Star Wars Retcons Rise of Skywalkers Death Star Destroyers (Again)

Star Wars Retcons Rise of Skywalker’s Death Star Destroyers (Again)

Star Wars has just retconned Rise of Skywalker’s Xyston-class Star Destroyers (again), linking them more closely to Death Star technology.

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Star Wars Retcons Rise of Skywalkers Death Star Destroyers (Again)

This article contains spoilers for Darth Vader #11.

Star Wars has retconned the Xyston-class Star Destroyers from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — again. When Emperor Palpatine returned in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, he boasted a fleet the likes of which the galaxy had never seen before. He had spent years building up a massive fleet of modified Imperial Star Destroyers on the Sith redoubt of Exegol, hidden in the depths of the Unknown Regions. Every one of these Star Destroyers had the power to destroy a planet.

But how did these Star Destroyers work? Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker never really explained them, so it fell to the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Visual Dictionary to help fans fit these new vessels into the lore. According to the Visual Dictionary, these Xyston-class Star Destroyers were each equipped with a reactor-fed axial superlaser, which had the ability to smash a planet from far orbit — but, crucially, was not described as using Death Star technology. Still, just as with the Death Star, each of these new Sith Star Destroyers had a weakness — in this case the axial superlaser itself, which if destroyed would consume the entire vessel in a spectacular explosion.

It seems Star Wars is retconning the Xyston-class Star Destroyers, though. In Darth Vader #11, by writer Greg Pak and artist Raffaele Ienco, Vader pursues his master into the Unknown Regions and confronts Palpatine on Exegol. There, he learns of the massive fleet the Emperor has already begun producing even during the Original Trilogy era, and he is unimpressed — until Palpatine takes his apprentice to a literal mountain of kyber crystals his Sith Eternal cultists are harvesting to power the cannons of his fleet. This, of course, is the same power source that generated the Death Star’s superlaser, as shown in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It seems these Sith Star Destroyers do use Death Star technology after all.

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There’s a sense in which this retcon is understandable; it creates a straightforward narrative line between the Death Stars, the most famous superweapons in the entire Star Wars saga, and the planet-smashing Star Destroyers that essentially served as the superweapons of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. It’s rather a bewildering retcon, though, in terms of understanding the precise timeline; the Emperor’s scientists must have figured out how to miniaturize the Death Star superlaser at tremendous speed, because Darth Vader #11 is set shortly after The Empire Strikes Back.

Equally problematic is the question of where all this kyber came from. The Jedi had kept kyber and its properties a closely-guarded secret, meaning access to the mineral was restricted until the rise of the Empire; in order to conduct their experiments with Death Star technology, the Empire scoured the galaxy, stripping every temple of its kyber and mining every fragment from worlds where they found it. The Rebel Alliance succeeded in destroying the first Death Star, and subsequently monitored all shipments of kyber across the galaxy. According to tie-ins, movement of kyber helped them figure out the Empire was building another superweapon, and led to the celebrated Bothan spies investigating whether the Empire was working on a second Death Star. Given all this attention, it’s hard to understand how the Rebels missed the harvesting of an entire mountain of kyber. It’s possible the Empire collected all this kyber in the Unknown Regions, and indeed perhaps that was the real reason Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy revealed Grand Admiral Thrawn was helping him map that vast tract of space. The frustrating thing about all this is that you get the sense Greg Pak’s Darth Vader story was supposed to clear up the Star Wars continuity, but it’s raised more questions than answers.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/star-wars-comics-retcon-palpatine-rise-skywalker-destroyers/

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