, with a few credits in his pocket, and the naval training that no one outside the Cluster had yet decided was worth anything.

The Mists fell behind him.

He did not look back. Or if he did, there is no record of it.

Outside the Cluster, he was no one.

Not yet.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T15:20:05Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Great Escape */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

[[File:HapesCluster.jpg|200px|thumb|Hapes Cluster geographic map]]

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

[[File:Andrew Starfyre Portrait.png|200px|thumb|King Andrew]]

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== The Road Less Traveled By ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet Hapes—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the Hapan Naval Academy nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

=== The Great Escape ===

The Transitory Mists do not care why you are leaving.

They do not distinguish between the deliberate versus desperate departure, between diplomat traveling to Lorell on a sanctioned vessel with filed flight plans and the man trying to move through them in the dark on a ship that had no business being in space at all. The gravity wells do not care. The ion storms do not check credentials. The concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace navigation through the Mists nearly impossible are not a policy that can be appealed or a border agent that can be persuaded. They are astrophysics. And astrophysics, unlike Hapan law, cannot be defied by conviction alone.

There were two ways through.

Lorell and Roqoo. The transit points—the gaps in the Mists where the gravity wells thinned enough to make hyperspace navigation possible, where the ion storms were sparse enough that a ship with functioning shields had a reasonable chance of emerging intact on the other side. Every sanctioned departure from the Hapes Cluster moved through one of them. Every diplomatic vessel, every trade convoy, every authorized traveler with the correct paperwork and the correct contacts and the correct understanding of what the Hapan border authority required—they all went through Lorell or Roqoo.

Which meant the border authority watched Lorell and Roqoo.

The Hapes Consortium had maintained its isolation for three thousand years. The infrastructure of that maintenance—the patrols, the checkpoints, the sensor arrays, the chain of command that connected a ship moving through the transit point to the ministry that would decide what to do about it—was not improvised. It had been built and refined and institutionalized across centuries. It knew what a sanctioned departure looked like. It knew, therefore, what an unsanctioned one looked like too.

Jacob Jansen had resigned his commission. He had a mark on his record and no allies left inside the institution that had produced the mark. He had whatever credits remained after the ship purchase—not many, and certainly not enough to bribe his way out of the Cluster. He had naval training that was now technically the property of a government he was in the process of defecting from, applied to a vessel that the government he was defecting from would, if it found him in the transit point without authorization, have every legal and institutional reason to stop.

But for some reason that didn't stop him. It didn't make him wait a little bit longer, save up a few more credits, or buy a better ship. In his mind, he had felt the pressure of Hapan isolation, its culture amplified inside the Academy—he couldn't stay another day. Another hour, or minute.

Being torn apart by the Mists sounded less painful than another debate in the mess hall. But if we know anything about Jansen, he had been thinking about this for a long time. And he had a good idea at this point how to get out.

What that passage actually looked like—the specific route he took, whether he went through Lorell or Roqoo or found some other way through the Mists that the border authority had not fully accounted for, whether he was detected and ignored or simply lucky or simply better at this than anyone had reason to expect—is not recorded in any document that has survived. The Hapan census records on the Jansen family, Hapan Intelligence would later insist, had been lost more than a decade ago. What sparse records existed had been supplied by Jacob himself. He was not, in other words, a man who left a detailed account of how he got out.

What is known is that he got out.

He got out on a ship he had spent nearly everything he had on—the only vessel on the lot he could afford that had a reasonable chance of getting off the ground. But it was not cut out for long voyages. It was not built for the Galactic Core, which had been the original plan—the logical destination for a young man with naval training and something to prove, the center of everything the Cluster had spent three thousand years declining to engage with. The reprimand had shortened his runway. The ship had shortened it further.

He went where the ship could take him.

The Glythe Sector. Home of the Trade Federation—an institution that had, among the Hapan people, a reputation for trustworthiness that most outside governments did not. It was not a warm reputation exactly. Hapans did not do warm reputations for outsiders. But trustworthiness was a specific quality that the Cluster's long experience of being betrayed by the outside galaxy had taught it to notice and remember when it found it. The Trade Federation had earned that notation, which was enough for Jansen.

He was traveling to a sector he had never been to, in a ship that may or may not survive the journey, with a few credits in his pocket, and the naval training that no one outside the Cluster had yet decided was worth anything.

The Mists fell behind him.

He did not look back. Or if he did, there is no record of it.

Outside the Cluster, he was no one.

Not yet.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T15:06:22Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Road Less Traveled By */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

[[File:HapesCluster.jpg|200px|thumb|Hapes Cluster geographic map]]

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

[[File:Andrew Starfyre Portrait.png|200px|thumb|King Andrew]]

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== The Road Less Traveled By ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet Hapes—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the Hapan Naval Academy nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

=== The Great Escape ===

The Transitory Mists do not care why you are leaving.

They do not distinguish between the deliberate versus desperate departure, between diplomat traveling to Lorell on a sanctioned vessel with filed flight plans and the man trying to move through them in the dark on a ship that had no business being in space at all. The gravity wells do not care. The ion storms do not check credentials. The concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace navigation through the Mists nearly impossible are not a policy that can be appealed or a border agent that can be persuaded. They are astrophysics. And astrophysics, unlike Hapan law, cannot be defied by conviction alone.

There were two ways through.

Lorell and Roqoo. The transit points—the gaps in the Mists where the gravity wells thinned enough to make hyperspace navigation possible, where the ion storms were sparse enough that a ship with functioning shields had a reasonable chance of emerging intact on the other side. Every sanctioned departure from the Hapes Cluster moved through one of them. Every diplomatic vessel, every trade convoy, every authorized traveler with the correct paperwork and the correct contacts and the correct understanding of what the Hapan border authority required—they all went through Lorell or Roqoo.

Which meant the border authority watched Lorell and Roqoo.

The Hapes Consortium had maintained its isolation for three thousand years. The infrastructure of that maintenance—the patrols, the checkpoints, the sensor arrays, the chain of command that connected a ship moving through the transit point to the ministry that would decide what to do about it—was not improvised. It had been built and refined and institutionalized across centuries. It knew what a sanctioned departure looked like. It knew, therefore, what an unsanctioned one looked like too.

Jacob Jansen had resigned his commission. He had a mark on his record and no allies left inside the institution that had produced the mark. He had whatever credits remained after the ship purchase—not many, and certainly not enough to bribe his way out of the Cluster. He had naval training that was now technically the property of a government he was in the process of defecting from, applied to a vessel that the government he was defecting from would, if it found him in the transit point without authorization, have every legal and institutional reason to stop.

But for some reason that didn't stop him. It didn't make him wait a little bit longer, save up a few more credits, or buy a better ship. In his mind, he had felt the pressure of Hapan isolation, its culture amplified inside the Academy—he couldn't stay another day. Another hour, or minute.

Being torn apart by the Mists sounded less painful than another debate in the mess hall. But if we know anything about Jansen, he had been thinking about this for a long time. And he had a good idea at this point how to get out.

What that passage actually looked like—the specific route he took, whether he went through Lorell or Roqoo or found some other way through the Mists that the border authority had not fully accounted for, whether he was detected and ignored or simply lucky or simply better at this than anyone had reason to expect—is not recorded in any document that has survived. The Hapan census records on the Jansen family, Hapan Intelligence would later insist, had been lost more than a decade ago. What sparse records existed had been supplied by Jacob himself. He was not, in other words, a man who left a detailed account of how he got out.

What is known is that he got out.

He got out on a ship he had spent nearly everything he had on—the only vessel on the lot he could afford that had a reasonable chance of getting off the ground. But it was not cut out for long voyages. It was not built for the Galactic Core, which had been the original plan—the logical destination for a young man with naval training and something to prove, the center of everything the Cluster had spent three thousand years declining to engage with. The reprimand had shortened his runway. The ship had shortened it further.

He went where the ship could take him.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T10:18:14Z

Gav Lucky: /* No One Ever Escapes the Cluster */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

[[File:HapesCluster.jpg|200px|thumb|Hapes Cluster geographic map]]

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

[[File:Andrew Starfyre Portrait.png|200px|thumb|King Andrew]]

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== The Road Less Traveled By ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet Hapes—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the Hapan Naval Academy nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

File:HapesCluster.jpg

2026-04-12T10:16:57Z

Gav Lucky:

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T10:14:54Z

Gav Lucky: /* King Andrew */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

[[File:Andrew Starfyre Portrait.png|200px|thumb|King Andrew]]

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== The Road Less Traveled By ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet Hapes—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the Hapan Naval Academy nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

File:Andrew Starfyre Portrait.png

2026-04-12T10:13:49Z

Gav Lucky:

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T10:12:32Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Road Less Traveled By */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== The Road Less Traveled By ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet Hapes—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the Hapan Naval Academy nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T10:11:14Z

Gav Lucky: /* A Rising Star */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== The Road Less Traveled By ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T10:10:07Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Stranger from Hapes */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

== The Stranger from Hapes ==

=== A Rising Star ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T10:08:57Z

Gav Lucky: /* King Andrew */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

=== The Stranger from Hapes ===

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T10:05:03Z

Gav Lucky: /* DarkClaw's Shadow */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

=== Tenacity ===

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

=== The Final Curtain ===

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-12T10:01:56Z

Gav Lucky:

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== DarkClaw's Shadow ==

There was only one ship in the known galaxy that could do what the XL-7000 could do.

It wasn't the 4 omnidirectional heavy lasers and 40 directional quad lasers—though it was considerable firepower. It wasn't the 425,000 ton cargo limit or 5,000,000 m³ of storage—a Modular Taskforce Cruiser could carry 5 times that. It was something more specific than either of those things, something that set the XL-7000 apart from every other capital ship in every other fleet in the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and that the Federation's enemies had learned to account for in ways that other ships simply did not require accounting for.

It could land.

8,000,000 tons of mostly Meleenium and Varmigio spanning 3,120 meters at its widest point, capable of quartering 1,000 service members and their equipment and their provisions and their weapons—and it could set down on the surface of a planet. Most capital ships of comparable scale existed entirely in space, dependent on smaller craft to move personnel and material to the surface. The XL-7000 needed no such arrangement. When it descended, it became, in that moment, something between a warship and a fortress.

And only the Trade Federation could build them.

The XL-7000 belonged to the Federation, the way certain things belong to certain institutions not because of law but because of what those institutions are willing to do to keep them. Other factions flew other ships. The Federation flew those too, but the XL-7000—or Lucrehulk-class Battleship as it became known as around Year 7—was Federation property in a way that went beyond ownership.

It was identity.

And the Federation did not distribute its identity carelessly. A Lucrehulk was not assigned to a department, or allocated to a function. It was issued to a person—specifically to the kind of person the Federation had decided that they, after whatever internal deliberation such decisions required, were worth one. Directors, Governors, Presidents, people who made decisions that would determine if the Federation would still exist in five years—those people had Lucrehulks.

The Tenacity was one of the oldest of them.

She had flown alongside Viceroy Corbin Esco's flagship the Prosperity and Duceroy Nereus Eruresto’s duty ship the Integrity in Year 5, when the Federation was losing its foothold over the Glythe Sector. She had been there for the pirate attacks on Vinsoth under the command of Eruresto, its weapon systems deciding whether the Federation would survive. Tenacity had seen things that would never make it into a holorecord or a GNS broadcast.

By Year 7, she was still flying—her continued existence in the fleet a statement about what the Federation valued and intended to keep.

On Year 7, Day 15, at 20:57 hours, in the Tyrius system at coordinates [140, -9], the Tenacity was the ship Larbac DarkClaw was commanding when he delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast.

The galaxy watched the familiar Arconian showman, the founding director of the Techno Union, the man who had given them the Tauntaun Races and the first round of drinks at the CrossStars Tavern and five months of the most entertaining programming on the Holonet. They heard the announcements—membership numbers, construction projects, stock dividends before the end of the month, the promise of more to come.

And then it was over. The citizens wondered when the Tauntaun Races would return.

What they weren't wondering—what none of them could have questioned, because it was not the kind of thing that Larbac would have let show through his delivery, or his cadence, or his smile—is whether their favorite showman was in fact giving a performance.

Because behind the announcements was the fact that the Techno Union, the sole manufacturer responsible for keeping Federation warships coming off the lines for the ongoing war effort, the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full weight of the Galactic Empire—was struggling. For how long exactly, and why exactly, and what Larbac knew about it and when he knew it—we'll never know.

When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track, ideally before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off of our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escapes the Cluster ==

The Hapes Cluster does not appear on most navigational charts the way other regions of space appear. It is there—ninety-five planets and nineteen smaller planetoids spread across seven distinct regions of the Inner Rim—but the space around it discourages approach in a way that no Imperial edict or border patrol could fully replicate. The Transitory Mists surround the Cluster on all sides: a nebula characterized by massive gravity wells, ion storms, and concentrations of cosmic dust that make hyperspace travel through it nearly impossible. In the entire span of the Mists, there are two transit points—Lorell and Roqoo.

For three thousand years, both of them were closed.

The civilization that built those walls had not always intended to. The Hapes Consortium was founded in approximately Year -4026—not by statesmen or explorers, but by the women the Lorell Raiders had kidnapped. The Raiders were brutal pirates who robbed worlds across the mid and outer rims and brought the most beautiful women they could find back to their colonies inside the Mists. The Republic eventually sent the Jedi to deal with them. Most of the Raiders' ships were destroyed. Much of the male population was killed. And the women—left behind, outnumbering the men and free for the first time—rose up under Ta'a Chume and Enelithia Nele'serin, took everything the Raiders had owned, and built something from it.

What they built lasted nearly four thousand years—nine eras, ten dynasties. A matriarchal monarchy in which men were considered, by law and custom and the settled conviction of millennia, to be inferior and incapable of leading. The Queen Mother ruled the noble houses charged with serving her. The borders stayed closed—not from weakness, but from the specific contempt of a people who had been found by the outside galaxy once and did not care to be found again. The Jedi having killed their ancestors, the Cluster sent the memory of it back out through the Mists and shut the door.

=== The Civil War ===

The throne the noble houses were fighting over had been empty for less than a year when the killing started.

The last Queen Mother—Inaq Thian Pal`durath, final sovereign of a dynasty that had held the Hapes Cluster for generations—fell into a coma in Year -81 without naming an heir. She had two daughters, Da`tan and Da`tanah, both Pal`durath, both with a claim—both with the kind of conviction that, in a civilization built on absolute monarchy, leaves very little room for compromise.

What followed was not a succession crisis in the administrative sense—a matter of lawyers and councils and carefully worded precedents. It was a war. Fifty-five years of it. The noble houses of the Cluster, which had spent centuries accumulating military capacity under the feudal system the Queen Mothers had built and tolerated because it served them, now turned that capacity on each other. The treasuries the Consortium had carefully maintained across millennia began to empty. The worlds that had developed in careful balance—technology and nature, progress and tradition, the Cluster and whatever existed beyond the Transitory Mists—began to feel the weight of what it cost to sustain a war that had no obvious end.

=== The Draconian Union ===

The Draconian Union formed around Princess Da`tan Pal`durath—the elder daughter, in the view of her supporters the rightful heir, a woman whose claim rested on lineage and on the conviction that the Hapes Consortium was what it had always been and that the purpose of winning the war was to ensure it remained so. The Draconians believed in absolute monarchy. In the feudal nobility as the legitimate structure of Hapan society. In heavy militarization as the expression of Hapan strength. In the traditions of four thousand years as the irreplaceable foundation of everything the Cluster had built.

They were not radicals. That was the point. They were the Cluster's memory of itself, organized into a fighting force.

Da`tan died before the war ended. Leadership of the Draconian Union passed to her cousin Da`tanah—the woman the eventual victors would describe as a tyrannical and dangerous despot, which is the description that tends to attach itself to the leaders of losing causes when the winners write the history. Da`tanah was, by the accounts of those who served under her, something more complicated than that. She was the woman who adopted the Tylger children when their mother was assassinated. One of those children was Alexander Tylger. She instilled in a boy from Arxian an undying sense of loyalty that he would carry for the rest of his life.

=== The Sword Confederacy ===

The second major faction was the Sword Confederacy. Where the Draconian Union was ideological—a coherent vision of what the Cluster should remain—the Confederacy was more pragmatic. A coalition of noble houses that had their own reasons for opposing the Draconian claim, their own grievances and ambitions, their own calculations about what a post-war Hapes Consortium might look like if they positioned themselves correctly. They fought and held territory. They were a force in the early and middle years of the civil war that the Draconians could not only.

And neither could the Phoenix Movement.

=== The Phoenix Movement ===

The Draconian’s industrial backbone was House Olanji. The most powerful noble house in Hapan history, seated on Charubah—the technological heart of the Cluster, the planet whose shipyard facilities had been building the Consortium's warships for generations. House Olanji did not merely support the Draconian Union. It sustained it. The warships, the logistics, the manufacturing capacity that allowed the Draconian cause to continue fighting long after simpler factions would have collapsed—all of it ran through Charubah. All of it ran through Olanji.

Charubah was not the kind of planet that produced revolutionaries. It was the kind of planet that made revolution seem… unnecessary. The third world from its sun in the Charu system, and the only major inhabited world there, it had covered most of its surface in cities without losing the mountain ranges, the vast oceans, the expansive forests, the snowy poles. It had found a way to hold both things—the technology and the natural beauty of the planet—and it held them without apparent contradiction.

Its people were confident in the way that people become confident when millennia of orderly progress through reason have left them no experience of chaos. Religion on the planet was virtually nonexistent. Few anomalies occurred in the star system. Things just… worked. Things had always worked. The Olanji Corporation had been building the Consortium's warships from Charubah's orbit for generations—its shipyard facilities visible from the surface on a clear night, the control towers of its major cities monitoring the constant flow of traffic to and from those shipyards around the clock. House Olanji was one of the most powerful noble houses in Hapan history. It had backed the Draconian Union during the civil war and had the industrial capacity to do so. On Charubah, the Draconian Union wasn’t an abstraction—it was employer.

Barret Starfyre farmed a small patch of land on the outskirts of Per'Aghtra, the planet's capital, in the shadow of all of it.

He had previously served as a pleasure slave to a noblewoman ruling the province around the city. When he was thrown out of her court—she wanting nothing further to do with him or the child she had produced with him—he took the land and worked it. He was considered a peasant. And his son would be considered the same. What Barret gave his son instead of inheritance was a disposition: he studied starship schematics in his spare time, dreamed of traveling a Cluster at war with itself, admired the starfighter pilots visible from the ground. He was a man who looked at the wall the civil war had built around ordinary life and imagined, quietly, what was on the other side of it.

Years later, Andrew Starfyre and his childhood friend Derrik Florda found an old XGH-50 stock freighter at a recycling depot on Charubah. It had belonged to Draconian Logistics. Its original name was the Firebreather. They bribed the depot manager to let them take it, repaired it at the Starfyre farm, renamed it the Phoenix, and used the ship's old authorization codes to travel restricted regions of the Hapes Cluster—moving through a civilization at war with itself, under the cover of a vessel that the war's own bureaucracy believed was still one of their own.

What the bureaucracy also didn't know was that two farmboys with an expired set of credentials were piloting a salvaged freighter named after resurrection—and building a revolution.

=== Rise of the Phoenix ===

The Phoenix Movement took years to grow, but it gradually tilted the balance of the civil war. It began to win not because it had the largest army or the most powerful industrial base—it had neither. It began to win because of what it was. Two farmboys from Charubah in a stolen freighter, moving through the Cluster on expired Draconian credentials, befriending people that the noble houses had never thought worth befriending. Building something that did not look, from the outside, like a political movement until it was already too large to stop. Andrew Starfyre had understood something that neither the Draconians nor the Sword Confederacy had understood—that the war was not only being fought with warships and treasury credits. It was being fought for the imagination of the Cluster's people. For the story they told themselves about what they were and what they could become.

The Sword Confederacy read the momentum and surrendered. They had always been pragmatic. When pragmatism pointed in a single direction, they followed it.

The Draconians did not surrender. That was not what the Draconians were. They fought to the end—to the Second Battle of Gallinore, where Da`tanah died alongside one of the Olanji twins, and the cause that had sustained itself for fifty-five years finally ran out of the thing that had kept it alive. Not ships. Not credits. Not territory.

The will to fight.

In the Royal Draconian Palace, when the news arrived from Gallinore, nobles committed suicide. Not in defeat exactly. In the specific despair of people who had organized their entire understanding of the world around a set of convictions that the world had just finished demonstrating it did not share. The Draconian Union had believed the Cluster was what it had always been. And The Second Battle of Gallinore was the refutation.

It had always been something else. It had simply taken fifty-five years of war to figure it out.

House Olanji faded in the years that followed. The industrial power that had sustained the Draconian cause—the shipyards, the manufacturing capacity, the Charubah infrastructure that had made the war possible—did not survive the peace in the form it had held during the war. The family faded. The corporation persisted, diminished. And on the planet whose control towers had directed the flow of Draconian logistics for half a century, Andrew Starfyre established House Starfyre. Built it on the ground where House Olanji had stood. Put the flaming Phoenix where the Olanji name had been.

The Draconian ideology did not fade with House Olanji. That was the thing about the civil war that the Phoenix Age's optimism sometimes obscured. The Draconians had lost the military conflict. They had not lost the argument. The conservative conviction—that the Cluster's traditions were its strength, that engagement with the outside galaxy was a form of slow dissolution, that the walls of the Transitory Mists were not a limitation but a definition—that conviction went underground. It found new vessels. And new voices, new careers built inside the institutions of the government that had defeated it, working patiently from within to ensure that the defeat did not become a transformation.

It found, eventually, Alexander Tylger.

He was not a Draconian in the formal sense. The Union was gone. Da`tanah was gone. The cause his adopted mother had died for was gone. But the beliefs—the deep, structural conviction about what the Cluster was and what it owed itself—those had been installed in him during the years he spent in the Draconian Royal Court, being educated by a woman who had organized her life around them. These beliefs were the furniture of his mind.

He carried them into government. Into the Prime Ministership. Into Lorell Hall and the conservative bloc he built across years of patient coalition work, blocking the influence of foreign ideals, keeping the revolutionary implications of the Phoenix Age from becoming the permanent settlement of Hapan politics. The Dragon of Lorell Hall. The man who had survived the Draconian collapse as a child and had spent his adult life ensuring that what the Draconians had believed did not die with it.

=== King Andrew ===

In Year -26, with the Cluster exhausted and its treasuries emptied and its noble houses stripped of the power they had spent fifty years spending on each other, Andrew Starfyre was crowned King of the reunified Hapes Consortium.

He did not rule like someone who had won. He ruled like a man who understood the cost of winning. His reign was spent mending—rebuilding the Hapan treasury, reconstructing societal infrastructure, expanding security, carefully reintegrating the noble houses into ceremonial roles that gave them the appearance of consequence without the substance of power. He opened Lorell as an ambassadorial world. He allowed Black Sun to become a trading partner. He cut the first deliberate window into the wall the Cluster had maintained for three thousand years and stood in the opening, managing what came through.

He did this as a man who had been born on the wrong side of every line the Cluster drew. The son of a pleasure slave. A farmboy from Per'Aghtra. A man who had moved through his own civilization using stolen credentials because the legitimate ones were not available to someone like him.

He had understood something about the Cluster's walls that only a person born outside them could understand. That they kept things in as much as they kept things out. That the civilization they protected was also the civilization they were slowly suffocating.

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:32:17Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Corporate Alliance */

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:22:52Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Corporate Alliance */

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:19:55Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Taste of Command */

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:19:07Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Shadow of DarkClaw */

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:18:34Z

Gav Lucky: /* Where is Larbac? */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Shadow of DarkClaw ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

<center>'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>
 ''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''</center>

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

[[File:Tfcarracklarge.jpg|200px|thumb|TFM Peacekeeper]]

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Joining the Federation|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Joining the Federation]]</ref>
</blockquote></blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:16:08Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Echo After Larbac */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== Where is Larbac? ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

<center>'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>
 ''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''</center>

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

[[File:Tfcarracklarge.jpg|200px|thumb|TFM Peacekeeper]]

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Joining the Federation|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Joining the Federation]]</ref>
</blockquote></blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:14:17Z

Gav Lucky: /* Changing Your Destiny on a Budget */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

<center>'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>
 ''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''</center>

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

[[File:Tfcarracklarge.jpg|200px|thumb|TFM Peacekeeper]]

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Joining the Federation|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Joining the Federation]]</ref>
</blockquote></blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:12:47Z

Gav Lucky: /* Changing Your Destiny on a Budget */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

<center>'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>
 ''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''</center>

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

[[File:Tfcarracklarge.jpg|200px|thumb|TFM Peacekeeper]]

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:12:06Z

Gav Lucky: /* Changing Your Destiny on a Budget */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

<center>'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>
 ''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''</center>

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

[[File:Tfcarracklarge.jpg|200px|thumb|TFM Peacekeeper]]

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T22:08:19Z

Gav Lucky: /* No One Ever Escaped from Hapes */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

<center>'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>
 ''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''</center>

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

[[File:Young_JJ.jpeg|200px|thumb|A young Jacob Jansen]]

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

File:Young JJ.jpeg

2026-04-11T22:06:02Z

Gav Lucky:

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T21:59:07Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Echo After Larbac */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

<center>'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>
 ''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''</center>

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T21:52:37Z

Gav Lucky: /* No One Ever Escaped from Hapes */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>

''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|TF Library — Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T21:51:54Z

Gav Lucky: /* No One Ever Escaped from Hapes */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>

''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself. <ref>[[Jacob_Jansen#Youth|Jacob Jansen: Youth]]</ref>
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T21:46:15Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Taste of Command */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>

''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

== The Taste of Command ==

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T21:45:13Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect */

= The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect =

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

== Editorial Foreword ==

== The Echo After Larbac ==

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>

''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ==

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ==

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

=== The Taste of Command ===

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T21:44:06Z

Gav Lucky: /* This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4 */

== The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect ==

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

=== Editorial Foreword ===

=== The Echo After Larbac ===

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>

''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

=== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ===

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

=== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ===

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

=== The Taste of Command ===

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T21:43:31Z

Gav Lucky: /* This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4 */

= This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4 =

== The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect ==

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

=== Editorial Foreword ===

=== The Echo After Larbac ===

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>

''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

=== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ===

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

=== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ===

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

=== The Taste of Command ===

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-11T21:43:06Z

Gav Lucky: /* The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Stranger from Hapes */

= This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4 =

= This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4 =

== The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Architect ==

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

=== Editorial Foreword ===

=== The Echo After Larbac ===

In the closing days of Year 7, the Trade Federation's most visible showman delivered what would prove to be his final broadcast. Larbac DarkClaw, host of the gruesome yet highly entertaining Tauntaun Races and founding director of the Techno Union, stood before the cameras to deliver one of his classic celebratory announcements—record membership numbers, new construction projects, and the promise of stock dividends before the end of the month.

'''[Begin Historical Record — GNS: Techno Union Growth | Author: Larbac DarkClaw | Y7D19]'''<ref>''GNS: "Techno Union Growth", c. Year 7 Day 19.''</ref>

''Onboard the XL-7000 Battleship TFL Tenacity in system Tyrius (140, -9) on Year 7 Day 15 20:57.''

<blockquote> "People of the Galaxy! We come before you today to bring good tidings in this season of happiness... Behind Us you see the new Techno Union family...bigger and better than ever before! We have grown quite a bit as the Eidola have pointed out earlier this week in their own news articles. Yes, it is no secret our member count has risen considerably..." </blockquote>

Onlookers across the Federation watched, captivated by their parasocial Arconian friend. With a smile and a wave of both his hands to the crowds, the CIS logo flashed up on the holoscreen and the broadcast ended.

They didn't know that this was the last time they would see Larbac.

As the citizens worried if the Tauntaun Races would ever return, their government was dealing with a somewhat larger issue related to his absence. The Techno Union which at the time was the only ship producer for the Federation—the sole manufacturer responsible for providing reinforcements during the ongoing war and the only force standing between Vinsoth and the full wraith of the Galactic Empire—was not producing any reinforcements at all. It had not been for some time. When Viceroy Bren Morgarr became aware of this, he asked the current Minister of the Interior to temporarily assume command of the NAT and get it back on track; before every flag across the Directorate was flying the Imperial crest.

When the GNS did a bit on asking people on the street who their elected representatives were, they knew most of them—Viceroy Morgarr, the formidable Defense Minister Tyridius who many mispronounced as “Admiral Trydius”, the populist and famed State Minister Tarion. But none of them could name the Minister of the Interior.

The one who built the very garrisons that protected them from impending doom when he was only Tribune; the one who Corporate Alliance brought in as a fixer when they were going insolvent—and now, the very person whose fault it would be if the last Lucrehulk was blown into smithereens if he couldn't turn the Techno Union around and get the shipyards producing more than they've ever produced before. But didn't Larbac claim during his last broadcast that they were already running at full capacity just before he left? Maybe he knew they were losing the war, took his credit and got the hell out of Glythe.

“Haha I'm sorry, I didn't even know we had a Minister of Interior. Do they decorate the Palace?”

“Yeah I know they changed the names of the positions recently. I don't know why they're always changing the names of departments and positions. Makes it look like the government is doing something instead of just sitting around getting rich off our tax credits.”

“Jacob who?”

=== No One Ever Escaped from Hapes ===

<blockquote>
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.
</blockquote>

The [[Hapes Consortium]] is one of the most isolated and insular civilizations in the known galaxy. The Hapan people do not leave. It is not merely custom—it is law. The Cluster's borders are enforced with the same rigidity as any Imperial edict, and the culture within them breeds a particular kind of citizen. They are polished, proud, and deeply skeptical of the rest of the galaxy.

Jacob Jansen was born on Year -22 on the planet [[Hapes]]—the seat of the Consortium and about as far from any of its borders as you can get. But by all accounts, he was not Hapan in temperament.

He enrolled at the [[Hapan Naval Academy]] nonetheless. It was practical, perhaps, or simply taking the only path available to him.

<blockquote>
At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy.
</blockquote>

The debates that broke out in the common rooms of the Hapan academies, as they did so often in those years, tended to settle on the same subjects: postings, commissions, which house had produced the finest officers, whether the Battle of Lorell still stood as the high-water mark of Hapan tactical thinking or whether something finer was possible. Jacob Jansen was always in those debates. He was always—quite forcefully, too, in a way that made older cadets uncomfortable without being able to say precisely why—arguing the wrong side of them. Not wrong by the evidence, no, but by what was thought to be the widely accepted answer young cadets were taught to arrive at when they had fully grasped the topic. Only, Jansen never arrived at the approved conclusion. And he would argue his side, with a specificity that suggested he had thought about it long before the conversation started, that the Cluster's insularity was not a strength, but a habit—that what his peers called tradition was often only accumulated comfort, to Hapan detriment. When the talk turned to the Hapan Navy, as it always did, and someone offered the usual formulation about its unmatched excellence, Jansen would let a beat pass, and then ask what exactly it was being compared to. The room tended to fall silent, or one of his more clever peers would pivot.

What Jansen didn’t know, which he would soon find out, was that being right was not the way to achieve his goals. That required respect, which required skills that were unfortunately not innate to him. Eventually, his disobedience caused a confrontation between the wrong commanding officer. Words were exchanged that were loud enough to leave a mark on his record.

Against Hapan law, he fled that night.

<blockquote>
A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.
</blockquote>

=== Changing Your Destiny on a Budget ===

Spent nearly everything he had scrimped and saved on the only junk ship on the lot he could afford that could get off the ground. He figured there was a 50-50 chance it didn't break down on the way to where he was going, which was better odds than he could have hoped for.

His original plan was to head to the Galactic Core—the logical location for a young man with naval training and something to prove. But the reprimand had given him a sense of urgency. And shortened his runway to save up for a better ship. The small rickety ship he had purchased was not up for a long voyage to the core worlds. So he went to the second best place—the [[Glythe Sector]], home of the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

<blockquote>
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. </blockquote>

And he kept his head down. And it worked. Defense Director [[Kell Archis]] was not a man given to easy impressions. But he made such an impression, and Director Archis decided to put Jansen to good use.

<blockquote>
His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.
</blockquote>

It was his first true taste of command within the Trade Federation. And it put him in proximity to someone who would open doors for him he never thought possible—only, it wasn't Director Archis.

=== The Taste of Command ===

The [[Trias Territory]] was not the Federation's most glamorous posting. The work consisted of logistics, garrison construction, and territorial oversight. Here, Jacob learned that there was something more powerful than ships and weapon systems—it was infrastructure.

<blockquote>
The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command.
</blockquote>

When Archis resigned, his Deputy [[Centauri Tyridius]] took his place.

<blockquote>
Part of the clan Centauri, Tyridius quickly made his way up the business ladder. When Viceroy Esco took control of the Trade Federation, Tyridius changed dramatically, inspired by the Viceroy's policies of peace and prosperity through integrity and honesty.
</blockquote>

Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship as much as a mentorship, and perhaps that distinction is what made it consequential.

<blockquote>
Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.
</blockquote>

It can only be assumed that Tyridius was foundational to Jansen's tactical and political acumen. One can only speculate as to what was discussed between them—how the Federation worked from the inside and the unwritten rules. He gave Jansen access to the kind of institutional knowledge that would have taken anyone else decades to accumulate. In return, Jacob gave him something rarer—proof that the investment was worth it.

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-07T01:40:21Z

Gav Lucky:

= This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4 =

== The Rise of the Federation – Part 2: The Stranger from Hapes ==

''Published by the Trade Federation Library''

''Compiled and authored by [[Gav Lucky]], Archivist and Self-Proclaimed
Authority on Trade Federation Greatness''

=== Editorial Foreword ===

[[Category:This Month in Trade Federation History]]

This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 27 • Month 4

2026-04-07T01:39:45Z

Gav Lucky: Created blank page

Jacob Jansen

2026-03-25T14:49:58Z

Gav Lucky: /* Service Record */

{{Infobox Character
| ImageHref = Jacob jansen ava.png
| Name = Jacob Jansen
| Homeworld = Hapes
| Born = Year -22
| Died =
| Race = Hapan
| Gender = Male
| Height = 1,88 meters
| Colouring =
| Hair Colour = Black
| Eye Colour = Blue
| Status = Active
| Ministry =
| Department =
| Position = [[Councillor]]
| Prior Service = [[Viceroy]] [[Regent]] [[Duceroy]] Minister of the Interior [[Techno Union]] [[Corporate Alliance]]
}}

The Hapan leader, '''Jacob Jansen''', has repeatedly guided the Trade Federation, serving as its 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th Viceroy. Though he currently operates as the owner and Arch-Provost of [[Rendili StarDrive]], he remains a key figure in TF governance as a Councillor on the [[Inner-Circle]].

==History==
===Youth===
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.

At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy. However, this was not to be. Although Hapan in origin, many have attested to the fact that Jacob is not very Hapan in his outlook. although most Hapans never leave the Hapes Cluster, Jacob wanted to strike out on his own and explore beyond the isolated Hapan borders. A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.

The small and rickety ship Jacob had bought was not up for the long voayage to the core worlds, and Jacob was obliged to divert his journey to the Trade Federation's Glythe Sector. The [[Trade Federation]] long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

===Joining the Federation===
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.

The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command. In time, Director of Archis resigned his post and his Deputy, [[Centauri Tyridius]] assumed command of the Department of Defense. Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.

==Assisting the Confederacy==
===Corporate Alliance===
It was clear to Tribune Jansen that if he wanted to further his career in the Trade Federation he would need to expand his experience and relations within the [[Confederacy of Independent Systems]]. Tribune Jansen applied for and was offered an open position running the Logistics Department at the [[Corporate Alliance]]. He requested and was granted an honorable discharge from the Trade Federation Navy to take up his new challenge in the Corporate Alliance.

The Corporate Alliance was lead by President [[Garven Stalwart]], a follower of [[Horley Cyan]]. Garven was a well respected man in the trade industry and Jansen was eager to learn much from him. However, the Corporate Alliance's Department of Logistics was at a crisis point, with chronic disorganization creating a logistic morass. Jansen quickly went to work, providing as much skill and discipline as he could muster to turn the department around. His experience with command at Trias served him well, and he grew into the challenge as the department blossomed under his care. Garven Stalwart was impressed with the skill and maturity of the young Jansen, and he promoted Jacob Vice President of Corporate Alliance. Moving in to a leadership role in the Alliance was a huge move for the new Vice President. Working closely together, the team of Stalwart and Jansen proved to be a great boon to the Corporate Alliance. Under their guidance, The Corporate Alliance regularly turned loss into profit.

However, there were rumors that the Trade Federation had fallen on difficult times. Viceroy Horley Cyan stepped down and former Viceroy Corbin Esco had resumed his leadership position. Much was changing withing the Federation, and people with leadership experience were needed to stabilize the galaxy's largest trade conglomerate. [[Centauri Tyridius]], who had risen to the position of Duceroy, asked Jansen to return to help the Federation. It was with much regret that Jacob decided to leave the Corporate Alliance, resigning his Vice President's post.

===Trade Federation===
On Jansen's return to Vinsoth, he met with Duceroy Tyridius, who offered him the job of running the newly-formed [[TF Ministry of the Interior]]. Jansen happily accepted, and was installed as [[Minister]] the following day. As Minister of the Interior, Jacob oversaw the Logistics Corps as well as the [[Department of Industry]]. This gave Jacob the ability to keep a close eye on all of the Trade Federation's facilities and cities throughout the entire Glythe Sector. This assignment was not a small task, but it was one Minister Jansen proved fully capable of handling. He spent a good amount of time as Minister working with Duceroy Tyridius and the [[TF Cabinet]]. He remained a steady rock throughout the following political turmoil: the resignation of Viceroy [[Corbin Esco]] gave rise to a usurpation attempt by Darvock Tarion. The rise of Duceroy [[Bren Morgarr]] to Viceroy ended much of the internal political conflict, but left some holes in the CIS leadership structure.

===Techno Union===
Throughout the political turmoil, [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] suffered due to a lack of real leadership. Minister Jansen recognized that Techno Union was a huge part of the Federation's future, and he volunteered to take temporary command. The vote was passed and Minister Jansen was appointed President of Techno Union. Jacob was given 3 simple tasks for his work in Techno Union: revitalize the membership the company, restore production and stabilize income. Over a short period of time, all these goals were completed and Jacob was now leading a significant competitor in the ship building industry. Sales were up, new shipyards were under construction and many new applicants made the faction a premier galactic employer.

==Back in the Trade Federation==
===Duceroy===
President Jansen had accomplished all but one task - finding his replacement. For this, he looked to a long-time and trusted friend, [[Krayt Fel]]. Krayt Fel took over the leadership of Techno Union, clearing the way for Jansen to return to service in the Trade Federation.

At this point, Duceroy Centauri Tyridius submitted his resignation, recommending Jansen as his replacement. The vote was taken to the Cabinet and Jacob was quickly approved as [[Duceroy]] of the Trade Federation.

With the Trade Federation in economic boom, the Federation was pushed into the galactic spotlight. Having hundreds of millions of credits at the government's disposal, Duceroy Jansen was appointed Director of the Treasury and quickly started to build up an impressive naval fleet for the Federation. Adding many warships and haulers to the naval roster, the Trade Federation was finally able to take on large projects it never was able before.

One of the most important additions to the Federation was the purchase of [[Starsign Shipyards]] from its owner and galactic trader, Syn. The purchase of Starsign gave the Trade Federation exclusive rights to produce the YT-510 and rights to both the YV-666 and YT-2400.

===Transition to Power===
Not too long into his tenure as Duceroy, Jansen experienced firsthand command issues that were not getting addressed by the Viceroy Morgarr. The Trade Federation had continued an extended war with the Galactic Empire, which hurt the Federation's economic standing and made adequate defense of Federation territory impossible. Duceroy Jansen quickly lost confidence in Viceroy Morgarr's inability to take advantage of opportunities for the Federation on a galactic level. He felt that if something was not done quickly, the Trade Federation would spiral down an irreversible path, squandering opportunities for continued galactic prominence.

Acting on his own, Duceroy Jansen spoke with the Cabinet looking for support to approach Viceroy Morgarr about his resignation. To his surprise, there was little resistance and every member of the Cabinet vowed their support to Jacob. The plan was to get a quick and harmless transition of power. Fearing the spectre of past political turmoil when Viceroy Morgarr came to power, Duceroy Jansen wanted to avoid a coup or civil war that would cause huge harm to the Trade Federation. Because of the delicacy of the situation, very few members were told of the quiet push for a transition of power.

A few days later, Duceroy Jansen respectfully approached Viceroy Morgarr, asking for his resignation. The Cabinet was invited into the discussion and almost immediately Viceroy Morgarr resigned his command of the Trade Federation.
[[File:VJJbridge.png|right|frame|none|A young Viceroy Jacob Jansen on the bridge of his flagship, the Lucrehulk 3210 Battleship [[Prosperity]]]]

===Viceroy===
On Year 8 Day 336 Duceroy Jansen was appointed [[Viceroy]] of the Trade Federation. Viceroy Jansen quickly implemented what some would call harsh but completely necessary changes in the Trade Federation and the Confederacy of Independent Systems. One of those changes was to end the war with the Galactic Empire.

Viceroy Jansen long felt the war was a huge mistake for the Trade Federation. The founding goals and principles of the Federation were being ignored because of a simple misunderstanding between the two powerful governments. Knowing this, Jacob contacted the Emperor and brokered a cease-fire between the two factions. Renewed commerce started to flow between the two governments, allowing a foundation for future relations to flourish. This cease-fire with the Empire opened diplomatic channels with both the Hapes Consortium and [[Mandalore]]. Both of whom where member states of the [[Imperial Union]] and allies of the Empire.

===The Imperial Union===
After peace was secured with the Empire, it was a natural step to move towards the Imperial Union. Jacob was approached by the Emperor and they both discussed possible future cooperation between the two governments. The decision would prove difficult for the new Viceroy, since never in the past had the Trade Federation been involved with the Galactic Civil War. Joining the Union would surely push the Federation to the Imperial side and cause political issues with the [[New Republic]] and their allies.

The decision was taken to the Cabinet where it was discussed for a many months. When the Cabinet was in agreement it was taken to the Confederate Senate and then to the [[Trade Federation Directorate]]. With unanimous support and approval, Jacob opened discussions with the Imperial Union heads of state.

After a few short discussions the Union approved the Trade Federation’s request for membership and on Year 9, Day 295 Jacob announced to the universe the good news in a live speech over the holonet.
[[File:Masterjacobjansen.png|right|thumb|500px|Master Jacob Jansen commanding Super Battle Droids]]
===The Force===
At a secluded meeting with Sith Lord Azrakh Raleep about Sith possibilities within the Trade Federation, Lord Raleep detected the ability to use the force within Viceroy Jansen. This was not a total surprise, as Jacob always felt he had an advantage over most people. He was always able to run a little faster and jump a little higher - the ability to always be ahead of the game. Some would say pure luck, but it was something far more powerful.

After a brief time with Lord Raleep, Viceroy Jansen traveled to meet with Emperor Vodo Bonias on his Super Star Destroyer where he trained in the powers of the Sith. There Jansen met Darth Malius, who served as his Master. The force was strong with Jansen and he quickly learned the ways of the Sith. When his training was complete Jansen left not only as a Viceroy, but a Sith Lord and member of the Sith Order.

Returning to the Trade Federation, Viceroy Jansen planned on using his new-found powers to better the Federation and its people, hoping to find more force users within the Trade Federation to act as its supreme guardians and enforcers.

===Evocati Order===
On Viceroy Jansen's return to the Trade Federation, he discovered the force within his Minister of Defense, [[Kage Renbukai]]. Viceroy Jansen took Kage as his apprentice, teaching Kage the ways of the force. Kage quickly reached the title of Knight. It was not too long before another member of the Trade Federation was found to have the force. [[Olwin Froon]], Director of Naval Production and leader of the [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] became Viceroy Jansen's second apprentice and quickly learned the ways of the force. It was then that Viceroy Jansen, Kage and Froon formed the Evocati Order and themselves served as the Inner Circle of the Order. The Evocati were designed to serve as the force guardians of the Trade Federation. The Order's mission is to serve the Trade Federation and to search its members for those special enough to have the ability to use the force. Since its creation, many members of the Trade Federation have joined its ranks. The Order stands as one of the most secretive divisions of the Trade Federation. For a good deal of time, no one outside of the Order even knew of its existence. Even today, very little information is known about the Order and its members.

===Alliance with the Hapes Consortium===
Following months of talks and weeks of non-stop fine tuning, in Year 11 Day 59 Viceroy Jansen signed the Trade Federation/Hapes Consortium Alliance with King Jessy James, ruler of the Hapes Consortium. The signing took place in the Stenness Node's Aweris System. Known as the [[Neshig Accords]], the alliance was the first of its kind for both governments: a no-strings-attached militaristic, economic, and social alliance between the two powers.[[File:Darth triaris.png|right|frame|none|Darth Triaris of the Sith Order]]

===Darth Triaris===
Viceroy Jacob Jansen grew very powerful in the Dark Side of the Force. His influence within the Sith Order grew such that, when the reign of Emperor Vodo Bonias ended, Jacob was asked to serve as one of four members on the Sith Council under the new Dark Lord of the Sith, Master Volentus. The position on the Council came with a promotion to Darth and a new name, Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris’ time in the Sith Council was short. Tensions arose between the Dark Lord of the Sith and Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris decided to pull out of the Sith Council and the Order to ensure no harm would come to relations between the Trade Federation and the Galactic Empire. Keeping his title, Darth Triaris strictly serves within the Inner Circle of the [[Evocati Order]].

===A New Direction===
With new leadership of the Empire came a new direction put upon the Imperial Union heads of state. The Empire wanted to reform the Union into a military coalition and wage war on the Galactic Alliance. This naturally divided the member states, many of whom did not wish to directly engage in war. The Trade Federation was on the side of peace. With drastic changes presented to Union heads of state, Jacob took the rare opportunity to move the Federation back on its original path of neutrality. After getting unanimous approval from the Cabinet, Jacob in turn spoke with the Empire and the remaining Union leaders. On hearing the Federation's plans, all remaining member states aside from the Empire decided to follow Jacob's example, withdraw from the Union, and declare neutrality. Jacob officially declared the Trade Federation's neutrality on Year 13 Day 315 in a public GNS titled "Honor, Integrity, and Profit."[[File:iu-conference.png|right|frame|none|400px|Viceroy Jacob Jansen announcing changes to the Imperial Union]]

===An Empire of Trade===
Leaving on peaceful terms with the Empire, Jacob quickly went to work with his Cabinet. For weeks they drafted up plans and ideas. The first of them was launched on Year 14 Day 52 in a GNS titled "Trade Federation Viceroy Aims To Strengthen Trading Community." The GNS was an announcement of the new Trade Federation Citizen Program, a program designed to recognize honorable traders of the galaxy by offering the support of the powerful economic engine of the Trade Federation. The program grants citizen status to galactic residents who fit the higher standards set to traders by the Trade Federation. The program instantly became a huge success. Many traders and entrepreneurs of the galaxy applied for membership. The Citizen Approval Board, composed of select Federation members, was quickly overloaded with applications and newly approved citizens have flooded Federation commerce centers throughout the galaxy.
[[File:Jacob saber.png|right|frame|Jacob's Lightsaber]]

===Retirement===
Jacob's nine-year run as Viceroy concluded when he formally resigned on Year 18, Day 68. He was succeeded by his current Regent, [[Nohv Schiller]]. For over a year, Jacob had been secretly planning this transition, only bringing his fellow Roys and Cabinet into the confidence later on. The public celebration, called "Federation Day," was actually a cleverly disguised farewell party for Jacob, planned with the Cabinet’s help. The secret was revealed on the event's final day through two broadcasts: "Future of the Trade Federation" for the local populace, and a GNS address for the rest of the galaxy. The broadcast announced his resignation and named Schiller as the new Viceroy. In turn, Viceroy Schiller honored Jacob with the [[Order of the Viceroy]] and appointed him as Regent to help him with his new duties. However, what seemed like a stable long-term solution quickly dissolved when the Viceroy unexpectedly revealed his own plans to step down.

===Viceroyal Carousel===
Jacob Jansen's hopes for a slow, relaxing retirement were repeatedly dashed by the demands of the Trade Federation. His second attempt at leisure was aborted on Year 19 Day 136 when he re-assumed the Viceroy title following Nohv Schiller's resignation. This tenure was marked by a successful, stabilizing maneuver: the signing of the Endor Pact, an alliance with The Kingdom of Elysia (modern day Czerka Corporation), and Kolkpravis.
Feeling he had secured the foundations, Jacob attempted his second retirement on Year 21 Day 292, handing the Viceroyalty to [[Salamku Derov]]. However, his appointment as Regent kept him tethered to the command structure. To his dismay, this brief respite ended abruptly when Viceroy Derov announced his intention to step down.
Inevitably, on Year 22 Day 216, Jacob Jansen was appointed Viceroy for a third time. This dedicated reign focused on structural reform, leading to the creation of the [[Inner-Circle]] and a significant policy shift with the Trade Federation's withdrawal from The [[Galactic Concordiate]].

In gratitude for his nearly 14 years of crucial service, Jacob was gifted [[Rendili StarDrive]] on Year 23 Day 320. On the same day, [[Salamku Derov]] took the helm for his second term.

===Arch-Provost and the Fourth Call===
Following his third retirement, Jacob accepted a position as Cabinet Advisor and Inner-Circle member, which facilitated a relocation to the Cularin System to take charge of [[Rendili StarDrive]]. Jacob and [[Nohv Schiller]] teamed up in Cularin to find the system in dire need of repair. The required rehabilitation was a massive undertaking, demanding that old shipyards be completely dismantled to make way for new, state-of-the-art facilities and depot stations. As soon as Rendili was finally ready to mass-produce its renowned ships—like the Lictor-class Dungeon Ship and Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruiser—trouble resurfaced in the Trade Federation.

On Year 24 Day 286, the inevitable happened: due to Viceroy Derov's health issues, Jacob Jansen was forced to assume the Viceroy title for a fourth time.

===Rotating Command===
Accepting his unbreakable ties to TF leadership, Jacob used this final term not just to govern, but to engineer a permanent solution to the leadership instability. He spearheaded critical changes to the TF charter, mandating a rotation of the Viceroyalty among all Inner-Circle members. This structural reform ensured that the demanding six-month term would not overwhelm any single individual and established a ready line of experienced successors.

During his six-month rotation, Jacob finalized additions to the Endor Pact and oversaw the dissolution of the Commerce Guilds. Upon completion of his term on Year 25 Day 217, Jacob stepped down to the position of Councillor.

===Current Day===
Splitting his time between Taanab and Cularin, he continues to run [[Rendili StarDrive]] while advising and assisting the Trade Federation leadership.

=Service Record=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Insignia
! style="text-align:center;" | Seal
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
|-
| Year 25 Day 217 - Current
| <center>Councillor (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 24 Day 286 - Year 25 Day 217
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 23 Day 320 - Year 24 Day 286
| <center>Advisor (n/a)</center>
| <center>N/A</center>
| <center>[[File: cabinetseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 22 Day 216 - Year 23 Day 320
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 21 Day 192 - Year 22 Day 216
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 19 Day 136 - Year 21 Day 192
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 18 Day 68 - Year 19 Day 136
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 338 - Year 18 Day 68
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 334 - Year 8 Day 338
| <center>Duceroy (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 127 - Year 8 Day 334
| <center>Minister (GL-1)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-1.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Moiseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Ministry_of_the_Interior|Interior Ministry]]</center>
|-
| Year 7 Day 306
| <center>Director (HC-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Hc-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Production-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Techno_Union|Techno Union]]</center>
|-
| ~Year 6 - Year 7 Day 306
| <center>Vice-President</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Logistics Director</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Tribune</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Cadet</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|}

=Awards and Commendations=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
|-
| [[Image:OV.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Viceroy]]
| [[Nohv Schiller]]
| Year 8, Day 68
|-
| [[Image:MOCF.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Confederacy: Member of the Confederate]]
| [[Bren Morgarr]]
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:EMoM.png]]
| [[Mark of the Master]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DS.jpg]]
| [[Diplomatic Star]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLos.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Loszog]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLek.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Lekua IV]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-TB.png]]
| [[Operation Taboon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SEPH.png]]
| [[Operation Seraph]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SARM.png]]
| [[Operation Strongarm]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:HUSNG-PRG.png]]
| [[Housing Project]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Ecom.png]]
| [[Council of Masters Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Eic.png]]
| [[Inner Circle Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:CR.png]]
| [[Cabinet Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DR.png]]
| [[Directorate Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VCE.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Corbin Esco
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VHC.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Horley Cyan
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VBM.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Bren Morgarr
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VJJ.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Jacob Jansen
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VNS.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Nohv Schiller
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[File:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Vas Felix
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-tod20.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] 20 years
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|}
 
[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]
[[Category:Duceroys]]
[[Category:Viceroys]]
[[Category:Regents]]
[[Category:Inner Circle]]

Jacob Jansen

2026-03-25T14:49:45Z

Gav Lucky: /* Service Record */

{{Infobox Character
| ImageHref = Jacob jansen ava.png
| Name = Jacob Jansen
| Homeworld = Hapes
| Born = Year -22
| Died =
| Race = Hapan
| Gender = Male
| Height = 1,88 meters
| Colouring =
| Hair Colour = Black
| Eye Colour = Blue
| Status = Active
| Ministry =
| Department =
| Position = [[Councillor]]
| Prior Service = [[Viceroy]] [[Regent]] [[Duceroy]] Minister of the Interior [[Techno Union]] [[Corporate Alliance]]
}}

The Hapan leader, '''Jacob Jansen''', has repeatedly guided the Trade Federation, serving as its 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th Viceroy. Though he currently operates as the owner and Arch-Provost of [[Rendili StarDrive]], he remains a key figure in TF governance as a Councillor on the [[Inner-Circle]].

==History==
===Youth===
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.

At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy. However, this was not to be. Although Hapan in origin, many have attested to the fact that Jacob is not very Hapan in his outlook. although most Hapans never leave the Hapes Cluster, Jacob wanted to strike out on his own and explore beyond the isolated Hapan borders. A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.

The small and rickety ship Jacob had bought was not up for the long voayage to the core worlds, and Jacob was obliged to divert his journey to the Trade Federation's Glythe Sector. The [[Trade Federation]] long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

===Joining the Federation===
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.

The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command. In time, Director of Archis resigned his post and his Deputy, [[Centauri Tyridius]] assumed command of the Department of Defense. Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.

==Assisting the Confederacy==
===Corporate Alliance===
It was clear to Tribune Jansen that if he wanted to further his career in the Trade Federation he would need to expand his experience and relations within the [[Confederacy of Independent Systems]]. Tribune Jansen applied for and was offered an open position running the Logistics Department at the [[Corporate Alliance]]. He requested and was granted an honorable discharge from the Trade Federation Navy to take up his new challenge in the Corporate Alliance.

The Corporate Alliance was lead by President [[Garven Stalwart]], a follower of [[Horley Cyan]]. Garven was a well respected man in the trade industry and Jansen was eager to learn much from him. However, the Corporate Alliance's Department of Logistics was at a crisis point, with chronic disorganization creating a logistic morass. Jansen quickly went to work, providing as much skill and discipline as he could muster to turn the department around. His experience with command at Trias served him well, and he grew into the challenge as the department blossomed under his care. Garven Stalwart was impressed with the skill and maturity of the young Jansen, and he promoted Jacob Vice President of Corporate Alliance. Moving in to a leadership role in the Alliance was a huge move for the new Vice President. Working closely together, the team of Stalwart and Jansen proved to be a great boon to the Corporate Alliance. Under their guidance, The Corporate Alliance regularly turned loss into profit.

However, there were rumors that the Trade Federation had fallen on difficult times. Viceroy Horley Cyan stepped down and former Viceroy Corbin Esco had resumed his leadership position. Much was changing withing the Federation, and people with leadership experience were needed to stabilize the galaxy's largest trade conglomerate. [[Centauri Tyridius]], who had risen to the position of Duceroy, asked Jansen to return to help the Federation. It was with much regret that Jacob decided to leave the Corporate Alliance, resigning his Vice President's post.

===Trade Federation===
On Jansen's return to Vinsoth, he met with Duceroy Tyridius, who offered him the job of running the newly-formed [[TF Ministry of the Interior]]. Jansen happily accepted, and was installed as [[Minister]] the following day. As Minister of the Interior, Jacob oversaw the Logistics Corps as well as the [[Department of Industry]]. This gave Jacob the ability to keep a close eye on all of the Trade Federation's facilities and cities throughout the entire Glythe Sector. This assignment was not a small task, but it was one Minister Jansen proved fully capable of handling. He spent a good amount of time as Minister working with Duceroy Tyridius and the [[TF Cabinet]]. He remained a steady rock throughout the following political turmoil: the resignation of Viceroy [[Corbin Esco]] gave rise to a usurpation attempt by Darvock Tarion. The rise of Duceroy [[Bren Morgarr]] to Viceroy ended much of the internal political conflict, but left some holes in the CIS leadership structure.

===Techno Union===
Throughout the political turmoil, [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] suffered due to a lack of real leadership. Minister Jansen recognized that Techno Union was a huge part of the Federation's future, and he volunteered to take temporary command. The vote was passed and Minister Jansen was appointed President of Techno Union. Jacob was given 3 simple tasks for his work in Techno Union: revitalize the membership the company, restore production and stabilize income. Over a short period of time, all these goals were completed and Jacob was now leading a significant competitor in the ship building industry. Sales were up, new shipyards were under construction and many new applicants made the faction a premier galactic employer.

==Back in the Trade Federation==
===Duceroy===
President Jansen had accomplished all but one task - finding his replacement. For this, he looked to a long-time and trusted friend, [[Krayt Fel]]. Krayt Fel took over the leadership of Techno Union, clearing the way for Jansen to return to service in the Trade Federation.

At this point, Duceroy Centauri Tyridius submitted his resignation, recommending Jansen as his replacement. The vote was taken to the Cabinet and Jacob was quickly approved as [[Duceroy]] of the Trade Federation.

With the Trade Federation in economic boom, the Federation was pushed into the galactic spotlight. Having hundreds of millions of credits at the government's disposal, Duceroy Jansen was appointed Director of the Treasury and quickly started to build up an impressive naval fleet for the Federation. Adding many warships and haulers to the naval roster, the Trade Federation was finally able to take on large projects it never was able before.

One of the most important additions to the Federation was the purchase of [[Starsign Shipyards]] from its owner and galactic trader, Syn. The purchase of Starsign gave the Trade Federation exclusive rights to produce the YT-510 and rights to both the YV-666 and YT-2400.

===Transition to Power===
Not too long into his tenure as Duceroy, Jansen experienced firsthand command issues that were not getting addressed by the Viceroy Morgarr. The Trade Federation had continued an extended war with the Galactic Empire, which hurt the Federation's economic standing and made adequate defense of Federation territory impossible. Duceroy Jansen quickly lost confidence in Viceroy Morgarr's inability to take advantage of opportunities for the Federation on a galactic level. He felt that if something was not done quickly, the Trade Federation would spiral down an irreversible path, squandering opportunities for continued galactic prominence.

Acting on his own, Duceroy Jansen spoke with the Cabinet looking for support to approach Viceroy Morgarr about his resignation. To his surprise, there was little resistance and every member of the Cabinet vowed their support to Jacob. The plan was to get a quick and harmless transition of power. Fearing the spectre of past political turmoil when Viceroy Morgarr came to power, Duceroy Jansen wanted to avoid a coup or civil war that would cause huge harm to the Trade Federation. Because of the delicacy of the situation, very few members were told of the quiet push for a transition of power.

A few days later, Duceroy Jansen respectfully approached Viceroy Morgarr, asking for his resignation. The Cabinet was invited into the discussion and almost immediately Viceroy Morgarr resigned his command of the Trade Federation.
[[File:VJJbridge.png|right|frame|none|A young Viceroy Jacob Jansen on the bridge of his flagship, the Lucrehulk 3210 Battleship [[Prosperity]]]]

===Viceroy===
On Year 8 Day 336 Duceroy Jansen was appointed [[Viceroy]] of the Trade Federation. Viceroy Jansen quickly implemented what some would call harsh but completely necessary changes in the Trade Federation and the Confederacy of Independent Systems. One of those changes was to end the war with the Galactic Empire.

Viceroy Jansen long felt the war was a huge mistake for the Trade Federation. The founding goals and principles of the Federation were being ignored because of a simple misunderstanding between the two powerful governments. Knowing this, Jacob contacted the Emperor and brokered a cease-fire between the two factions. Renewed commerce started to flow between the two governments, allowing a foundation for future relations to flourish. This cease-fire with the Empire opened diplomatic channels with both the Hapes Consortium and [[Mandalore]]. Both of whom where member states of the [[Imperial Union]] and allies of the Empire.

===The Imperial Union===
After peace was secured with the Empire, it was a natural step to move towards the Imperial Union. Jacob was approached by the Emperor and they both discussed possible future cooperation between the two governments. The decision would prove difficult for the new Viceroy, since never in the past had the Trade Federation been involved with the Galactic Civil War. Joining the Union would surely push the Federation to the Imperial side and cause political issues with the [[New Republic]] and their allies.

The decision was taken to the Cabinet where it was discussed for a many months. When the Cabinet was in agreement it was taken to the Confederate Senate and then to the [[Trade Federation Directorate]]. With unanimous support and approval, Jacob opened discussions with the Imperial Union heads of state.

After a few short discussions the Union approved the Trade Federation’s request for membership and on Year 9, Day 295 Jacob announced to the universe the good news in a live speech over the holonet.
[[File:Masterjacobjansen.png|right|thumb|500px|Master Jacob Jansen commanding Super Battle Droids]]
===The Force===
At a secluded meeting with Sith Lord Azrakh Raleep about Sith possibilities within the Trade Federation, Lord Raleep detected the ability to use the force within Viceroy Jansen. This was not a total surprise, as Jacob always felt he had an advantage over most people. He was always able to run a little faster and jump a little higher - the ability to always be ahead of the game. Some would say pure luck, but it was something far more powerful.

After a brief time with Lord Raleep, Viceroy Jansen traveled to meet with Emperor Vodo Bonias on his Super Star Destroyer where he trained in the powers of the Sith. There Jansen met Darth Malius, who served as his Master. The force was strong with Jansen and he quickly learned the ways of the Sith. When his training was complete Jansen left not only as a Viceroy, but a Sith Lord and member of the Sith Order.

Returning to the Trade Federation, Viceroy Jansen planned on using his new-found powers to better the Federation and its people, hoping to find more force users within the Trade Federation to act as its supreme guardians and enforcers.

===Evocati Order===
On Viceroy Jansen's return to the Trade Federation, he discovered the force within his Minister of Defense, [[Kage Renbukai]]. Viceroy Jansen took Kage as his apprentice, teaching Kage the ways of the force. Kage quickly reached the title of Knight. It was not too long before another member of the Trade Federation was found to have the force. [[Olwin Froon]], Director of Naval Production and leader of the [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] became Viceroy Jansen's second apprentice and quickly learned the ways of the force. It was then that Viceroy Jansen, Kage and Froon formed the Evocati Order and themselves served as the Inner Circle of the Order. The Evocati were designed to serve as the force guardians of the Trade Federation. The Order's mission is to serve the Trade Federation and to search its members for those special enough to have the ability to use the force. Since its creation, many members of the Trade Federation have joined its ranks. The Order stands as one of the most secretive divisions of the Trade Federation. For a good deal of time, no one outside of the Order even knew of its existence. Even today, very little information is known about the Order and its members.

===Alliance with the Hapes Consortium===
Following months of talks and weeks of non-stop fine tuning, in Year 11 Day 59 Viceroy Jansen signed the Trade Federation/Hapes Consortium Alliance with King Jessy James, ruler of the Hapes Consortium. The signing took place in the Stenness Node's Aweris System. Known as the [[Neshig Accords]], the alliance was the first of its kind for both governments: a no-strings-attached militaristic, economic, and social alliance between the two powers.[[File:Darth triaris.png|right|frame|none|Darth Triaris of the Sith Order]]

===Darth Triaris===
Viceroy Jacob Jansen grew very powerful in the Dark Side of the Force. His influence within the Sith Order grew such that, when the reign of Emperor Vodo Bonias ended, Jacob was asked to serve as one of four members on the Sith Council under the new Dark Lord of the Sith, Master Volentus. The position on the Council came with a promotion to Darth and a new name, Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris’ time in the Sith Council was short. Tensions arose between the Dark Lord of the Sith and Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris decided to pull out of the Sith Council and the Order to ensure no harm would come to relations between the Trade Federation and the Galactic Empire. Keeping his title, Darth Triaris strictly serves within the Inner Circle of the [[Evocati Order]].

===A New Direction===
With new leadership of the Empire came a new direction put upon the Imperial Union heads of state. The Empire wanted to reform the Union into a military coalition and wage war on the Galactic Alliance. This naturally divided the member states, many of whom did not wish to directly engage in war. The Trade Federation was on the side of peace. With drastic changes presented to Union heads of state, Jacob took the rare opportunity to move the Federation back on its original path of neutrality. After getting unanimous approval from the Cabinet, Jacob in turn spoke with the Empire and the remaining Union leaders. On hearing the Federation's plans, all remaining member states aside from the Empire decided to follow Jacob's example, withdraw from the Union, and declare neutrality. Jacob officially declared the Trade Federation's neutrality on Year 13 Day 315 in a public GNS titled "Honor, Integrity, and Profit."[[File:iu-conference.png|right|frame|none|400px|Viceroy Jacob Jansen announcing changes to the Imperial Union]]

===An Empire of Trade===
Leaving on peaceful terms with the Empire, Jacob quickly went to work with his Cabinet. For weeks they drafted up plans and ideas. The first of them was launched on Year 14 Day 52 in a GNS titled "Trade Federation Viceroy Aims To Strengthen Trading Community." The GNS was an announcement of the new Trade Federation Citizen Program, a program designed to recognize honorable traders of the galaxy by offering the support of the powerful economic engine of the Trade Federation. The program grants citizen status to galactic residents who fit the higher standards set to traders by the Trade Federation. The program instantly became a huge success. Many traders and entrepreneurs of the galaxy applied for membership. The Citizen Approval Board, composed of select Federation members, was quickly overloaded with applications and newly approved citizens have flooded Federation commerce centers throughout the galaxy.
[[File:Jacob saber.png|right|frame|Jacob's Lightsaber]]

===Retirement===
Jacob's nine-year run as Viceroy concluded when he formally resigned on Year 18, Day 68. He was succeeded by his current Regent, [[Nohv Schiller]]. For over a year, Jacob had been secretly planning this transition, only bringing his fellow Roys and Cabinet into the confidence later on. The public celebration, called "Federation Day," was actually a cleverly disguised farewell party for Jacob, planned with the Cabinet’s help. The secret was revealed on the event's final day through two broadcasts: "Future of the Trade Federation" for the local populace, and a GNS address for the rest of the galaxy. The broadcast announced his resignation and named Schiller as the new Viceroy. In turn, Viceroy Schiller honored Jacob with the [[Order of the Viceroy]] and appointed him as Regent to help him with his new duties. However, what seemed like a stable long-term solution quickly dissolved when the Viceroy unexpectedly revealed his own plans to step down.

===Viceroyal Carousel===
Jacob Jansen's hopes for a slow, relaxing retirement were repeatedly dashed by the demands of the Trade Federation. His second attempt at leisure was aborted on Year 19 Day 136 when he re-assumed the Viceroy title following Nohv Schiller's resignation. This tenure was marked by a successful, stabilizing maneuver: the signing of the Endor Pact, an alliance with The Kingdom of Elysia (modern day Czerka Corporation), and Kolkpravis.
Feeling he had secured the foundations, Jacob attempted his second retirement on Year 21 Day 292, handing the Viceroyalty to [[Salamku Derov]]. However, his appointment as Regent kept him tethered to the command structure. To his dismay, this brief respite ended abruptly when Viceroy Derov announced his intention to step down.
Inevitably, on Year 22 Day 216, Jacob Jansen was appointed Viceroy for a third time. This dedicated reign focused on structural reform, leading to the creation of the [[Inner-Circle]] and a significant policy shift with the Trade Federation's withdrawal from The [[Galactic Concordiate]].

In gratitude for his nearly 14 years of crucial service, Jacob was gifted [[Rendili StarDrive]] on Year 23 Day 320. On the same day, [[Salamku Derov]] took the helm for his second term.

===Arch-Provost and the Fourth Call===
Following his third retirement, Jacob accepted a position as Cabinet Advisor and Inner-Circle member, which facilitated a relocation to the Cularin System to take charge of [[Rendili StarDrive]]. Jacob and [[Nohv Schiller]] teamed up in Cularin to find the system in dire need of repair. The required rehabilitation was a massive undertaking, demanding that old shipyards be completely dismantled to make way for new, state-of-the-art facilities and depot stations. As soon as Rendili was finally ready to mass-produce its renowned ships—like the Lictor-class Dungeon Ship and Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruiser—trouble resurfaced in the Trade Federation.

On Year 24 Day 286, the inevitable happened: due to Viceroy Derov's health issues, Jacob Jansen was forced to assume the Viceroy title for a fourth time.

===Rotating Command===
Accepting his unbreakable ties to TF leadership, Jacob used this final term not just to govern, but to engineer a permanent solution to the leadership instability. He spearheaded critical changes to the TF charter, mandating a rotation of the Viceroyalty among all Inner-Circle members. This structural reform ensured that the demanding six-month term would not overwhelm any single individual and established a ready line of experienced successors.

During his six-month rotation, Jacob finalized additions to the Endor Pact and oversaw the dissolution of the Commerce Guilds. Upon completion of his term on Year 25 Day 217, Jacob stepped down to the position of Councillor.

===Current Day===
Splitting his time between Taanab and Cularin, he continues to run [[Rendili StarDrive]] while advising and assisting the Trade Federation leadership.

=Service Record=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Insignia
! style="text-align:center;" | Seal
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
|-
| Year 25 Day 217 - Current
| <center>Councillor (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 24 Day 286 - Year 25 Day 217
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 23 Day 320 - Year 24 Day 286
| <center>Advisor (n/a)</center>
| <center>N/A</center>
| <center>[[File: cabinetseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 22 Day 216 - Year 23 Day 320
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 21 Day 192 - Year 22 Day 216
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 19 Day 136 - Year 21 Day 192
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 18 Day 68 - Year 19 Day 136
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 338 - Year 18 Day 68
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 334 - Year 8 Day 338
| <center>Duceroy (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 127 - Year 8 Day 334
| <center>Minister (GL-1)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-1.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Moiseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Ministry_of_the_Interior|Interior Ministry]]</center>
|-
| Year 7 Day 306
| <center>Director (HC-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Hc-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Production-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Techno_Union|Techno Union]]</center>
|-
| ~Year 6
| <center>Vice-President</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Logistics Director</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Tribune</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Cadet</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|}

=Awards and Commendations=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
|-
| [[Image:OV.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Viceroy]]
| [[Nohv Schiller]]
| Year 8, Day 68
|-
| [[Image:MOCF.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Confederacy: Member of the Confederate]]
| [[Bren Morgarr]]
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:EMoM.png]]
| [[Mark of the Master]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DS.jpg]]
| [[Diplomatic Star]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLos.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Loszog]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLek.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Lekua IV]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-TB.png]]
| [[Operation Taboon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SEPH.png]]
| [[Operation Seraph]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SARM.png]]
| [[Operation Strongarm]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:HUSNG-PRG.png]]
| [[Housing Project]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Ecom.png]]
| [[Council of Masters Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Eic.png]]
| [[Inner Circle Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:CR.png]]
| [[Cabinet Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DR.png]]
| [[Directorate Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VCE.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Corbin Esco
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VHC.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Horley Cyan
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VBM.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Bren Morgarr
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VJJ.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Jacob Jansen
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VNS.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Nohv Schiller
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[File:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Vas Felix
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-tod20.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] 20 years
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|}
 
[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]
[[Category:Duceroys]]
[[Category:Viceroys]]
[[Category:Regents]]
[[Category:Inner Circle]]

Jacob Jansen

2026-03-25T14:49:13Z

Gav Lucky: /* Service Record */

{{Infobox Character
| ImageHref = Jacob jansen ava.png
| Name = Jacob Jansen
| Homeworld = Hapes
| Born = Year -22
| Died =
| Race = Hapan
| Gender = Male
| Height = 1,88 meters
| Colouring =
| Hair Colour = Black
| Eye Colour = Blue
| Status = Active
| Ministry =
| Department =
| Position = [[Councillor]]
| Prior Service = [[Viceroy]] [[Regent]] [[Duceroy]] Minister of the Interior [[Techno Union]] [[Corporate Alliance]]
}}

The Hapan leader, '''Jacob Jansen''', has repeatedly guided the Trade Federation, serving as its 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th Viceroy. Though he currently operates as the owner and Arch-Provost of [[Rendili StarDrive]], he remains a key figure in TF governance as a Councillor on the [[Inner-Circle]].

==History==
===Youth===
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.

At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy. However, this was not to be. Although Hapan in origin, many have attested to the fact that Jacob is not very Hapan in his outlook. although most Hapans never leave the Hapes Cluster, Jacob wanted to strike out on his own and explore beyond the isolated Hapan borders. A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.

The small and rickety ship Jacob had bought was not up for the long voayage to the core worlds, and Jacob was obliged to divert his journey to the Trade Federation's Glythe Sector. The [[Trade Federation]] long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

===Joining the Federation===
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.

The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command. In time, Director of Archis resigned his post and his Deputy, [[Centauri Tyridius]] assumed command of the Department of Defense. Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.

==Assisting the Confederacy==
===Corporate Alliance===
It was clear to Tribune Jansen that if he wanted to further his career in the Trade Federation he would need to expand his experience and relations within the [[Confederacy of Independent Systems]]. Tribune Jansen applied for and was offered an open position running the Logistics Department at the [[Corporate Alliance]]. He requested and was granted an honorable discharge from the Trade Federation Navy to take up his new challenge in the Corporate Alliance.

The Corporate Alliance was lead by President [[Garven Stalwart]], a follower of [[Horley Cyan]]. Garven was a well respected man in the trade industry and Jansen was eager to learn much from him. However, the Corporate Alliance's Department of Logistics was at a crisis point, with chronic disorganization creating a logistic morass. Jansen quickly went to work, providing as much skill and discipline as he could muster to turn the department around. His experience with command at Trias served him well, and he grew into the challenge as the department blossomed under his care. Garven Stalwart was impressed with the skill and maturity of the young Jansen, and he promoted Jacob Vice President of Corporate Alliance. Moving in to a leadership role in the Alliance was a huge move for the new Vice President. Working closely together, the team of Stalwart and Jansen proved to be a great boon to the Corporate Alliance. Under their guidance, The Corporate Alliance regularly turned loss into profit.

However, there were rumors that the Trade Federation had fallen on difficult times. Viceroy Horley Cyan stepped down and former Viceroy Corbin Esco had resumed his leadership position. Much was changing withing the Federation, and people with leadership experience were needed to stabilize the galaxy's largest trade conglomerate. [[Centauri Tyridius]], who had risen to the position of Duceroy, asked Jansen to return to help the Federation. It was with much regret that Jacob decided to leave the Corporate Alliance, resigning his Vice President's post.

===Trade Federation===
On Jansen's return to Vinsoth, he met with Duceroy Tyridius, who offered him the job of running the newly-formed [[TF Ministry of the Interior]]. Jansen happily accepted, and was installed as [[Minister]] the following day. As Minister of the Interior, Jacob oversaw the Logistics Corps as well as the [[Department of Industry]]. This gave Jacob the ability to keep a close eye on all of the Trade Federation's facilities and cities throughout the entire Glythe Sector. This assignment was not a small task, but it was one Minister Jansen proved fully capable of handling. He spent a good amount of time as Minister working with Duceroy Tyridius and the [[TF Cabinet]]. He remained a steady rock throughout the following political turmoil: the resignation of Viceroy [[Corbin Esco]] gave rise to a usurpation attempt by Darvock Tarion. The rise of Duceroy [[Bren Morgarr]] to Viceroy ended much of the internal political conflict, but left some holes in the CIS leadership structure.

===Techno Union===
Throughout the political turmoil, [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] suffered due to a lack of real leadership. Minister Jansen recognized that Techno Union was a huge part of the Federation's future, and he volunteered to take temporary command. The vote was passed and Minister Jansen was appointed President of Techno Union. Jacob was given 3 simple tasks for his work in Techno Union: revitalize the membership the company, restore production and stabilize income. Over a short period of time, all these goals were completed and Jacob was now leading a significant competitor in the ship building industry. Sales were up, new shipyards were under construction and many new applicants made the faction a premier galactic employer.

==Back in the Trade Federation==
===Duceroy===
President Jansen had accomplished all but one task - finding his replacement. For this, he looked to a long-time and trusted friend, [[Krayt Fel]]. Krayt Fel took over the leadership of Techno Union, clearing the way for Jansen to return to service in the Trade Federation.

At this point, Duceroy Centauri Tyridius submitted his resignation, recommending Jansen as his replacement. The vote was taken to the Cabinet and Jacob was quickly approved as [[Duceroy]] of the Trade Federation.

With the Trade Federation in economic boom, the Federation was pushed into the galactic spotlight. Having hundreds of millions of credits at the government's disposal, Duceroy Jansen was appointed Director of the Treasury and quickly started to build up an impressive naval fleet for the Federation. Adding many warships and haulers to the naval roster, the Trade Federation was finally able to take on large projects it never was able before.

One of the most important additions to the Federation was the purchase of [[Starsign Shipyards]] from its owner and galactic trader, Syn. The purchase of Starsign gave the Trade Federation exclusive rights to produce the YT-510 and rights to both the YV-666 and YT-2400.

===Transition to Power===
Not too long into his tenure as Duceroy, Jansen experienced firsthand command issues that were not getting addressed by the Viceroy Morgarr. The Trade Federation had continued an extended war with the Galactic Empire, which hurt the Federation's economic standing and made adequate defense of Federation territory impossible. Duceroy Jansen quickly lost confidence in Viceroy Morgarr's inability to take advantage of opportunities for the Federation on a galactic level. He felt that if something was not done quickly, the Trade Federation would spiral down an irreversible path, squandering opportunities for continued galactic prominence.

Acting on his own, Duceroy Jansen spoke with the Cabinet looking for support to approach Viceroy Morgarr about his resignation. To his surprise, there was little resistance and every member of the Cabinet vowed their support to Jacob. The plan was to get a quick and harmless transition of power. Fearing the spectre of past political turmoil when Viceroy Morgarr came to power, Duceroy Jansen wanted to avoid a coup or civil war that would cause huge harm to the Trade Federation. Because of the delicacy of the situation, very few members were told of the quiet push for a transition of power.

A few days later, Duceroy Jansen respectfully approached Viceroy Morgarr, asking for his resignation. The Cabinet was invited into the discussion and almost immediately Viceroy Morgarr resigned his command of the Trade Federation.
[[File:VJJbridge.png|right|frame|none|A young Viceroy Jacob Jansen on the bridge of his flagship, the Lucrehulk 3210 Battleship [[Prosperity]]]]

===Viceroy===
On Year 8 Day 336 Duceroy Jansen was appointed [[Viceroy]] of the Trade Federation. Viceroy Jansen quickly implemented what some would call harsh but completely necessary changes in the Trade Federation and the Confederacy of Independent Systems. One of those changes was to end the war with the Galactic Empire.

Viceroy Jansen long felt the war was a huge mistake for the Trade Federation. The founding goals and principles of the Federation were being ignored because of a simple misunderstanding between the two powerful governments. Knowing this, Jacob contacted the Emperor and brokered a cease-fire between the two factions. Renewed commerce started to flow between the two governments, allowing a foundation for future relations to flourish. This cease-fire with the Empire opened diplomatic channels with both the Hapes Consortium and [[Mandalore]]. Both of whom where member states of the [[Imperial Union]] and allies of the Empire.

===The Imperial Union===
After peace was secured with the Empire, it was a natural step to move towards the Imperial Union. Jacob was approached by the Emperor and they both discussed possible future cooperation between the two governments. The decision would prove difficult for the new Viceroy, since never in the past had the Trade Federation been involved with the Galactic Civil War. Joining the Union would surely push the Federation to the Imperial side and cause political issues with the [[New Republic]] and their allies.

The decision was taken to the Cabinet where it was discussed for a many months. When the Cabinet was in agreement it was taken to the Confederate Senate and then to the [[Trade Federation Directorate]]. With unanimous support and approval, Jacob opened discussions with the Imperial Union heads of state.

After a few short discussions the Union approved the Trade Federation’s request for membership and on Year 9, Day 295 Jacob announced to the universe the good news in a live speech over the holonet.
[[File:Masterjacobjansen.png|right|thumb|500px|Master Jacob Jansen commanding Super Battle Droids]]
===The Force===
At a secluded meeting with Sith Lord Azrakh Raleep about Sith possibilities within the Trade Federation, Lord Raleep detected the ability to use the force within Viceroy Jansen. This was not a total surprise, as Jacob always felt he had an advantage over most people. He was always able to run a little faster and jump a little higher - the ability to always be ahead of the game. Some would say pure luck, but it was something far more powerful.

After a brief time with Lord Raleep, Viceroy Jansen traveled to meet with Emperor Vodo Bonias on his Super Star Destroyer where he trained in the powers of the Sith. There Jansen met Darth Malius, who served as his Master. The force was strong with Jansen and he quickly learned the ways of the Sith. When his training was complete Jansen left not only as a Viceroy, but a Sith Lord and member of the Sith Order.

Returning to the Trade Federation, Viceroy Jansen planned on using his new-found powers to better the Federation and its people, hoping to find more force users within the Trade Federation to act as its supreme guardians and enforcers.

===Evocati Order===
On Viceroy Jansen's return to the Trade Federation, he discovered the force within his Minister of Defense, [[Kage Renbukai]]. Viceroy Jansen took Kage as his apprentice, teaching Kage the ways of the force. Kage quickly reached the title of Knight. It was not too long before another member of the Trade Federation was found to have the force. [[Olwin Froon]], Director of Naval Production and leader of the [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] became Viceroy Jansen's second apprentice and quickly learned the ways of the force. It was then that Viceroy Jansen, Kage and Froon formed the Evocati Order and themselves served as the Inner Circle of the Order. The Evocati were designed to serve as the force guardians of the Trade Federation. The Order's mission is to serve the Trade Federation and to search its members for those special enough to have the ability to use the force. Since its creation, many members of the Trade Federation have joined its ranks. The Order stands as one of the most secretive divisions of the Trade Federation. For a good deal of time, no one outside of the Order even knew of its existence. Even today, very little information is known about the Order and its members.

===Alliance with the Hapes Consortium===
Following months of talks and weeks of non-stop fine tuning, in Year 11 Day 59 Viceroy Jansen signed the Trade Federation/Hapes Consortium Alliance with King Jessy James, ruler of the Hapes Consortium. The signing took place in the Stenness Node's Aweris System. Known as the [[Neshig Accords]], the alliance was the first of its kind for both governments: a no-strings-attached militaristic, economic, and social alliance between the two powers.[[File:Darth triaris.png|right|frame|none|Darth Triaris of the Sith Order]]

===Darth Triaris===
Viceroy Jacob Jansen grew very powerful in the Dark Side of the Force. His influence within the Sith Order grew such that, when the reign of Emperor Vodo Bonias ended, Jacob was asked to serve as one of four members on the Sith Council under the new Dark Lord of the Sith, Master Volentus. The position on the Council came with a promotion to Darth and a new name, Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris’ time in the Sith Council was short. Tensions arose between the Dark Lord of the Sith and Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris decided to pull out of the Sith Council and the Order to ensure no harm would come to relations between the Trade Federation and the Galactic Empire. Keeping his title, Darth Triaris strictly serves within the Inner Circle of the [[Evocati Order]].

===A New Direction===
With new leadership of the Empire came a new direction put upon the Imperial Union heads of state. The Empire wanted to reform the Union into a military coalition and wage war on the Galactic Alliance. This naturally divided the member states, many of whom did not wish to directly engage in war. The Trade Federation was on the side of peace. With drastic changes presented to Union heads of state, Jacob took the rare opportunity to move the Federation back on its original path of neutrality. After getting unanimous approval from the Cabinet, Jacob in turn spoke with the Empire and the remaining Union leaders. On hearing the Federation's plans, all remaining member states aside from the Empire decided to follow Jacob's example, withdraw from the Union, and declare neutrality. Jacob officially declared the Trade Federation's neutrality on Year 13 Day 315 in a public GNS titled "Honor, Integrity, and Profit."[[File:iu-conference.png|right|frame|none|400px|Viceroy Jacob Jansen announcing changes to the Imperial Union]]

===An Empire of Trade===
Leaving on peaceful terms with the Empire, Jacob quickly went to work with his Cabinet. For weeks they drafted up plans and ideas. The first of them was launched on Year 14 Day 52 in a GNS titled "Trade Federation Viceroy Aims To Strengthen Trading Community." The GNS was an announcement of the new Trade Federation Citizen Program, a program designed to recognize honorable traders of the galaxy by offering the support of the powerful economic engine of the Trade Federation. The program grants citizen status to galactic residents who fit the higher standards set to traders by the Trade Federation. The program instantly became a huge success. Many traders and entrepreneurs of the galaxy applied for membership. The Citizen Approval Board, composed of select Federation members, was quickly overloaded with applications and newly approved citizens have flooded Federation commerce centers throughout the galaxy.
[[File:Jacob saber.png|right|frame|Jacob's Lightsaber]]

===Retirement===
Jacob's nine-year run as Viceroy concluded when he formally resigned on Year 18, Day 68. He was succeeded by his current Regent, [[Nohv Schiller]]. For over a year, Jacob had been secretly planning this transition, only bringing his fellow Roys and Cabinet into the confidence later on. The public celebration, called "Federation Day," was actually a cleverly disguised farewell party for Jacob, planned with the Cabinet’s help. The secret was revealed on the event's final day through two broadcasts: "Future of the Trade Federation" for the local populace, and a GNS address for the rest of the galaxy. The broadcast announced his resignation and named Schiller as the new Viceroy. In turn, Viceroy Schiller honored Jacob with the [[Order of the Viceroy]] and appointed him as Regent to help him with his new duties. However, what seemed like a stable long-term solution quickly dissolved when the Viceroy unexpectedly revealed his own plans to step down.

===Viceroyal Carousel===
Jacob Jansen's hopes for a slow, relaxing retirement were repeatedly dashed by the demands of the Trade Federation. His second attempt at leisure was aborted on Year 19 Day 136 when he re-assumed the Viceroy title following Nohv Schiller's resignation. This tenure was marked by a successful, stabilizing maneuver: the signing of the Endor Pact, an alliance with The Kingdom of Elysia (modern day Czerka Corporation), and Kolkpravis.
Feeling he had secured the foundations, Jacob attempted his second retirement on Year 21 Day 292, handing the Viceroyalty to [[Salamku Derov]]. However, his appointment as Regent kept him tethered to the command structure. To his dismay, this brief respite ended abruptly when Viceroy Derov announced his intention to step down.
Inevitably, on Year 22 Day 216, Jacob Jansen was appointed Viceroy for a third time. This dedicated reign focused on structural reform, leading to the creation of the [[Inner-Circle]] and a significant policy shift with the Trade Federation's withdrawal from The [[Galactic Concordiate]].

In gratitude for his nearly 14 years of crucial service, Jacob was gifted [[Rendili StarDrive]] on Year 23 Day 320. On the same day, [[Salamku Derov]] took the helm for his second term.

===Arch-Provost and the Fourth Call===
Following his third retirement, Jacob accepted a position as Cabinet Advisor and Inner-Circle member, which facilitated a relocation to the Cularin System to take charge of [[Rendili StarDrive]]. Jacob and [[Nohv Schiller]] teamed up in Cularin to find the system in dire need of repair. The required rehabilitation was a massive undertaking, demanding that old shipyards be completely dismantled to make way for new, state-of-the-art facilities and depot stations. As soon as Rendili was finally ready to mass-produce its renowned ships—like the Lictor-class Dungeon Ship and Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruiser—trouble resurfaced in the Trade Federation.

On Year 24 Day 286, the inevitable happened: due to Viceroy Derov's health issues, Jacob Jansen was forced to assume the Viceroy title for a fourth time.

===Rotating Command===
Accepting his unbreakable ties to TF leadership, Jacob used this final term not just to govern, but to engineer a permanent solution to the leadership instability. He spearheaded critical changes to the TF charter, mandating a rotation of the Viceroyalty among all Inner-Circle members. This structural reform ensured that the demanding six-month term would not overwhelm any single individual and established a ready line of experienced successors.

During his six-month rotation, Jacob finalized additions to the Endor Pact and oversaw the dissolution of the Commerce Guilds. Upon completion of his term on Year 25 Day 217, Jacob stepped down to the position of Councillor.

===Current Day===
Splitting his time between Taanab and Cularin, he continues to run [[Rendili StarDrive]] while advising and assisting the Trade Federation leadership.

=Service Record=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Insignia
! style="text-align:center;" | Seal
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
|-
| Year 25 Day 217 - Current
| <center>Councillor (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 24 Day 286 - Year 25 Day 217
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 23 Day 320 - Year 24 Day 286
| <center>Advisor (n/a)</center>
| <center>N/A</center>
| <center>[[File: cabinetseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 22 Day 216 - Year 23 Day 320
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 21 Day 192 - Year 22 Day 216
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 19 Day 136 - Year 21 Day 192
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 18 Day 68 - Year 19 Day 136
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 338 - Year 18 Day 68
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 334 - Year 8 Day 338
| <center>Duceroy (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 127
| <center>Minister (GL-1)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-1.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Moiseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Ministry_of_the_Interior|Interior Ministry]]</center>
|-
| Year 7 Day 306
| <center>Director (HC-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Hc-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Production-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Techno_Union|Techno Union]]</center>
|-
| ~Year 6
| <center>Vice-President</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Logistics Director</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Tribune</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Cadet</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|}

=Awards and Commendations=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
|-
| [[Image:OV.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Viceroy]]
| [[Nohv Schiller]]
| Year 8, Day 68
|-
| [[Image:MOCF.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Confederacy: Member of the Confederate]]
| [[Bren Morgarr]]
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:EMoM.png]]
| [[Mark of the Master]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DS.jpg]]
| [[Diplomatic Star]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLos.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Loszog]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLek.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Lekua IV]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-TB.png]]
| [[Operation Taboon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SEPH.png]]
| [[Operation Seraph]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SARM.png]]
| [[Operation Strongarm]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:HUSNG-PRG.png]]
| [[Housing Project]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Ecom.png]]
| [[Council of Masters Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Eic.png]]
| [[Inner Circle Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:CR.png]]
| [[Cabinet Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DR.png]]
| [[Directorate Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VCE.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Corbin Esco
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VHC.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Horley Cyan
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VBM.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Bren Morgarr
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VJJ.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Jacob Jansen
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VNS.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Nohv Schiller
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[File:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Vas Felix
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-tod20.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] 20 years
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|}
 
[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]
[[Category:Duceroys]]
[[Category:Viceroys]]
[[Category:Regents]]
[[Category:Inner Circle]]

Jacob Jansen

2026-03-25T14:43:05Z

Gav Lucky: /* Service Record */

{{Infobox Character
| ImageHref = Jacob jansen ava.png
| Name = Jacob Jansen
| Homeworld = Hapes
| Born = Year -22
| Died =
| Race = Hapan
| Gender = Male
| Height = 1,88 meters
| Colouring =
| Hair Colour = Black
| Eye Colour = Blue
| Status = Active
| Ministry =
| Department =
| Position = [[Councillor]]
| Prior Service = [[Viceroy]] [[Regent]] [[Duceroy]] Minister of the Interior [[Techno Union]] [[Corporate Alliance]]
}}

The Hapan leader, '''Jacob Jansen''', has repeatedly guided the Trade Federation, serving as its 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th Viceroy. Though he currently operates as the owner and Arch-Provost of [[Rendili StarDrive]], he remains a key figure in TF governance as a Councillor on the [[Inner-Circle]].

==History==
===Youth===
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.

At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy. However, this was not to be. Although Hapan in origin, many have attested to the fact that Jacob is not very Hapan in his outlook. although most Hapans never leave the Hapes Cluster, Jacob wanted to strike out on his own and explore beyond the isolated Hapan borders. A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.

The small and rickety ship Jacob had bought was not up for the long voayage to the core worlds, and Jacob was obliged to divert his journey to the Trade Federation's Glythe Sector. The [[Trade Federation]] long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

===Joining the Federation===
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.

The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command. In time, Director of Archis resigned his post and his Deputy, [[Centauri Tyridius]] assumed command of the Department of Defense. Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.

==Assisting the Confederacy==
===Corporate Alliance===
It was clear to Tribune Jansen that if he wanted to further his career in the Trade Federation he would need to expand his experience and relations within the [[Confederacy of Independent Systems]]. Tribune Jansen applied for and was offered an open position running the Logistics Department at the [[Corporate Alliance]]. He requested and was granted an honorable discharge from the Trade Federation Navy to take up his new challenge in the Corporate Alliance.

The Corporate Alliance was lead by President [[Garven Stalwart]], a follower of [[Horley Cyan]]. Garven was a well respected man in the trade industry and Jansen was eager to learn much from him. However, the Corporate Alliance's Department of Logistics was at a crisis point, with chronic disorganization creating a logistic morass. Jansen quickly went to work, providing as much skill and discipline as he could muster to turn the department around. His experience with command at Trias served him well, and he grew into the challenge as the department blossomed under his care. Garven Stalwart was impressed with the skill and maturity of the young Jansen, and he promoted Jacob Vice President of Corporate Alliance. Moving in to a leadership role in the Alliance was a huge move for the new Vice President. Working closely together, the team of Stalwart and Jansen proved to be a great boon to the Corporate Alliance. Under their guidance, The Corporate Alliance regularly turned loss into profit.

However, there were rumors that the Trade Federation had fallen on difficult times. Viceroy Horley Cyan stepped down and former Viceroy Corbin Esco had resumed his leadership position. Much was changing withing the Federation, and people with leadership experience were needed to stabilize the galaxy's largest trade conglomerate. [[Centauri Tyridius]], who had risen to the position of Duceroy, asked Jansen to return to help the Federation. It was with much regret that Jacob decided to leave the Corporate Alliance, resigning his Vice President's post.

===Trade Federation===
On Jansen's return to Vinsoth, he met with Duceroy Tyridius, who offered him the job of running the newly-formed [[TF Ministry of the Interior]]. Jansen happily accepted, and was installed as [[Minister]] the following day. As Minister of the Interior, Jacob oversaw the Logistics Corps as well as the [[Department of Industry]]. This gave Jacob the ability to keep a close eye on all of the Trade Federation's facilities and cities throughout the entire Glythe Sector. This assignment was not a small task, but it was one Minister Jansen proved fully capable of handling. He spent a good amount of time as Minister working with Duceroy Tyridius and the [[TF Cabinet]]. He remained a steady rock throughout the following political turmoil: the resignation of Viceroy [[Corbin Esco]] gave rise to a usurpation attempt by Darvock Tarion. The rise of Duceroy [[Bren Morgarr]] to Viceroy ended much of the internal political conflict, but left some holes in the CIS leadership structure.

===Techno Union===
Throughout the political turmoil, [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] suffered due to a lack of real leadership. Minister Jansen recognized that Techno Union was a huge part of the Federation's future, and he volunteered to take temporary command. The vote was passed and Minister Jansen was appointed President of Techno Union. Jacob was given 3 simple tasks for his work in Techno Union: revitalize the membership the company, restore production and stabilize income. Over a short period of time, all these goals were completed and Jacob was now leading a significant competitor in the ship building industry. Sales were up, new shipyards were under construction and many new applicants made the faction a premier galactic employer.

==Back in the Trade Federation==
===Duceroy===
President Jansen had accomplished all but one task - finding his replacement. For this, he looked to a long-time and trusted friend, [[Krayt Fel]]. Krayt Fel took over the leadership of Techno Union, clearing the way for Jansen to return to service in the Trade Federation.

At this point, Duceroy Centauri Tyridius submitted his resignation, recommending Jansen as his replacement. The vote was taken to the Cabinet and Jacob was quickly approved as [[Duceroy]] of the Trade Federation.

With the Trade Federation in economic boom, the Federation was pushed into the galactic spotlight. Having hundreds of millions of credits at the government's disposal, Duceroy Jansen was appointed Director of the Treasury and quickly started to build up an impressive naval fleet for the Federation. Adding many warships and haulers to the naval roster, the Trade Federation was finally able to take on large projects it never was able before.

One of the most important additions to the Federation was the purchase of [[Starsign Shipyards]] from its owner and galactic trader, Syn. The purchase of Starsign gave the Trade Federation exclusive rights to produce the YT-510 and rights to both the YV-666 and YT-2400.

===Transition to Power===
Not too long into his tenure as Duceroy, Jansen experienced firsthand command issues that were not getting addressed by the Viceroy Morgarr. The Trade Federation had continued an extended war with the Galactic Empire, which hurt the Federation's economic standing and made adequate defense of Federation territory impossible. Duceroy Jansen quickly lost confidence in Viceroy Morgarr's inability to take advantage of opportunities for the Federation on a galactic level. He felt that if something was not done quickly, the Trade Federation would spiral down an irreversible path, squandering opportunities for continued galactic prominence.

Acting on his own, Duceroy Jansen spoke with the Cabinet looking for support to approach Viceroy Morgarr about his resignation. To his surprise, there was little resistance and every member of the Cabinet vowed their support to Jacob. The plan was to get a quick and harmless transition of power. Fearing the spectre of past political turmoil when Viceroy Morgarr came to power, Duceroy Jansen wanted to avoid a coup or civil war that would cause huge harm to the Trade Federation. Because of the delicacy of the situation, very few members were told of the quiet push for a transition of power.

A few days later, Duceroy Jansen respectfully approached Viceroy Morgarr, asking for his resignation. The Cabinet was invited into the discussion and almost immediately Viceroy Morgarr resigned his command of the Trade Federation.
[[File:VJJbridge.png|right|frame|none|A young Viceroy Jacob Jansen on the bridge of his flagship, the Lucrehulk 3210 Battleship [[Prosperity]]]]

===Viceroy===
On Year 8 Day 336 Duceroy Jansen was appointed [[Viceroy]] of the Trade Federation. Viceroy Jansen quickly implemented what some would call harsh but completely necessary changes in the Trade Federation and the Confederacy of Independent Systems. One of those changes was to end the war with the Galactic Empire.

Viceroy Jansen long felt the war was a huge mistake for the Trade Federation. The founding goals and principles of the Federation were being ignored because of a simple misunderstanding between the two powerful governments. Knowing this, Jacob contacted the Emperor and brokered a cease-fire between the two factions. Renewed commerce started to flow between the two governments, allowing a foundation for future relations to flourish. This cease-fire with the Empire opened diplomatic channels with both the Hapes Consortium and [[Mandalore]]. Both of whom where member states of the [[Imperial Union]] and allies of the Empire.

===The Imperial Union===
After peace was secured with the Empire, it was a natural step to move towards the Imperial Union. Jacob was approached by the Emperor and they both discussed possible future cooperation between the two governments. The decision would prove difficult for the new Viceroy, since never in the past had the Trade Federation been involved with the Galactic Civil War. Joining the Union would surely push the Federation to the Imperial side and cause political issues with the [[New Republic]] and their allies.

The decision was taken to the Cabinet where it was discussed for a many months. When the Cabinet was in agreement it was taken to the Confederate Senate and then to the [[Trade Federation Directorate]]. With unanimous support and approval, Jacob opened discussions with the Imperial Union heads of state.

After a few short discussions the Union approved the Trade Federation’s request for membership and on Year 9, Day 295 Jacob announced to the universe the good news in a live speech over the holonet.
[[File:Masterjacobjansen.png|right|thumb|500px|Master Jacob Jansen commanding Super Battle Droids]]
===The Force===
At a secluded meeting with Sith Lord Azrakh Raleep about Sith possibilities within the Trade Federation, Lord Raleep detected the ability to use the force within Viceroy Jansen. This was not a total surprise, as Jacob always felt he had an advantage over most people. He was always able to run a little faster and jump a little higher - the ability to always be ahead of the game. Some would say pure luck, but it was something far more powerful.

After a brief time with Lord Raleep, Viceroy Jansen traveled to meet with Emperor Vodo Bonias on his Super Star Destroyer where he trained in the powers of the Sith. There Jansen met Darth Malius, who served as his Master. The force was strong with Jansen and he quickly learned the ways of the Sith. When his training was complete Jansen left not only as a Viceroy, but a Sith Lord and member of the Sith Order.

Returning to the Trade Federation, Viceroy Jansen planned on using his new-found powers to better the Federation and its people, hoping to find more force users within the Trade Federation to act as its supreme guardians and enforcers.

===Evocati Order===
On Viceroy Jansen's return to the Trade Federation, he discovered the force within his Minister of Defense, [[Kage Renbukai]]. Viceroy Jansen took Kage as his apprentice, teaching Kage the ways of the force. Kage quickly reached the title of Knight. It was not too long before another member of the Trade Federation was found to have the force. [[Olwin Froon]], Director of Naval Production and leader of the [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] became Viceroy Jansen's second apprentice and quickly learned the ways of the force. It was then that Viceroy Jansen, Kage and Froon formed the Evocati Order and themselves served as the Inner Circle of the Order. The Evocati were designed to serve as the force guardians of the Trade Federation. The Order's mission is to serve the Trade Federation and to search its members for those special enough to have the ability to use the force. Since its creation, many members of the Trade Federation have joined its ranks. The Order stands as one of the most secretive divisions of the Trade Federation. For a good deal of time, no one outside of the Order even knew of its existence. Even today, very little information is known about the Order and its members.

===Alliance with the Hapes Consortium===
Following months of talks and weeks of non-stop fine tuning, in Year 11 Day 59 Viceroy Jansen signed the Trade Federation/Hapes Consortium Alliance with King Jessy James, ruler of the Hapes Consortium. The signing took place in the Stenness Node's Aweris System. Known as the [[Neshig Accords]], the alliance was the first of its kind for both governments: a no-strings-attached militaristic, economic, and social alliance between the two powers.[[File:Darth triaris.png|right|frame|none|Darth Triaris of the Sith Order]]

===Darth Triaris===
Viceroy Jacob Jansen grew very powerful in the Dark Side of the Force. His influence within the Sith Order grew such that, when the reign of Emperor Vodo Bonias ended, Jacob was asked to serve as one of four members on the Sith Council under the new Dark Lord of the Sith, Master Volentus. The position on the Council came with a promotion to Darth and a new name, Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris’ time in the Sith Council was short. Tensions arose between the Dark Lord of the Sith and Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris decided to pull out of the Sith Council and the Order to ensure no harm would come to relations between the Trade Federation and the Galactic Empire. Keeping his title, Darth Triaris strictly serves within the Inner Circle of the [[Evocati Order]].

===A New Direction===
With new leadership of the Empire came a new direction put upon the Imperial Union heads of state. The Empire wanted to reform the Union into a military coalition and wage war on the Galactic Alliance. This naturally divided the member states, many of whom did not wish to directly engage in war. The Trade Federation was on the side of peace. With drastic changes presented to Union heads of state, Jacob took the rare opportunity to move the Federation back on its original path of neutrality. After getting unanimous approval from the Cabinet, Jacob in turn spoke with the Empire and the remaining Union leaders. On hearing the Federation's plans, all remaining member states aside from the Empire decided to follow Jacob's example, withdraw from the Union, and declare neutrality. Jacob officially declared the Trade Federation's neutrality on Year 13 Day 315 in a public GNS titled "Honor, Integrity, and Profit."[[File:iu-conference.png|right|frame|none|400px|Viceroy Jacob Jansen announcing changes to the Imperial Union]]

===An Empire of Trade===
Leaving on peaceful terms with the Empire, Jacob quickly went to work with his Cabinet. For weeks they drafted up plans and ideas. The first of them was launched on Year 14 Day 52 in a GNS titled "Trade Federation Viceroy Aims To Strengthen Trading Community." The GNS was an announcement of the new Trade Federation Citizen Program, a program designed to recognize honorable traders of the galaxy by offering the support of the powerful economic engine of the Trade Federation. The program grants citizen status to galactic residents who fit the higher standards set to traders by the Trade Federation. The program instantly became a huge success. Many traders and entrepreneurs of the galaxy applied for membership. The Citizen Approval Board, composed of select Federation members, was quickly overloaded with applications and newly approved citizens have flooded Federation commerce centers throughout the galaxy.
[[File:Jacob saber.png|right|frame|Jacob's Lightsaber]]

===Retirement===
Jacob's nine-year run as Viceroy concluded when he formally resigned on Year 18, Day 68. He was succeeded by his current Regent, [[Nohv Schiller]]. For over a year, Jacob had been secretly planning this transition, only bringing his fellow Roys and Cabinet into the confidence later on. The public celebration, called "Federation Day," was actually a cleverly disguised farewell party for Jacob, planned with the Cabinet’s help. The secret was revealed on the event's final day through two broadcasts: "Future of the Trade Federation" for the local populace, and a GNS address for the rest of the galaxy. The broadcast announced his resignation and named Schiller as the new Viceroy. In turn, Viceroy Schiller honored Jacob with the [[Order of the Viceroy]] and appointed him as Regent to help him with his new duties. However, what seemed like a stable long-term solution quickly dissolved when the Viceroy unexpectedly revealed his own plans to step down.

===Viceroyal Carousel===
Jacob Jansen's hopes for a slow, relaxing retirement were repeatedly dashed by the demands of the Trade Federation. His second attempt at leisure was aborted on Year 19 Day 136 when he re-assumed the Viceroy title following Nohv Schiller's resignation. This tenure was marked by a successful, stabilizing maneuver: the signing of the Endor Pact, an alliance with The Kingdom of Elysia (modern day Czerka Corporation), and Kolkpravis.
Feeling he had secured the foundations, Jacob attempted his second retirement on Year 21 Day 292, handing the Viceroyalty to [[Salamku Derov]]. However, his appointment as Regent kept him tethered to the command structure. To his dismay, this brief respite ended abruptly when Viceroy Derov announced his intention to step down.
Inevitably, on Year 22 Day 216, Jacob Jansen was appointed Viceroy for a third time. This dedicated reign focused on structural reform, leading to the creation of the [[Inner-Circle]] and a significant policy shift with the Trade Federation's withdrawal from The [[Galactic Concordiate]].

In gratitude for his nearly 14 years of crucial service, Jacob was gifted [[Rendili StarDrive]] on Year 23 Day 320. On the same day, [[Salamku Derov]] took the helm for his second term.

===Arch-Provost and the Fourth Call===
Following his third retirement, Jacob accepted a position as Cabinet Advisor and Inner-Circle member, which facilitated a relocation to the Cularin System to take charge of [[Rendili StarDrive]]. Jacob and [[Nohv Schiller]] teamed up in Cularin to find the system in dire need of repair. The required rehabilitation was a massive undertaking, demanding that old shipyards be completely dismantled to make way for new, state-of-the-art facilities and depot stations. As soon as Rendili was finally ready to mass-produce its renowned ships—like the Lictor-class Dungeon Ship and Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruiser—trouble resurfaced in the Trade Federation.

On Year 24 Day 286, the inevitable happened: due to Viceroy Derov's health issues, Jacob Jansen was forced to assume the Viceroy title for a fourth time.

===Rotating Command===
Accepting his unbreakable ties to TF leadership, Jacob used this final term not just to govern, but to engineer a permanent solution to the leadership instability. He spearheaded critical changes to the TF charter, mandating a rotation of the Viceroyalty among all Inner-Circle members. This structural reform ensured that the demanding six-month term would not overwhelm any single individual and established a ready line of experienced successors.

During his six-month rotation, Jacob finalized additions to the Endor Pact and oversaw the dissolution of the Commerce Guilds. Upon completion of his term on Year 25 Day 217, Jacob stepped down to the position of Councillor.

===Current Day===
Splitting his time between Taanab and Cularin, he continues to run [[Rendili StarDrive]] while advising and assisting the Trade Federation leadership.

=Service Record=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Insignia
! style="text-align:center;" | Seal
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
|-
| Year 25 Day 217 - Current
| <center>Councillor (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 24 Day 286 - Year 25 Day 217
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 23 Day 320 - Year 24 Day 286
| <center>Advisor (n/a)</center>
| <center>N/A</center>
| <center>[[File: cabinetseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 22 Day 216 - Year 23 Day 320
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 21 Day 192 - Year 22 Day 216
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 19 Day 136 - Year 21 Day 192
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 18 Day 68 - Year 19 Day 136
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 338 - Year 18 Day 68
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 334 - Year 8 Day 338
| <center>Duceroy (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 127
| <center>Minister (GL-1)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-1.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Moiseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Ministry_of_the_Interior|Interior Ministry]]</center>
|-
| Year 7 Day 306
| <center>Director (HC-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Hc-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Production-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Techno_Union|Techno Union]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Vice-President</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Logistics Director</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Tribune</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Cadet</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|}

=Awards and Commendations=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
|-
| [[Image:OV.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Viceroy]]
| [[Nohv Schiller]]
| Year 8, Day 68
|-
| [[Image:MOCF.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Confederacy: Member of the Confederate]]
| [[Bren Morgarr]]
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:EMoM.png]]
| [[Mark of the Master]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DS.jpg]]
| [[Diplomatic Star]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLos.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Loszog]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLek.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Lekua IV]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-TB.png]]
| [[Operation Taboon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SEPH.png]]
| [[Operation Seraph]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SARM.png]]
| [[Operation Strongarm]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:HUSNG-PRG.png]]
| [[Housing Project]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Ecom.png]]
| [[Council of Masters Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Eic.png]]
| [[Inner Circle Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:CR.png]]
| [[Cabinet Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DR.png]]
| [[Directorate Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VCE.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Corbin Esco
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VHC.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Horley Cyan
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VBM.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Bren Morgarr
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VJJ.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Jacob Jansen
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VNS.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Nohv Schiller
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[File:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Vas Felix
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-tod20.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] 20 years
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|}
 
[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]
[[Category:Duceroys]]
[[Category:Viceroys]]
[[Category:Regents]]
[[Category:Inner Circle]]

Jacob Jansen

2026-03-24T14:59:13Z

Gav Lucky: /* Service Record */

{{Infobox Character
| ImageHref = Jacob jansen ava.png
| Name = Jacob Jansen
| Homeworld = Hapes
| Born = Year -22
| Died =
| Race = Hapan
| Gender = Male
| Height = 1,88 meters
| Colouring =
| Hair Colour = Black
| Eye Colour = Blue
| Status = Active
| Ministry =
| Department =
| Position = [[Councillor]]
| Prior Service = [[Viceroy]] [[Regent]] [[Duceroy]] Minister of the Interior [[Techno Union]] [[Corporate Alliance]]
}}

The Hapan leader, '''Jacob Jansen''', has repeatedly guided the Trade Federation, serving as its 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th Viceroy. Though he currently operates as the owner and Arch-Provost of [[Rendili StarDrive]], he remains a key figure in TF governance as a Councillor on the [[Inner-Circle]].

==History==
===Youth===
Jacob Jansen's early life is veiled by a shroud of mystery that even the most probing security checks cannot penetrate. What little is known can only be gleaned from whispered rumors, some wild and fanciful. What is known for certain is that he was born on the planet Hapes, but Hapan Intelligence insists that census information on the Jansen family was lost more than a decade ago, leaving sparse records supplied by Jacob himself.

At an early age, Jacob entered the Hapan Naval Academy where he studied galactic Naval tactics. HNA records show that Jacob was an excellent student, and that HNA officials looked forward eagerly to the day when his rising star would lead in the Hapan Navy. However, this was not to be. Although Hapan in origin, many have attested to the fact that Jacob is not very Hapan in his outlook. although most Hapans never leave the Hapes Cluster, Jacob wanted to strike out on his own and explore beyond the isolated Hapan borders. A loud disagreement with his commanding officer is the only blot on Jacob's record from the HNA, and it proved the motivation for Jacob to begin the pursuit of his desires. Resigning from the Academy, Jacob defied Hapan law and departed the Hapes Cluster, spending most of his savings for a small ship to make for the Galactic Core.

The small and rickety ship Jacob had bought was not up for the long voayage to the core worlds, and Jacob was obliged to divert his journey to the Trade Federation's Glythe Sector. The [[Trade Federation]] long enjoyed a reputation for trustworthiness among the Hapan people, and Jacob traveled to Glythe seeking asylum and a chance to put his Hapan naval training to good use.

===Joining the Federation===
Upon arriving on Vinsoth, Jacob quickly made his way to the the local recruitment office. All of his entry examinations were passed with extremely high scores, drawing the attention of recruitment commanders. Looking for an opportunity to explore Jacob's potential, Federation Command placed him in the 2nd Fleet under Kell Archis, where Jacob was given command of the Carrack/S-class Light Cruiser [[TFN Peacekeeper]]. His performance in the Department of Defense was outstanding and he quickly gained the trust of Archis who promoted Jacob to the rank of Tribune and Trias Territory Military Governor.

The position of Military Governor gave Jacob his first true taste of command in the Trade Federation. In what was to become a feature of his tactical career, Tribune Jansen provided a strong defense system for the Trias Territory's small selection fo star systems. The defense implementations at Trias gained Tribune Jansen significant support from Director of Defense Kell Archis, who recognized the value of the organizational mind under his command. In time, Director of Archis resigned his post and his Deputy, [[Centauri Tyridius]] assumed command of the Department of Defense. Throughout their long time working together, Tribune Jansen and Director Tyridius formed a strong friendship and remain today on the best of terms.

==Assisting the Confederacy==
===Corporate Alliance===
It was clear to Tribune Jansen that if he wanted to further his career in the Trade Federation he would need to expand his experience and relations within the [[Confederacy of Independent Systems]]. Tribune Jansen applied for and was offered an open position running the Logistics Department at the [[Corporate Alliance]]. He requested and was granted an honorable discharge from the Trade Federation Navy to take up his new challenge in the Corporate Alliance.

The Corporate Alliance was lead by President [[Garven Stalwart]], a follower of [[Horley Cyan]]. Garven was a well respected man in the trade industry and Jansen was eager to learn much from him. However, the Corporate Alliance's Department of Logistics was at a crisis point, with chronic disorganization creating a logistic morass. Jansen quickly went to work, providing as much skill and discipline as he could muster to turn the department around. His experience with command at Trias served him well, and he grew into the challenge as the department blossomed under his care. Garven Stalwart was impressed with the skill and maturity of the young Jansen, and he promoted Jacob Vice President of Corporate Alliance. Moving in to a leadership role in the Alliance was a huge move for the new Vice President. Working closely together, the team of Stalwart and Jansen proved to be a great boon to the Corporate Alliance. Under their guidance, The Corporate Alliance regularly turned loss into profit.

However, there were rumors that the Trade Federation had fallen on difficult times. Viceroy Horley Cyan stepped down and former Viceroy Corbin Esco had resumed his leadership position. Much was changing withing the Federation, and people with leadership experience were needed to stabilize the galaxy's largest trade conglomerate. [[Centauri Tyridius]], who had risen to the position of Duceroy, asked Jansen to return to help the Federation. It was with much regret that Jacob decided to leave the Corporate Alliance, resigning his Vice President's post.

===Trade Federation===
On Jansen's return to Vinsoth, he met with Duceroy Tyridius, who offered him the job of running the newly-formed [[TF Ministry of the Interior]]. Jansen happily accepted, and was installed as [[Minister]] the following day. As Minister of the Interior, Jacob oversaw the Logistics Corps as well as the [[Department of Industry]]. This gave Jacob the ability to keep a close eye on all of the Trade Federation's facilities and cities throughout the entire Glythe Sector. This assignment was not a small task, but it was one Minister Jansen proved fully capable of handling. He spent a good amount of time as Minister working with Duceroy Tyridius and the [[TF Cabinet]]. He remained a steady rock throughout the following political turmoil: the resignation of Viceroy [[Corbin Esco]] gave rise to a usurpation attempt by Darvock Tarion. The rise of Duceroy [[Bren Morgarr]] to Viceroy ended much of the internal political conflict, but left some holes in the CIS leadership structure.

===Techno Union===
Throughout the political turmoil, [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] suffered due to a lack of real leadership. Minister Jansen recognized that Techno Union was a huge part of the Federation's future, and he volunteered to take temporary command. The vote was passed and Minister Jansen was appointed President of Techno Union. Jacob was given 3 simple tasks for his work in Techno Union: revitalize the membership the company, restore production and stabilize income. Over a short period of time, all these goals were completed and Jacob was now leading a significant competitor in the ship building industry. Sales were up, new shipyards were under construction and many new applicants made the faction a premier galactic employer.

==Back in the Trade Federation==
===Duceroy===
President Jansen had accomplished all but one task - finding his replacement. For this, he looked to a long-time and trusted friend, [[Krayt Fel]]. Krayt Fel took over the leadership of Techno Union, clearing the way for Jansen to return to service in the Trade Federation.

At this point, Duceroy Centauri Tyridius submitted his resignation, recommending Jansen as his replacement. The vote was taken to the Cabinet and Jacob was quickly approved as [[Duceroy]] of the Trade Federation.

With the Trade Federation in economic boom, the Federation was pushed into the galactic spotlight. Having hundreds of millions of credits at the government's disposal, Duceroy Jansen was appointed Director of the Treasury and quickly started to build up an impressive naval fleet for the Federation. Adding many warships and haulers to the naval roster, the Trade Federation was finally able to take on large projects it never was able before.

One of the most important additions to the Federation was the purchase of [[Starsign Shipyards]] from its owner and galactic trader, Syn. The purchase of Starsign gave the Trade Federation exclusive rights to produce the YT-510 and rights to both the YV-666 and YT-2400.

===Transition to Power===
Not too long into his tenure as Duceroy, Jansen experienced firsthand command issues that were not getting addressed by the Viceroy Morgarr. The Trade Federation had continued an extended war with the Galactic Empire, which hurt the Federation's economic standing and made adequate defense of Federation territory impossible. Duceroy Jansen quickly lost confidence in Viceroy Morgarr's inability to take advantage of opportunities for the Federation on a galactic level. He felt that if something was not done quickly, the Trade Federation would spiral down an irreversible path, squandering opportunities for continued galactic prominence.

Acting on his own, Duceroy Jansen spoke with the Cabinet looking for support to approach Viceroy Morgarr about his resignation. To his surprise, there was little resistance and every member of the Cabinet vowed their support to Jacob. The plan was to get a quick and harmless transition of power. Fearing the spectre of past political turmoil when Viceroy Morgarr came to power, Duceroy Jansen wanted to avoid a coup or civil war that would cause huge harm to the Trade Federation. Because of the delicacy of the situation, very few members were told of the quiet push for a transition of power.

A few days later, Duceroy Jansen respectfully approached Viceroy Morgarr, asking for his resignation. The Cabinet was invited into the discussion and almost immediately Viceroy Morgarr resigned his command of the Trade Federation.
[[File:VJJbridge.png|right|frame|none|A young Viceroy Jacob Jansen on the bridge of his flagship, the Lucrehulk 3210 Battleship [[Prosperity]]]]

===Viceroy===
On Year 8 Day 336 Duceroy Jansen was appointed [[Viceroy]] of the Trade Federation. Viceroy Jansen quickly implemented what some would call harsh but completely necessary changes in the Trade Federation and the Confederacy of Independent Systems. One of those changes was to end the war with the Galactic Empire.

Viceroy Jansen long felt the war was a huge mistake for the Trade Federation. The founding goals and principles of the Federation were being ignored because of a simple misunderstanding between the two powerful governments. Knowing this, Jacob contacted the Emperor and brokered a cease-fire between the two factions. Renewed commerce started to flow between the two governments, allowing a foundation for future relations to flourish. This cease-fire with the Empire opened diplomatic channels with both the Hapes Consortium and [[Mandalore]]. Both of whom where member states of the [[Imperial Union]] and allies of the Empire.

===The Imperial Union===
After peace was secured with the Empire, it was a natural step to move towards the Imperial Union. Jacob was approached by the Emperor and they both discussed possible future cooperation between the two governments. The decision would prove difficult for the new Viceroy, since never in the past had the Trade Federation been involved with the Galactic Civil War. Joining the Union would surely push the Federation to the Imperial side and cause political issues with the [[New Republic]] and their allies.

The decision was taken to the Cabinet where it was discussed for a many months. When the Cabinet was in agreement it was taken to the Confederate Senate and then to the [[Trade Federation Directorate]]. With unanimous support and approval, Jacob opened discussions with the Imperial Union heads of state.

After a few short discussions the Union approved the Trade Federation’s request for membership and on Year 9, Day 295 Jacob announced to the universe the good news in a live speech over the holonet.
[[File:Masterjacobjansen.png|right|thumb|500px|Master Jacob Jansen commanding Super Battle Droids]]
===The Force===
At a secluded meeting with Sith Lord Azrakh Raleep about Sith possibilities within the Trade Federation, Lord Raleep detected the ability to use the force within Viceroy Jansen. This was not a total surprise, as Jacob always felt he had an advantage over most people. He was always able to run a little faster and jump a little higher - the ability to always be ahead of the game. Some would say pure luck, but it was something far more powerful.

After a brief time with Lord Raleep, Viceroy Jansen traveled to meet with Emperor Vodo Bonias on his Super Star Destroyer where he trained in the powers of the Sith. There Jansen met Darth Malius, who served as his Master. The force was strong with Jansen and he quickly learned the ways of the Sith. When his training was complete Jansen left not only as a Viceroy, but a Sith Lord and member of the Sith Order.

Returning to the Trade Federation, Viceroy Jansen planned on using his new-found powers to better the Federation and its people, hoping to find more force users within the Trade Federation to act as its supreme guardians and enforcers.

===Evocati Order===
On Viceroy Jansen's return to the Trade Federation, he discovered the force within his Minister of Defense, [[Kage Renbukai]]. Viceroy Jansen took Kage as his apprentice, teaching Kage the ways of the force. Kage quickly reached the title of Knight. It was not too long before another member of the Trade Federation was found to have the force. [[Olwin Froon]], Director of Naval Production and leader of the [[Kuat Drive Yards|Techno Union]] became Viceroy Jansen's second apprentice and quickly learned the ways of the force. It was then that Viceroy Jansen, Kage and Froon formed the Evocati Order and themselves served as the Inner Circle of the Order. The Evocati were designed to serve as the force guardians of the Trade Federation. The Order's mission is to serve the Trade Federation and to search its members for those special enough to have the ability to use the force. Since its creation, many members of the Trade Federation have joined its ranks. The Order stands as one of the most secretive divisions of the Trade Federation. For a good deal of time, no one outside of the Order even knew of its existence. Even today, very little information is known about the Order and its members.

===Alliance with the Hapes Consortium===
Following months of talks and weeks of non-stop fine tuning, in Year 11 Day 59 Viceroy Jansen signed the Trade Federation/Hapes Consortium Alliance with King Jessy James, ruler of the Hapes Consortium. The signing took place in the Stenness Node's Aweris System. Known as the [[Neshig Accords]], the alliance was the first of its kind for both governments: a no-strings-attached militaristic, economic, and social alliance between the two powers.[[File:Darth triaris.png|right|frame|none|Darth Triaris of the Sith Order]]

===Darth Triaris===
Viceroy Jacob Jansen grew very powerful in the Dark Side of the Force. His influence within the Sith Order grew such that, when the reign of Emperor Vodo Bonias ended, Jacob was asked to serve as one of four members on the Sith Council under the new Dark Lord of the Sith, Master Volentus. The position on the Council came with a promotion to Darth and a new name, Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris’ time in the Sith Council was short. Tensions arose between the Dark Lord of the Sith and Darth Triaris. Darth Triaris decided to pull out of the Sith Council and the Order to ensure no harm would come to relations between the Trade Federation and the Galactic Empire. Keeping his title, Darth Triaris strictly serves within the Inner Circle of the [[Evocati Order]].

===A New Direction===
With new leadership of the Empire came a new direction put upon the Imperial Union heads of state. The Empire wanted to reform the Union into a military coalition and wage war on the Galactic Alliance. This naturally divided the member states, many of whom did not wish to directly engage in war. The Trade Federation was on the side of peace. With drastic changes presented to Union heads of state, Jacob took the rare opportunity to move the Federation back on its original path of neutrality. After getting unanimous approval from the Cabinet, Jacob in turn spoke with the Empire and the remaining Union leaders. On hearing the Federation's plans, all remaining member states aside from the Empire decided to follow Jacob's example, withdraw from the Union, and declare neutrality. Jacob officially declared the Trade Federation's neutrality on Year 13 Day 315 in a public GNS titled "Honor, Integrity, and Profit."[[File:iu-conference.png|right|frame|none|400px|Viceroy Jacob Jansen announcing changes to the Imperial Union]]

===An Empire of Trade===
Leaving on peaceful terms with the Empire, Jacob quickly went to work with his Cabinet. For weeks they drafted up plans and ideas. The first of them was launched on Year 14 Day 52 in a GNS titled "Trade Federation Viceroy Aims To Strengthen Trading Community." The GNS was an announcement of the new Trade Federation Citizen Program, a program designed to recognize honorable traders of the galaxy by offering the support of the powerful economic engine of the Trade Federation. The program grants citizen status to galactic residents who fit the higher standards set to traders by the Trade Federation. The program instantly became a huge success. Many traders and entrepreneurs of the galaxy applied for membership. The Citizen Approval Board, composed of select Federation members, was quickly overloaded with applications and newly approved citizens have flooded Federation commerce centers throughout the galaxy.
[[File:Jacob saber.png|right|frame|Jacob's Lightsaber]]

===Retirement===
Jacob's nine-year run as Viceroy concluded when he formally resigned on Year 18, Day 68. He was succeeded by his current Regent, [[Nohv Schiller]]. For over a year, Jacob had been secretly planning this transition, only bringing his fellow Roys and Cabinet into the confidence later on. The public celebration, called "Federation Day," was actually a cleverly disguised farewell party for Jacob, planned with the Cabinet’s help. The secret was revealed on the event's final day through two broadcasts: "Future of the Trade Federation" for the local populace, and a GNS address for the rest of the galaxy. The broadcast announced his resignation and named Schiller as the new Viceroy. In turn, Viceroy Schiller honored Jacob with the [[Order of the Viceroy]] and appointed him as Regent to help him with his new duties. However, what seemed like a stable long-term solution quickly dissolved when the Viceroy unexpectedly revealed his own plans to step down.

===Viceroyal Carousel===
Jacob Jansen's hopes for a slow, relaxing retirement were repeatedly dashed by the demands of the Trade Federation. His second attempt at leisure was aborted on Year 19 Day 136 when he re-assumed the Viceroy title following Nohv Schiller's resignation. This tenure was marked by a successful, stabilizing maneuver: the signing of the Endor Pact, an alliance with The Kingdom of Elysia (modern day Czerka Corporation), and Kolkpravis.
Feeling he had secured the foundations, Jacob attempted his second retirement on Year 21 Day 292, handing the Viceroyalty to [[Salamku Derov]]. However, his appointment as Regent kept him tethered to the command structure. To his dismay, this brief respite ended abruptly when Viceroy Derov announced his intention to step down.
Inevitably, on Year 22 Day 216, Jacob Jansen was appointed Viceroy for a third time. This dedicated reign focused on structural reform, leading to the creation of the [[Inner-Circle]] and a significant policy shift with the Trade Federation's withdrawal from The [[Galactic Concordiate]].

In gratitude for his nearly 14 years of crucial service, Jacob was gifted [[Rendili StarDrive]] on Year 23 Day 320. On the same day, [[Salamku Derov]] took the helm for his second term.

===Arch-Provost and the Fourth Call===
Following his third retirement, Jacob accepted a position as Cabinet Advisor and Inner-Circle member, which facilitated a relocation to the Cularin System to take charge of [[Rendili StarDrive]]. Jacob and [[Nohv Schiller]] teamed up in Cularin to find the system in dire need of repair. The required rehabilitation was a massive undertaking, demanding that old shipyards be completely dismantled to make way for new, state-of-the-art facilities and depot stations. As soon as Rendili was finally ready to mass-produce its renowned ships—like the Lictor-class Dungeon Ship and Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruiser—trouble resurfaced in the Trade Federation.

On Year 24 Day 286, the inevitable happened: due to Viceroy Derov's health issues, Jacob Jansen was forced to assume the Viceroy title for a fourth time.

===Rotating Command===
Accepting his unbreakable ties to TF leadership, Jacob used this final term not just to govern, but to engineer a permanent solution to the leadership instability. He spearheaded critical changes to the TF charter, mandating a rotation of the Viceroyalty among all Inner-Circle members. This structural reform ensured that the demanding six-month term would not overwhelm any single individual and established a ready line of experienced successors.

During his six-month rotation, Jacob finalized additions to the Endor Pact and oversaw the dissolution of the Commerce Guilds. Upon completion of his term on Year 25 Day 217, Jacob stepped down to the position of Councillor.

===Current Day===
Splitting his time between Taanab and Cularin, he continues to run [[Rendili StarDrive]] while advising and assisting the Trade Federation leadership.

=Service Record=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Insignia
! style="text-align:center;" | Seal
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
|-
| Year 25 Day 217 - Current
| <center>Councillor (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 24 Day 286 - Year 25 Day 217
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 23 Day 320 - Year 24 Day 286
| <center>Advisor (n/a)</center>
| <center>N/A</center>
| <center>[[File: cabinetseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 22 Day 216 - Year 23 Day 320
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 21 Day 192 - Year 22 Day 216
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 19 Day 136 - Year 21 Day 192
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 18 Day 68 - Year 19 Day 136
| <center>Regent (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: regentseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 338 - Year 18 Day 68
| <center>Viceroy (GL-3)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-3.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: viceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 338 - Year 8 Day 338
| <center>Duceroy (GL-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Duceroyseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Cabinet]]</center>
|-
| Year 8 Day 127
| <center>Minister (GL-1)</center>
| <center>[[File:Gl-1.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Moiseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Ministry_of_the_Interior|Interior Ministry]]</center>
|-
| Year 7 Day 306
| <center>Director (HC-2)</center>
| <center>[[File:Hc-2.png|100px]]</center>
| <center>[[File: Production-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Techno_Union|Techno Union]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Vice-President</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Logistics Director</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>[[Corporate Alliance]]</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Tribune</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|-
| Data Missing
| <center>Cadet</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>n/a</center>
| <center>Department of Defense</center>
|}

=Awards and Commendations=
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
|-
| [[Image:OV.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Viceroy]]
| [[Nohv Schiller]]
| Year 8, Day 68
|-
| [[Image:MOCF.jpg]]
| [[Order of the Confederacy: Member of the Confederate]]
| [[Bren Morgarr]]
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:EMoM.png]]
| [[Mark of the Master]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DS.jpg]]
| [[Diplomatic Star]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLos.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Loszog]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TPLek.png]]
| [[Tax Planet Lekua IV]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-TB.png]]
| [[Operation Taboon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SEPH.png]]
| [[Operation Seraph]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:OP-SARM.png]]
| [[Operation Strongarm]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:HUSNG-PRG.png]]
| [[Housing Project]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Ecom.png]]
| [[Council of Masters Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:Eic.png]]
| [[Inner Circle Ribbon]]
| Evocati Inner Circle
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:CR.png]]
| [[Cabinet Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:DR.png]]
| [[Directorate Ribbon]]
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VCE.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Corbin Esco
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VHC.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Horley Cyan
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VBM.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Bren Morgarr
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VJJ.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Jacob Jansen
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-VNS.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Nohv Schiller
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[File:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] Vas Felix
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|-
| [[Image:TOD-tod20.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty]] 20 years
| Cabinet
| Unknown
|}
 
[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]
[[Category:Duceroys]]
[[Category:Viceroys]]
[[Category:Regents]]
[[Category:Inner Circle]]

Gav Lucky

2026-03-01T20:04:47Z

Gav Lucky: /* Operation REDACTED */

{| class="infobox bordered" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="right" dth="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Gav_Lucky_ava.jpg|150px]]
|-
| style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Biographical Information'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Full Name:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Uglogavste Lukiil
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Aliases:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| ''Gav Lucky'' ''Dogbone'' ''The Space Pig''
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Homeworld:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Gentes
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Born:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Year -4 Day 143
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Physical Description'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Race:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Ugnaught
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Gender:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Male
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Height:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| 142 cm
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Colouring:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Porcelain
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Hair Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Brunette
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Eye Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Brown
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Trade Federation Service'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Status:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Active Duty
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Ministry:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| [[File:Moiseal.png|30px]] [[Ministry of the Interior|Interior]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Department:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| [[File:Operations-seal.png|30px]] [[Department of Operations|Operations]] - [[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Position:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"|
[[File:O-1.png|130px]] [[Chain of Command|Ensign]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Part-Time:
|style="padding-left:5px;"|
[[File:Archives-seal.png|30px]] [[Library_team|Library]] - [[Library_team|Archivist]] 
[[File:Tf-holotech-seal.png|30px]] [[Department_of_Holotech|Holotech]] - [[Department_of_Holotech|Developer]] 

|}

 

==Background==

[[File:Colossal-class_Heavy_Carrier_Ugnorgrad_I.png|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky's personal flagship the [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Ships&ID=253 Colossal-class Heavy Carrier] Ugnorgrad I]] 

Born beneath the heavy, sulfurous skies of Gentes, Uglogavste Lukiil came into the galaxy with a mind tuned for machinery and a soul already weighed by the oppression of his people. Like so many Ugnaughts before him, he escaped the drudgery of servitude, drifting to Bespin where the towering halls of Ugnorgrad hummed with welding arcs and the quiet desperation of survival.

On Bespin, he found refuge in the union workshops and data cores, refining not just his mechanical skill but a deep mastery of systems: computer networks, logistics algorithms, capital ship protocols. By day he was a quiet laborer; by night, a silent student of power, watching how the flow of credits and contracts shaped destinies far more decisively than any hydrospanner.
[[File:Holochess_screenshot.png|left|200px]]

His true name, Uglogavste Lukiil, was a tangle to most tongues. Smirking at the galaxy’s discomfort, he offered a simpler handle: "You may call me Gav Luck." It was meant as a quick, memorable alias, something that sounded like "Give Luck" and carried a hint of charm and fortune. But in the cantinas of Bespin, the name began to evolve. Gav spent long evenings hunched over holochess boards and pazaak tables, usually walking away with his credits intact or only slightly lighter. Then, one night, he hit a small jackpot on the slots, the kind of rare win that cantina patrons remembered for years. From then on, the regulars started calling him "Gav Lucky" as a teasing nod to that single windfall and a name that, to his mild annoyance, stuck harder than the original. Yet beneath that easy nickname and easy grin lay a mind haunted by the fate of powerless workers, scarred by watching entire communities collapse under the weight of financial neglect. For Gav Lucky, money was not mere currency; it was armor, weapon, and salvation.

==Career Timeline==

===An OOC Introduction===

<blockquote>
Storytelling has always been the lens through which I experience Star Wars roleplay, and Star Wars Combine is no different. For me, the game isn’t just a set of mechanics, but rather a living galaxy, and every choice deserves to be remembered. My habit of chronicling in detail began during my work on [[Library Art Museum#The Wall|The Wall]], when I saw so many sparsely populated, outdated, or even empty service pages, alongside long-overdue Tour of Duty badge and member reward requests on the forums. All of these things require keeping good records which, at present, isn’t centrally tracked. I wanted to make it easier for future admins, but also to ensure that no moment of my own journey in the [[Trade Federation]] or SWC was lost to time. In both the game and real life, I think journaling is a vital tool for those suffering from the human condition, especially for someone like me who so easily forgets people, places, and events as the years pass. As [[Hartroff Parmenion]] once said to me after reading my Library works: ''Verba volant, scripta manent''—'''spoken words fly away, written words remain'''. Some say I have the “Gift of Gav,” a tendency to turn even the smallest update into a saga. I’ll take that as a compliment. After all, the fun of SWC is not only in what we do, but in how we tell the tale. — The Player
</blockquote>

===Cadet===

====Joining Up====

His path to the Federation began in the most unassuming of ways. He was standing in a dingy spaceport terminal, waiting for a delayed transport, when a Holonet recruitment broadcast flickered to life above the crowd. The advertisement was crisp, authoritative, and emblazoned with the seal of the Trade Federation Department of Admissions.

<center>[[File:Doaseal.png|200px]][[File:Samantha_dordoli_ava.png|200px]]</center>

Front and center stood [[Samantha Dordoli]], delivering a precise and confident appeal to those seeking opportunity, structure, and purpose. In her words, Gav heard not just an invitation, but a promise: that order and ambition could be harnessed to lift those who were willing to work for it. By the time his transport arrived, he had already filled out the enlistment forms.

Driven by a relentless need to rewrite his people’s story and that of his own, he set his sights on the Trade Federation: a colossus of order, profit, and prestige. With each promotion and each credit earned, Gav Lucky would step further away from the darkness of Gentes and deeper into the halls of influence, where he would secure not just personal wealth but a fortress of resources strong enough to protect any who still bear the scars of servitude.

In every deal, every convoy manifest, every whispered negotiation, echoed his core philosophy: power is the ultimate currency, and luck favors those who build it themselves.

====The Academy====

[[File:Forsetticapital.png|300px|thumb|upright=1.65|Aeriel view of the Viceroyal Palace, and the surrounding areas of the city of Forsetti.]]

Cadet life was a shock both in its rigor and in its order. Assigned to a small cohort of recruits from across the galaxy, Gav quickly learned that the Academy was more than drills and data entry. It was a crucible for loyalty, skill, and adaptability. His knack for pattern recognition and logistical problem-solving made him an asset in training simulations, where he could predict enemy maneuvers and optimize fleet positioning with uncanny accuracy.
He passed the [[Basic Training Standard Exam]] and on Y26 D205, Gav stood before the Federation banner, right hand raised, and swore the [[Department_of_Admissions#Oath_to_the_Trade_Federation|Trade Federation Oath]]. For the first time, the weight of service felt heavier than the weight of survival.

===Cadet First Class - The Savage Squirrels===

====First Asteroid Field Prospecting Mission====

Assigned to the [[Department of Operations]] under the [[Ministry of the Interior]], Gav found himself in the ranks of the Savage Squirrels Flight Team, a unit as eccentric as it was effective. Under [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]] and Operations Director [[Dak Ironfist]], the team’s operations ranged from precision transport runs to asteroid field prospecting. Day-to-day orders came from [[Chain of Command|Lt. Commander]] [[Heuk Gisa]], whose terse directives left no room for hesitation.

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="left" width="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:AF_tool_screenshot.png|200px]]
|}

In those days, Gav started to make a name for himself with his sustained, methodical work. His first deployment was to an asteroid field outside of [[Ktil]] where he was tasked with reprospecting it. Using a standard issue GPS, he was able to pull Federation mining data and see that 13 previous uncovered deposits were still active with varying stability. The scanner also detected 11 undiscovered deposits. It was rough in the beginning as he tried to get his bearings. From speaking to instructors at the Academy, asteroid field prospecting was more of an art than a science. After the first couple days, he thought that there had to be a better way. During sleeping hours, he would stay up in the bunk of his [[Y-8]] mining vessel and run thought experiments on his datapad. He programmed a game that would generate random asteroid fields and place random deposits. He would play this game all night trying different strategies and also updating an AI assistant to predict the next best possible asteroid to scan. After a couple nights, he started to see patterns and develop what he thought was a winning strategy. On the third day, he had played the game hundreds of times and essentially developed many years of prospecting experience in simulation. He ended up finishing the mission in nine days.

====First Holotech Assignment====

That performance did not go unnoticed. [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]], impressed by both the ingenuity and the discipline behind the operation, personally put in a recommendation to Kaire Nat-Sa, the [[Defense Minister]] and Main Administrator of the [[Department of Holotech]]. Soon after, Gav received a formal communication from Holotech headquarters.

Known as the Federation’s hidden engine for innovation, Holotech specialized in turning individual talent into institutional capability. Gav began working under Kaire’s direction outside of [[Department of Operations|Operations]] work on the Trade Federation Management System. Because of his interest in asteroid field prospecting tactics at the time, his first development task he was assigned was to integrate a prototype asteroid field deposit tracking system into the main Management System, which at the time was operating separately. It would be the first Holotech assignment of many.

====First Library Card====

[[File:TF Library Gav Lucky.png|250px|thumb|Gav standing in the Library in Forsetti admiring a statue of [[Kurner Dahtar]]]]

Working in Holotech meant many trips to the Federation Library, looking up protocols and technical blueprints. Because he spent so much time there, on Y26 D233 he volunteered as an archivist. Not only did he fall in love with library science and circulation, but it allowed him access to many of the more restricted sections of the archives. Not long after, [[State Minister]] [[Thion Roseland]], who was also essentially acting as interim Chief Archivist, stepped down from his post and relinquished all State and Library duties.

The Library grew even quieter in Thion Roseland’s absence. One evening, Gav found himself alone among the shelves, methodically replacing holobooks, the soft hum of the preservation systems his only company. In that stillness, the Library began to feel less like a workplace and more like a sanctuary. Feeling a flicker of mischief with no one watching, he wandered into the Chief Archivist’s chambers. Minister Roseland had spent little time there, preferring his office at the [[Ministry of State]], and the room bore the signs, with dust gathering on the desk, stale air, and shelves untouched for weeks.

Drawers yielded little of interest until he found it: an unmarked access key. Curiosity piqued, Gav experimented, discovering that the key granted him the ability to withdraw blank holobooks from restricted storage and, more importantly, to author new entries within the Library’s secure archive. It was an archivist’s dream and an invitation to shape history.

He knew exactly where to begin. Drawing on months of late-night reading and note-taking, he began work on a serialized chronicle he had long imagined: This Month in Trade Federation History. With unrestricted access to the Federation’s historical records, he could weave together recovered archives, oral histories, and rediscovered GNS clippings into a living narrative of the Federation’s evolution. On Y26 D233, he released the first issue, [[This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 26 • Month 8]], to wide acclaim among those who cared for the Federation’s legacy.

The project lit a fire. Gav started expanding other holobooks, merging details from cross-referenced sources and building comprehensive indexes. His work quickly caught the attention of senior officials, and before long, he was entrusted with the responsibilities of Interim Chief Archivist. In this capacity, he authored the [[Library Charter]], codifying the institution’s purpose and scope; documented the Modus Operandi for the Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative; and designed the Federation’s official [[Chain of Command]] diagram.

He also transformed an unused section of the Library into a permanent Art Museum exhibit, curating a collection of recovered Federation visual history. This moved Captain Hartroff Parmenion and so he dug up his old findings from his Archeological Investigations in Federation History project, featuring former logos of past Operations [[Flight Team|Flight Teams]]. To Gav, this was preservation as strategy. Heritage and identity, he knew, were themselves forms of power, and a well-tended history could be as potent a weapon as any fleet.

====First Slabbing Mission - Kuna`s Tail VII====

=====A Blue Milk Run=====

It was Year 26 Day 248. Gav was looking through his standard issue flight team datapad searching for his next mission when he saw [[Kuna`s Tail Economic Development Project Year 26|an announcement about an economic development happening on Kuna`s Tail VII]]. For flight team members like himself, this meant a plethora of "slabbing" missions had been posted. What would happen is a TF service member would be assigned as the leader of a "slabbing squad"--a ragtag group of mercenary riflemen--and their mandate was to "clear" each planned city site of all hostile life forms. This ranged from groups of bandits to flocks of creatures. Anything that would interfere with construction that was not authorized by the Federation was to be removed by force. It was essentially a glorified pest control operation. There were rumors that many bandit groups of Diathim, Fosh, and Toydarian descent had been spotted, along with colossal sized [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=408 streaked velkers] and [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=451 purrgils]. Needless to say, it was not a mission for the faint of heart, but Gav was up to the task in hopes of rounding out his work experience. Corresponding with [[Alories Tanus]], a fellow service member he had met in his travels, about the potential dangers, Tanus replied to his holomessage:

<blockquote>
It's pretty easy! You won't die haha. Just watch your medical supplies, inspect your riflemen make sure they are equipped with their standard issue [[A280]], and keep at a distance of 7-8 clicks. Why don't you work on latitude 16? Start at longitude 19 and meet Captain Parmenion in the middle. I've mostly cleared that site already so it'll be a good way to ease into it.
</blockquote>

Mostly cleared... see a familiar face... Alories made it sound like a blue milk run. So he signed up for the mission and set his [https://guide.swcombine.com/wiki/NavComp NavComp] to Kuna`s Tail VII. It took him five days in hyperspace to get there, which he spent leisurely tinkering on holotech projects and scribbling in his holobooks.

=====A Rag-Tag Bunch=====

On Day 255, he exited hyperspace and arrived in orbit of Kuna`s Tail VII. He was to report to the Lucrehulk Battleship Basilisk to rendezvous with his slabbing squad. But the first thing he had to do was find a jetpack. He was told by Lt. Commander Gisa that there might be extras at the entrance of the ship, otherwise he would have to go to the outfitter on Dor. Well, there was not, but he decided to walk around the ship until finally he found an armoury that had an extra. ''That's why they call me Lucky,'' he chuckled to himself. The whole side mission made him quite late to the briefing...

He approached the lineup and introduced himself.

<blockquote>
Greetings! Apologies for the tardiness... My name is Cadet First Class Lucky. I will be leading the slabbing mission for the coming days...
</blockquote>

As he briefed the squad, he noticed mixed reactions. Amseth Onasi, a Hapan in some sort of uniform, listened respectfully. A pair of Gamorreans grumbled to each other, judging their leader and compatriots of varying statures, all dwarfed in comparison to their own.

<blockquote>
''At least he is Porcine, but barely clears 100cm...'' said the one Gamorrean.

''I heard it's his first slab mission, take orders with grain of spice... and why are Ewok and Aleena here? They can barely lift their rifle...'' said the other.
</blockquote>

The Ewok simply stood and tilted his head occasionally as Gav spoke, while the Aleena looked like someone who was trying to convince themselves, and others, that they were ready for something they were not.

Gav walked down the line and inspected each member of the squad, making sure each had a rifle and a jetpack. Unfortunately, one of the members did not have a jetpack. He had no confidence that there were any extra jetpacks on the ship, so he said they would have to sit out and maybe if there's a supply run at some point they could join in.

<blockquote>
''11 instead of 12, no biggie,'' he thought. ''Plenty of medical supplies, one can stay inside the ship in case we need to make a run for it. It'll be fine...''
</blockquote>

He had a slight feeling in his gut that things were not going as well as he had hope, maybe an even slighter feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn't put a finger on it. ''Too late now,'' he said under his breath. ''Too late now. We have to get moving.''

=====The First Encounter=====

[[File:Gav_Lucky_outfitted.jpg|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky, armed and ready for action]]

The crew loaded onto Gav's [[ATR-6]] gunboat and began their descent to 19-16. From the atmosphere the site looked acquiescent; not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Soon they arrived on the "surface", which, being that Kuna`s Tail VII was a gas planet, simply meant an altitude that was ideal for building a floating city; close enough to the gas to mine it without suffocating. Gav had spoken to some old Academy friends on best strategies. ''Hug the perimeter so you don't get ambushed- Move a couple clicks and then go outside and scan with your macrobinoculars- I bounce between the four corners- you should only need to go between two positions...'' Needless to say, he would have to see what worked best for him. Hopefully his squad wouldn't notice that he had no idea what he was doing...

He decided to try the outskirts idea. He started in a corner of the site and started going around the outside. He would move a couple clicks, very cautiously, and get out to check with his macrobinoculars. After a while, his squad started getting restless, which he took as a sign that it was normal to move a bit quicker. So he moved about 6 or 7 clicks and got out of the ATR.

There it was. Hovering with his jetpack, he saw it with his very own eyes: a bloodied, half shot-to-death streaked velker. It was massive, but injured badly, presumably the blue milk run Alories left him. ''Thank You Alories!'' He thought confidently. He popped his head back inside the ATR and said, ''Alright crew, pile out!''

They began to open fire on the poor velker, its screeches terrifying yet muffled by several clicks of gas, but he knew it was for the greater good. He looked upon his crew and felt a sense of pride seeing them in formation hovering in the air, rifles pointed in the same direction, except... ''Wait a minute,'' he thought to himself as he noticed a gap in the line of rifles. There hovered the Aleena, Alsten Endel, without a rifle! Just kind of flailing his arms around to make it look like he was doing something, fooling around with his equipment, as if he wouldn't be noticed!

[[File:Alsten_flailing.png|500px]]

<blockquote>
Gav: ALSTEN, WHAT IN THE VICEROY'S NAME ARE YOU DOING!? WHERE IS YOUR STANDARD ISSUE!?

Alsten: SIR! I WAS WORRIED ABOUT MY JETPACK--BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!--CORRECTLY AND--SCREEEEEECH!--SURE IT--

Gav: ENOUGH! I CAN'T HEAR A KRIFFING THING YOU'RE SAYING! JUST STAND BACK AND--

Alsten: WHAT SIR? WHAT DID YOU SAY?

''Gav flew over to him and pulled him behind the firing line before grabbing him by the pack straps and yanking him up close face to face.

Gav: STAY! PUT!
</blockquote>

Eventually the screeching died down and the velker slowly fell out of the air into the gassy abyss. Turns out Alsten had lost his gun on the Basilisk, or someone took it thinking it was their issue, who knows. Thankfully, Gav had an extra emergency A280 in the cockpit.

<blockquote>
Gav: This is my only extra A280. Use the strap, do NOT drop it or I will drop YOU off on this surface without propulsion! You got that?

Alsten: ''*gulp*'' Yes sir!
</blockquote>

=====Return Fire=====

Once the city construction was under way, Gav and crew were on to the next spot. They proceeded as before, moving a couple clicks and going out to check. Eventually they came upon not one, but two velkers. Even from a distance they looked humongous. But they were just as skittish as the last one despite being in perfect condition. Without knowing where the attack was coming from, all they could do is fly around, to no avail. Eventually, both velkers succumbed to the rifles and the gas beneath them.

''Another slab cleared,'' said Gav to himself. As they all started heading back to the ATR-6, they heard someone exclaim...

<blockquote>
Alsten: SOMETHIN' BIT ME!
</blockquote>

They all turned around to see Alsten holding his rear and groaning loudly. All of a sudden, the ATR-6 started getting pelted with projectiles. "AAaaAAh!!!" screamed Amseth, gripping his left shoulder. "TAKE COVER!" shouted Gav. They all retreated to the opposite side of the ship that was being peppered, mounted their rifles onto the roof of the ATR, and began to return fire. Gav went around and tended to Alsten and Amseth's wounds. "Hang in there!" he told them. Amseth was taking it well, as if he had seen action before. Alsten, on the other hand, was not so composed.

<blockquote>
Alsten: MY ARSE IS ON FIRE!!

Gav: Hang in there Alsten! It looks like it went straight through, it's just a flesh wound!

Alsten: IT STINGS! I'M GONNA PASS OUT!
</blockquote>

Gav grabbed Alsten and guided him back into the ship before returning to the fight. It was a long battle, but eventually Gav confirmed the last bandit had fallen using his macrobinoculars.

When they got back inside the ship, Alsten was crying.

<blockquote>
Alsten: Sir... you saved my life... ''*sniffles*'' how can I ever repay you...

Gav: Alsten, I didn't save-- ''Gav paused...'' you can pay me back by getting back out there and helping us finish this mission.

Alsten: Yes sir! I just need a minute for the meds to kick in...
</blockquote>

=====There She Glows!=====

Kuna's Tail VII had a way of making even the most hardened sentients feel small. Despite this, the crew was beginning to move like a proper unit and the work they were doing began to feel routine. The gunboat drifted along the perimeter lights-out, quiet under a lid of pale cloud, the gas below moving like a slow ocean with no waves. Gav felt that chill go up his spine again. What was a whisper before was now a pounding in his chest, but there was no stopping the gunboat. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

They touched down at the next marker and fanned out. The whole crew now had their macrobinoculars up, but no one detected any movement. It was so eerie that even the Gamorreans stopped grumbling. Gav raised a gloved hand and the unit slid forward in twos, jetpacks feathering over the gas. The site's construction pylons stood like toothpicks stabbed into mist. They were a reminder that there ''was'' something here, otherwise the city construction would be underway; it was a reminder that battle was inevitable.

The first bandit group caught a bug and broke the quiet from the west scaffolds. HB-5s and BT 500s hammered the ATR's plating and sent sparks across the viewports. Amseth barely flinched, took a round across the pauldron, planted his A280 on the gunwale, and answered with neat, surgical bursts. The Gamorreans roared like someone had insulted their ancestry and hosed the scaffolds. Gav cut the air with his hand, called the ranges, and walked the fire in. Between the experience of the squad members and the power and range of their A280s, once they realized they didn't stand a chance, the west side folded fast.

Then the second group lit up from the south cranes. This position was a bit smarter due to the elevation. Shots licked the top of a Gamorrean's pack and sent him pinwheeling. Alsten yelped and threw himself under the ATR's wing, then popped back up, white-knuckled but determined, and for once remembered to check his safety before pulling the trigger. Eventually, one last quiet thud echoed and the return fire stopped.

"Hold your fire!" said Gav, holding up a closed fist.

Gav took a slow lap with the macros. The slab returned to that library hush he was starting to think was worse than noise. He opened his mouth to call it clear... when the shadows moved.

Shapes the size of frigates turned inside the fog, low and patient, as if the whole world were a lagoon and they had just surfaced to breathe. They came on without hurry, the way big things move when they do not need to prove how big they are.

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0;margin: 10px" align="left"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000"| [[File:Purgills.png|200px]]
|}

Purrgils--you hear about them, you see holos. None of that prepares you for a living wall of muscle and light deciding your city site is now a mating ground, or your hyperlane is now a migratory path. Even at a distance their presence pressed at the chest. The nearest drifted across a bank of cloud and the entire squad went still, rifles aimed at the beasts but not quite aware that they might not fire even if Gav gave the word. But Gav knew the damage these creatures could cause and, unfortunately, it was their job to make sure the citizens of the Federation who started a life here did not have to worry about it. It was his job to make the tough calls, and it was the crew's job to follow orders. His next order was spoken in a monotone voice, to let the crew know that he knew the gravity of his call, and that it was okay that it did not feel good, but it was not him, but the Viceroy which was the decider, he a marshall of that will, and the crew an extension of him.

''Fire.''

The squad answered as one. A ragged volley of red lanced through the haze, striking along the purrgils’ flanks. The giants shuddered, not with fear but irritation, rolling in slow arcs as if to show just how little their rifles meant. Then the light began.

It started deep under the skin, a pulse of violet swelling into indigo, crawling the length of their bodies like lightning trapped under ice. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. Gav knew what was coming next. He had read reports, heard the stories, and in that moment, he understood why spacers dreaded this sight more than the creatures themselves.

The nearest purrgil blurred at the edges, its bulk dimming until it simply was not there anymore. The second followed, vanishing into the mist.

“High sky, reacquire!” Gav called.

Minutes later, the shapes resolved again, farther out. Another volley. Another bloom of violet. Another blink into nothing. The third time it happened, the glow rolling up the spine of the larger beast, Alsten’s voice cut through the comms:

“There she glows!”

Half the squad groaned, the other half laughed, and Gav could only shake his head. The name stuck instantly, repeated every time the halo began to build. The fight turned into a deadly game of dejarik... move, fire, vanish, repeat... each exchange drawing more from the crew’s dwindling reserves of patience and bacta.

They tried to box them in toward the pylons, tried to flank and drive them east, tried holding fire until they crossed the open lanes. None of it worked for long. Every time the light appeared beneath that thick hide, they were gone before the next breath.

On the sixth pass, the pair did not return. Whether they had decided to leave or had simply moved beyond the slab’s perimeter, Gav could not say. The mist closed behind them, leaving only silence and the faint shimmer of heat along the barrel of his rifle.

He scanned one last time with the macros, seeing nothing but the skeletal frame of the city-to-be. Then he slung the rifle and keyed the comm.

“Form up. We’re done here.”

As the ATR-6 lifted away, the crew settled into the familiar quiet that came after hard work without celebration. Their medkits were light, their packs lighter. Gav’s ribs ached where the bacta patch clung, and he could feel the sting of every bruise through his armor.

Time for that supply run, rearm, and rethink the plan. Maybe he could research what technology was available there come up with something before they got back. But he had to think fast...

=====Resupply, Regroup, Rethink=====

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="left" width="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Hyperspace.gif|275px]]
|}

Gav set course for Dor, more specifically, the Endor Palace Member Outfitters, where even the most battered field team could walk away looking parade-ready.

The resupply run was deliberate. Fresh A280s with factory calibrations. Replacement armor plates. Macrobinoculars that didn’t lag. Jetpacks with more thrust than wheeze. And pairs of multisensor packs to try something Gav had read on his datapad while studying equipment holorecords... When they lifted again to return to the next slab, the crew looked sharper, heavier, and, Gav hoped, ready for a different style of fight.

This time, he planned to put eyes where the enemy didn’t expect them.

The east side got Alsten. At 17,11, the ridge ran close to where velkers had been spotted earlier, and the little Aleena’s discomfort was obvious.

:Alsten: Sir, this is awfully close to them.

Gav shoved a multisensor pack into his chest.

:Gav: That’s the point. You’ll be fine. Keep low, stay sharp, and if anything moves that shouldn’t, call it in.

Leaving him there felt wrong, but having a live scout in place could save the squad from being ambushed and get them all home sooner. From there, Gav moved the ATR-6 along the western perimeter, working toward 4,11. When the moment felt right, he brought the ship down and dropped another scout to cover the gap, an Ewok named Wolam Highwind, who took the multisensor pack and jumped out of the gunboat without so much as a word.

For a while, it worked. The east and west placements gave them early warnings and cut down on ambushes. But the gaps still showed. Gav had fallen into the same trap he had once mocked in others; he assumed the hostiles would stay to the middle because that’s where most of the fighting happened. That’s how you learned the hard way about the corners: you didn’t need to check them... until you did. And when the enemy slipped into that blind space, the range rings meant nothing. They could vanish completely, only to reappear where your lines were weakest.

The first warning came from the west. The Ewok posted there, who was armed and out in the open, suddenly lit up on sensors. Bandits had come out of nowhere, closing to within a click before anyone could react. The Ewok returned fire immediately, but the flash of his blaster only drew more rounds his way.

Gav didn’t think. He dove in with the squad, A280 singing, cutting down the closest threats before they could finish the job. By the time he reached the Ewok, the little scout was down, armor dented, weapon still gripped in one limp hand. The medics worked fast, but it was too late. The lesson to Gav was clear.

Every placement, every piece of kit, every decision had weight. Get it wrong, and you didn’t just lose your position; you risked sending someone home in a body bag.

Gav stood over the body bag as the medics loaded him aboard. As he entered the gunboat behind them, the crew stared at Wolam's body. They knew it was a risk they all understood when they signed up, some thought they would have made a different call or tried something different, some thought nothing at all. Whether they were mad, scared, or simply didn't want to feel the guilt that Gav was feeling, they couldn't look him in the eye. He knew he had to say something.

:Gav: I know what you're all thinking. I made a bad call, and got Wolam killed. And you'd be right. This one's on me. And I don't know how I'm ever going to sleep again, or how I'm going to knock on his family's hut and give them the news. But if he hadn't have alerted us to the ambush, it may be more than just him laying there. But it's on me... it's on me... and I have to live with that... be thankful you don't...

His eyes started to water, but he held it back and got into the cockpit, set the autopilot to the next slab, and started scribbling in his holobook again. Going over all his notes, he had an epiphany, something became very clear... it was even riskier than the last idea... but if it worked, they would never lose the upper hand again. He heard the voice of Minister Oodoov in his ear, who had visited the Academy once to give a lecture on the scientific work that the Interior is responsible for...

''...This is the dark art of experimenting; the field guides, the holorecords, the technical specifications... are sometimes a lie.''

=====Castling Ewoks Formation=====

The next slab was to be run with the so-called "Castling Ewoks Formation," a peculiar formation Gav had concocted during his journaling session. The tactic was simple on paper: place two ''unarmed'' Ewoks, each fitted with multisensors, at fixed positions 1,21 and 20,21 on the slab grid. From these back-corner perches, their overlapping sensor fields made it nearly impossible for hostiles to slip away unseen. Why it worked so well was anyone's guess. Some swore it was the Ewoks' size and unarmed status that kept them invisible to the enemy’s targeting logic, their naturally good perception allowing them to setup sensors in just the right position; others claimed the bandits simply refused to acknowledge being threatened by something knee-high, unarmed, and furry.

The formation worked surprisingly well and the unit made quick work of the found pests, the Ewoks sensors preventing the enemy from evading their forces. It didn't make up for Wolam's death, which Gav would have to explain for when he got back, but he felt they were safer and more effective now than ever before.

Just as planned, Gav and crew linked up with Captain Parmenion on the way to the next site. He and the Joint Defense Fleet had been orchestrating the broader clearing effort. From here on, they would be working in conjunction with something they called the Gambit Maneuver, a "precision assignment protocol" designed to keep pressure on the remaining gaps in the planet’s defensive perimeter. Gav's role was to start in the middle of the planet at longitude 14, latitude 10, then head westward to support Director Minwolf and Crewman Goriski where the line stretched thin.

The first contact came quickly: a bandit group holding the approaches with a velker flock drifting just behind them. The initial exchange went badly. Their fire was heavy, the supply of bacta patches less effective than they had hoped. Shots burned through Gav's pauldron and left a dull ache in his side. He toggled comms to Minwolf for advice.

:Gav: Director Minwolf, please advise, this isn't holding. The bacta is not working fast enough.

:Minwolf: You need refills, not patches. And don’t use Ryfills unless you want to spend the next day poisoned.

He logged the warning. Survive the slab first, worry about the outfitter later.

The bandits continued to ignore the Ewoks, even as the little scouts relayed exact firing coordinates to the squad. Whether they could not detect them on sensors or simply could not bring themselves to target them, Gav didn't know. But their presence was decisive. With their eyes guiding the team, he kept the squad at the optimum range of nine clicks, far enough to blunt the worst of the incoming fire, close enough to land clean shots and conserve medical supplies. Within two controlled exchanges, the bandits were broken.

With that threat dealt with, their focus shifted to the velkers. According to his field notes, he had observed that they favored the far corners once disturbed, and the northeast quadrant was unnaturally quiet. If his calculations were right, moving to 12,7 would put then at exactly nine clicks from them. As he eased the ''ATR-6'' into position, he pulled one of his last bacta patches and pressed it over the burn along my ribs. The cool sting was a small comfort.

Somewhere ahead, hidden in the shifting gas, the next fight was waiting.

===Flight Sergeant - The Savage Squirrels===

====Borrowed by the DoR====

Mammoth mission

====Operation '''REDACTED'''====

==Service Record==

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Directorate
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
! style="text-align:center;" | Work Experience
|-
| Y27 D15 - Present
| [[File:O-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Ensign</center>
| 
|-
| Y26 D358 - Present
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Archivist</center>
| 
* Published issues for the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series

|-
| Y26 D272 - Y27 D15
| [[File:E-4.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Flight Sergeant</center>
| 
* Transported x4 Mammoth loads of Meleenium from an asteroid field depot to a main depot logging over 110 flight hours in 5 days (Year 26 Day 269-274). Mission required to execution of microjumping in order to avoid asteriod field damage to the rig exiting hyper on the wrong side of the field due to Endor's Gate X-1 as opposed to the desired Y+1 location of the depot.
* For Operation Durelium Storm, constructed x3 Durelium Mine Cities and prospected 22 quadrants on a Vex II in 9 days, discovering x9 Tibannagas deposits.
* Conducted research on asteroid field prospecting for the [[Directorate of Resources|DoR]] and compiled recommendations to improve the [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]] Asteroid Prospecting Tool
* Conducted research on terrestrial prospecting for the [[Ministry of the Interior|MoI]] and compiled recommendations for general policy and strategies for finding specific raw materials
* Planetary prospected Dorriella II and III
* Slabbed and constructed x11 Mine Cities in 14 days

|-
| Y26 D207 - Present
|
| <center>[[File: Tf-holotech-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Developer</center>
| 
* Integrate existing Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool into [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]], incorporating database driven persistence and existing permissions system
* Spearheaded the initial Member Module and Automated Payroll features for [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]]
* Enhanced the Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool with pre-prospecting features and auto-assist technology

|-
| Y26 D233 - Y26 D358
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Chief Archivist</center>
| 
* Began publishing the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series
* Envisioned and authored the ''[[Library Charter]]''
* Spearheaded the ''[[Chain of Command]]'' Project
* Launched the [[Library_Charter#Continuity_Restoration_and_Standardization_Initiative|Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative]]
* Launched the [[Library Art Museum]]

|-
| Y26 D205 - Y26 D272
| [[File:E-2.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Cadet First Class</center>
| 
* Prospect asteroid field with 13 revealed/11 unrevealed in 9 days averaging 5-6 scans a day for a total of 48 scans
* Transported x3 MC-30b to new system w/ G-1A taxi
* Cleared 15 slabs on Kuna`s Tail VII in 13 days

|-
| Y26 D205
| [[File:E-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Doaseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training]] Cadet</center>
| 
* Passed the ''[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training Standard Exam]]''
* Took the ''[[Department of Admissions|Trade Federation Oath]]''

|}

==Awards and Commendations==
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
! style="text-align:center;" | Reason
|-
| [[Image:Op kunastail.png]]
| Kuna`s Tail Mission Ribbon
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
|
|-
| [[Image:DSM-L1.jpg]]
| [[Distinguished Service Award|Distinguished Service Award - Level 1]]
| [[Minwolf Kandar]]
| Y27 D15
| We also have another member who wears multiple hats in the Ministry of State. Until my last announcement, Gav Lucky has served as the Chief Archivist. He was responsible for getting the organizational ball rolling and moving forward with uncovering the history that all of us share as citizens of the Trade Federation. What many of you do not know is that he has worked tirelessly over the past few months in the background. He has worked as an assistant to Kaire Nat-Sa in helping to develop experimental tools and code that all of us will benefit from when we use TFMS. For his dedication to his work and the people of the Trade Federation, I present to him the First Level of the Distinguished Service Award.
|-
| [[Image:PC.png]]
| [[Prospectors Cross]]
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
| For his ongoing work in demystifying Asteroid fields and Asteroid Field Prospecting in particular.
|-
| [[Image:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty Medal - Viceroy Vas Felix]]
| Automatic
| Y26 D205
|
|}
 

[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]

Trade Federation Market

2025-12-20T10:59:39Z

Gav Lucky:

Created around Year 14, by [[Ted Winner]] and [[Tanez Kalrade]], the [https://market.swc-tf.com/ Trade Federation Market] is a galaxy-spanning trading platform on which sole traders, companies, governments, or small groups can buy, list, and bid on wares of any kind. It is one of two such major networks in the galaxy and features products from some of the galaxy’s most famous corporations and traders.

Whilst the Trade Federation and its nationalized corporations list their own products, those groups which are registered licensees of the Trade Federation also feature some of the most sought after goods listed on the market.

The market that we know today was released in Year 23 Day 154. Announced by [[Ted Winner]], a team consisting of [[Dreks Selmur]], [[Kaire Nat-Sa]] and Ted Winner with art from [[Kaire Nat-Sa]], [[Jacob Jansen]] and [[Grimaldus Helbrecht]] and server administration work by [[Olwin Froon]]. [https://market.swc-tf.com/news.php?mode=dispArticle&article=82 V4 Release news article].

=Terms and Conditions=

This document is considered accepted by all users, factions, and non-faction groups (NFGs) that have an account and use said account for the purpose of selling, purchasing, trading, or otherwise using any aspect of the Trade Federation Market (TFM) including any subscription tools, price index, or any other portion of the website.

''Last Updated By Tanez Kalrade On Y19 D80'' 
''Previously Updated By Tanez Kalrade On Y17 D283'' 
''Previously Updated By Tanez Kalrade On Y17 D216''

====Communication====

Communication is based on the request of the shop, seller, or otherwise specified in each listing. The user is responsible for looking for the proper contact method and address. DMs sent to Department of Trade personnel regarding listings of other people will not be responded to due to lack of time. Order Messages are recommended as the preferred method when an order has been placed, as the system will notify all parties clearly when one is submitted.

All users registered on the TFM website accept that any form of discrimination is forbidden. Furthermore, the TFM actuates a PG-13 communications policy, and all users are expected to exercise appropriate discretion thereof. Should breaches of those stipulations occur, the Department reserves the right to discipline the offending accounts. Users should report any such situations to the Director of Trade directly or through the Administrative request system, and the Department will make a judgement as to the extent(if any), of the breach.

====Updates====

These Terms and Conditions are subject to change whenever necessary. Updates will be announced via the news announcement or article portions of the site. Users are responsible for looking for the changes or inquiring if they are affected.

====Access====

The Trade Federation Market (TFM) is a trading platform run by the Trade Federation`s Department of Trade (DoT). TFM is open to all not presently banned in the Star Wars Combine (SWC). It is separate from the DoT, which will use the available features to prevent users on the Trade Federation Blacklist purchasing from TF shops only.

All sales made via the TFM are considered as contracts subject to the TF Code of Commerce. Users which have committed (or attempted) a crime against another user will therefore be dealt with according to the provisions of that code.

====Exploits and Modifications to Code====

Users who exploit (or attempt to exploit) any flaws with the TFM will be severely punished. Exploiting a flaw includes, but is not limited to, form modification, injection, and any other non-standard acts of use on the TFM (via exploits, bugs, or links etc.). Users who initially discover a flaw are expected to disclose them in the proper location with details on how they came to discover the flaw. Users who can reasonably be expected to have seen notice of a flaw who utilize such a flaw themselves outside the scope of regular use will be subject to the punishments listed below. In short, we expect users to follow SWC`s Golden Rule while using the TFM.

Such incidents will be investigated by the TFM team, and users found guilty will face punishments up to (and including) the removal of citizenship, suspension of accounts, or a total ban from the TFM.

Customer and Seller Responsibilities

It is both the customer`s responsibility that they abide by both these Terms and Conditions as well as the Terms of the seller (individual, faction, NFG, or shop). It is the seller`s responsibility to remain active, be clear with customers, and make sure their terms and conditions do not contradict these Terms and Conditions.

====Citizen Responsibilities====

Citizens of the Trade Federation are given special discounts on TF products for their personal use. Using these discounts to buy for reselling, either personal, factions, NFGs, or others is strictly prohibited. Any accounts of this should be reported and shall be investigated and may result in banishment or removal of citizenship permanently.

====Review Appeals====

Reviews may be appealed in certain circumstances only. Those made in error by the reviewer can be reported via the Admin Request System (ARS), and shall be modified accordingly. Requests to modify erroneous reviews of orders older than 30 days can be made, but may or may not be modified. Reviews containing inappropriate material will have the inappropriate material redacted with a notice appended that TFM staff have redacted material deemed to be inappropriate, or which arise from orders in which a crime has taken place can be reported via the ARS. Reviews related to crimes that have occurred will simply be removed from the record.

Reviews will not be modified on any other grounds.

====Overrides====

Department of Trade Staff will not override any limits, prices, or terms unless they violate these Terms and Conditions. Should any person notice something not acceptable either within reports, terms, listings, or reviews, they should contact Trade Federation staff immediately. A small reward in the form of market points may be applicable.

For the additional Terms and Conditions of Factions, NFGs or shops, please refer to the [https://market.swc-tf.com/terms_and_conditions.php holosite] directly.

Gav Lucky

2025-12-11T04:59:53Z

Gav Lucky: /* Awards and Commendations */

{| class="infobox bordered" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="right" dth="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Gav_Lucky_ava.jpg|150px]]
|-
| style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Biographical Information'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Full Name:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Uglogavste Lukiil
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Aliases:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| ''Gav Lucky'' ''Dogbone'' ''The Space Pig''
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Homeworld:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Gentes
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Born:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Year -4 Day 143
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Physical Description'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Race:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Ugnaught
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Gender:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Male
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Height:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| 142 cm
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Colouring:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Porcelain
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Hair Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Brunette
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Eye Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Brown
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Trade Federation Service'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Status:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Active Duty
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Ministry:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| [[File:Moiseal.png|30px]] [[Ministry of the Interior|Interior]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Department:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| [[File:Operations-seal.png|30px]] [[Department of Operations|Operations]] - [[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Position:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"|
[[File:O-1.png|130px]] [[Chain of Command|Ensign]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Part-Time:
|style="padding-left:5px;"|
[[File:Archives-seal.png|30px]] [[Library_team|Library]] - [[Library_team|Archivist]] 
[[File:Tf-holotech-seal.png|30px]] [[Department_of_Holotech|Holotech]] - [[Department_of_Holotech|Developer]] 

|}

 

==Background==

[[File:Colossal-class_Heavy_Carrier_Ugnorgrad_I.png|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky's personal flagship the [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Ships&ID=253 Colossal-class Heavy Carrier] Ugnorgrad I]] 

Born beneath the heavy, sulfurous skies of Gentes, Uglogavste Lukiil came into the galaxy with a mind tuned for machinery and a soul already weighed by the oppression of his people. Like so many Ugnaughts before him, he escaped the drudgery of servitude, drifting to Bespin where the towering halls of Ugnorgrad hummed with welding arcs and the quiet desperation of survival.

On Bespin, he found refuge in the union workshops and data cores, refining not just his mechanical skill but a deep mastery of systems: computer networks, logistics algorithms, capital ship protocols. By day he was a quiet laborer; by night, a silent student of power, watching how the flow of credits and contracts shaped destinies far more decisively than any hydrospanner.
[[File:Holochess_screenshot.png|left|200px]]

His true name, Uglogavste Lukiil, was a tangle to most tongues. Smirking at the galaxy’s discomfort, he offered a simpler handle: "You may call me Gav Luck." It was meant as a quick, memorable alias, something that sounded like "Give Luck" and carried a hint of charm and fortune. But in the cantinas of Bespin, the name began to evolve. Gav spent long evenings hunched over holochess boards and pazaak tables, usually walking away with his credits intact or only slightly lighter. Then, one night, he hit a small jackpot on the slots, the kind of rare win that cantina patrons remembered for years. From then on, the regulars started calling him "Gav Lucky" as a teasing nod to that single windfall and a name that, to his mild annoyance, stuck harder than the original. Yet beneath that easy nickname and easy grin lay a mind haunted by the fate of powerless workers, scarred by watching entire communities collapse under the weight of financial neglect. For Gav Lucky, money was not mere currency; it was armor, weapon, and salvation.

==Career Timeline==

===An OOC Introduction===

<blockquote>
Storytelling has always been the lens through which I experience Star Wars roleplay, and Star Wars Combine is no different. For me, the game isn’t just a set of mechanics, but rather a living galaxy, and every choice deserves to be remembered. My habit of chronicling in detail began during my work on [[Library Art Museum#The Wall|The Wall]], when I saw so many sparsely populated, outdated, or even empty service pages, alongside long-overdue Tour of Duty badge and member reward requests on the forums. All of these things require keeping good records which, at present, isn’t centrally tracked. I wanted to make it easier for future admins, but also to ensure that no moment of my own journey in the [[Trade Federation]] or SWC was lost to time. In both the game and real life, I think journaling is a vital tool for those suffering from the human condition, especially for someone like me who so easily forgets people, places, and events as the years pass. As [[Hartroff Parmenion]] once said to me after reading my Library works: ''Verba volant, scripta manent''—'''spoken words fly away, written words remain'''. Some say I have the “Gift of Gav,” a tendency to turn even the smallest update into a saga. I’ll take that as a compliment. After all, the fun of SWC is not only in what we do, but in how we tell the tale. — The Player
</blockquote>

===Cadet===

====Joining Up====

His path to the Federation began in the most unassuming of ways. He was standing in a dingy spaceport terminal, waiting for a delayed transport, when a Holonet recruitment broadcast flickered to life above the crowd. The advertisement was crisp, authoritative, and emblazoned with the seal of the Trade Federation Department of Admissions.

<center>[[File:Doaseal.png|200px]][[File:Samantha_dordoli_ava.png|200px]]</center>

Front and center stood [[Samantha Dordoli]], delivering a precise and confident appeal to those seeking opportunity, structure, and purpose. In her words, Gav heard not just an invitation, but a promise: that order and ambition could be harnessed to lift those who were willing to work for it. By the time his transport arrived, he had already filled out the enlistment forms.

Driven by a relentless need to rewrite his people’s story and that of his own, he set his sights on the Trade Federation: a colossus of order, profit, and prestige. With each promotion and each credit earned, Gav Lucky would step further away from the darkness of Gentes and deeper into the halls of influence, where he would secure not just personal wealth but a fortress of resources strong enough to protect any who still bear the scars of servitude.

In every deal, every convoy manifest, every whispered negotiation, echoed his core philosophy: power is the ultimate currency, and luck favors those who build it themselves.

====The Academy====

[[File:Forsetticapital.png|300px|thumb|upright=1.65|Aeriel view of the Viceroyal Palace, and the surrounding areas of the city of Forsetti.]]

Cadet life was a shock both in its rigor and in its order. Assigned to a small cohort of recruits from across the galaxy, Gav quickly learned that the Academy was more than drills and data entry. It was a crucible for loyalty, skill, and adaptability. His knack for pattern recognition and logistical problem-solving made him an asset in training simulations, where he could predict enemy maneuvers and optimize fleet positioning with uncanny accuracy.
He passed the [[Basic Training Standard Exam]] and on Y26 D205, Gav stood before the Federation banner, right hand raised, and swore the [[Department_of_Admissions#Oath_to_the_Trade_Federation|Trade Federation Oath]]. For the first time, the weight of service felt heavier than the weight of survival.

===Cadet First Class - The Savage Squirrels===

====First Asteroid Field Prospecting Mission====

Assigned to the [[Department of Operations]] under the [[Ministry of the Interior]], Gav found himself in the ranks of the Savage Squirrels Flight Team, a unit as eccentric as it was effective. Under [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]] and Operations Director [[Dak Ironfist]], the team’s operations ranged from precision transport runs to asteroid field prospecting. Day-to-day orders came from [[Chain of Command|Lt. Commander]] [[Heuk Gisa]], whose terse directives left no room for hesitation.

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| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:AF_tool_screenshot.png|200px]]
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In those days, Gav started to make a name for himself with his sustained, methodical work. His first deployment was to an asteroid field outside of [[Ktil]] where he was tasked with reprospecting it. Using a standard issue GPS, he was able to pull Federation mining data and see that 13 previous uncovered deposits were still active with varying stability. The scanner also detected 11 undiscovered deposits. It was rough in the beginning as he tried to get his bearings. From speaking to instructors at the Academy, asteroid field prospecting was more of an art than a science. After the first couple days, he thought that there had to be a better way. During sleeping hours, he would stay up in the bunk of his [[Y-8]] mining vessel and run thought experiments on his datapad. He programmed a game that would generate random asteroid fields and place random deposits. He would play this game all night trying different strategies and also updating an AI assistant to predict the next best possible asteroid to scan. After a couple nights, he started to see patterns and develop what he thought was a winning strategy. On the third day, he had played the game hundreds of times and essentially developed many years of prospecting experience in simulation. He ended up finishing the mission in nine days.

====First Holotech Assignment====

That performance did not go unnoticed. [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]], impressed by both the ingenuity and the discipline behind the operation, personally put in a recommendation to Kaire Nat-Sa, the [[Defense Minister]] and Main Administrator of the [[Department of Holotech]]. Soon after, Gav received a formal communication from Holotech headquarters.

Known as the Federation’s hidden engine for innovation, Holotech specialized in turning individual talent into institutional capability. Gav began working under Kaire’s direction outside of [[Department of Operations|Operations]] work on the Trade Federation Management System. Because of his interest in asteroid field prospecting tactics at the time, his first development task he was assigned was to integrate a prototype asteroid field deposit tracking system into the main Management System, which at the time was operating separately. It would be the first Holotech assignment of many.

====First Library Card====

[[File:TF Library Gav Lucky.png|250px|thumb|Gav standing in the Library in Forsetti admiring a statue of [[Kurner Dahtar]]]]

Working in Holotech meant many trips to the Federation Library, looking up protocols and technical blueprints. Because he spent so much time there, on Y26 D233 he volunteered as an archivist. Not only did he fall in love with library science and circulation, but it allowed him access to many of the more restricted sections of the archives. Not long after, [[State Minister]] [[Thion Roseland]], who was also essentially acting as interim Chief Archivist, stepped down from his post and relinquished all State and Library duties.

The Library grew even quieter in Thion Roseland’s absence. One evening, Gav found himself alone among the shelves, methodically replacing holobooks, the soft hum of the preservation systems his only company. In that stillness, the Library began to feel less like a workplace and more like a sanctuary. Feeling a flicker of mischief with no one watching, he wandered into the Chief Archivist’s chambers. Minister Roseland had spent little time there, preferring his office at the [[Ministry of State]], and the room bore the signs, with dust gathering on the desk, stale air, and shelves untouched for weeks.

Drawers yielded little of interest until he found it: an unmarked access key. Curiosity piqued, Gav experimented, discovering that the key granted him the ability to withdraw blank holobooks from restricted storage and, more importantly, to author new entries within the Library’s secure archive. It was an archivist’s dream and an invitation to shape history.

He knew exactly where to begin. Drawing on months of late-night reading and note-taking, he began work on a serialized chronicle he had long imagined: This Month in Trade Federation History. With unrestricted access to the Federation’s historical records, he could weave together recovered archives, oral histories, and rediscovered GNS clippings into a living narrative of the Federation’s evolution. On Y26 D233, he released the first issue, [[This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 26 • Month 8]], to wide acclaim among those who cared for the Federation’s legacy.

The project lit a fire. Gav started expanding other holobooks, merging details from cross-referenced sources and building comprehensive indexes. His work quickly caught the attention of senior officials, and before long, he was entrusted with the responsibilities of Interim Chief Archivist. In this capacity, he authored the [[Library Charter]], codifying the institution’s purpose and scope; documented the Modus Operandi for the Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative; and designed the Federation’s official [[Chain of Command]] diagram.

He also transformed an unused section of the Library into a permanent Art Museum exhibit, curating a collection of recovered Federation visual history. This moved Captain Hartroff Parmenion and so he dug up his old findings from his Archeological Investigations in Federation History project, featuring former logos of past Operations [[Flight Team|Flight Teams]]. To Gav, this was preservation as strategy. Heritage and identity, he knew, were themselves forms of power, and a well-tended history could be as potent a weapon as any fleet.

====First Slabbing Mission - Kuna`s Tail VII====

=====A Blue Milk Run=====

It was Year 26 Day 248. Gav was looking through his standard issue flight team datapad searching for his next mission when he saw [[Kuna`s Tail Economic Development Project Year 26|an announcement about an economic development happening on Kuna`s Tail VII]]. For flight team members like himself, this meant a plethora of "slabbing" missions had been posted. What would happen is a TF service member would be assigned as the leader of a "slabbing squad"--a ragtag group of mercenary riflemen--and their mandate was to "clear" each planned city site of all hostile life forms. This ranged from groups of bandits to flocks of creatures. Anything that would interfere with construction that was not authorized by the Federation was to be removed by force. It was essentially a glorified pest control operation. There were rumors that many bandit groups of Diathim, Fosh, and Toydarian descent had been spotted, along with colossal sized [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=408 streaked velkers] and [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=451 purrgils]. Needless to say, it was not a mission for the faint of heart, but Gav was up to the task in hopes of rounding out his work experience. Corresponding with [[Alories Tanus]], a fellow service member he had met in his travels, about the potential dangers, Tanus replied to his holomessage:

<blockquote>
It's pretty easy! You won't die haha. Just watch your medical supplies, inspect your riflemen make sure they are equipped with their standard issue [[A280]], and keep at a distance of 7-8 clicks. Why don't you work on latitude 16? Start at longitude 19 and meet Captain Parmenion in the middle. I've mostly cleared that site already so it'll be a good way to ease into it.
</blockquote>

Mostly cleared... see a familiar face... Alories made it sound like a blue milk run. So he signed up for the mission and set his [https://guide.swcombine.com/wiki/NavComp NavComp] to Kuna`s Tail VII. It took him five days in hyperspace to get there, which he spent leisurely tinkering on holotech projects and scribbling in his holobooks.

=====A Rag-Tag Bunch=====

On Day 255, he exited hyperspace and arrived in orbit of Kuna`s Tail VII. He was to report to the Lucrehulk Battleship Basilisk to rendezvous with his slabbing squad. But the first thing he had to do was find a jetpack. He was told by Lt. Commander Gisa that there might be extras at the entrance of the ship, otherwise he would have to go to the outfitter on Dor. Well, there was not, but he decided to walk around the ship until finally he found an armoury that had an extra. ''That's why they call me Lucky,'' he chuckled to himself. The whole side mission made him quite late to the briefing...

He approached the lineup and introduced himself.

<blockquote>
Greetings! Apologies for the tardiness... My name is Cadet First Class Lucky. I will be leading the slabbing mission for the coming days...
</blockquote>

As he briefed the squad, he noticed mixed reactions. Amseth Onasi, a Hapan in some sort of uniform, listened respectfully. A pair of Gamorreans grumbled to each other, judging their leader and compatriots of varying statures, all dwarfed in comparison to their own.

<blockquote>
''At least he is Porcine, but barely clears 100cm...'' said the one Gamorrean.

''I heard it's his first slab mission, take orders with grain of spice... and why are Ewok and Aleena here? They can barely lift their rifle...'' said the other.
</blockquote>

The Ewok simply stood and tilted his head occasionally as Gav spoke, while the Aleena looked like someone who was trying to convince themselves, and others, that they were ready for something they were not.

Gav walked down the line and inspected each member of the squad, making sure each had a rifle and a jetpack. Unfortunately, one of the members did not have a jetpack. He had no confidence that there were any extra jetpacks on the ship, so he said they would have to sit out and maybe if there's a supply run at some point they could join in.

<blockquote>
''11 instead of 12, no biggie,'' he thought. ''Plenty of medical supplies, one can stay inside the ship in case we need to make a run for it. It'll be fine...''
</blockquote>

He had a slight feeling in his gut that things were not going as well as he had hope, maybe an even slighter feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn't put a finger on it. ''Too late now,'' he said under his breath. ''Too late now. We have to get moving.''

=====The First Encounter=====

[[File:Gav_Lucky_outfitted.jpg|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky, armed and ready for action]]

The crew loaded onto Gav's [[ATR-6]] gunboat and began their descent to 19-16. From the atmosphere the site looked acquiescent; not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Soon they arrived on the "surface", which, being that Kuna`s Tail VII was a gas planet, simply meant an altitude that was ideal for building a floating city; close enough to the gas to mine it without suffocating. Gav had spoken to some old Academy friends on best strategies. ''Hug the perimeter so you don't get ambushed- Move a couple clicks and then go outside and scan with your macrobinoculars- I bounce between the four corners- you should only need to go between two positions...'' Needless to say, he would have to see what worked best for him. Hopefully his squad wouldn't notice that he had no idea what he was doing...

He decided to try the outskirts idea. He started in a corner of the site and started going around the outside. He would move a couple clicks, very cautiously, and get out to check with his macrobinoculars. After a while, his squad started getting restless, which he took as a sign that it was normal to move a bit quicker. So he moved about 6 or 7 clicks and got out of the ATR.

There it was. Hovering with his jetpack, he saw it with his very own eyes: a bloodied, half shot-to-death streaked velker. It was massive, but injured badly, presumably the blue milk run Alories left him. ''Thank You Alories!'' He thought confidently. He popped his head back inside the ATR and said, ''Alright crew, pile out!''

They began to open fire on the poor velker, its screeches terrifying yet muffled by several clicks of gas, but he knew it was for the greater good. He looked upon his crew and felt a sense of pride seeing them in formation hovering in the air, rifles pointed in the same direction, except... ''Wait a minute,'' he thought to himself as he noticed a gap in the line of rifles. There hovered the Aleena, Alsten Endel, without a rifle! Just kind of flailing his arms around to make it look like he was doing something, fooling around with his equipment, as if he wouldn't be noticed!

[[File:Alsten_flailing.png|500px]]

<blockquote>
Gav: ALSTEN, WHAT IN THE VICEROY'S NAME ARE YOU DOING!? WHERE IS YOUR STANDARD ISSUE!?

Alsten: SIR! I WAS WORRIED ABOUT MY JETPACK--BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!--CORRECTLY AND--SCREEEEEECH!--SURE IT--

Gav: ENOUGH! I CAN'T HEAR A KRIFFING THING YOU'RE SAYING! JUST STAND BACK AND--

Alsten: WHAT SIR? WHAT DID YOU SAY?

''Gav flew over to him and pulled him behind the firing line before grabbing him by the pack straps and yanking him up close face to face.

Gav: STAY! PUT!
</blockquote>

Eventually the screeching died down and the velker slowly fell out of the air into the gassy abyss. Turns out Alsten had lost his gun on the Basilisk, or someone took it thinking it was their issue, who knows. Thankfully, Gav had an extra emergency A280 in the cockpit.

<blockquote>
Gav: This is my only extra A280. Use the strap, do NOT drop it or I will drop YOU off on this surface without propulsion! You got that?

Alsten: ''*gulp*'' Yes sir!
</blockquote>

=====Return Fire=====

Once the city construction was under way, Gav and crew were on to the next spot. They proceeded as before, moving a couple clicks and going out to check. Eventually they came upon not one, but two velkers. Even from a distance they looked humongous. But they were just as skittish as the last one despite being in perfect condition. Without knowing where the attack was coming from, all they could do is fly around, to no avail. Eventually, both velkers succumbed to the rifles and the gas beneath them.

''Another slab cleared,'' said Gav to himself. As they all started heading back to the ATR-6, they heard someone exclaim...

<blockquote>
Alsten: SOMETHIN' BIT ME!
</blockquote>

They all turned around to see Alsten holding his rear and groaning loudly. All of a sudden, the ATR-6 started getting pelted with projectiles. "AAaaAAh!!!" screamed Amseth, gripping his left shoulder. "TAKE COVER!" shouted Gav. They all retreated to the opposite side of the ship that was being peppered, mounted their rifles onto the roof of the ATR, and began to return fire. Gav went around and tended to Alsten and Amseth's wounds. "Hang in there!" he told them. Amseth was taking it well, as if he had seen action before. Alsten, on the other hand, was not so composed.

<blockquote>
Alsten: MY ARSE IS ON FIRE!!

Gav: Hang in there Alsten! It looks like it went straight through, it's just a flesh wound!

Alsten: IT STINGS! I'M GONNA PASS OUT!
</blockquote>

Gav grabbed Alsten and guided him back into the ship before returning to the fight. It was a long battle, but eventually Gav confirmed the last bandit had fallen using his macrobinoculars.

When they got back inside the ship, Alsten was crying.

<blockquote>
Alsten: Sir... you saved my life... ''*sniffles*'' how can I ever repay you...

Gav: Alsten, I didn't save-- ''Gav paused...'' you can pay me back by getting back out there and helping us finish this mission.

Alsten: Yes sir! I just need a minute for the meds to kick in...
</blockquote>

=====There She Glows!=====

Kuna's Tail VII had a way of making even the most hardened sentients feel small. Despite this, the crew was beginning to move like a proper unit and the work they were doing began to feel routine. The gunboat drifted along the perimeter lights-out, quiet under a lid of pale cloud, the gas below moving like a slow ocean with no waves. Gav felt that chill go up his spine again. What was a whisper before was now a pounding in his chest, but there was no stopping the gunboat. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

They touched down at the next marker and fanned out. The whole crew now had their macrobinoculars up, but no one detected any movement. It was so eerie that even the Gamorreans stopped grumbling. Gav raised a gloved hand and the unit slid forward in twos, jetpacks feathering over the gas. The site's construction pylons stood like toothpicks stabbed into mist. They were a reminder that there ''was'' something here, otherwise the city construction would be underway; it was a reminder that battle was inevitable.

The first bandit group caught a bug and broke the quiet from the west scaffolds. HB-5s and BT 500s hammered the ATR's plating and sent sparks across the viewports. Amseth barely flinched, took a round across the pauldron, planted his A280 on the gunwale, and answered with neat, surgical bursts. The Gamorreans roared like someone had insulted their ancestry and hosed the scaffolds. Gav cut the air with his hand, called the ranges, and walked the fire in. Between the experience of the squad members and the power and range of their A280s, once they realized they didn't stand a chance, the west side folded fast.

Then the second group lit up from the south cranes. This position was a bit smarter due to the elevation. Shots licked the top of a Gamorrean's pack and sent him pinwheeling. Alsten yelped and threw himself under the ATR's wing, then popped back up, white-knuckled but determined, and for once remembered to check his safety before pulling the trigger. Eventually, one last quiet thud echoed and the return fire stopped.

"Hold your fire!" said Gav, holding up a closed fist.

Gav took a slow lap with the macros. The slab returned to that library hush he was starting to think was worse than noise. He opened his mouth to call it clear... when the shadows moved.

Shapes the size of frigates turned inside the fog, low and patient, as if the whole world were a lagoon and they had just surfaced to breathe. They came on without hurry, the way big things move when they do not need to prove how big they are.

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| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000"| [[File:Purgills.png|200px]]
|}

Purrgils--you hear about them, you see holos. None of that prepares you for a living wall of muscle and light deciding your city site is now a mating ground, or your hyperlane is now a migratory path. Even at a distance their presence pressed at the chest. The nearest drifted across a bank of cloud and the entire squad went still, rifles aimed at the beasts but not quite aware that they might not fire even if Gav gave the word. But Gav knew the damage these creatures could cause and, unfortunately, it was their job to make sure the citizens of the Federation who started a life here did not have to worry about it. It was his job to make the tough calls, and it was the crew's job to follow orders. His next order was spoken in a monotone voice, to let the crew know that he knew the gravity of his call, and that it was okay that it did not feel good, but it was not him, but the Viceroy which was the decider, he a marshall of that will, and the crew an extension of him.

''Fire.''

The squad answered as one. A ragged volley of red lanced through the haze, striking along the purrgils’ flanks. The giants shuddered, not with fear but irritation, rolling in slow arcs as if to show just how little their rifles meant. Then the light began.

It started deep under the skin, a pulse of violet swelling into indigo, crawling the length of their bodies like lightning trapped under ice. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. Gav knew what was coming next. He had read reports, heard the stories, and in that moment, he understood why spacers dreaded this sight more than the creatures themselves.

The nearest purrgil blurred at the edges, its bulk dimming until it simply was not there anymore. The second followed, vanishing into the mist.

“High sky, reacquire!” Gav called.

Minutes later, the shapes resolved again, farther out. Another volley. Another bloom of violet. Another blink into nothing. The third time it happened, the glow rolling up the spine of the larger beast, Alsten’s voice cut through the comms:

“There she glows!”

Half the squad groaned, the other half laughed, and Gav could only shake his head. The name stuck instantly, repeated every time the halo began to build. The fight turned into a deadly game of dejarik... move, fire, vanish, repeat... each exchange drawing more from the crew’s dwindling reserves of patience and bacta.

They tried to box them in toward the pylons, tried to flank and drive them east, tried holding fire until they crossed the open lanes. None of it worked for long. Every time the light appeared beneath that thick hide, they were gone before the next breath.

On the sixth pass, the pair did not return. Whether they had decided to leave or had simply moved beyond the slab’s perimeter, Gav could not say. The mist closed behind them, leaving only silence and the faint shimmer of heat along the barrel of his rifle.

He scanned one last time with the macros, seeing nothing but the skeletal frame of the city-to-be. Then he slung the rifle and keyed the comm.

“Form up. We’re done here.”

As the ATR-6 lifted away, the crew settled into the familiar quiet that came after hard work without celebration. Their medkits were light, their packs lighter. Gav’s ribs ached where the bacta patch clung, and he could feel the sting of every bruise through his armor.

Time for that supply run, rearm, and rethink the plan. Maybe he could research what technology was available there come up with something before they got back. But he had to think fast...

=====Resupply, Regroup, Rethink=====

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| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Hyperspace.gif|275px]]
|}

Gav set course for Dor, more specifically, the Endor Palace Member Outfitters, where even the most battered field team could walk away looking parade-ready.

The resupply run was deliberate. Fresh A280s with factory calibrations. Replacement armor plates. Macrobinoculars that didn’t lag. Jetpacks with more thrust than wheeze. And pairs of multisensor packs to try something Gav had read on his datapad while studying equipment holorecords... When they lifted again to return to the next slab, the crew looked sharper, heavier, and, Gav hoped, ready for a different style of fight.

This time, he planned to put eyes where the enemy didn’t expect them.

The east side got Alsten. At 17,11, the ridge ran close to where velkers had been spotted earlier, and the little Aleena’s discomfort was obvious.

:Alsten: Sir, this is awfully close to them.

Gav shoved a multisensor pack into his chest.

:Gav: That’s the point. You’ll be fine. Keep low, stay sharp, and if anything moves that shouldn’t, call it in.

Leaving him there felt wrong, but having a live scout in place could save the squad from being ambushed and get them all home sooner. From there, Gav moved the ATR-6 along the western perimeter, working toward 4,11. When the moment felt right, he brought the ship down and dropped another scout to cover the gap, an Ewok named Wolam Highwind, who took the multisensor pack and jumped out of the gunboat without so much as a word.

For a while, it worked. The east and west placements gave them early warnings and cut down on ambushes. But the gaps still showed. Gav had fallen into the same trap he had once mocked in others; he assumed the hostiles would stay to the middle because that’s where most of the fighting happened. That’s how you learned the hard way about the corners: you didn’t need to check them... until you did. And when the enemy slipped into that blind space, the range rings meant nothing. They could vanish completely, only to reappear where your lines were weakest.

The first warning came from the west. The Ewok posted there, who was armed and out in the open, suddenly lit up on sensors. Bandits had come out of nowhere, closing to within a click before anyone could react. The Ewok returned fire immediately, but the flash of his blaster only drew more rounds his way.

Gav didn’t think. He dove in with the squad, A280 singing, cutting down the closest threats before they could finish the job. By the time he reached the Ewok, the little scout was down, armor dented, weapon still gripped in one limp hand. The medics worked fast, but it was too late. The lesson to Gav was clear.

Every placement, every piece of kit, every decision had weight. Get it wrong, and you didn’t just lose your position; you risked sending someone home in a body bag.

Gav stood over the body bag as the medics loaded him aboard. As he entered the gunboat behind them, the crew stared at Wolam's body. They knew it was a risk they all understood when they signed up, some thought they would have made a different call or tried something different, some thought nothing at all. Whether they were mad, scared, or simply didn't want to feel the guilt that Gav was feeling, they couldn't look him in the eye. He knew he had to say something.

:Gav: I know what you're all thinking. I made a bad call, and got Wolam killed. And you'd be right. This one's on me. And I don't know how I'm ever going to sleep again, or how I'm going to knock on his family's hut and give them the news. But if he hadn't have alerted us to the ambush, it may be more than just him laying there. But it's on me... it's on me... and I have to live with that... be thankful you don't...

His eyes started to water, but he held it back and got into the cockpit, set the autopilot to the next slab, and started scribbling in his holobook again. Going over all his notes, he had an epiphany, something became very clear... it was even riskier than the last idea... but if it worked, they would never lose the upper hand again. He heard the voice of Minister Oodoov in his ear, who had visited the Academy once to give a lecture on the scientific work that the Interior is responsible for...

''...This is the dark art of experimenting; the field guides, the holorecords, the technical specifications... are sometimes a lie.''

=====Castling Ewoks Formation=====

The next slab was to be run with the so-called "Castling Ewoks Formation," a peculiar formation Gav had concocted during his journaling session. The tactic was simple on paper: place two ''unarmed'' Ewoks, each fitted with multisensors, at fixed positions 1,21 and 20,21 on the slab grid. From these back-corner perches, their overlapping sensor fields made it nearly impossible for hostiles to slip away unseen. Why it worked so well was anyone's guess. Some swore it was the Ewoks' size and unarmed status that kept them invisible to the enemy’s targeting logic, their naturally good perception allowing them to setup sensors in just the right position; others claimed the bandits simply refused to acknowledge being threatened by something knee-high, unarmed, and furry.

The formation worked surprisingly well and the unit made quick work of the found pests, the Ewoks sensors preventing the enemy from evading their forces. It didn't make up for Wolam's death, which Gav would have to explain for when he got back, but he felt they were safer and more effective now than ever before.

Just as planned, Gav and crew linked up with Captain Parmenion on the way to the next site. He and the Joint Defense Fleet had been orchestrating the broader clearing effort. From here on, they would be working in conjunction with something they called the Gambit Maneuver, a "precision assignment protocol" designed to keep pressure on the remaining gaps in the planet’s defensive perimeter. Gav's role was to start in the middle of the planet at longitude 14, latitude 10, then head westward to support Director Minwolf and Crewman Goriski where the line stretched thin.

The first contact came quickly: a bandit group holding the approaches with a velker flock drifting just behind them. The initial exchange went badly. Their fire was heavy, the supply of bacta patches less effective than they had hoped. Shots burned through Gav's pauldron and left a dull ache in his side. He toggled comms to Minwolf for advice.

:Gav: Director Minwolf, please advise, this isn't holding. The bacta is not working fast enough.

:Minwolf: You need refills, not patches. And don’t use Ryfills unless you want to spend the next day poisoned.

He logged the warning. Survive the slab first, worry about the outfitter later.

The bandits continued to ignore the Ewoks, even as the little scouts relayed exact firing coordinates to the squad. Whether they could not detect them on sensors or simply could not bring themselves to target them, Gav didn't know. But their presence was decisive. With their eyes guiding the team, he kept the squad at the optimum range of nine clicks, far enough to blunt the worst of the incoming fire, close enough to land clean shots and conserve medical supplies. Within two controlled exchanges, the bandits were broken.

With that threat dealt with, their focus shifted to the velkers. According to his field notes, he had observed that they favored the far corners once disturbed, and the northeast quadrant was unnaturally quiet. If his calculations were right, moving to 12,7 would put then at exactly nine clicks from them. As he eased the ''ATR-6'' into position, he pulled one of his last bacta patches and pressed it over the burn along my ribs. The cool sting was a small comfort.

Somewhere ahead, hidden in the shifting gas, the next fight was waiting.

===Flight Sergeant - The Savage Squirrels===

====Borrowed by the DoR====

Mammoth mission

====Operation ''REDACTED''====

==Service Record==

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Directorate
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
! style="text-align:center;" | Work Experience
|-
| Y27 D15 - Present
| [[File:O-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Ensign</center>
| 
|-
| Y26 D358 - Present
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Archivist</center>
| 
* Published issues for the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series

|-
| Y26 D272 - Y27 D15
| [[File:E-4.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Flight Sergeant</center>
| 
* Transported x4 Mammoth loads of Meleenium from an asteroid field depot to a main depot logging over 110 flight hours in 5 days (Year 26 Day 269-274). Mission required to execution of microjumping in order to avoid asteriod field damage to the rig exiting hyper on the wrong side of the field due to Endor's Gate X-1 as opposed to the desired Y+1 location of the depot.
* For Operation Durelium Storm, constructed x3 Durelium Mine Cities and prospected 22 quadrants on a Vex II in 9 days, discovering x9 Tibannagas deposits.
* Conducted research on asteroid field prospecting for the [[Directorate of Resources|DoR]] and compiled recommendations to improve the [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]] Asteroid Prospecting Tool
* Conducted research on terrestrial prospecting for the [[Ministry of the Interior|MoI]] and compiled recommendations for general policy and strategies for finding specific raw materials
* Planetary prospected Dorriella II and III
* Slabbed and constructed x11 Mine Cities in 14 days

|-
| Y26 D207 - Present
|
| <center>[[File: Tf-holotech-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Developer</center>
| 
* Integrate existing Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool into [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]], incorporating database driven persistence and existing permissions system
* Spearheaded the initial Member Module and Automated Payroll features for [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]]
* Enhanced the Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool with pre-prospecting features and auto-assist technology

|-
| Y26 D233 - Y26 D358
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Chief Archivist</center>
| 
* Began publishing the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series
* Envisioned and authored the ''[[Library Charter]]''
* Spearheaded the ''[[Chain of Command]]'' Project
* Launched the [[Library_Charter#Continuity_Restoration_and_Standardization_Initiative|Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative]]
* Launched the [[Library Art Museum]]

|-
| Y26 D205 - Y26 D272
| [[File:E-2.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Cadet First Class</center>
| 
* Prospect asteroid field with 13 revealed/11 unrevealed in 9 days averaging 5-6 scans a day for a total of 48 scans
* Transported x3 MC-30b to new system w/ G-1A taxi
* Cleared 15 slabs on Kuna`s Tail VII in 13 days

|-
| Y26 D205
| [[File:E-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Doaseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training]] Cadet</center>
| 
* Passed the ''[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training Standard Exam]]''
* Took the ''[[Department of Admissions|Trade Federation Oath]]''

|}

==Awards and Commendations==
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
! style="text-align:center;" | Reason
|-
| [[Image:Op kunastail.png]]
| Kuna`s Tail Mission Ribbon
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
|
|-
| [[Image:DSM-L1.jpg]]
| [[Distinguished Service Award|Distinguished Service Award - Level 1]]
| [[Minwolf Kandar]]
| Y27 D15
| We also have another member who wears multiple hats in the Ministry of State. Until my last announcement, Gav Lucky has served as the Chief Archivist. He was responsible for getting the organizational ball rolling and moving forward with uncovering the history that all of us share as citizens of the Trade Federation. What many of you do not know is that he has worked tirelessly over the past few months in the background. He has worked as an assistant to Kaire Nat-Sa in helping to develop experimental tools and code that all of us will benefit from when we use TFMS. For his dedication to his work and the people of the Trade Federation, I present to him the First Level of the Distinguished Service Award.
|-
| [[Image:PC.png]]
| [[Prospectors Cross]]
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
| For his ongoing work in demystifying Asteroid fields and Asteroid Field Prospecting in particular.
|-
| [[Image:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty Medal - Viceroy Vas Felix]]
| Automatic
| Y26 D205
|
|}
 

[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]

Trade Federation Commendations

2025-12-11T04:57:37Z

Gav Lucky: /* Operation Tala */

'''Trade Federation Commendations''' are medals awarded to members of the [[Trade Federation]] and the nationalized factions for outstanding service. Medals are always displayed on Trade Federation ID card, they are an optional addition to uniforms. When worn, all medals are displayed in a specific order decided by [[TF Cabinet|the Cabinet]], beginning with those awarded by the [[Viceroy]] and followed by Ministry–related and Mission Medals.

Before Year 15, medals were displayed on a separate commendations bar that accompanied the [[Trade Federation]] ID card.

==General Medals==
The medals listed below are awarded to members of the Trade Federation.

===Order of the Viceroy===
[[Image:OV.jpg]] 

Awarded by: GL-3

The [[Order of the Viceroy]] [OV] is awarded to any person who has distinguished himself or herself by extraordinary achievement. The performance must be evidenced by voluntary action above and beyond the call of duty. The extraordinary achievement must have resulted in an accomplishment so exceptional and outstanding as to clearly set the individual apart from his or her comrades or from other persons in similar circumstances. The Order of the Viceroy Confers Lordship, however only Members of the Trade Federation are eligible for this award.

===Gold Seal===
[[Image:GS.jpg]] 

Awarded by: GL-3 and above

The [[Gold Seal]] [GS] is awarded for consistent and exemplary service to the awarding member and/or actions which resulted in overall improvement of the Federation, "above and beyond the call of duty". The medal cannot be awarded for general activity.

===Silver Seal===
[[Image:SS.jpg]] 

Awarded by: HC-2 and above

The [[Silver Seal]] [SS] is a medal of high prestige, and may be awarded when an member has performed consistent or exemplary services to the awarding member which were highly notable and influential, but not profound enough to earn a Gold Seal.

===Bronze Seal===
[[Image:BS.jpg]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Bronze Seal]] [BS] is the first level of three seals awarded for services which are not only notable, but substantial. It may be awarded when an member has performed a service that (while not being influential or difficult enough to warrant a Gold Seal or Silver Seal) is of a high quality and deserves more recognition lower medals.

===Federation Star===
[[Image:FS.jpg]] 

Awarded By: GL-2 and above

The [[Federation Star]] [FS] is awarded for consistent and exemplary service to the awarding officer and or actions which resulted in overall improvement of large sections of the Trade Federation under his control, above and beyond the call of duty. It cannot be awarded for general activity. The year of the award is engraved on the reverse, along with the name, rank and unit of the recipient.

===Purple Heart===
[[Image:PH.jpg]] 

Awarded By: GL-2 and above

The [[Purple Heart]] [PH] is awarded in the name of the Viceroy of the Trade Federation to any member of the Trade Federation who, while serving with the Trade Federation who has been wounded or killed, or may hereafter die from being wounded.

===Berubian Medal of Self Sacrifice===
[[Image:MSS.jpg]] 

Awarded By: GL-3 and above

The [[Berubian Medal of Self Sacrifice]] [MSS] medal is awarded to any person who rescues, or endeavors to rescue, any other person from harm. The rescue must have been at the risk of the rescuer's own life, with evidence of extreme and heroic daring. On the reverse of the Medal the date of the act is inscribed, along with the name, rank and unit of the recipient, plus the persons(s) life who was saved by the act. Only the Viceroy can award this honor.

===Prisoner of War Medal===
[[Image:POW.jpg]] 

Awarded By: GL-2 and above

The [[Prisoner of War Medal]] [POW] is issued only to persons who are taken prisoner or held captive while engaged in action against an enemy of the Trade Federation, or while serving with friendly forces engaged in armed conflict. The recipient's conduct, whilst in captivity, must have been honorable.

===Medal of Loyalty===
[[Image:MoL.jpg]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Medal of Loyalty]] [MoL] is awarded for exemplary services to the Trade Federation showing extreme loyalty in any scenario within the Trade Federation. Can only be awarded once.
===Special Service Ribbon===
[[File:SSR-L1.png]] [[File:SSR-L2.png]] [[File:SSR-L3.png]] [[File:SSR-L4.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member of the Trade Federation who has distinguishes themselves, as going beyond what was expected, and rising above their peers while serving with the Federation on any mission or operation. Awarded for combat or non-combat service. Can be awarded up to four times, where each level replaces the previous.

===Distinguished Service Medal===
[[Image:DSM-L1.jpg]] [[Image:DSM-L2.png]] [[Image:DSM-L3.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Distinguished Service Medal]] [DSM-L1/L2/L3] is awarded to any member of the Trade Federation who, while serving with the Federation in any capacity, distinguishes themselves by extraordinary service in a duty of great responsibility. Awarded for combat or non-combat service. Can be awarded up to three times, each level replaces the previous.

===Good Conduct Award===
[[Image:GCA-L1.jpg]] [[Image:GCA-L2.png]] [[Image:GCA-L3.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Good Conduct Award]] [GCA-L1/L2/L3] is awarded for demonstrating honorable behavior consistently beyond that expected of personnel in the Trade Federation. Can be awarded up to three times, each level replaces the previous.

===Graphic Award of Excellence===
[[Image:GAE.jpg]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Graphic Award of Excellence]] [GAE] is awarded for exemplary services to the Trade Federation in the Graphic Design Field. Can only be awarded once.

===Holonet Development Award===
[[Image:HDA.jpg]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Holonet Development Award]] [HDA] is awarded for exemplary services to the Trade Federation in the Web Design Field. Can only be awarded once.

===Marketplace Development Award [MDA]===
[[File:Mda.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[MDA]] is awarded for exemplary services to the Trade Federation coding the Trade Federation Market. Can only be awarded once.

===Directorate Ribbon===
[[Image:DR.png]] 

Awarded By: Automatically Awarded

The [[Directorate Ribbon]] [DR] is awarded to members of the Trade Federation who have served on the Directorate. Can only be awarded once.

===Cabinet Ribbon===
[[Image:CR.png]] 

Awarded By: Automatically Awarded

The [[Cabinet Ribbon]] [CR] is awarded to members of the Trade Federation who have served on the Cabinet. Can only be awarded once.

===Tour of Duty Medal===
====Viceroy Corbin Esco====
[[Image:TOD-VCE.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Tour of Duty Medal]] [TOD-VCE] is awarded to members of the Trade Federation who have served during the reign of Viceroy Corbin Esco.

====Viceroy Horley Cyan====
[[Image:TOD-VHC.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Tour of Duty Medal]] [TOD-VHC] is awarded to members of the Trade Federation who have served during the reign of Viceroy Horley Cyan.

====Viceroy Bren Morgarr====
[[Image:TOD-VBM.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Tour of Duty Medal]] [TOD-VBM] is awarded to members of the Trade Federation who have served during the reign of Viceroy Bren Morgarr.

====Viceroy Jacob Jansen====
[[Image:TOD-VJJ.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Tour of Duty Medal]] [TOD-VJJ] is awarded to members of the Trade Federation who have served during the reign of Viceroy Jacob Jansen.

====Viceroy Nohv Schiller====
[[Image:TOD-VNS.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Tour of Duty Medal]] [TOD-VNS] is awarded to members of the Trade Federation who have served during the reign of Viceroy Nohv Schiller.

====Viceroy Vas Felix====
[[File:Vvf-tod.png]]

The [[Tour of Duty Medal]] [TOD-VVF] is awarded to members of the Trade Federation who have served during the reign of Viceroy Vas Felix.
====Tour of Duty====
[[image:TOD-tod1.png]] [[image:TOD-tod2.png]] [[image:TOD-tod3.png]] [[image:TOD-tod4.png]] [[image:TOD-tod5.png]] [[image:TOD-tod6.png]] [[image:TOD-tod7.png]] [[image:TOD-tod8.png]] [[image:TOD-tod9.png]] [[image:TOD-tod10.png]] [[image:TOD-tod11.png]] [[image:TOD-tod12.png]] [[image:TOD-tod13.png]] [[image:TOD-tod14.png]] [[image:TOD-tod15.png]] 

The Trade Federation [[Tour of Duty Medal]] is awarded to members who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) in service of the Trade Federation. The number of years is added to the medal bar to indicate further Tours starting after year 1.

===The Avance Coalition===
[[File:ToD TAC 1.png]]

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The Avance Coalition Tour of Duty Medal was awarded to members of the Avance Coalition who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) in service of the Avance Coalition before its merger with the Trade Federation. The number of years is added to the medal bar to indicate further Tours starting after year 1.

==Ministry of Defense==
The medals listed below are specific to the Trade Federations Ministry of Defense.

===Medal of Valor===
[[Image:MV.jpg]] 

Awarded By: GL-3

The [[Medal of Valor]] [MV] is awarded in the name of the Trade Federation, to a person who, while a member of the Armed Forces, distinguishes himself or herself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his or her life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in action against an enemy of the Trade Federation; while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the Trade Federation is not a belligerent party. The deed performed must have been one of personal bravery or self-sacrifice so conspicuous as to clearly distinguish the individual above his or her comrades and must have involved risk of life. On the reverse of the Medal the date of the act is inscribed, along with the name, rank and unit of the recipient. Only the Viceroy can award this honor.

===Distinguished Flying Cross===
[[Image:DFC.jpg]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Distinguished Flying Cross]] [DFC] is awarded to all Military personnel in command of Capital, Freighter or fighter class ships for an act or acts of valor, courage or devotion to duty performed whilst flying in active operations against the enemy. A straight silver bar is awarded for further act or acts of valor, courage or devotion to duty whilst flying in active operations against the enemy. The slip-on bar has an Lucrehulk Battleship in the centre. The year of the award is engraved on the reverse, along with the name, rank and unit of the recipient.

===Intelligence Cross===
[[Image:IC.jpg]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Intelligence Cross]] [IC] is awarded for services which are not only notable, but substantial in the Intelligence field. This medal can only be awarded once.

===Capital Ship Command===
[[Image:CSC-L1.png]] [[Image:CSC-L2.png]] [[Image:CSC-L3.png]] [[Image:CSC-L4.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Capital Ship Command]] [CSC-L1/L2/L3/L4] is awarded to any pilot who was shown a proficiency piloting a capital ship. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require a capital ship to be flown as the primary purpose of the mission. The pilot is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding the operation of the capital ship or other elements of the mission.

Non-combat missions that would be counted as capital ship missions are relocation from shipyard to base, reconnaissance, equipment relocation. Combat missions would include escort missions, security sweeps, and any combat and combat training such as target practice & group maneuvers.

===Fighter Command===
[[Image:FCC-L1.png]] [[Image:FCC-L2.png]] [[Image:FCC-L3.png]] [[Image:FCC-L4.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Fighter Command]] [FCC-L1/L2/L3/L4] is awarded to any pilot who was shown a proficiency piloting a fighter. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require a fighter to be flown as the primary purpose of the mission. The pilot is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding the operation of the fighter or other elements of the mission.

Non-combat missions would include moving ships to their base, proficiency in squading. Combat missions would include escort missions, security sweeps, and any combat and combat training.

===Garrison Command===
[[File:Gc l1.png]] [[File:Gc l2.png]] [[File:Gc l3.png]] [[File:Gc l4.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

Garrison Command is awarded to any pilot who has shown proficiency in garrison command missions. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require garrison work as the primary purpose of the mission. The pilot is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding any elements of the mission.

===Armor Command===
[[Image:AC-L1.png]] [[Image:AC-L2.png]] [[Image:AC-L3.png]] [[Image:AC-L4.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Armor Command]] [AC-L1/L2/L3/L4] is awarded to any pilot who has shown a proficiency piloting a vehicle. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require a vehicle operation as the primary purpose of the mission. The pilot is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding the operation of the vehicle or other elements of the mission.

Non-combat missions would include moving vehicles to their base, proficiency in squading, planetary patrol. Combat missions would include combat and combat training.

===Droid Command===
[[File:MoD Droid 1.png]] [[File:MoD Droid 2.png]] [[File:MoD Droid 3.png]] [[File:MoD Droid 4.png]]

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

[[Droid Command]] is awarded to any trooper who has shown a proficiency managing droids. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require a droid squad operation as the primary purpose of the mission. The trooper is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding the operation of the vehicle or other elements of the mission.

Non-combat missions would include moving droids to their base, proficiency in squading. Combat missions would include combat and combat training.

===Infantry Command===
[[Image:IC-L1.png]] [[Image:IC-L2.png]] [[Image:IC-L3.png]] [[Image:IC-L4.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Infantry Command]] [IC-L1/L2/L3/L4] is awarded to any trooper who has shown a proficiency managing droids/NPCs. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require an infantry group operation as the primary purpose of the mission. The trooper is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding the operation of the vehicle or other elements of the mission.

Non-combat missions would include moving droids/NPCs to their base, proficiency in squading, Combat missions would include combat and combat training.
===Reconnaissance Specialist===
[[File:Rs l1.png]] [[File:Rs l2.png]] [[File:Rs l3.png]] [[File:Rs l4.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

Reconnaissance Specialist is awarded to any pilot who has shown proficiency in general reconnaissance. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require reconnaissance as the primary purpose of the mission. The pilot is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding any elements of the mission. Missions used to award this medal include security sweeps of surface or space, system patrols, and deep space sector scans.

===Security Specialist===
[[Image:SS-L1.png]] [[Image:SS-L2.png]] [[Image:SS-L3.png]] [[Image:SS-L4.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Security Specialist]] [SS-L1/L2/L3/L4] is awarded to any pilot who has shown proficiency in general security missions. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require security as the primary purpose of the mission. The pilot is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding any elements of the mission.

Missions used to award this medal include security sweeps of surface or space, building military facilities such as shield generators, making military facilities operational. Also included would be the arresting and transport of prisoners, and any other specialized security work requested by cabinet that does not fall in any of the other four categories.

===FSS Veteran===
[[Image:FSSV.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[FSS Veteran]] [FSSV] is awarded to members of the Federation Security Service who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the force showing consistent or exemplary services to the Ministry of Defense. This medal is not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour of Duty and can only be awarded once.

==Ministry of the Interior==
The medals listed below are specific to the Trade Federations Ministry of the Interior.

===Production Star [PS]===
[[File:PS.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The Production Star is awarded for the extraordinary achievement in the Ministry of Production. The extraordinary achievement must have resulted in an accomplishment of developing and/or increasing production efficiencies through innovation and determination.

===Prospectors Cross===
[[Image:PC.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Prospectors Cross]] [PC] is awarded to those who have dedicated themselves over an extended period to the pursuit of raw materials to feed the forges of the Federation, this is an acknowledgment of consistent exemplary aptitude and self-sacrifice in the field. Can only be awarded once.

===Interior Service Medal - Gold===
[[Image:ISMG.png]] 

Awarded By: GL-1 and above

The [[Interior Service Medal]] [ISMG] is awarded to members of the Ministry of the Interior that have showed consistent or exemplary services to their Interior Department, their support has been invaluable towards the growth of the Trade Federation or NATs and their dedication becoming a shining example to others. One Tour of Duty is the minimal prerequisite for this award. This medal replaces Silver and Bronze medal.

===Interior Service Medal - Silver===
[[Image:ISMS.png]] 

Awarded By: GL-1 and above

The [[Interior Service Medal]] [ISMS] is awarded to members of the Ministry of the Interior that have showed consistent or exemplary services to their Interior Department. This medal replaces Bronze medal.

===Interior Service Medal - Bronze===
[[Image:ISMB.png]] 

Awarded By: GL-1 and above

The [[Interior Service Medal]] [ISMB] is awarded to Trade Federation members who have actively and notably served the Department of Logistics. Three months of service is the minimal prerequisite for this award.

===Industry Service Commendation===
[[image:MOIG.png]][[image:MOIS.png]][[image:MOIB.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[Industry Service Commendation]]This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to construction efforts within the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).

===Logistics Service Commendation===
[[file:Lsc-g.png]] - [[File:Lsc-s.png]]- [[File:Lsc-b.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[Logistics Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Interior members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to Department of Logistics. This commendation is gradated, and recognizes various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum of active service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties consisting of either service longevity or service beyond their call of duty. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to Logistics and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (ToD2 minimum service required).

===BAW Service Commendation===
[[file:MMG.png]]- [[file:MMS.png]] - [[file:MMB.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[BAW Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Production members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to BAW. This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to BAW and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).

===CA Service Commendation===
[[file:Ca-g.png]] - [[file:Ca-s.png]]- [[file:Ca-b.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[CA Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Production members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to CA. This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to CA and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).

===KDY Service Commendation===
[[file:MNPG.png]] - [[file:MNPS.png]] - [[file:MNPB.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[KDY Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Production members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to KDY. This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to KDY and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).

===TU Service Commendation===
[[file:MVPG.png]] - [[file:MVPS.png]] - [[file:MVPB.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[TU Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Production members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to TU. This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to TU and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).

===Interior Veteran===
[[Image:MIV.jpg]] 

Awarded By: GL-1 and above

The [[Interior Veteran]] [MIV] is awarded to members of the Ministry of the Interior who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the Ministry showing consistent or exemplary services to their Department. This medal is not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour of Duty. Can only be awarded once.

==Ministry of State==
The medals listed below are specific to the Trade Federations Ministry of State.

===Diplomatic Star===
[[Image:DS.jpg]] 

Awarded By: GL-3

The [[Diplomatic Star]] [DS] is awarded for the extraordinary achievement in Diplomacy. The extraordinary achievement must have resulted in an accomplishment of averting war or ceasing conflict through diplomatic means.

===Ercrow Star===
[[Image:ES.png]] 

Awarded By: GL-3

Named in honor of [[Tal Ercrow]], the [[Ercrow Star]] [ES] is awarded for the extraordinary work in the Federation Ledger, formerly the Confederate Ledger, the newsletter of the Trade Federation. Can only be awarded once.

===Dahtar Award===
[[Image:DA.jpg]] 

Awarded By: GL-3

Named in honor of [[Kurner Dahtar]], the [[Dahtar Award]] [DA] is awarded for consistent and exemplary service to the Trade Federation Library. Can only be awarded once.

===Morale Support Rose===
[[Image:MSR.png]] 

Awarded By: GL-3

The [[Morale Support Rose]] [MSR] is awarded for excellent service in the Trade Federation Morale team. Can only be awarded once.

===Medal of Culture===
[[Image:MoC.png]] 

Awarded By: GL-3

The [[Medal of Culture]] [MoC] is awarded to longstanding extraordinary service in the Department of Culture. Can only be awarded once.

===Identifications Dedication Bar===
[[Image:IDB.png]] 

Awarded By: GL-3

The [[Identifications Dedication Bar]] [IDB] is awarded to those who consistently dedicated time and effort to the making of Trade Federation ID cards and Avatars. Can only be awarded once.

===Admissions Service Medal===
[[File:ASM.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[The Admissions Service Medal]] is awarded for the extraordinary achievement going far and beyond the call of duty while serving in the Department of Admissions. Can only be awarded once.

===Trade Star [TS]===
[[File:TS.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to those who have dedicated themselves over an extended period to the pursuit of economics to support the Department of Trade. This is an acknowledgment of consistent exemplary aptitude and/or extraordinary achievement in pursuit of profit while upholding honour and integrity. Can only be awarded once.

==Evocati Order==
Guardians of the Trade Federation and force sensitive members, the following medals are special for the Evocati Order.

===Evocati Seal===
[[Image:EVS.png]] 

Awarded By: Evocati Inner Circle

The [[Evocati Seal]] [EVS] is awarded to any member of the Evocati Order who, while serving with the Order in any capacity, distinguishes themselves by extraordinary service in a duty of great responsibility. Awarded for non-mission service. Can only be awarded once.

===Mark of the Master===
[[Image:EMoM.png]] 

Awarded By: Evocati Inner Circle

The [[Mark of the Master]] [EMoM] is awarded to Evocati Knights, Lords and Masters who have effectively passed their knowledge of the Force onto more than one Apprentice and helped to strengthen the Order's next generation. Can only be awarded once.

===Evocati Service Medal===
[[Image:ESM-L1.png]] [[Image:ESM-L2.png]] [[Image:ESM-L3.png]] [[Image:ESM-L4.png]] 

Awarded By: Evocati Inner Circle

The [[Evocati Service Medal]] [ESM-L1/L2/L3/L4] is awarded to any member of the Evocati Order who has shown proficiency in general missions on behalf of Evocati. Proficiency is displayed in the successful completion of numerous missions that require the Force as the primary purpose of the mission. The member is expected to consistently complete the mission with no coaching or assistance regarding any elements of the mission.

===Inner Circle Ribbon===
[[File:Eic.png]] 
Awarded By: Evocati Inner Circle

[[Inner Circle Ribbon]]Awarded to members of the Trade Federation Evocati Order who have served on the Inner Circle. Can only be awarded once.

===Council of Masters Ribbon===
[[File:Ecom.png]] 
Awarded By: Evocati Inner Circle

[[Council of Masters Ribbon]]Awarded to members of the Trade Federation Evocati Order who have served on the Council of Masters. Can only be awarded once.

==Operations==
The medals listed below are specific to large scale Trade Federation missions and operations.

===Tax Planet Loszog===
[[Image:TPLos.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Tax Planet Loszog]] [TPLos] is awarded to any member who took any part on the Loszog Tax Planet Construction Project.

===Tax Planet Lekua IV===
[[Image:TPLek.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Tax Planet Lekua IV]] [TPLek] is awarded to any member who took any part on the Lekua IV Tax Planet Construction Project.

===Tax Planet Rafa V===
[[Image:TPRaf.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Tax Planet Rafa V]] [TPRaf] is awarded to any member who took any part on the Rafa V Tax Planet Construction Project.

===Tax Planet Nargorn===
[[Image:TPNar.jpg]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Tax Planet Nargorn]] [TPNar] is awarded to any member who took any part on the Nargorn Tax Planet Construction Project.

===Tax Planet Pengalan===
[[Image:TPPen.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Tax Planet Pengalan]] [TPPen] is awarded to any member who took any part on the Pengalan Tax Planet Construction Project.

===Operation Taboon===
[[Image:OP-TB.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Operation|Operation Taboon]] [OP-TB] is awarded to any member who took part in Operation Taboon.

===Operation Seraph===
[[Image:OP-SEPH.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Operation|Operation Seraph]] [OP-SEPH] is awarded to any member who took part in Operation Seraph.

===Operation Strongarm===
[[Image:OP-SARM.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Operation|Operation Strongarm]] [OP-SARM] is awarded to any member who took part in Operation Strongarm.

===Housing Project===
[[Image:HUSNG-PRG.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

The [[Housing Project]] [HUSNG-PRG] is awarded to any member who took part in the Trade Federation Sector Housing Project.

===Operation Korev===
[[File:Op korev.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member who took part in the [[Trade Federation Operation Korev]].

===Operation Vectinia===
[[File:Op vec.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member who took part in Operation Vectinia.

===Operation Carcassonne===
[[File:Op car.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member who took part in Operation Carcassonne.

===Operation Vensensor===
[[File:Op ven.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member who took part in Operation Vensensor.

===Operation Zorbia===
[[File:Op zorbia.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member who took part in Operation Zorbia.

===Operation Hanchin===
[[File:Op hanchin.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member who took part in Operation Hanchin.

===Operation Tala===
[[File:Op tala.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member who took part in Operation Tala.

===Operation Kuna`s Tail===
[[File:op_kunastail.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-2 and above

Awarded to any member who took part in Operation Kuna`s Tail.

==Discontinued==
The following commendations have been officially retired by order of the Viceroy and are no longer being awarded to the members of the Trade Federation and its nationalized factions. However members who have previously been awarded can still proudly display these awards.

===Order of the Confederacy===
====Commander of the Confederate Forces====
[[Image:CCF.jpg]] 

Awarded By: N/A

The [[Order of the Confederacy]] Commander of the Confederate Forces [CCF] was awarded by the Viceroy of the Trade Federation to commissioned officers of the rank of Captain or higher of all military branches for the highest degree of valor or self-sacrifice in the presence of the enemy. The Commander of the Confederate Forces was considered the highest and most distinguished decoration for military services, both in the Trade Federation and the Confederacy.

====Officer of the Confederate Forces====
[[Image:OCF.jpg]] 

Awarded By: N/A

The [[Order of the Confederacy]] Officer of the Confederate Forces [OCF] was awarded by the Viceroy of the Trade Federation, The Officer of the Confederate was awarded to recognize distinguished service of the most exceptional valor or self-sacrifice in the presence of the enemy to all ranks of the armed forces.

====Member of the Confederate====
[[Image:MOCF.jpg]] 

Awarded By: N/A

The [[Order of the Confederacy]] Member of the Confederate [MOC] was the highest and most distinguished decoration for non-military services. Awarded to recognize exceptional service to the Confederacy in any field, including services rendered by government servants.

===Distinguished Industry Service===
[[Image:DIS.jpg]] 

Awarded By: N/A

The [[Distinguished Industry Service]] [DIS] medal was awarded to those hard-working members of the Trade Federation's Department of Industry, who have distinguished themselves through exemplary service. Nowadays, however, with the introduction of new awards in this field of expertise, this medal has been retired.

===Honorable Service===
[[Image:HS.jpg]] 

Awarded By: N/A

In the past, the [[Honorable Service]] [HS] medal was awarded to members of the Trade Federation, who have performed honorable deeds and tasks beyond what was expected in their regular line of duty. This award has been officially retired by order of the Viceroy.

===State Veteran===
[[Image:MOSV.jpg]] 

Awarded By: N/A

The [[State Veteran]] [MOSV] was awarded to members of the Ministry of the State who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the Ministry showing consistent or exemplary services to their Department. This medal was not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour.

===Glythe Fleet Veteran===
[[Image:GFV.png]] 

Awarded By: N/A

The [[Fleet Veteran|Glythe Fleet Veteran]] [GFV] was awarded to members of the Glythe Fleet who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the fleet showing consistent or exemplary services to the Ministry of Defence. This medal was not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour of Duty and can only be awarded once. Since the closing of the Glythe Fleet, this medal is no longer awarded.

===Centrality Fleet Veteran===
[[Image:CFV.png]] 

Awarded By: N/A

The [[Fleet Veteran|Centrality Fleet Veteran]] [CFV] was awarded to members of the Centrality Fleet who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the fleet showing consistent or exemplary services to the Ministry of Defence. This medal was not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour of Duty and can only be awarded once. Since the closing of the Centrality Fleet, this medal is no longer awarded.
===HVN Service Commendation===
[[File:Morg.png]] - [[File:Morb.png]] - [[File:Mors.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[HVN Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of the Interior members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to Haven Corp. This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to Haven Corporation and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).
===AMC Service Commendation===
[[file:Mop-g.png]] - [[file:Mop-s.png]] - [[file:Mop-b.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[AMC Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Production members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to AMC. This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to AMC and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).
===DMC Service Commendation===
[[file:MRG.png]] - [[file:MRS.png]] - [[file:MRB.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[DMC Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Production members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to DMC. This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to DMC and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).

===1st Fleet Veteran===
[[Image:1FV.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Fleet Veteran|1st Fleet Veteran]] [1FV] is awarded to members of the 1st Fleet who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the fleet showing consistent or exemplary services to the Ministry of Defence. This medal is not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour of Duty and can only be awarded once.

===2nd Fleet Veteran===
[[Image:2FV.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Fleet Veteran|2nd Fleet Veteran]] [2FV] is awarded to members of the 2nd Fleet who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the fleet showing consistent or exemplary services to the Ministry of Defence. This medal is not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour of Duty and can only be awarded once.

===3rd Fleet Veteran===
[[Image:3FV.png]] 

Awarded By: HC-1 and above

The [[Fleet Veteran|3rd Fleet Veteran]] [3FV] is awarded to members of the 3rd Fleet who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the fleet showing consistent or exemplary services to the Ministry of Defence. This medal is not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour of Duty and can only be awarded once.

===CG Service Commendation===
[[File:Cgg.png]] - [[ File:Cgs.png]] - [[file:Cgb.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[CG Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Interior members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to the Commerce Guild. This commendation is gradated, and recognizes various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum of active service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties consisting of either service longevity or service beyond their call of duty. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to Ministry restocking efforts and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (ToD2 minimum service required).

===RSD Service Commendation===
[[file:Rsd-g.png]] - [[file:Rsd-s.png]] - [[file:Rsd-b.png]]

Awarded By: HC-2 and above

[[RSD Service Commendation]]Awarded to Ministry of Production members who have demonstrated consistent and exemplary services to RSD. This commendation is gradated, and recognises various degrees of excellence performed by the individual in question throughout their service. Bronze endorses active and notable service (3-months minimum service required). Silver endorses consistent aptitude and self-sacrifice in the performance of their duties. Gold accredits members who have shown invaluable support to RSD and the Federation at large, these are exemplars to others (2 ToD minimum service required).
[[Category:Awards]]
===Production Veteran [MPV]===
[[File:MPV.png]] 
Awarded By: HC-1 and above

Awarded to members of the Ministry of the Production who have completed 1 Tour of Duty (1 Year) within the Ministry showing consistent or exemplary services to their Department. This medal is not automatically awarded after serving 1 Tour of Duty. Can only be awarded once.

File:Op kunastail.png

2025-12-11T04:56:00Z

Gav Lucky:

Gav Lucky

2025-12-11T04:47:38Z

Gav Lucky: /* First Slabbing Mission */

{| class="infobox bordered" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="right" dth="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Gav_Lucky_ava.jpg|150px]]
|-
| style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Biographical Information'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Full Name:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Uglogavste Lukiil
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Aliases:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| ''Gav Lucky'' ''Dogbone'' ''The Space Pig''
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Homeworld:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Gentes
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Born:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Year -4 Day 143
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Physical Description'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Race:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Ugnaught
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Gender:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Male
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Height:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| 142 cm
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Colouring:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Porcelain
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Hair Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Brunette
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Eye Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Brown
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Trade Federation Service'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Status:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Active Duty
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Ministry:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| [[File:Moiseal.png|30px]] [[Ministry of the Interior|Interior]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Department:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| [[File:Operations-seal.png|30px]] [[Department of Operations|Operations]] - [[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Position:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"|
[[File:O-1.png|130px]] [[Chain of Command|Ensign]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Part-Time:
|style="padding-left:5px;"|
[[File:Archives-seal.png|30px]] [[Library_team|Library]] - [[Library_team|Archivist]] 
[[File:Tf-holotech-seal.png|30px]] [[Department_of_Holotech|Holotech]] - [[Department_of_Holotech|Developer]] 

|}

 

==Background==

[[File:Colossal-class_Heavy_Carrier_Ugnorgrad_I.png|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky's personal flagship the [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Ships&ID=253 Colossal-class Heavy Carrier] Ugnorgrad I]] 

Born beneath the heavy, sulfurous skies of Gentes, Uglogavste Lukiil came into the galaxy with a mind tuned for machinery and a soul already weighed by the oppression of his people. Like so many Ugnaughts before him, he escaped the drudgery of servitude, drifting to Bespin where the towering halls of Ugnorgrad hummed with welding arcs and the quiet desperation of survival.

On Bespin, he found refuge in the union workshops and data cores, refining not just his mechanical skill but a deep mastery of systems: computer networks, logistics algorithms, capital ship protocols. By day he was a quiet laborer; by night, a silent student of power, watching how the flow of credits and contracts shaped destinies far more decisively than any hydrospanner.
[[File:Holochess_screenshot.png|left|200px]]

His true name, Uglogavste Lukiil, was a tangle to most tongues. Smirking at the galaxy’s discomfort, he offered a simpler handle: "You may call me Gav Luck." It was meant as a quick, memorable alias, something that sounded like "Give Luck" and carried a hint of charm and fortune. But in the cantinas of Bespin, the name began to evolve. Gav spent long evenings hunched over holochess boards and pazaak tables, usually walking away with his credits intact or only slightly lighter. Then, one night, he hit a small jackpot on the slots, the kind of rare win that cantina patrons remembered for years. From then on, the regulars started calling him "Gav Lucky" as a teasing nod to that single windfall and a name that, to his mild annoyance, stuck harder than the original. Yet beneath that easy nickname and easy grin lay a mind haunted by the fate of powerless workers, scarred by watching entire communities collapse under the weight of financial neglect. For Gav Lucky, money was not mere currency; it was armor, weapon, and salvation.

==Career Timeline==

===An OOC Introduction===

<blockquote>
Storytelling has always been the lens through which I experience Star Wars roleplay, and Star Wars Combine is no different. For me, the game isn’t just a set of mechanics, but rather a living galaxy, and every choice deserves to be remembered. My habit of chronicling in detail began during my work on [[Library Art Museum#The Wall|The Wall]], when I saw so many sparsely populated, outdated, or even empty service pages, alongside long-overdue Tour of Duty badge and member reward requests on the forums. All of these things require keeping good records which, at present, isn’t centrally tracked. I wanted to make it easier for future admins, but also to ensure that no moment of my own journey in the [[Trade Federation]] or SWC was lost to time. In both the game and real life, I think journaling is a vital tool for those suffering from the human condition, especially for someone like me who so easily forgets people, places, and events as the years pass. As [[Hartroff Parmenion]] once said to me after reading my Library works: ''Verba volant, scripta manent''—'''spoken words fly away, written words remain'''. Some say I have the “Gift of Gav,” a tendency to turn even the smallest update into a saga. I’ll take that as a compliment. After all, the fun of SWC is not only in what we do, but in how we tell the tale. — The Player
</blockquote>

===Cadet===

====Joining Up====

His path to the Federation began in the most unassuming of ways. He was standing in a dingy spaceport terminal, waiting for a delayed transport, when a Holonet recruitment broadcast flickered to life above the crowd. The advertisement was crisp, authoritative, and emblazoned with the seal of the Trade Federation Department of Admissions.

<center>[[File:Doaseal.png|200px]][[File:Samantha_dordoli_ava.png|200px]]</center>

Front and center stood [[Samantha Dordoli]], delivering a precise and confident appeal to those seeking opportunity, structure, and purpose. In her words, Gav heard not just an invitation, but a promise: that order and ambition could be harnessed to lift those who were willing to work for it. By the time his transport arrived, he had already filled out the enlistment forms.

Driven by a relentless need to rewrite his people’s story and that of his own, he set his sights on the Trade Federation: a colossus of order, profit, and prestige. With each promotion and each credit earned, Gav Lucky would step further away from the darkness of Gentes and deeper into the halls of influence, where he would secure not just personal wealth but a fortress of resources strong enough to protect any who still bear the scars of servitude.

In every deal, every convoy manifest, every whispered negotiation, echoed his core philosophy: power is the ultimate currency, and luck favors those who build it themselves.

====The Academy====

[[File:Forsetticapital.png|300px|thumb|upright=1.65|Aeriel view of the Viceroyal Palace, and the surrounding areas of the city of Forsetti.]]

Cadet life was a shock both in its rigor and in its order. Assigned to a small cohort of recruits from across the galaxy, Gav quickly learned that the Academy was more than drills and data entry. It was a crucible for loyalty, skill, and adaptability. His knack for pattern recognition and logistical problem-solving made him an asset in training simulations, where he could predict enemy maneuvers and optimize fleet positioning with uncanny accuracy.
He passed the [[Basic Training Standard Exam]] and on Y26 D205, Gav stood before the Federation banner, right hand raised, and swore the [[Department_of_Admissions#Oath_to_the_Trade_Federation|Trade Federation Oath]]. For the first time, the weight of service felt heavier than the weight of survival.

===Cadet First Class - The Savage Squirrels===

====First Asteroid Field Prospecting Mission====

Assigned to the [[Department of Operations]] under the [[Ministry of the Interior]], Gav found himself in the ranks of the Savage Squirrels Flight Team, a unit as eccentric as it was effective. Under [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]] and Operations Director [[Dak Ironfist]], the team’s operations ranged from precision transport runs to asteroid field prospecting. Day-to-day orders came from [[Chain of Command|Lt. Commander]] [[Heuk Gisa]], whose terse directives left no room for hesitation.

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="left" width="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:AF_tool_screenshot.png|200px]]
|}

In those days, Gav started to make a name for himself with his sustained, methodical work. His first deployment was to an asteroid field outside of [[Ktil]] where he was tasked with reprospecting it. Using a standard issue GPS, he was able to pull Federation mining data and see that 13 previous uncovered deposits were still active with varying stability. The scanner also detected 11 undiscovered deposits. It was rough in the beginning as he tried to get his bearings. From speaking to instructors at the Academy, asteroid field prospecting was more of an art than a science. After the first couple days, he thought that there had to be a better way. During sleeping hours, he would stay up in the bunk of his [[Y-8]] mining vessel and run thought experiments on his datapad. He programmed a game that would generate random asteroid fields and place random deposits. He would play this game all night trying different strategies and also updating an AI assistant to predict the next best possible asteroid to scan. After a couple nights, he started to see patterns and develop what he thought was a winning strategy. On the third day, he had played the game hundreds of times and essentially developed many years of prospecting experience in simulation. He ended up finishing the mission in nine days.

====First Holotech Assignment====

That performance did not go unnoticed. [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]], impressed by both the ingenuity and the discipline behind the operation, personally put in a recommendation to Kaire Nat-Sa, the [[Defense Minister]] and Main Administrator of the [[Department of Holotech]]. Soon after, Gav received a formal communication from Holotech headquarters.

Known as the Federation’s hidden engine for innovation, Holotech specialized in turning individual talent into institutional capability. Gav began working under Kaire’s direction outside of [[Department of Operations|Operations]] work on the Trade Federation Management System. Because of his interest in asteroid field prospecting tactics at the time, his first development task he was assigned was to integrate a prototype asteroid field deposit tracking system into the main Management System, which at the time was operating separately. It would be the first Holotech assignment of many.

====First Library Card====

[[File:TF Library Gav Lucky.png|250px|thumb|Gav standing in the Library in Forsetti admiring a statue of [[Kurner Dahtar]]]]

Working in Holotech meant many trips to the Federation Library, looking up protocols and technical blueprints. Because he spent so much time there, on Y26 D233 he volunteered as an archivist. Not only did he fall in love with library science and circulation, but it allowed him access to many of the more restricted sections of the archives. Not long after, [[State Minister]] [[Thion Roseland]], who was also essentially acting as interim Chief Archivist, stepped down from his post and relinquished all State and Library duties.

The Library grew even quieter in Thion Roseland’s absence. One evening, Gav found himself alone among the shelves, methodically replacing holobooks, the soft hum of the preservation systems his only company. In that stillness, the Library began to feel less like a workplace and more like a sanctuary. Feeling a flicker of mischief with no one watching, he wandered into the Chief Archivist’s chambers. Minister Roseland had spent little time there, preferring his office at the [[Ministry of State]], and the room bore the signs, with dust gathering on the desk, stale air, and shelves untouched for weeks.

Drawers yielded little of interest until he found it: an unmarked access key. Curiosity piqued, Gav experimented, discovering that the key granted him the ability to withdraw blank holobooks from restricted storage and, more importantly, to author new entries within the Library’s secure archive. It was an archivist’s dream and an invitation to shape history.

He knew exactly where to begin. Drawing on months of late-night reading and note-taking, he began work on a serialized chronicle he had long imagined: This Month in Trade Federation History. With unrestricted access to the Federation’s historical records, he could weave together recovered archives, oral histories, and rediscovered GNS clippings into a living narrative of the Federation’s evolution. On Y26 D233, he released the first issue, [[This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 26 • Month 8]], to wide acclaim among those who cared for the Federation’s legacy.

The project lit a fire. Gav started expanding other holobooks, merging details from cross-referenced sources and building comprehensive indexes. His work quickly caught the attention of senior officials, and before long, he was entrusted with the responsibilities of Interim Chief Archivist. In this capacity, he authored the [[Library Charter]], codifying the institution’s purpose and scope; documented the Modus Operandi for the Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative; and designed the Federation’s official [[Chain of Command]] diagram.

He also transformed an unused section of the Library into a permanent Art Museum exhibit, curating a collection of recovered Federation visual history. This moved Captain Hartroff Parmenion and so he dug up his old findings from his Archeological Investigations in Federation History project, featuring former logos of past Operations [[Flight Team|Flight Teams]]. To Gav, this was preservation as strategy. Heritage and identity, he knew, were themselves forms of power, and a well-tended history could be as potent a weapon as any fleet.

====First Slabbing Mission - Kuna`s Tail VII====

=====A Blue Milk Run=====

It was Year 26 Day 248. Gav was looking through his standard issue flight team datapad searching for his next mission when he saw [[Kuna`s Tail Economic Development Project Year 26|an announcement about an economic development happening on Kuna`s Tail VII]]. For flight team members like himself, this meant a plethora of "slabbing" missions had been posted. What would happen is a TF service member would be assigned as the leader of a "slabbing squad"--a ragtag group of mercenary riflemen--and their mandate was to "clear" each planned city site of all hostile life forms. This ranged from groups of bandits to flocks of creatures. Anything that would interfere with construction that was not authorized by the Federation was to be removed by force. It was essentially a glorified pest control operation. There were rumors that many bandit groups of Diathim, Fosh, and Toydarian descent had been spotted, along with colossal sized [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=408 streaked velkers] and [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=451 purrgils]. Needless to say, it was not a mission for the faint of heart, but Gav was up to the task in hopes of rounding out his work experience. Corresponding with [[Alories Tanus]], a fellow service member he had met in his travels, about the potential dangers, Tanus replied to his holomessage:

<blockquote>
It's pretty easy! You won't die haha. Just watch your medical supplies, inspect your riflemen make sure they are equipped with their standard issue [[A280]], and keep at a distance of 7-8 clicks. Why don't you work on latitude 16? Start at longitude 19 and meet Captain Parmenion in the middle. I've mostly cleared that site already so it'll be a good way to ease into it.
</blockquote>

Mostly cleared... see a familiar face... Alories made it sound like a blue milk run. So he signed up for the mission and set his [https://guide.swcombine.com/wiki/NavComp NavComp] to Kuna`s Tail VII. It took him five days in hyperspace to get there, which he spent leisurely tinkering on holotech projects and scribbling in his holobooks.

=====A Rag-Tag Bunch=====

On Day 255, he exited hyperspace and arrived in orbit of Kuna`s Tail VII. He was to report to the Lucrehulk Battleship Basilisk to rendezvous with his slabbing squad. But the first thing he had to do was find a jetpack. He was told by Lt. Commander Gisa that there might be extras at the entrance of the ship, otherwise he would have to go to the outfitter on Dor. Well, there was not, but he decided to walk around the ship until finally he found an armoury that had an extra. ''That's why they call me Lucky,'' he chuckled to himself. The whole side mission made him quite late to the briefing...

He approached the lineup and introduced himself.

<blockquote>
Greetings! Apologies for the tardiness... My name is Cadet First Class Lucky. I will be leading the slabbing mission for the coming days...
</blockquote>

As he briefed the squad, he noticed mixed reactions. Amseth Onasi, a Hapan in some sort of uniform, listened respectfully. A pair of Gamorreans grumbled to each other, judging their leader and compatriots of varying statures, all dwarfed in comparison to their own.

<blockquote>
''At least he is Porcine, but barely clears 100cm...'' said the one Gamorrean.

''I heard it's his first slab mission, take orders with grain of spice... and why are Ewok and Aleena here? They can barely lift their rifle...'' said the other.
</blockquote>

The Ewok simply stood and tilted his head occasionally as Gav spoke, while the Aleena looked like someone who was trying to convince themselves, and others, that they were ready for something they were not.

Gav walked down the line and inspected each member of the squad, making sure each had a rifle and a jetpack. Unfortunately, one of the members did not have a jetpack. He had no confidence that there were any extra jetpacks on the ship, so he said they would have to sit out and maybe if there's a supply run at some point they could join in.

<blockquote>
''11 instead of 12, no biggie,'' he thought. ''Plenty of medical supplies, one can stay inside the ship in case we need to make a run for it. It'll be fine...''
</blockquote>

He had a slight feeling in his gut that things were not going as well as he had hope, maybe an even slighter feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn't put a finger on it. ''Too late now,'' he said under his breath. ''Too late now. We have to get moving.''

=====The First Encounter=====

[[File:Gav_Lucky_outfitted.jpg|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky, armed and ready for action]]

The crew loaded onto Gav's [[ATR-6]] gunboat and began their descent to 19-16. From the atmosphere the site looked acquiescent; not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Soon they arrived on the "surface", which, being that Kuna`s Tail VII was a gas planet, simply meant an altitude that was ideal for building a floating city; close enough to the gas to mine it without suffocating. Gav had spoken to some old Academy friends on best strategies. ''Hug the perimeter so you don't get ambushed- Move a couple clicks and then go outside and scan with your macrobinoculars- I bounce between the four corners- you should only need to go between two positions...'' Needless to say, he would have to see what worked best for him. Hopefully his squad wouldn't notice that he had no idea what he was doing...

He decided to try the outskirts idea. He started in a corner of the site and started going around the outside. He would move a couple clicks, very cautiously, and get out to check with his macrobinoculars. After a while, his squad started getting restless, which he took as a sign that it was normal to move a bit quicker. So he moved about 6 or 7 clicks and got out of the ATR.

There it was. Hovering with his jetpack, he saw it with his very own eyes: a bloodied, half shot-to-death streaked velker. It was massive, but injured badly, presumably the blue milk run Alories left him. ''Thank You Alories!'' He thought confidently. He popped his head back inside the ATR and said, ''Alright crew, pile out!''

They began to open fire on the poor velker, its screeches terrifying yet muffled by several clicks of gas, but he knew it was for the greater good. He looked upon his crew and felt a sense of pride seeing them in formation hovering in the air, rifles pointed in the same direction, except... ''Wait a minute,'' he thought to himself as he noticed a gap in the line of rifles. There hovered the Aleena, Alsten Endel, without a rifle! Just kind of flailing his arms around to make it look like he was doing something, fooling around with his equipment, as if he wouldn't be noticed!

[[File:Alsten_flailing.png|500px]]

<blockquote>
Gav: ALSTEN, WHAT IN THE VICEROY'S NAME ARE YOU DOING!? WHERE IS YOUR STANDARD ISSUE!?

Alsten: SIR! I WAS WORRIED ABOUT MY JETPACK--BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!--CORRECTLY AND--SCREEEEEECH!--SURE IT--

Gav: ENOUGH! I CAN'T HEAR A KRIFFING THING YOU'RE SAYING! JUST STAND BACK AND--

Alsten: WHAT SIR? WHAT DID YOU SAY?

''Gav flew over to him and pulled him behind the firing line before grabbing him by the pack straps and yanking him up close face to face.

Gav: STAY! PUT!
</blockquote>

Eventually the screeching died down and the velker slowly fell out of the air into the gassy abyss. Turns out Alsten had lost his gun on the Basilisk, or someone took it thinking it was their issue, who knows. Thankfully, Gav had an extra emergency A280 in the cockpit.

<blockquote>
Gav: This is my only extra A280. Use the strap, do NOT drop it or I will drop YOU off on this surface without propulsion! You got that?

Alsten: ''*gulp*'' Yes sir!
</blockquote>

=====Return Fire=====

Once the city construction was under way, Gav and crew were on to the next spot. They proceeded as before, moving a couple clicks and going out to check. Eventually they came upon not one, but two velkers. Even from a distance they looked humongous. But they were just as skittish as the last one despite being in perfect condition. Without knowing where the attack was coming from, all they could do is fly around, to no avail. Eventually, both velkers succumbed to the rifles and the gas beneath them.

''Another slab cleared,'' said Gav to himself. As they all started heading back to the ATR-6, they heard someone exclaim...

<blockquote>
Alsten: SOMETHIN' BIT ME!
</blockquote>

They all turned around to see Alsten holding his rear and groaning loudly. All of a sudden, the ATR-6 started getting pelted with projectiles. "AAaaAAh!!!" screamed Amseth, gripping his left shoulder. "TAKE COVER!" shouted Gav. They all retreated to the opposite side of the ship that was being peppered, mounted their rifles onto the roof of the ATR, and began to return fire. Gav went around and tended to Alsten and Amseth's wounds. "Hang in there!" he told them. Amseth was taking it well, as if he had seen action before. Alsten, on the other hand, was not so composed.

<blockquote>
Alsten: MY ARSE IS ON FIRE!!

Gav: Hang in there Alsten! It looks like it went straight through, it's just a flesh wound!

Alsten: IT STINGS! I'M GONNA PASS OUT!
</blockquote>

Gav grabbed Alsten and guided him back into the ship before returning to the fight. It was a long battle, but eventually Gav confirmed the last bandit had fallen using his macrobinoculars.

When they got back inside the ship, Alsten was crying.

<blockquote>
Alsten: Sir... you saved my life... ''*sniffles*'' how can I ever repay you...

Gav: Alsten, I didn't save-- ''Gav paused...'' you can pay me back by getting back out there and helping us finish this mission.

Alsten: Yes sir! I just need a minute for the meds to kick in...
</blockquote>

=====There She Glows!=====

Kuna's Tail VII had a way of making even the most hardened sentients feel small. Despite this, the crew was beginning to move like a proper unit and the work they were doing began to feel routine. The gunboat drifted along the perimeter lights-out, quiet under a lid of pale cloud, the gas below moving like a slow ocean with no waves. Gav felt that chill go up his spine again. What was a whisper before was now a pounding in his chest, but there was no stopping the gunboat. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

They touched down at the next marker and fanned out. The whole crew now had their macrobinoculars up, but no one detected any movement. It was so eerie that even the Gamorreans stopped grumbling. Gav raised a gloved hand and the unit slid forward in twos, jetpacks feathering over the gas. The site's construction pylons stood like toothpicks stabbed into mist. They were a reminder that there ''was'' something here, otherwise the city construction would be underway; it was a reminder that battle was inevitable.

The first bandit group caught a bug and broke the quiet from the west scaffolds. HB-5s and BT 500s hammered the ATR's plating and sent sparks across the viewports. Amseth barely flinched, took a round across the pauldron, planted his A280 on the gunwale, and answered with neat, surgical bursts. The Gamorreans roared like someone had insulted their ancestry and hosed the scaffolds. Gav cut the air with his hand, called the ranges, and walked the fire in. Between the experience of the squad members and the power and range of their A280s, once they realized they didn't stand a chance, the west side folded fast.

Then the second group lit up from the south cranes. This position was a bit smarter due to the elevation. Shots licked the top of a Gamorrean's pack and sent him pinwheeling. Alsten yelped and threw himself under the ATR's wing, then popped back up, white-knuckled but determined, and for once remembered to check his safety before pulling the trigger. Eventually, one last quiet thud echoed and the return fire stopped.

"Hold your fire!" said Gav, holding up a closed fist.

Gav took a slow lap with the macros. The slab returned to that library hush he was starting to think was worse than noise. He opened his mouth to call it clear... when the shadows moved.

Shapes the size of frigates turned inside the fog, low and patient, as if the whole world were a lagoon and they had just surfaced to breathe. They came on without hurry, the way big things move when they do not need to prove how big they are.

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| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000"| [[File:Purgills.png|200px]]
|}

Purrgils--you hear about them, you see holos. None of that prepares you for a living wall of muscle and light deciding your city site is now a mating ground, or your hyperlane is now a migratory path. Even at a distance their presence pressed at the chest. The nearest drifted across a bank of cloud and the entire squad went still, rifles aimed at the beasts but not quite aware that they might not fire even if Gav gave the word. But Gav knew the damage these creatures could cause and, unfortunately, it was their job to make sure the citizens of the Federation who started a life here did not have to worry about it. It was his job to make the tough calls, and it was the crew's job to follow orders. His next order was spoken in a monotone voice, to let the crew know that he knew the gravity of his call, and that it was okay that it did not feel good, but it was not him, but the Viceroy which was the decider, he a marshall of that will, and the crew an extension of him.

''Fire.''

The squad answered as one. A ragged volley of red lanced through the haze, striking along the purrgils’ flanks. The giants shuddered, not with fear but irritation, rolling in slow arcs as if to show just how little their rifles meant. Then the light began.

It started deep under the skin, a pulse of violet swelling into indigo, crawling the length of their bodies like lightning trapped under ice. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. Gav knew what was coming next. He had read reports, heard the stories, and in that moment, he understood why spacers dreaded this sight more than the creatures themselves.

The nearest purrgil blurred at the edges, its bulk dimming until it simply was not there anymore. The second followed, vanishing into the mist.

“High sky, reacquire!” Gav called.

Minutes later, the shapes resolved again, farther out. Another volley. Another bloom of violet. Another blink into nothing. The third time it happened, the glow rolling up the spine of the larger beast, Alsten’s voice cut through the comms:

“There she glows!”

Half the squad groaned, the other half laughed, and Gav could only shake his head. The name stuck instantly, repeated every time the halo began to build. The fight turned into a deadly game of dejarik... move, fire, vanish, repeat... each exchange drawing more from the crew’s dwindling reserves of patience and bacta.

They tried to box them in toward the pylons, tried to flank and drive them east, tried holding fire until they crossed the open lanes. None of it worked for long. Every time the light appeared beneath that thick hide, they were gone before the next breath.

On the sixth pass, the pair did not return. Whether they had decided to leave or had simply moved beyond the slab’s perimeter, Gav could not say. The mist closed behind them, leaving only silence and the faint shimmer of heat along the barrel of his rifle.

He scanned one last time with the macros, seeing nothing but the skeletal frame of the city-to-be. Then he slung the rifle and keyed the comm.

“Form up. We’re done here.”

As the ATR-6 lifted away, the crew settled into the familiar quiet that came after hard work without celebration. Their medkits were light, their packs lighter. Gav’s ribs ached where the bacta patch clung, and he could feel the sting of every bruise through his armor.

Time for that supply run, rearm, and rethink the plan. Maybe he could research what technology was available there come up with something before they got back. But he had to think fast...

=====Resupply, Regroup, Rethink=====

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="left" width="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Hyperspace.gif|275px]]
|}

Gav set course for Dor, more specifically, the Endor Palace Member Outfitters, where even the most battered field team could walk away looking parade-ready.

The resupply run was deliberate. Fresh A280s with factory calibrations. Replacement armor plates. Macrobinoculars that didn’t lag. Jetpacks with more thrust than wheeze. And pairs of multisensor packs to try something Gav had read on his datapad while studying equipment holorecords... When they lifted again to return to the next slab, the crew looked sharper, heavier, and, Gav hoped, ready for a different style of fight.

This time, he planned to put eyes where the enemy didn’t expect them.

The east side got Alsten. At 17,11, the ridge ran close to where velkers had been spotted earlier, and the little Aleena’s discomfort was obvious.

:Alsten: Sir, this is awfully close to them.

Gav shoved a multisensor pack into his chest.

:Gav: That’s the point. You’ll be fine. Keep low, stay sharp, and if anything moves that shouldn’t, call it in.

Leaving him there felt wrong, but having a live scout in place could save the squad from being ambushed and get them all home sooner. From there, Gav moved the ATR-6 along the western perimeter, working toward 4,11. When the moment felt right, he brought the ship down and dropped another scout to cover the gap, an Ewok named Wolam Highwind, who took the multisensor pack and jumped out of the gunboat without so much as a word.

For a while, it worked. The east and west placements gave them early warnings and cut down on ambushes. But the gaps still showed. Gav had fallen into the same trap he had once mocked in others; he assumed the hostiles would stay to the middle because that’s where most of the fighting happened. That’s how you learned the hard way about the corners: you didn’t need to check them... until you did. And when the enemy slipped into that blind space, the range rings meant nothing. They could vanish completely, only to reappear where your lines were weakest.

The first warning came from the west. The Ewok posted there, who was armed and out in the open, suddenly lit up on sensors. Bandits had come out of nowhere, closing to within a click before anyone could react. The Ewok returned fire immediately, but the flash of his blaster only drew more rounds his way.

Gav didn’t think. He dove in with the squad, A280 singing, cutting down the closest threats before they could finish the job. By the time he reached the Ewok, the little scout was down, armor dented, weapon still gripped in one limp hand. The medics worked fast, but it was too late. The lesson to Gav was clear.

Every placement, every piece of kit, every decision had weight. Get it wrong, and you didn’t just lose your position; you risked sending someone home in a body bag.

Gav stood over the body bag as the medics loaded him aboard. As he entered the gunboat behind them, the crew stared at Wolam's body. They knew it was a risk they all understood when they signed up, some thought they would have made a different call or tried something different, some thought nothing at all. Whether they were mad, scared, or simply didn't want to feel the guilt that Gav was feeling, they couldn't look him in the eye. He knew he had to say something.

:Gav: I know what you're all thinking. I made a bad call, and got Wolam killed. And you'd be right. This one's on me. And I don't know how I'm ever going to sleep again, or how I'm going to knock on his family's hut and give them the news. But if he hadn't have alerted us to the ambush, it may be more than just him laying there. But it's on me... it's on me... and I have to live with that... be thankful you don't...

His eyes started to water, but he held it back and got into the cockpit, set the autopilot to the next slab, and started scribbling in his holobook again. Going over all his notes, he had an epiphany, something became very clear... it was even riskier than the last idea... but if it worked, they would never lose the upper hand again. He heard the voice of Minister Oodoov in his ear, who had visited the Academy once to give a lecture on the scientific work that the Interior is responsible for...

''...This is the dark art of experimenting; the field guides, the holorecords, the technical specifications... are sometimes a lie.''

=====Castling Ewoks Formation=====

The next slab was to be run with the so-called "Castling Ewoks Formation," a peculiar formation Gav had concocted during his journaling session. The tactic was simple on paper: place two ''unarmed'' Ewoks, each fitted with multisensors, at fixed positions 1,21 and 20,21 on the slab grid. From these back-corner perches, their overlapping sensor fields made it nearly impossible for hostiles to slip away unseen. Why it worked so well was anyone's guess. Some swore it was the Ewoks' size and unarmed status that kept them invisible to the enemy’s targeting logic, their naturally good perception allowing them to setup sensors in just the right position; others claimed the bandits simply refused to acknowledge being threatened by something knee-high, unarmed, and furry.

The formation worked surprisingly well and the unit made quick work of the found pests, the Ewoks sensors preventing the enemy from evading their forces. It didn't make up for Wolam's death, which Gav would have to explain for when he got back, but he felt they were safer and more effective now than ever before.

Just as planned, Gav and crew linked up with Captain Parmenion on the way to the next site. He and the Joint Defense Fleet had been orchestrating the broader clearing effort. From here on, they would be working in conjunction with something they called the Gambit Maneuver, a "precision assignment protocol" designed to keep pressure on the remaining gaps in the planet’s defensive perimeter. Gav's role was to start in the middle of the planet at longitude 14, latitude 10, then head westward to support Director Minwolf and Crewman Goriski where the line stretched thin.

The first contact came quickly: a bandit group holding the approaches with a velker flock drifting just behind them. The initial exchange went badly. Their fire was heavy, the supply of bacta patches less effective than they had hoped. Shots burned through Gav's pauldron and left a dull ache in his side. He toggled comms to Minwolf for advice.

:Gav: Director Minwolf, please advise, this isn't holding. The bacta is not working fast enough.

:Minwolf: You need refills, not patches. And don’t use Ryfills unless you want to spend the next day poisoned.

He logged the warning. Survive the slab first, worry about the outfitter later.

The bandits continued to ignore the Ewoks, even as the little scouts relayed exact firing coordinates to the squad. Whether they could not detect them on sensors or simply could not bring themselves to target them, Gav didn't know. But their presence was decisive. With their eyes guiding the team, he kept the squad at the optimum range of nine clicks, far enough to blunt the worst of the incoming fire, close enough to land clean shots and conserve medical supplies. Within two controlled exchanges, the bandits were broken.

With that threat dealt with, their focus shifted to the velkers. According to his field notes, he had observed that they favored the far corners once disturbed, and the northeast quadrant was unnaturally quiet. If his calculations were right, moving to 12,7 would put then at exactly nine clicks from them. As he eased the ''ATR-6'' into position, he pulled one of his last bacta patches and pressed it over the burn along my ribs. The cool sting was a small comfort.

Somewhere ahead, hidden in the shifting gas, the next fight was waiting.

===Flight Sergeant - The Savage Squirrels===

====Borrowed by the DoR====

Mammoth mission

====Operation ''REDACTED''====

==Service Record==

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Directorate
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
! style="text-align:center;" | Work Experience
|-
| Y27 D15 - Present
| [[File:O-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Ensign</center>
| 
|-
| Y26 D358 - Present
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Archivist</center>
| 
* Published issues for the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series

|-
| Y26 D272 - Y27 D15
| [[File:E-4.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Flight Sergeant</center>
| 
* Transported x4 Mammoth loads of Meleenium from an asteroid field depot to a main depot logging over 110 flight hours in 5 days (Year 26 Day 269-274). Mission required to execution of microjumping in order to avoid asteriod field damage to the rig exiting hyper on the wrong side of the field due to Endor's Gate X-1 as opposed to the desired Y+1 location of the depot.
* For Operation Durelium Storm, constructed x3 Durelium Mine Cities and prospected 22 quadrants on a Vex II in 9 days, discovering x9 Tibannagas deposits.
* Conducted research on asteroid field prospecting for the [[Directorate of Resources|DoR]] and compiled recommendations to improve the [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]] Asteroid Prospecting Tool
* Conducted research on terrestrial prospecting for the [[Ministry of the Interior|MoI]] and compiled recommendations for general policy and strategies for finding specific raw materials
* Planetary prospected Dorriella II and III
* Slabbed and constructed x11 Mine Cities in 14 days

|-
| Y26 D207 - Present
|
| <center>[[File: Tf-holotech-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Developer</center>
| 
* Integrate existing Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool into [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]], incorporating database driven persistence and existing permissions system
* Spearheaded the initial Member Module and Automated Payroll features for [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]]
* Enhanced the Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool with pre-prospecting features and auto-assist technology

|-
| Y26 D233 - Y26 D358
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Chief Archivist</center>
| 
* Began publishing the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series
* Envisioned and authored the ''[[Library Charter]]''
* Spearheaded the ''[[Chain of Command]]'' Project
* Launched the [[Library_Charter#Continuity_Restoration_and_Standardization_Initiative|Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative]]
* Launched the [[Library Art Museum]]

|-
| Y26 D205 - Y26 D272
| [[File:E-2.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Cadet First Class</center>
| 
* Prospect asteroid field with 13 revealed/11 unrevealed in 9 days averaging 5-6 scans a day for a total of 48 scans
* Transported x3 MC-30b to new system w/ G-1A taxi
* Cleared 15 slabs on Kuna`s Tail VII in 13 days

|-
| Y26 D205
| [[File:E-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Doaseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training]] Cadet</center>
| 
* Passed the ''[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training Standard Exam]]''
* Took the ''[[Department of Admissions|Trade Federation Oath]]''

|}

==Awards and Commendations==
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
! style="text-align:center;" | Reason
|-
| [[Image:DSM-L1.jpg]]
| [[Distinguished Service Award|Distinguished Service Award - Level 1]]
| [[Minwolf Kandar]]
| Y27 D15
| We also have another member who wears multiple hats in the Ministry of State. Until my last announcement, Gav Lucky has served as the Chief Archivist. He was responsible for getting the organizational ball rolling and moving forward with uncovering the history that all of us share as citizens of the Trade Federation. What many of you do not know is that he has worked tirelessly over the past few months in the background. He has worked as an assistant to Kaire Nat-Sa in helping to develop experimental tools and code that all of us will benefit from when we use TFMS. For his dedication to his work and the people of the Trade Federation, I present to him the First Level of the Distinguished Service Award.
|-
| [[Image:PC.png]]
| [[Prospectors Cross]]
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
| For his ongoing work in demystifying Asteroid fields and Asteroid Field Prospecting in particular.
|-
| [[Image:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty Medal - Viceroy Vas Felix]]
| Automatic
| Y26 D205
|
|}
 

[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]

Gav Lucky

2025-12-10T22:55:49Z

Gav Lucky:

{| class="infobox bordered" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="right" dth="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Gav_Lucky_ava.jpg|150px]]
|-
| style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Biographical Information'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Full Name:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Uglogavste Lukiil
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Aliases:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| ''Gav Lucky'' ''Dogbone'' ''The Space Pig''
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Homeworld:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Gentes
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Born:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Year -4 Day 143
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Physical Description'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Race:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Ugnaught
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Gender:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Male
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Height:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| 142 cm
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Colouring:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Porcelain
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Hair Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Brunette
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Eye Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Brown
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Trade Federation Service'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Status:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Active Duty
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Ministry:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| [[File:Moiseal.png|30px]] [[Ministry of the Interior|Interior]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Department:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| [[File:Operations-seal.png|30px]] [[Department of Operations|Operations]] - [[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Position:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"|
[[File:O-1.png|130px]] [[Chain of Command|Ensign]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Part-Time:
|style="padding-left:5px;"|
[[File:Archives-seal.png|30px]] [[Library_team|Library]] - [[Library_team|Archivist]] 
[[File:Tf-holotech-seal.png|30px]] [[Department_of_Holotech|Holotech]] - [[Department_of_Holotech|Developer]] 

|}

 

==Background==

[[File:Colossal-class_Heavy_Carrier_Ugnorgrad_I.png|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky's personal flagship the [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Ships&ID=253 Colossal-class Heavy Carrier] Ugnorgrad I]] 

Born beneath the heavy, sulfurous skies of Gentes, Uglogavste Lukiil came into the galaxy with a mind tuned for machinery and a soul already weighed by the oppression of his people. Like so many Ugnaughts before him, he escaped the drudgery of servitude, drifting to Bespin where the towering halls of Ugnorgrad hummed with welding arcs and the quiet desperation of survival.

On Bespin, he found refuge in the union workshops and data cores, refining not just his mechanical skill but a deep mastery of systems: computer networks, logistics algorithms, capital ship protocols. By day he was a quiet laborer; by night, a silent student of power, watching how the flow of credits and contracts shaped destinies far more decisively than any hydrospanner.
[[File:Holochess_screenshot.png|left|200px]]

His true name, Uglogavste Lukiil, was a tangle to most tongues. Smirking at the galaxy’s discomfort, he offered a simpler handle: "You may call me Gav Luck." It was meant as a quick, memorable alias, something that sounded like "Give Luck" and carried a hint of charm and fortune. But in the cantinas of Bespin, the name began to evolve. Gav spent long evenings hunched over holochess boards and pazaak tables, usually walking away with his credits intact or only slightly lighter. Then, one night, he hit a small jackpot on the slots, the kind of rare win that cantina patrons remembered for years. From then on, the regulars started calling him "Gav Lucky" as a teasing nod to that single windfall and a name that, to his mild annoyance, stuck harder than the original. Yet beneath that easy nickname and easy grin lay a mind haunted by the fate of powerless workers, scarred by watching entire communities collapse under the weight of financial neglect. For Gav Lucky, money was not mere currency; it was armor, weapon, and salvation.

==Career Timeline==

===An OOC Introduction===

<blockquote>
Storytelling has always been the lens through which I experience Star Wars roleplay, and Star Wars Combine is no different. For me, the game isn’t just a set of mechanics, but rather a living galaxy, and every choice deserves to be remembered. My habit of chronicling in detail began during my work on [[Library Art Museum#The Wall|The Wall]], when I saw so many sparsely populated, outdated, or even empty service pages, alongside long-overdue Tour of Duty badge and member reward requests on the forums. All of these things require keeping good records which, at present, isn’t centrally tracked. I wanted to make it easier for future admins, but also to ensure that no moment of my own journey in the [[Trade Federation]] or SWC was lost to time. In both the game and real life, I think journaling is a vital tool for those suffering from the human condition, especially for someone like me who so easily forgets people, places, and events as the years pass. As [[Hartroff Parmenion]] once said to me after reading my Library works: ''Verba volant, scripta manent''—'''spoken words fly away, written words remain'''. Some say I have the “Gift of Gav,” a tendency to turn even the smallest update into a saga. I’ll take that as a compliment. After all, the fun of SWC is not only in what we do, but in how we tell the tale. — The Player
</blockquote>

===Cadet===

====Joining Up====

His path to the Federation began in the most unassuming of ways. He was standing in a dingy spaceport terminal, waiting for a delayed transport, when a Holonet recruitment broadcast flickered to life above the crowd. The advertisement was crisp, authoritative, and emblazoned with the seal of the Trade Federation Department of Admissions.

<center>[[File:Doaseal.png|200px]][[File:Samantha_dordoli_ava.png|200px]]</center>

Front and center stood [[Samantha Dordoli]], delivering a precise and confident appeal to those seeking opportunity, structure, and purpose. In her words, Gav heard not just an invitation, but a promise: that order and ambition could be harnessed to lift those who were willing to work for it. By the time his transport arrived, he had already filled out the enlistment forms.

Driven by a relentless need to rewrite his people’s story and that of his own, he set his sights on the Trade Federation: a colossus of order, profit, and prestige. With each promotion and each credit earned, Gav Lucky would step further away from the darkness of Gentes and deeper into the halls of influence, where he would secure not just personal wealth but a fortress of resources strong enough to protect any who still bear the scars of servitude.

In every deal, every convoy manifest, every whispered negotiation, echoed his core philosophy: power is the ultimate currency, and luck favors those who build it themselves.

====The Academy====

[[File:Forsetticapital.png|300px|thumb|upright=1.65|Aeriel view of the Viceroyal Palace, and the surrounding areas of the city of Forsetti.]]

Cadet life was a shock both in its rigor and in its order. Assigned to a small cohort of recruits from across the galaxy, Gav quickly learned that the Academy was more than drills and data entry. It was a crucible for loyalty, skill, and adaptability. His knack for pattern recognition and logistical problem-solving made him an asset in training simulations, where he could predict enemy maneuvers and optimize fleet positioning with uncanny accuracy.
He passed the [[Basic Training Standard Exam]] and on Y26 D205, Gav stood before the Federation banner, right hand raised, and swore the [[Department_of_Admissions#Oath_to_the_Trade_Federation|Trade Federation Oath]]. For the first time, the weight of service felt heavier than the weight of survival.

===Cadet First Class - The Savage Squirrels===

====First Asteroid Field Prospecting Mission====

Assigned to the [[Department of Operations]] under the [[Ministry of the Interior]], Gav found himself in the ranks of the Savage Squirrels Flight Team, a unit as eccentric as it was effective. Under [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]] and Operations Director [[Dak Ironfist]], the team’s operations ranged from precision transport runs to asteroid field prospecting. Day-to-day orders came from [[Chain of Command|Lt. Commander]] [[Heuk Gisa]], whose terse directives left no room for hesitation.

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="left" width="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:AF_tool_screenshot.png|200px]]
|}

In those days, Gav started to make a name for himself with his sustained, methodical work. His first deployment was to an asteroid field outside of [[Ktil]] where he was tasked with reprospecting it. Using a standard issue GPS, he was able to pull Federation mining data and see that 13 previous uncovered deposits were still active with varying stability. The scanner also detected 11 undiscovered deposits. It was rough in the beginning as he tried to get his bearings. From speaking to instructors at the Academy, asteroid field prospecting was more of an art than a science. After the first couple days, he thought that there had to be a better way. During sleeping hours, he would stay up in the bunk of his [[Y-8]] mining vessel and run thought experiments on his datapad. He programmed a game that would generate random asteroid fields and place random deposits. He would play this game all night trying different strategies and also updating an AI assistant to predict the next best possible asteroid to scan. After a couple nights, he started to see patterns and develop what he thought was a winning strategy. On the third day, he had played the game hundreds of times and essentially developed many years of prospecting experience in simulation. He ended up finishing the mission in nine days.

====First Holotech Assignment====

That performance did not go unnoticed. [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]], impressed by both the ingenuity and the discipline behind the operation, personally put in a recommendation to Kaire Nat-Sa, the [[Defense Minister]] and Main Administrator of the [[Department of Holotech]]. Soon after, Gav received a formal communication from Holotech headquarters.

Known as the Federation’s hidden engine for innovation, Holotech specialized in turning individual talent into institutional capability. Gav began working under Kaire’s direction outside of [[Department of Operations|Operations]] work on the Trade Federation Management System. Because of his interest in asteroid field prospecting tactics at the time, his first development task he was assigned was to integrate a prototype asteroid field deposit tracking system into the main Management System, which at the time was operating separately. It would be the first Holotech assignment of many.

====First Library Card====

[[File:TF Library Gav Lucky.png|250px|thumb|Gav standing in the Library in Forsetti admiring a statue of [[Kurner Dahtar]]]]

Working in Holotech meant many trips to the Federation Library, looking up protocols and technical blueprints. Because he spent so much time there, on Y26 D233 he volunteered as an archivist. Not only did he fall in love with library science and circulation, but it allowed him access to many of the more restricted sections of the archives. Not long after, [[State Minister]] [[Thion Roseland]], who was also essentially acting as interim Chief Archivist, stepped down from his post and relinquished all State and Library duties.

The Library grew even quieter in Thion Roseland’s absence. One evening, Gav found himself alone among the shelves, methodically replacing holobooks, the soft hum of the preservation systems his only company. In that stillness, the Library began to feel less like a workplace and more like a sanctuary. Feeling a flicker of mischief with no one watching, he wandered into the Chief Archivist’s chambers. Minister Roseland had spent little time there, preferring his office at the [[Ministry of State]], and the room bore the signs, with dust gathering on the desk, stale air, and shelves untouched for weeks.

Drawers yielded little of interest until he found it: an unmarked access key. Curiosity piqued, Gav experimented, discovering that the key granted him the ability to withdraw blank holobooks from restricted storage and, more importantly, to author new entries within the Library’s secure archive. It was an archivist’s dream and an invitation to shape history.

He knew exactly where to begin. Drawing on months of late-night reading and note-taking, he began work on a serialized chronicle he had long imagined: This Month in Trade Federation History. With unrestricted access to the Federation’s historical records, he could weave together recovered archives, oral histories, and rediscovered GNS clippings into a living narrative of the Federation’s evolution. On Y26 D233, he released the first issue, [[This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 26 • Month 8]], to wide acclaim among those who cared for the Federation’s legacy.

The project lit a fire. Gav started expanding other holobooks, merging details from cross-referenced sources and building comprehensive indexes. His work quickly caught the attention of senior officials, and before long, he was entrusted with the responsibilities of Interim Chief Archivist. In this capacity, he authored the [[Library Charter]], codifying the institution’s purpose and scope; documented the Modus Operandi for the Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative; and designed the Federation’s official [[Chain of Command]] diagram.

He also transformed an unused section of the Library into a permanent Art Museum exhibit, curating a collection of recovered Federation visual history. This moved Captain Hartroff Parmenion and so he dug up his old findings from his Archeological Investigations in Federation History project, featuring former logos of past Operations [[Flight Team|Flight Teams]]. To Gav, this was preservation as strategy. Heritage and identity, he knew, were themselves forms of power, and a well-tended history could be as potent a weapon as any fleet.

====First Slabbing Mission====

=====A Blue Milk Run=====

It was Year 26 Day 248. Gav was looking through his standard issue flight team datapad searching for his next mission when he saw [[Kuna`s Tail Economic Development Project Year 26|an announcement about an economic development happening on Kuna`s Tail VII]]. For flight team members like himself, this meant a plethora of "slabbing" missions had been posted. What would happen is a TF service member would be assigned as the leader of a "slabbing squad"--a ragtag group of mercenary riflemen--and their mandate was to "clear" each planned city site of all hostile life forms. This ranged from groups of bandits to flocks of creatures. Anything that would interfere with construction that was not authorized by the Federation was to be removed by force. It was essentially a glorified pest control operation. There were rumors that many bandit groups of Diathim, Fosh, and Toydarian descent had been spotted, along with colossal sized [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=408 streaked velkers] and [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=451 purrgils]. Needless to say, it was not a mission for the faint of heart, but Gav was up to the task in hopes of rounding out his work experience. Corresponding with [[Alories Tanus]], a fellow service member he had met in his travels, about the potential dangers, Tanus replied to his holomessage:

<blockquote>
It's pretty easy! You won't die haha. Just watch your medical supplies, inspect your riflemen make sure they are equipped with their standard issue [[A280]], and keep at a distance of 7-8 clicks. Why don't you work on latitude 16? Start at longitude 19 and meet Captain Parmenion in the middle. I've mostly cleared that site already so it'll be a good way to ease into it.
</blockquote>

Mostly cleared... see a familiar face... Alories made it sound like a blue milk run. So he signed up for the mission and set his [https://guide.swcombine.com/wiki/NavComp NavComp] to Kuna`s Tail VII. It took him five days in hyperspace to get there, which he spent leisurely tinkering on holotech projects and scribbling in his holobooks.

=====A Rag-Tag Bunch=====

On Day 255, he exited hyperspace and arrived in orbit of Kuna`s Tail VII. He was to report to the Lucrehulk Battleship Basilisk to rendezvous with his slabbing squad. But the first thing he had to do was find a jetpack. He was told by Lt. Commander Gisa that there might be extras at the entrance of the ship, otherwise he would have to go to the outfitter on Dor. Well, there was not, but he decided to walk around the ship until finally he found an armoury that had an extra. ''That's why they call me Lucky,'' he chuckled to himself. The whole side mission made him quite late to the briefing...

He approached the lineup and introduced himself.

<blockquote>
Greetings! Apologies for the tardiness... My name is Cadet First Class Lucky. I will be leading the slabbing mission for the coming days...
</blockquote>

As he briefed the squad, he noticed mixed reactions. Amseth Onasi, a Hapan in some sort of uniform, listened respectfully. A pair of Gamorreans grumbled to each other, judging their leader and compatriots of varying statures, all dwarfed in comparison to their own.

<blockquote>
''At least he is Porcine, but barely clears 100cm...'' said the one Gamorrean.

''I heard it's his first slab mission, take orders with grain of spice... and why are Ewok and Aleena here? They can barely lift their rifle...'' said the other.
</blockquote>

The Ewok simply stood and tilted his head occasionally as Gav spoke, while the Aleena looked like someone who was trying to convince themselves, and others, that they were ready for something they were not.

Gav walked down the line and inspected each member of the squad, making sure each had a rifle and a jetpack. Unfortunately, one of the members did not have a jetpack. He had no confidence that there were any extra jetpacks on the ship, so he said they would have to sit out and maybe if there's a supply run at some point they could join in.

<blockquote>
''11 instead of 12, no biggie,'' he thought. ''Plenty of medical supplies, one can stay inside the ship in case we need to make a run for it. It'll be fine...''
</blockquote>

He had a slight feeling in his gut that things were not going as well as he had hope, maybe an even slighter feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn't put a finger on it. ''Too late now,'' he said under his breath. ''Too late now. We have to get moving.''

=====The First Encounter=====

[[File:Gav_Lucky_outfitted.jpg|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky, armed and ready for action]]

The crew loaded onto Gav's [[ATR-6]] gunboat and began their descent to 19-16. From the atmosphere the site looked acquiescent; not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Soon they arrived on the "surface", which, being that Kuna`s Tail VII was a gas planet, simply meant an altitude that was ideal for building a floating city; close enough to the gas to mine it without suffocating. Gav had spoken to some old Academy friends on best strategies. ''Hug the perimeter so you don't get ambushed- Move a couple clicks and then go outside and scan with your macrobinoculars- I bounce between the four corners- you should only need to go between two positions...'' Needless to say, he would have to see what worked best for him. Hopefully his squad wouldn't notice that he had no idea what he was doing...

He decided to try the outskirts idea. He started in a corner of the site and started going around the outside. He would move a couple clicks, very cautiously, and get out to check with his macrobinoculars. After a while, his squad started getting restless, which he took as a sign that it was normal to move a bit quicker. So he moved about 6 or 7 clicks and got out of the ATR.

There it was. Hovering with his jetpack, he saw it with his very own eyes: a bloodied, half shot-to-death streaked velker. It was massive, but injured badly, presumably the blue milk run Alories left him. ''Thank You Alories!'' He thought confidently. He popped his head back inside the ATR and said, ''Alright crew, pile out!''

They began to open fire on the poor velker, its screeches terrifying yet muffled by several clicks of gas, but he knew it was for the greater good. He looked upon his crew and felt a sense of pride seeing them in formation hovering in the air, rifles pointed in the same direction, except... ''Wait a minute,'' he thought to himself as he noticed a gap in the line of rifles. There hovered the Aleena, Alsten Endel, without a rifle! Just kind of flailing his arms around to make it look like he was doing something, fooling around with his equipment, as if he wouldn't be noticed!

[[File:Alsten_flailing.png|500px]]

<blockquote>
Gav: ALSTEN, WHAT IN THE VICEROY'S NAME ARE YOU DOING!? WHERE IS YOUR STANDARD ISSUE!?

Alsten: SIR! I WAS WORRIED ABOUT MY JETPACK--BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!--CORRECTLY AND--SCREEEEEECH!--SURE IT--

Gav: ENOUGH! I CAN'T HEAR A KRIFFING THING YOU'RE SAYING! JUST STAND BACK AND--

Alsten: WHAT SIR? WHAT DID YOU SAY?

''Gav flew over to him and pulled him behind the firing line before grabbing him by the pack straps and yanking him up close face to face.

Gav: STAY! PUT!
</blockquote>

Eventually the screeching died down and the velker slowly fell out of the air into the gassy abyss. Turns out Alsten had lost his gun on the Basilisk, or someone took it thinking it was their issue, who knows. Thankfully, Gav had an extra emergency A280 in the cockpit.

<blockquote>
Gav: This is my only extra A280. Use the strap, do NOT drop it or I will drop YOU off on this surface without propulsion! You got that?

Alsten: ''*gulp*'' Yes sir!
</blockquote>

=====Return Fire=====

Once the city construction was under way, Gav and crew were on to the next spot. They proceeded as before, moving a couple clicks and going out to check. Eventually they came upon not one, but two velkers. Even from a distance they looked humongous. But they were just as skittish as the last one despite being in perfect condition. Without knowing where the attack was coming from, all they could do is fly around, to no avail. Eventually, both velkers succumbed to the rifles and the gas beneath them.

''Another slab cleared,'' said Gav to himself. As they all started heading back to the ATR-6, they heard someone exclaim...

<blockquote>
Alsten: SOMETHIN' BIT ME!
</blockquote>

They all turned around to see Alsten holding his rear and groaning loudly. All of a sudden, the ATR-6 started getting pelted with projectiles. "AAaaAAh!!!" screamed Amseth, gripping his left shoulder. "TAKE COVER!" shouted Gav. They all retreated to the opposite side of the ship that was being peppered, mounted their rifles onto the roof of the ATR, and began to return fire. Gav went around and tended to Alsten and Amseth's wounds. "Hang in there!" he told them. Amseth was taking it well, as if he had seen action before. Alsten, on the other hand, was not so composed.

<blockquote>
Alsten: MY ARSE IS ON FIRE!!

Gav: Hang in there Alsten! It looks like it went straight through, it's just a flesh wound!

Alsten: IT STINGS! I'M GONNA PASS OUT!
</blockquote>

Gav grabbed Alsten and guided him back into the ship before returning to the fight. It was a long battle, but eventually Gav confirmed the last bandit had fallen using his macrobinoculars.

When they got back inside the ship, Alsten was crying.

<blockquote>
Alsten: Sir... you saved my life... ''*sniffles*'' how can I ever repay you...

Gav: Alsten, I didn't save-- ''Gav paused...'' you can pay me back by getting back out there and helping us finish this mission.

Alsten: Yes sir! I just need a minute for the meds to kick in...
</blockquote>

=====There She Glows!=====

Kuna's Tail VII had a way of making even the most hardened sentients feel small. Despite this, the crew was beginning to move like a proper unit and the work they were doing began to feel routine. The gunboat drifted along the perimeter lights-out, quiet under a lid of pale cloud, the gas below moving like a slow ocean with no waves. Gav felt that chill go up his spine again. What was a whisper before was now a pounding in his chest, but there was no stopping the gunboat. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

They touched down at the next marker and fanned out. The whole crew now had their macrobinoculars up, but no one detected any movement. It was so eerie that even the Gamorreans stopped grumbling. Gav raised a gloved hand and the unit slid forward in twos, jetpacks feathering over the gas. The site's construction pylons stood like toothpicks stabbed into mist. They were a reminder that there ''was'' something here, otherwise the city construction would be underway; it was a reminder that battle was inevitable.

The first bandit group caught a bug and broke the quiet from the west scaffolds. HB-5s and BT 500s hammered the ATR's plating and sent sparks across the viewports. Amseth barely flinched, took a round across the pauldron, planted his A280 on the gunwale, and answered with neat, surgical bursts. The Gamorreans roared like someone had insulted their ancestry and hosed the scaffolds. Gav cut the air with his hand, called the ranges, and walked the fire in. Between the experience of the squad members and the power and range of their A280s, once they realized they didn't stand a chance, the west side folded fast.

Then the second group lit up from the south cranes. This position was a bit smarter due to the elevation. Shots licked the top of a Gamorrean's pack and sent him pinwheeling. Alsten yelped and threw himself under the ATR's wing, then popped back up, white-knuckled but determined, and for once remembered to check his safety before pulling the trigger. Eventually, one last quiet thud echoed and the return fire stopped.

"Hold your fire!" said Gav, holding up a closed fist.

Gav took a slow lap with the macros. The slab returned to that library hush he was starting to think was worse than noise. He opened his mouth to call it clear... when the shadows moved.

Shapes the size of frigates turned inside the fog, low and patient, as if the whole world were a lagoon and they had just surfaced to breathe. They came on without hurry, the way big things move when they do not need to prove how big they are.

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0;margin: 10px" align="left"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000"| [[File:Purgills.png|200px]]
|}

Purrgils--you hear about them, you see holos. None of that prepares you for a living wall of muscle and light deciding your city site is now a mating ground, or your hyperlane is now a migratory path. Even at a distance their presence pressed at the chest. The nearest drifted across a bank of cloud and the entire squad went still, rifles aimed at the beasts but not quite aware that they might not fire even if Gav gave the word. But Gav knew the damage these creatures could cause and, unfortunately, it was their job to make sure the citizens of the Federation who started a life here did not have to worry about it. It was his job to make the tough calls, and it was the crew's job to follow orders. His next order was spoken in a monotone voice, to let the crew know that he knew the gravity of his call, and that it was okay that it did not feel good, but it was not him, but the Viceroy which was the decider, he a marshall of that will, and the crew an extension of him.

''Fire.''

The squad answered as one. A ragged volley of red lanced through the haze, striking along the purrgils’ flanks. The giants shuddered, not with fear but irritation, rolling in slow arcs as if to show just how little their rifles meant. Then the light began.

It started deep under the skin, a pulse of violet swelling into indigo, crawling the length of their bodies like lightning trapped under ice. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. Gav knew what was coming next. He had read reports, heard the stories, and in that moment, he understood why spacers dreaded this sight more than the creatures themselves.

The nearest purrgil blurred at the edges, its bulk dimming until it simply was not there anymore. The second followed, vanishing into the mist.

“High sky, reacquire!” Gav called.

Minutes later, the shapes resolved again, farther out. Another volley. Another bloom of violet. Another blink into nothing. The third time it happened, the glow rolling up the spine of the larger beast, Alsten’s voice cut through the comms:

“There she glows!”

Half the squad groaned, the other half laughed, and Gav could only shake his head. The name stuck instantly, repeated every time the halo began to build. The fight turned into a deadly game of dejarik... move, fire, vanish, repeat... each exchange drawing more from the crew’s dwindling reserves of patience and bacta.

They tried to box them in toward the pylons, tried to flank and drive them east, tried holding fire until they crossed the open lanes. None of it worked for long. Every time the light appeared beneath that thick hide, they were gone before the next breath.

On the sixth pass, the pair did not return. Whether they had decided to leave or had simply moved beyond the slab’s perimeter, Gav could not say. The mist closed behind them, leaving only silence and the faint shimmer of heat along the barrel of his rifle.

He scanned one last time with the macros, seeing nothing but the skeletal frame of the city-to-be. Then he slung the rifle and keyed the comm.

“Form up. We’re done here.”

As the ATR-6 lifted away, the crew settled into the familiar quiet that came after hard work without celebration. Their medkits were light, their packs lighter. Gav’s ribs ached where the bacta patch clung, and he could feel the sting of every bruise through his armor.

Time for that supply run, rearm, and rethink the plan. Maybe he could research what technology was available there come up with something before they got back. But he had to think fast...

=====Resupply, Regroup, Rethink=====

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="left" width="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Hyperspace.gif|275px]]
|}

Gav set course for Dor, more specifically, the Endor Palace Member Outfitters, where even the most battered field team could walk away looking parade-ready.

The resupply run was deliberate. Fresh A280s with factory calibrations. Replacement armor plates. Macrobinoculars that didn’t lag. Jetpacks with more thrust than wheeze. And pairs of multisensor packs to try something Gav had read on his datapad while studying equipment holorecords... When they lifted again to return to the next slab, the crew looked sharper, heavier, and, Gav hoped, ready for a different style of fight.

This time, he planned to put eyes where the enemy didn’t expect them.

The east side got Alsten. At 17,11, the ridge ran close to where velkers had been spotted earlier, and the little Aleena’s discomfort was obvious.

:Alsten: Sir, this is awfully close to them.

Gav shoved a multisensor pack into his chest.

:Gav: That’s the point. You’ll be fine. Keep low, stay sharp, and if anything moves that shouldn’t, call it in.

Leaving him there felt wrong, but having a live scout in place could save the squad from being ambushed and get them all home sooner. From there, Gav moved the ATR-6 along the western perimeter, working toward 4,11. When the moment felt right, he brought the ship down and dropped another scout to cover the gap, an Ewok named Wolam Highwind, who took the multisensor pack and jumped out of the gunboat without so much as a word.

For a while, it worked. The east and west placements gave them early warnings and cut down on ambushes. But the gaps still showed. Gav had fallen into the same trap he had once mocked in others; he assumed the hostiles would stay to the middle because that’s where most of the fighting happened. That’s how you learned the hard way about the corners: you didn’t need to check them... until you did. And when the enemy slipped into that blind space, the range rings meant nothing. They could vanish completely, only to reappear where your lines were weakest.

The first warning came from the west. The Ewok posted there, who was armed and out in the open, suddenly lit up on sensors. Bandits had come out of nowhere, closing to within a click before anyone could react. The Ewok returned fire immediately, but the flash of his blaster only drew more rounds his way.

Gav didn’t think. He dove in with the squad, A280 singing, cutting down the closest threats before they could finish the job. By the time he reached the Ewok, the little scout was down, armor dented, weapon still gripped in one limp hand. The medics worked fast, but it was too late. The lesson to Gav was clear.

Every placement, every piece of kit, every decision had weight. Get it wrong, and you didn’t just lose your position; you risked sending someone home in a body bag.

Gav stood over the body bag as the medics loaded him aboard. As he entered the gunboat behind them, the crew stared at Wolam's body. They knew it was a risk they all understood when they signed up, some thought they would have made a different call or tried something different, some thought nothing at all. Whether they were mad, scared, or simply didn't want to feel the guilt that Gav was feeling, they couldn't look him in the eye. He knew he had to say something.

:Gav: I know what you're all thinking. I made a bad call, and got Wolam killed. And you'd be right. This one's on me. And I don't know how I'm ever going to sleep again, or how I'm going to knock on his family's hut and give them the news. But if he hadn't have alerted us to the ambush, it may be more than just him laying there. But it's on me... it's on me... and I have to live with that... be thankful you don't...

His eyes started to water, but he held it back and got into the cockpit, set the autopilot to the next slab, and started scribbling in his holobook again. Going over all his notes, he had an epiphany, something became very clear... it was even riskier than the last idea... but if it worked, they would never lose the upper hand again. He heard the voice of Minister Oodoov in his ear, who had visited the Academy once to give a lecture on the scientific work that the Interior is responsible for...

''...This is the dark art of experimenting; the field guides, the holorecords, the technical specifications... are sometimes a lie.''

=====Castling Ewoks Formation=====

The next slab was to be run with the so-called "Castling Ewoks Formation," a peculiar formation Gav had concocted during his journaling session. The tactic was simple on paper: place two ''unarmed'' Ewoks, each fitted with multisensors, at fixed positions 1,21 and 20,21 on the slab grid. From these back-corner perches, their overlapping sensor fields made it nearly impossible for hostiles to slip away unseen. Why it worked so well was anyone's guess. Some swore it was the Ewoks' size and unarmed status that kept them invisible to the enemy’s targeting logic, their naturally good perception allowing them to setup sensors in just the right position; others claimed the bandits simply refused to acknowledge being threatened by something knee-high, unarmed, and furry.

The formation worked surprisingly well and the unit made quick work of the found pests, the Ewoks sensors preventing the enemy from evading their forces. It didn't make up for Wolam's death, which Gav would have to explain for when he got back, but he felt they were safer and more effective now than ever before.

Just as planned, Gav and crew linked up with Captain Parmenion on the way to the next site. He and the Joint Defense Fleet had been orchestrating the broader clearing effort. From here on, they would be working in conjunction with something they called the Gambit Maneuver, a "precision assignment protocol" designed to keep pressure on the remaining gaps in the planet’s defensive perimeter. Gav's role was to start in the middle of the planet at longitude 14, latitude 10, then head westward to support Director Minwolf and Crewman Goriski where the line stretched thin.

The first contact came quickly: a bandit group holding the approaches with a velker flock drifting just behind them. The initial exchange went badly. Their fire was heavy, the supply of bacta patches less effective than they had hoped. Shots burned through Gav's pauldron and left a dull ache in his side. He toggled comms to Minwolf for advice.

:Gav: Director Minwolf, please advise, this isn't holding. The bacta is not working fast enough.

:Minwolf: You need refills, not patches. And don’t use Ryfills unless you want to spend the next day poisoned.

He logged the warning. Survive the slab first, worry about the outfitter later.

The bandits continued to ignore the Ewoks, even as the little scouts relayed exact firing coordinates to the squad. Whether they could not detect them on sensors or simply could not bring themselves to target them, Gav didn't know. But their presence was decisive. With their eyes guiding the team, he kept the squad at the optimum range of nine clicks, far enough to blunt the worst of the incoming fire, close enough to land clean shots and conserve medical supplies. Within two controlled exchanges, the bandits were broken.

With that threat dealt with, their focus shifted to the velkers. According to his field notes, he had observed that they favored the far corners once disturbed, and the northeast quadrant was unnaturally quiet. If his calculations were right, moving to 12,7 would put then at exactly nine clicks from them. As he eased the ''ATR-6'' into position, he pulled one of his last bacta patches and pressed it over the burn along my ribs. The cool sting was a small comfort.

Somewhere ahead, hidden in the shifting gas, the next fight was waiting.

===Flight Sergeant - The Savage Squirrels===

====Borrowed by the DoR====

Mammoth mission

====Operation ''REDACTED''====

==Service Record==

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Directorate
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
! style="text-align:center;" | Work Experience
|-
| Y27 D15 - Present
| [[File:O-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Ensign</center>
| 
|-
| Y26 D358 - Present
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Archivist</center>
| 
* Published issues for the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series

|-
| Y26 D272 - Y27 D15
| [[File:E-4.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Flight Sergeant</center>
| 
* Transported x4 Mammoth loads of Meleenium from an asteroid field depot to a main depot logging over 110 flight hours in 5 days (Year 26 Day 269-274). Mission required to execution of microjumping in order to avoid asteriod field damage to the rig exiting hyper on the wrong side of the field due to Endor's Gate X-1 as opposed to the desired Y+1 location of the depot.
* For Operation Durelium Storm, constructed x3 Durelium Mine Cities and prospected 22 quadrants on a Vex II in 9 days, discovering x9 Tibannagas deposits.
* Conducted research on asteroid field prospecting for the [[Directorate of Resources|DoR]] and compiled recommendations to improve the [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]] Asteroid Prospecting Tool
* Conducted research on terrestrial prospecting for the [[Ministry of the Interior|MoI]] and compiled recommendations for general policy and strategies for finding specific raw materials
* Planetary prospected Dorriella II and III
* Slabbed and constructed x11 Mine Cities in 14 days

|-
| Y26 D207 - Present
|
| <center>[[File: Tf-holotech-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Developer</center>
| 
* Integrate existing Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool into [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]], incorporating database driven persistence and existing permissions system
* Spearheaded the initial Member Module and Automated Payroll features for [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]]
* Enhanced the Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool with pre-prospecting features and auto-assist technology

|-
| Y26 D233 - Y26 D358
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Chief Archivist</center>
| 
* Began publishing the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series
* Envisioned and authored the ''[[Library Charter]]''
* Spearheaded the ''[[Chain of Command]]'' Project
* Launched the [[Library_Charter#Continuity_Restoration_and_Standardization_Initiative|Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative]]
* Launched the [[Library Art Museum]]

|-
| Y26 D205 - Y26 D272
| [[File:E-2.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Cadet First Class</center>
| 
* Prospect asteroid field with 13 revealed/11 unrevealed in 9 days averaging 5-6 scans a day for a total of 48 scans
* Transported x3 MC-30b to new system w/ G-1A taxi
* Cleared 15 slabs on Kuna`s Tail VII in 13 days

|-
| Y26 D205
| [[File:E-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Doaseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training]] Cadet</center>
| 
* Passed the ''[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training Standard Exam]]''
* Took the ''[[Department of Admissions|Trade Federation Oath]]''

|}

==Awards and Commendations==
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
! style="text-align:center;" | Reason
|-
| [[Image:DSM-L1.jpg]]
| [[Distinguished Service Award|Distinguished Service Award - Level 1]]
| [[Minwolf Kandar]]
| Y27 D15
| We also have another member who wears multiple hats in the Ministry of State. Until my last announcement, Gav Lucky has served as the Chief Archivist. He was responsible for getting the organizational ball rolling and moving forward with uncovering the history that all of us share as citizens of the Trade Federation. What many of you do not know is that he has worked tirelessly over the past few months in the background. He has worked as an assistant to Kaire Nat-Sa in helping to develop experimental tools and code that all of us will benefit from when we use TFMS. For his dedication to his work and the people of the Trade Federation, I present to him the First Level of the Distinguished Service Award.
|-
| [[Image:PC.png]]
| [[Prospectors Cross]]
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
| For his ongoing work in demystifying Asteroid fields and Asteroid Field Prospecting in particular.
|-
| [[Image:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty Medal - Viceroy Vas Felix]]
| Automatic
| Y26 D205
|
|}
 

[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]

Gav Lucky

2025-12-10T22:53:11Z

Gav Lucky:

{| class="infobox bordered" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="right" dth="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Gav_Lucky_ava.jpg|150px]]
|-
| style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Biographical Information'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Full Name:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Uglogavste Lukiil
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Aliases:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| ''Gav Lucky'' ''Dogbone'' ''The Space Pig''
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Homeworld:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Gentes
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Born:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Year -4 Day 143
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Physical Description'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Race:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Ugnaught
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Gender:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Male
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Height:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| 142 cm
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Colouring:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Porcelain
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Hair Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Brunette
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Eye Colour:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Brown
|-
|style=background:#347ab0; align=center colspan=2 |<center>'''Trade Federation Service'''</center>
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Status:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Active Duty
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Ministry:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| [[File:Moiseal.png|30px]] [[Ministry of the Interior|Interior]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Department:
|style="padding-left:5px;"| [[File:Operations-seal.png|30px]] [[Department of Operations|Operations]] - [[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"| Position:
|style="padding-left:5px;background:#e2e8eb;"|
[[File:O-1.png|30px]] [[Chain of Command|Ensign]]
|-
|style="padding-left:5px;"| Part-Time:
|style="padding-left:5px;"|
[[File:Archives-seal.png|30px]] [[Library_team|Library]] - [[Library_team|Archivist]] 
[[File:Tf-holotech-seal.png|30px]] [[Department_of_Holotech|Holotech]] - [[Department_of_Holotech|Developer]] 

|}

 

==Background==

[[File:Colossal-class_Heavy_Carrier_Ugnorgrad_I.png|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky's personal flagship the [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Ships&ID=253 Colossal-class Heavy Carrier] Ugnorgrad I]] 

Born beneath the heavy, sulfurous skies of Gentes, Uglogavste Lukiil came into the galaxy with a mind tuned for machinery and a soul already weighed by the oppression of his people. Like so many Ugnaughts before him, he escaped the drudgery of servitude, drifting to Bespin where the towering halls of Ugnorgrad hummed with welding arcs and the quiet desperation of survival.

On Bespin, he found refuge in the union workshops and data cores, refining not just his mechanical skill but a deep mastery of systems: computer networks, logistics algorithms, capital ship protocols. By day he was a quiet laborer; by night, a silent student of power, watching how the flow of credits and contracts shaped destinies far more decisively than any hydrospanner.
[[File:Holochess_screenshot.png|left|200px]]

His true name, Uglogavste Lukiil, was a tangle to most tongues. Smirking at the galaxy’s discomfort, he offered a simpler handle: "You may call me Gav Luck." It was meant as a quick, memorable alias, something that sounded like "Give Luck" and carried a hint of charm and fortune. But in the cantinas of Bespin, the name began to evolve. Gav spent long evenings hunched over holochess boards and pazaak tables, usually walking away with his credits intact or only slightly lighter. Then, one night, he hit a small jackpot on the slots, the kind of rare win that cantina patrons remembered for years. From then on, the regulars started calling him "Gav Lucky" as a teasing nod to that single windfall and a name that, to his mild annoyance, stuck harder than the original. Yet beneath that easy nickname and easy grin lay a mind haunted by the fate of powerless workers, scarred by watching entire communities collapse under the weight of financial neglect. For Gav Lucky, money was not mere currency; it was armor, weapon, and salvation.

==Career Timeline==

===An OOC Introduction===

<blockquote>
Storytelling has always been the lens through which I experience Star Wars roleplay, and Star Wars Combine is no different. For me, the game isn’t just a set of mechanics, but rather a living galaxy, and every choice deserves to be remembered. My habit of chronicling in detail began during my work on [[Library Art Museum#The Wall|The Wall]], when I saw so many sparsely populated, outdated, or even empty service pages, alongside long-overdue Tour of Duty badge and member reward requests on the forums. All of these things require keeping good records which, at present, isn’t centrally tracked. I wanted to make it easier for future admins, but also to ensure that no moment of my own journey in the [[Trade Federation]] or SWC was lost to time. In both the game and real life, I think journaling is a vital tool for those suffering from the human condition, especially for someone like me who so easily forgets people, places, and events as the years pass. As [[Hartroff Parmenion]] once said to me after reading my Library works: ''Verba volant, scripta manent''—'''spoken words fly away, written words remain'''. Some say I have the “Gift of Gav,” a tendency to turn even the smallest update into a saga. I’ll take that as a compliment. After all, the fun of SWC is not only in what we do, but in how we tell the tale. — The Player
</blockquote>

===Cadet===

====Joining Up====

His path to the Federation began in the most unassuming of ways. He was standing in a dingy spaceport terminal, waiting for a delayed transport, when a Holonet recruitment broadcast flickered to life above the crowd. The advertisement was crisp, authoritative, and emblazoned with the seal of the Trade Federation Department of Admissions.

<center>[[File:Doaseal.png|200px]][[File:Samantha_dordoli_ava.png|200px]]</center>

Front and center stood [[Samantha Dordoli]], delivering a precise and confident appeal to those seeking opportunity, structure, and purpose. In her words, Gav heard not just an invitation, but a promise: that order and ambition could be harnessed to lift those who were willing to work for it. By the time his transport arrived, he had already filled out the enlistment forms.

Driven by a relentless need to rewrite his people’s story and that of his own, he set his sights on the Trade Federation: a colossus of order, profit, and prestige. With each promotion and each credit earned, Gav Lucky would step further away from the darkness of Gentes and deeper into the halls of influence, where he would secure not just personal wealth but a fortress of resources strong enough to protect any who still bear the scars of servitude.

In every deal, every convoy manifest, every whispered negotiation, echoed his core philosophy: power is the ultimate currency, and luck favors those who build it themselves.

====The Academy====

[[File:Forsetticapital.png|300px|thumb|upright=1.65|Aeriel view of the Viceroyal Palace, and the surrounding areas of the city of Forsetti.]]

Cadet life was a shock both in its rigor and in its order. Assigned to a small cohort of recruits from across the galaxy, Gav quickly learned that the Academy was more than drills and data entry. It was a crucible for loyalty, skill, and adaptability. His knack for pattern recognition and logistical problem-solving made him an asset in training simulations, where he could predict enemy maneuvers and optimize fleet positioning with uncanny accuracy.
He passed the [[Basic Training Standard Exam]] and on Y26 D205, Gav stood before the Federation banner, right hand raised, and swore the [[Department_of_Admissions#Oath_to_the_Trade_Federation|Trade Federation Oath]]. For the first time, the weight of service felt heavier than the weight of survival.

===Cadet First Class - The Savage Squirrels===

====First Asteroid Field Prospecting Mission====

Assigned to the [[Department of Operations]] under the [[Ministry of the Interior]], Gav found himself in the ranks of the Savage Squirrels Flight Team, a unit as eccentric as it was effective. Under [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]] and Operations Director [[Dak Ironfist]], the team’s operations ranged from precision transport runs to asteroid field prospecting. Day-to-day orders came from [[Chain of Command|Lt. Commander]] [[Heuk Gisa]], whose terse directives left no room for hesitation.

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="left" width="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:AF_tool_screenshot.png|200px]]
|}

In those days, Gav started to make a name for himself with his sustained, methodical work. His first deployment was to an asteroid field outside of [[Ktil]] where he was tasked with reprospecting it. Using a standard issue GPS, he was able to pull Federation mining data and see that 13 previous uncovered deposits were still active with varying stability. The scanner also detected 11 undiscovered deposits. It was rough in the beginning as he tried to get his bearings. From speaking to instructors at the Academy, asteroid field prospecting was more of an art than a science. After the first couple days, he thought that there had to be a better way. During sleeping hours, he would stay up in the bunk of his [[Y-8]] mining vessel and run thought experiments on his datapad. He programmed a game that would generate random asteroid fields and place random deposits. He would play this game all night trying different strategies and also updating an AI assistant to predict the next best possible asteroid to scan. After a couple nights, he started to see patterns and develop what he thought was a winning strategy. On the third day, he had played the game hundreds of times and essentially developed many years of prospecting experience in simulation. He ended up finishing the mission in nine days.

====First Holotech Assignment====

That performance did not go unnoticed. [[Interior Minister]] [[Dred Oodoov]], impressed by both the ingenuity and the discipline behind the operation, personally put in a recommendation to Kaire Nat-Sa, the [[Defense Minister]] and Main Administrator of the [[Department of Holotech]]. Soon after, Gav received a formal communication from Holotech headquarters.

Known as the Federation’s hidden engine for innovation, Holotech specialized in turning individual talent into institutional capability. Gav began working under Kaire’s direction outside of [[Department of Operations|Operations]] work on the Trade Federation Management System. Because of his interest in asteroid field prospecting tactics at the time, his first development task he was assigned was to integrate a prototype asteroid field deposit tracking system into the main Management System, which at the time was operating separately. It would be the first Holotech assignment of many.

====First Library Card====

[[File:TF Library Gav Lucky.png|250px|thumb|Gav standing in the Library in Forsetti admiring a statue of [[Kurner Dahtar]]]]

Working in Holotech meant many trips to the Federation Library, looking up protocols and technical blueprints. Because he spent so much time there, on Y26 D233 he volunteered as an archivist. Not only did he fall in love with library science and circulation, but it allowed him access to many of the more restricted sections of the archives. Not long after, [[State Minister]] [[Thion Roseland]], who was also essentially acting as interim Chief Archivist, stepped down from his post and relinquished all State and Library duties.

The Library grew even quieter in Thion Roseland’s absence. One evening, Gav found himself alone among the shelves, methodically replacing holobooks, the soft hum of the preservation systems his only company. In that stillness, the Library began to feel less like a workplace and more like a sanctuary. Feeling a flicker of mischief with no one watching, he wandered into the Chief Archivist’s chambers. Minister Roseland had spent little time there, preferring his office at the [[Ministry of State]], and the room bore the signs, with dust gathering on the desk, stale air, and shelves untouched for weeks.

Drawers yielded little of interest until he found it: an unmarked access key. Curiosity piqued, Gav experimented, discovering that the key granted him the ability to withdraw blank holobooks from restricted storage and, more importantly, to author new entries within the Library’s secure archive. It was an archivist’s dream and an invitation to shape history.

He knew exactly where to begin. Drawing on months of late-night reading and note-taking, he began work on a serialized chronicle he had long imagined: This Month in Trade Federation History. With unrestricted access to the Federation’s historical records, he could weave together recovered archives, oral histories, and rediscovered GNS clippings into a living narrative of the Federation’s evolution. On Y26 D233, he released the first issue, [[This Month in Trade Federation History – Year 26 • Month 8]], to wide acclaim among those who cared for the Federation’s legacy.

The project lit a fire. Gav started expanding other holobooks, merging details from cross-referenced sources and building comprehensive indexes. His work quickly caught the attention of senior officials, and before long, he was entrusted with the responsibilities of Interim Chief Archivist. In this capacity, he authored the [[Library Charter]], codifying the institution’s purpose and scope; documented the Modus Operandi for the Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative; and designed the Federation’s official [[Chain of Command]] diagram.

He also transformed an unused section of the Library into a permanent Art Museum exhibit, curating a collection of recovered Federation visual history. This moved Captain Hartroff Parmenion and so he dug up his old findings from his Archeological Investigations in Federation History project, featuring former logos of past Operations [[Flight Team|Flight Teams]]. To Gav, this was preservation as strategy. Heritage and identity, he knew, were themselves forms of power, and a well-tended history could be as potent a weapon as any fleet.

====First Slabbing Mission====

=====A Blue Milk Run=====

It was Year 26 Day 248. Gav was looking through his standard issue flight team datapad searching for his next mission when he saw [[Kuna`s Tail Economic Development Project Year 26|an announcement about an economic development happening on Kuna`s Tail VII]]. For flight team members like himself, this meant a plethora of "slabbing" missions had been posted. What would happen is a TF service member would be assigned as the leader of a "slabbing squad"--a ragtag group of mercenary riflemen--and their mandate was to "clear" each planned city site of all hostile life forms. This ranged from groups of bandits to flocks of creatures. Anything that would interfere with construction that was not authorized by the Federation was to be removed by force. It was essentially a glorified pest control operation. There were rumors that many bandit groups of Diathim, Fosh, and Toydarian descent had been spotted, along with colossal sized [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=408 streaked velkers] and [https://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Colossal&ID=451 purrgils]. Needless to say, it was not a mission for the faint of heart, but Gav was up to the task in hopes of rounding out his work experience. Corresponding with [[Alories Tanus]], a fellow service member he had met in his travels, about the potential dangers, Tanus replied to his holomessage:

<blockquote>
It's pretty easy! You won't die haha. Just watch your medical supplies, inspect your riflemen make sure they are equipped with their standard issue [[A280]], and keep at a distance of 7-8 clicks. Why don't you work on latitude 16? Start at longitude 19 and meet Captain Parmenion in the middle. I've mostly cleared that site already so it'll be a good way to ease into it.
</blockquote>

Mostly cleared... see a familiar face... Alories made it sound like a blue milk run. So he signed up for the mission and set his [https://guide.swcombine.com/wiki/NavComp NavComp] to Kuna`s Tail VII. It took him five days in hyperspace to get there, which he spent leisurely tinkering on holotech projects and scribbling in his holobooks.

=====A Rag-Tag Bunch=====

On Day 255, he exited hyperspace and arrived in orbit of Kuna`s Tail VII. He was to report to the Lucrehulk Battleship Basilisk to rendezvous with his slabbing squad. But the first thing he had to do was find a jetpack. He was told by Lt. Commander Gisa that there might be extras at the entrance of the ship, otherwise he would have to go to the outfitter on Dor. Well, there was not, but he decided to walk around the ship until finally he found an armoury that had an extra. ''That's why they call me Lucky,'' he chuckled to himself. The whole side mission made him quite late to the briefing...

He approached the lineup and introduced himself.

<blockquote>
Greetings! Apologies for the tardiness... My name is Cadet First Class Lucky. I will be leading the slabbing mission for the coming days...
</blockquote>

As he briefed the squad, he noticed mixed reactions. Amseth Onasi, a Hapan in some sort of uniform, listened respectfully. A pair of Gamorreans grumbled to each other, judging their leader and compatriots of varying statures, all dwarfed in comparison to their own.

<blockquote>
''At least he is Porcine, but barely clears 100cm...'' said the one Gamorrean.

''I heard it's his first slab mission, take orders with grain of spice... and why are Ewok and Aleena here? They can barely lift their rifle...'' said the other.
</blockquote>

The Ewok simply stood and tilted his head occasionally as Gav spoke, while the Aleena looked like someone who was trying to convince themselves, and others, that they were ready for something they were not.

Gav walked down the line and inspected each member of the squad, making sure each had a rifle and a jetpack. Unfortunately, one of the members did not have a jetpack. He had no confidence that there were any extra jetpacks on the ship, so he said they would have to sit out and maybe if there's a supply run at some point they could join in.

<blockquote>
''11 instead of 12, no biggie,'' he thought. ''Plenty of medical supplies, one can stay inside the ship in case we need to make a run for it. It'll be fine...''
</blockquote>

He had a slight feeling in his gut that things were not going as well as he had hope, maybe an even slighter feeling that something was wrong, but he couldn't put a finger on it. ''Too late now,'' he said under his breath. ''Too late now. We have to get moving.''

=====The First Encounter=====

[[File:Gav_Lucky_outfitted.jpg|200px|thumb|Gav Lucky, armed and ready for action]]

The crew loaded onto Gav's [[ATR-6]] gunboat and began their descent to 19-16. From the atmosphere the site looked acquiescent; not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Soon they arrived on the "surface", which, being that Kuna`s Tail VII was a gas planet, simply meant an altitude that was ideal for building a floating city; close enough to the gas to mine it without suffocating. Gav had spoken to some old Academy friends on best strategies. ''Hug the perimeter so you don't get ambushed- Move a couple clicks and then go outside and scan with your macrobinoculars- I bounce between the four corners- you should only need to go between two positions...'' Needless to say, he would have to see what worked best for him. Hopefully his squad wouldn't notice that he had no idea what he was doing...

He decided to try the outskirts idea. He started in a corner of the site and started going around the outside. He would move a couple clicks, very cautiously, and get out to check with his macrobinoculars. After a while, his squad started getting restless, which he took as a sign that it was normal to move a bit quicker. So he moved about 6 or 7 clicks and got out of the ATR.

There it was. Hovering with his jetpack, he saw it with his very own eyes: a bloodied, half shot-to-death streaked velker. It was massive, but injured badly, presumably the blue milk run Alories left him. ''Thank You Alories!'' He thought confidently. He popped his head back inside the ATR and said, ''Alright crew, pile out!''

They began to open fire on the poor velker, its screeches terrifying yet muffled by several clicks of gas, but he knew it was for the greater good. He looked upon his crew and felt a sense of pride seeing them in formation hovering in the air, rifles pointed in the same direction, except... ''Wait a minute,'' he thought to himself as he noticed a gap in the line of rifles. There hovered the Aleena, Alsten Endel, without a rifle! Just kind of flailing his arms around to make it look like he was doing something, fooling around with his equipment, as if he wouldn't be noticed!

[[File:Alsten_flailing.png|500px]]

<blockquote>
Gav: ALSTEN, WHAT IN THE VICEROY'S NAME ARE YOU DOING!? WHERE IS YOUR STANDARD ISSUE!?

Alsten: SIR! I WAS WORRIED ABOUT MY JETPACK--BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!--CORRECTLY AND--SCREEEEEECH!--SURE IT--

Gav: ENOUGH! I CAN'T HEAR A KRIFFING THING YOU'RE SAYING! JUST STAND BACK AND--

Alsten: WHAT SIR? WHAT DID YOU SAY?

''Gav flew over to him and pulled him behind the firing line before grabbing him by the pack straps and yanking him up close face to face.

Gav: STAY! PUT!
</blockquote>

Eventually the screeching died down and the velker slowly fell out of the air into the gassy abyss. Turns out Alsten had lost his gun on the Basilisk, or someone took it thinking it was their issue, who knows. Thankfully, Gav had an extra emergency A280 in the cockpit.

<blockquote>
Gav: This is my only extra A280. Use the strap, do NOT drop it or I will drop YOU off on this surface without propulsion! You got that?

Alsten: ''*gulp*'' Yes sir!
</blockquote>

=====Return Fire=====

Once the city construction was under way, Gav and crew were on to the next spot. They proceeded as before, moving a couple clicks and going out to check. Eventually they came upon not one, but two velkers. Even from a distance they looked humongous. But they were just as skittish as the last one despite being in perfect condition. Without knowing where the attack was coming from, all they could do is fly around, to no avail. Eventually, both velkers succumbed to the rifles and the gas beneath them.

''Another slab cleared,'' said Gav to himself. As they all started heading back to the ATR-6, they heard someone exclaim...

<blockquote>
Alsten: SOMETHIN' BIT ME!
</blockquote>

They all turned around to see Alsten holding his rear and groaning loudly. All of a sudden, the ATR-6 started getting pelted with projectiles. "AAaaAAh!!!" screamed Amseth, gripping his left shoulder. "TAKE COVER!" shouted Gav. They all retreated to the opposite side of the ship that was being peppered, mounted their rifles onto the roof of the ATR, and began to return fire. Gav went around and tended to Alsten and Amseth's wounds. "Hang in there!" he told them. Amseth was taking it well, as if he had seen action before. Alsten, on the other hand, was not so composed.

<blockquote>
Alsten: MY ARSE IS ON FIRE!!

Gav: Hang in there Alsten! It looks like it went straight through, it's just a flesh wound!

Alsten: IT STINGS! I'M GONNA PASS OUT!
</blockquote>

Gav grabbed Alsten and guided him back into the ship before returning to the fight. It was a long battle, but eventually Gav confirmed the last bandit had fallen using his macrobinoculars.

When they got back inside the ship, Alsten was crying.

<blockquote>
Alsten: Sir... you saved my life... ''*sniffles*'' how can I ever repay you...

Gav: Alsten, I didn't save-- ''Gav paused...'' you can pay me back by getting back out there and helping us finish this mission.

Alsten: Yes sir! I just need a minute for the meds to kick in...
</blockquote>

=====There She Glows!=====

Kuna's Tail VII had a way of making even the most hardened sentients feel small. Despite this, the crew was beginning to move like a proper unit and the work they were doing began to feel routine. The gunboat drifted along the perimeter lights-out, quiet under a lid of pale cloud, the gas below moving like a slow ocean with no waves. Gav felt that chill go up his spine again. What was a whisper before was now a pounding in his chest, but there was no stopping the gunboat. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

They touched down at the next marker and fanned out. The whole crew now had their macrobinoculars up, but no one detected any movement. It was so eerie that even the Gamorreans stopped grumbling. Gav raised a gloved hand and the unit slid forward in twos, jetpacks feathering over the gas. The site's construction pylons stood like toothpicks stabbed into mist. They were a reminder that there ''was'' something here, otherwise the city construction would be underway; it was a reminder that battle was inevitable.

The first bandit group caught a bug and broke the quiet from the west scaffolds. HB-5s and BT 500s hammered the ATR's plating and sent sparks across the viewports. Amseth barely flinched, took a round across the pauldron, planted his A280 on the gunwale, and answered with neat, surgical bursts. The Gamorreans roared like someone had insulted their ancestry and hosed the scaffolds. Gav cut the air with his hand, called the ranges, and walked the fire in. Between the experience of the squad members and the power and range of their A280s, once they realized they didn't stand a chance, the west side folded fast.

Then the second group lit up from the south cranes. This position was a bit smarter due to the elevation. Shots licked the top of a Gamorrean's pack and sent him pinwheeling. Alsten yelped and threw himself under the ATR's wing, then popped back up, white-knuckled but determined, and for once remembered to check his safety before pulling the trigger. Eventually, one last quiet thud echoed and the return fire stopped.

"Hold your fire!" said Gav, holding up a closed fist.

Gav took a slow lap with the macros. The slab returned to that library hush he was starting to think was worse than noise. He opened his mouth to call it clear... when the shadows moved.

Shapes the size of frigates turned inside the fog, low and patient, as if the whole world were a lagoon and they had just surfaced to breathe. They came on without hurry, the way big things move when they do not need to prove how big they are.

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0;margin: 10px" align="left"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000"| [[File:Purgills.png|200px]]
|}

Purrgils--you hear about them, you see holos. None of that prepares you for a living wall of muscle and light deciding your city site is now a mating ground, or your hyperlane is now a migratory path. Even at a distance their presence pressed at the chest. The nearest drifted across a bank of cloud and the entire squad went still, rifles aimed at the beasts but not quite aware that they might not fire even if Gav gave the word. But Gav knew the damage these creatures could cause and, unfortunately, it was their job to make sure the citizens of the Federation who started a life here did not have to worry about it. It was his job to make the tough calls, and it was the crew's job to follow orders. His next order was spoken in a monotone voice, to let the crew know that he knew the gravity of his call, and that it was okay that it did not feel good, but it was not him, but the Viceroy which was the decider, he a marshall of that will, and the crew an extension of him.

''Fire.''

The squad answered as one. A ragged volley of red lanced through the haze, striking along the purrgils’ flanks. The giants shuddered, not with fear but irritation, rolling in slow arcs as if to show just how little their rifles meant. Then the light began.

It started deep under the skin, a pulse of violet swelling into indigo, crawling the length of their bodies like lightning trapped under ice. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. Gav knew what was coming next. He had read reports, heard the stories, and in that moment, he understood why spacers dreaded this sight more than the creatures themselves.

The nearest purrgil blurred at the edges, its bulk dimming until it simply was not there anymore. The second followed, vanishing into the mist.

“High sky, reacquire!” Gav called.

Minutes later, the shapes resolved again, farther out. Another volley. Another bloom of violet. Another blink into nothing. The third time it happened, the glow rolling up the spine of the larger beast, Alsten’s voice cut through the comms:

“There she glows!”

Half the squad groaned, the other half laughed, and Gav could only shake his head. The name stuck instantly, repeated every time the halo began to build. The fight turned into a deadly game of dejarik... move, fire, vanish, repeat... each exchange drawing more from the crew’s dwindling reserves of patience and bacta.

They tried to box them in toward the pylons, tried to flank and drive them east, tried holding fire until they crossed the open lanes. None of it worked for long. Every time the light appeared beneath that thick hide, they were gone before the next breath.

On the sixth pass, the pair did not return. Whether they had decided to leave or had simply moved beyond the slab’s perimeter, Gav could not say. The mist closed behind them, leaving only silence and the faint shimmer of heat along the barrel of his rifle.

He scanned one last time with the macros, seeing nothing but the skeletal frame of the city-to-be. Then he slung the rifle and keyed the comm.

“Form up. We’re done here.”

As the ATR-6 lifted away, the crew settled into the familiar quiet that came after hard work without celebration. Their medkits were light, their packs lighter. Gav’s ribs ached where the bacta patch clung, and he could feel the sting of every bruise through his armor.

Time for that supply run, rearm, and rethink the plan. Maybe he could research what technology was available there come up with something before they got back. But he had to think fast...

=====Resupply, Regroup, Rethink=====

{| border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="background: #eef4f7;border: 0px solid black;margin:0 0 10px 15px;padding: 0" align="left" width="275px;"
| colspan="2" align="center" style="background:#000000;width:275px;height:160px"| [[File:Hyperspace.gif|275px]]
|}

Gav set course for Dor, more specifically, the Endor Palace Member Outfitters, where even the most battered field team could walk away looking parade-ready.

The resupply run was deliberate. Fresh A280s with factory calibrations. Replacement armor plates. Macrobinoculars that didn’t lag. Jetpacks with more thrust than wheeze. And pairs of multisensor packs to try something Gav had read on his datapad while studying equipment holorecords... When they lifted again to return to the next slab, the crew looked sharper, heavier, and, Gav hoped, ready for a different style of fight.

This time, he planned to put eyes where the enemy didn’t expect them.

The east side got Alsten. At 17,11, the ridge ran close to where velkers had been spotted earlier, and the little Aleena’s discomfort was obvious.

:Alsten: Sir, this is awfully close to them.

Gav shoved a multisensor pack into his chest.

:Gav: That’s the point. You’ll be fine. Keep low, stay sharp, and if anything moves that shouldn’t, call it in.

Leaving him there felt wrong, but having a live scout in place could save the squad from being ambushed and get them all home sooner. From there, Gav moved the ATR-6 along the western perimeter, working toward 4,11. When the moment felt right, he brought the ship down and dropped another scout to cover the gap, an Ewok named Wolam Highwind, who took the multisensor pack and jumped out of the gunboat without so much as a word.

For a while, it worked. The east and west placements gave them early warnings and cut down on ambushes. But the gaps still showed. Gav had fallen into the same trap he had once mocked in others; he assumed the hostiles would stay to the middle because that’s where most of the fighting happened. That’s how you learned the hard way about the corners: you didn’t need to check them... until you did. And when the enemy slipped into that blind space, the range rings meant nothing. They could vanish completely, only to reappear where your lines were weakest.

The first warning came from the west. The Ewok posted there, who was armed and out in the open, suddenly lit up on sensors. Bandits had come out of nowhere, closing to within a click before anyone could react. The Ewok returned fire immediately, but the flash of his blaster only drew more rounds his way.

Gav didn’t think. He dove in with the squad, A280 singing, cutting down the closest threats before they could finish the job. By the time he reached the Ewok, the little scout was down, armor dented, weapon still gripped in one limp hand. The medics worked fast, but it was too late. The lesson to Gav was clear.

Every placement, every piece of kit, every decision had weight. Get it wrong, and you didn’t just lose your position; you risked sending someone home in a body bag.

Gav stood over the body bag as the medics loaded him aboard. As he entered the gunboat behind them, the crew stared at Wolam's body. They knew it was a risk they all understood when they signed up, some thought they would have made a different call or tried something different, some thought nothing at all. Whether they were mad, scared, or simply didn't want to feel the guilt that Gav was feeling, they couldn't look him in the eye. He knew he had to say something.

:Gav: I know what you're all thinking. I made a bad call, and got Wolam killed. And you'd be right. This one's on me. And I don't know how I'm ever going to sleep again, or how I'm going to knock on his family's hut and give them the news. But if he hadn't have alerted us to the ambush, it may be more than just him laying there. But it's on me... it's on me... and I have to live with that... be thankful you don't...

His eyes started to water, but he held it back and got into the cockpit, set the autopilot to the next slab, and started scribbling in his holobook again. Going over all his notes, he had an epiphany, something became very clear... it was even riskier than the last idea... but if it worked, they would never lose the upper hand again. He heard the voice of Minister Oodoov in his ear, who had visited the Academy once to give a lecture on the scientific work that the Interior is responsible for...

''...This is the dark art of experimenting; the field guides, the holorecords, the technical specifications... are sometimes a lie.''

=====Castling Ewoks Formation=====

The next slab was to be run with the so-called "Castling Ewoks Formation," a peculiar formation Gav had concocted during his journaling session. The tactic was simple on paper: place two ''unarmed'' Ewoks, each fitted with multisensors, at fixed positions 1,21 and 20,21 on the slab grid. From these back-corner perches, their overlapping sensor fields made it nearly impossible for hostiles to slip away unseen. Why it worked so well was anyone's guess. Some swore it was the Ewoks' size and unarmed status that kept them invisible to the enemy’s targeting logic, their naturally good perception allowing them to setup sensors in just the right position; others claimed the bandits simply refused to acknowledge being threatened by something knee-high, unarmed, and furry.

The formation worked surprisingly well and the unit made quick work of the found pests, the Ewoks sensors preventing the enemy from evading their forces. It didn't make up for Wolam's death, which Gav would have to explain for when he got back, but he felt they were safer and more effective now than ever before.

Just as planned, Gav and crew linked up with Captain Parmenion on the way to the next site. He and the Joint Defense Fleet had been orchestrating the broader clearing effort. From here on, they would be working in conjunction with something they called the Gambit Maneuver, a "precision assignment protocol" designed to keep pressure on the remaining gaps in the planet’s defensive perimeter. Gav's role was to start in the middle of the planet at longitude 14, latitude 10, then head westward to support Director Minwolf and Crewman Goriski where the line stretched thin.

The first contact came quickly: a bandit group holding the approaches with a velker flock drifting just behind them. The initial exchange went badly. Their fire was heavy, the supply of bacta patches less effective than they had hoped. Shots burned through Gav's pauldron and left a dull ache in his side. He toggled comms to Minwolf for advice.

:Gav: Director Minwolf, please advise, this isn't holding. The bacta is not working fast enough.

:Minwolf: You need refills, not patches. And don’t use Ryfills unless you want to spend the next day poisoned.

He logged the warning. Survive the slab first, worry about the outfitter later.

The bandits continued to ignore the Ewoks, even as the little scouts relayed exact firing coordinates to the squad. Whether they could not detect them on sensors or simply could not bring themselves to target them, Gav didn't know. But their presence was decisive. With their eyes guiding the team, he kept the squad at the optimum range of nine clicks, far enough to blunt the worst of the incoming fire, close enough to land clean shots and conserve medical supplies. Within two controlled exchanges, the bandits were broken.

With that threat dealt with, their focus shifted to the velkers. According to his field notes, he had observed that they favored the far corners once disturbed, and the northeast quadrant was unnaturally quiet. If his calculations were right, moving to 12,7 would put then at exactly nine clicks from them. As he eased the ''ATR-6'' into position, he pulled one of his last bacta patches and pressed it over the burn along my ribs. The cool sting was a small comfort.

Somewhere ahead, hidden in the shifting gas, the next fight was waiting.

===Flight Sergeant - The Savage Squirrels===

====Borrowed by the DoR====

Mammoth mission

====Operation ''REDACTED''====

==Service Record==

{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Dates
! style="text-align:center;" | Rank
! style="text-align:center;" | Directorate
! style="text-align:center;" | Assignment
! style="text-align:center;" | Work Experience
|-
| Y27 D15 - Present
| [[File:O-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Ensign</center>
| 
|-
| Y26 D358 - Present
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Archivist</center>
| 
* Published issues for the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series

|-
| Y26 D272 - Y27 D15
| [[File:E-4.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Flight Sergeant</center>
| 
* Transported x4 Mammoth loads of Meleenium from an asteroid field depot to a main depot logging over 110 flight hours in 5 days (Year 26 Day 269-274). Mission required to execution of microjumping in order to avoid asteriod field damage to the rig exiting hyper on the wrong side of the field due to Endor's Gate X-1 as opposed to the desired Y+1 location of the depot.
* For Operation Durelium Storm, constructed x3 Durelium Mine Cities and prospected 22 quadrants on a Vex II in 9 days, discovering x9 Tibannagas deposits.
* Conducted research on asteroid field prospecting for the [[Directorate of Resources|DoR]] and compiled recommendations to improve the [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]] Asteroid Prospecting Tool
* Conducted research on terrestrial prospecting for the [[Ministry of the Interior|MoI]] and compiled recommendations for general policy and strategies for finding specific raw materials
* Planetary prospected Dorriella II and III
* Slabbed and constructed x11 Mine Cities in 14 days

|-
| Y26 D207 - Present
|
| <center>[[File: Tf-holotech-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Developer</center>
| 
* Integrate existing Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool into [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]], incorporating database driven persistence and existing permissions system
* Spearheaded the initial Member Module and Automated Payroll features for [[Department of Holotech|TFMS]]
* Enhanced the Asteroid Field Prospecting Tool with pre-prospecting features and auto-assist technology

|-
| Y26 D233 - Y26 D358
|
| <center>[[File:Archives-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>Chief Archivist</center>
| 
* Began publishing the ''[[This Month in Trade Federation History]]'' series
* Envisioned and authored the ''[[Library Charter]]''
* Spearheaded the ''[[Chain of Command]]'' Project
* Launched the [[Library_Charter#Continuity_Restoration_and_Standardization_Initiative|Continuity Restoration and Standardization Initiative]]
* Launched the [[Library Art Museum]]

|-
| Y26 D205 - Y26 D272
| [[File:E-2.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Operations-seal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Flight Team|Savage Squirrels]] Cadet First Class</center>
| 
* Prospect asteroid field with 13 revealed/11 unrevealed in 9 days averaging 5-6 scans a day for a total of 48 scans
* Transported x3 MC-30b to new system w/ G-1A taxi
* Cleared 15 slabs on Kuna`s Tail VII in 13 days

|-
| Y26 D205
| [[File:E-1.png|100px]]
| <center>[[File: Doaseal.png|50px]]</center>
| <center>[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training]] Cadet</center>
| 
* Passed the ''[[Department of Admissions|Basic Training Standard Exam]]''
* Took the ''[[Department of Admissions|Trade Federation Oath]]''

|}

==Awards and Commendations==
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto; border-collapse:collapse; background:#e2e8eb; width:100%;" border=1
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Image
! style="text-align:center;" | Award Name
! style="text-align:center;" | Awarded By
! style="text-align:center;" | Date Awarded
! style="text-align:center;" | Reason
|-
| [[Image:DSM-L1.jpg]]
| [[Distinguished Service Award|Distinguished Service Award - Level 1]]
| [[Minwolf Kandar]]
| Y27 D15
| We also have another member who wears multiple hats in the Ministry of State. Until my last announcement, Gav Lucky has served as the Chief Archivist. He was responsible for getting the organizational ball rolling and moving forward with uncovering the history that all of us share as citizens of the Trade Federation. What many of you do not know is that he has worked tirelessly over the past few months in the background. He has worked as an assistant to Kaire Nat-Sa in helping to develop experimental tools and code that all of us will benefit from when we use TFMS. For his dedication to his work and the people of the Trade Federation, I present to him the First Level of the Distinguished Service Award.
|-
| [[Image:PC.png]]
| [[Prospectors Cross]]
| [[Dred Oodoov]]
| Y27 D15
| For his ongoing work in demystifying Asteroid fields and Asteroid Field Prospecting in particular.
|-
| [[Image:Vvf-tod.png]]
| [[Tour of Duty Medal|Tour of Duty Medal - Viceroy Vas Felix]]
| Automatic
| Y26 D205
|
|}
 

[[Category:Trade Federation Members]]