New Spaceships Revealed From 'Star Wars: The High Republic'

One of the first mantras that George Lucas gave to his design team (starting with Ralph McQuarrie) was that everything in Star Wars had to look used and ordinary, and nothing should stand out. Even the spaceships, the Death Star, and weapons of the Empire, though not looking used and “trashy,” had to have a minimalistic, functional design. This approach stood in a rather sharp contrast to the sci-fi movies that had come before, where everything had to look extraordinary, shiny, and “spacey.”

This design language for Star Wars was amended somehow when Lucas created the prequels, with more elegant pieces like Padme’s chrome starship, or the interior of the Jedi Temple and the Senate building, in order to show the wealth and the cultivation (especially in the core worlds) at the tail end of an era with more or less peace for “a thousand generations.” And one could live in this bubble, if they never had to visit the lower levels of Coruscant...

Another of Lucas’ mantras was to never throw anything away, be it ideas, plot elements, names, characters, or designs. Even if they don’t fit for a current project or can’t be used right now, they might come handy at some other point in time, even if this point may be decades into the future.

It seems as if both of these mantras still hold true today, as the concept artists and designers at Lucasfilm asked the following questions when starting to create the worlds and the look of the High Republic, an era that is set around 200 years before the events of the prequel trilogy, when both the Galactic Republic itself and the Jedi were - as the name suggests – at their prime:

1. How can the new designs be a derivation of what was established before? (Although, strictly speaking, they had to work backwards from the prequel trilogy)

2. What concepts, sketches, and designs that have never been used before were available in the archives?

At the time that this article is written, the first three books (an adult novel, a junior novel, and a children’s book) as well as the first issue of the first High Republic era comic series have been published, with many more to come during the course of the coming months and years. So what follows is only the initial wave of starships and vehicles that have a more prominent role in the works that are available so far.

All of the pictures in this article are copyright Lucasfilm Ltd.:

Starlight Beacon

This massive space station, constructed by the Republic and guided by the Jedi, acted as a kind of a lighthouse, a beacon that should help travelers find their way through the then unstable and partly unexplored space of the Outer Rim Territories. While the top of the station deliberately mimics the towers of the Jedi temple, the underbelly housed the more industrial and less cultivated facilities, somehow mirroring the structure of Coruscant itself.

Jedi Vector

These predecessors of the Jedi Starfighters from the last years of the Republic and the Clone Wars were sleek, insect-like fighters that could accommodate one or two pilots, so that a Jedi Master and his Padawan could fly together. A specialty of these ships was that its weapon systems could only be powered-up by placing a lightsaber in the cockpit, thus preventing the ships from being used by non-Jedi and to make sure that the weapons were not activated light-heartedly.

Longbeam:

This hammerhead-looking ship was the original design for the Resistance bombers for Episode VIII, before their design settled on the more vertical look that was used in the film. During the High Republic, these ships weren’t just used for combat (although they each carry six missiles), but also for search, rescue, and other purposes. A minimum crew of three was necessary to fly this ship, and it could transport up to 24 passengers.

Legacy Run

Like the Longbeam, the concept of this large transport ship is not that old, as it was designed as an early version of Han Solo’s Eravana, the ship that swallows the Millennium Falcon after Rey and Finn flee from Jakku. (This is why you see a YT-1300 in the picture below).

The Legacy Run was already more than 100 years old at the time of its destruction and could be heavily modified to accommodate all kinds of cargo it had to carry on each respective voyage. Apart from that, it could also transport up to 9,000 passengers.

Nihil starships (Stormships)

The Nihil are the bad guys of the High Republic era. They are described as a kind of space Vikings, roaming and marauding throughout the Outer Rim regions, plundering what they can get and destroying what they cannot. As diverse as the looks of this group itself are, the designs of their spaceships look like a patchwork force with hardly any uniformity. As Pablo Hidalgo pointed out, "The Nihil have a design language with a big vocabulary.”

The following picture shows a Nihil Stormship that was equipped with a so-called “Path Engine,” a device that could provide a very fast way of hyperspace travel.

The novel Light of the Jedi alone includes a number of additional spaceships, like Cloudships, Star Hoppers, or other types of starfighters, for which we don't have pictures or extensive descriptions yet. But it sure seems like there may be a visual dictionary or a The Art of the High Republic book in the making, which would surely describe and show them all very well.

Written By Gerald Petschk

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