The galactic economy is pretty big. The Core Rulebook says that it "turns on the wealth and products of billions of worlds." As Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters notes, "a galaxy-wide economy based on the import and export of goods has allowed some worlds to specialize in areas of production, knowing that their other needs would be taken care of by other worlds," a fact handily demonstrated by such worlds as the fully automated automaton-manufacturing worlds of Mechis III ("Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88") and Telti (The New Rebellion), or the fully-industrialized world of Metalorn ("A Princess Alone!"), which was said to be "just one in hundreds of Imperial factory planets." The New Essential Guide to Droids states that the Commerce Guild “had its fingers in millions of mining operations across the galaxy,” while Attack of the Clones Incredible Cross-Sections mentions that the Mining Guild controls "billions of anonymous, young, high-metallicity planets." Nor are all such worlds devoted to manufacturing and heavy industry: "Recon & Report: The Journey to Coruscant" mentions the Empire's "key agricultural worlds," including the eighteen 'agri-planets' wholly owned and managed by the Salliche Ag Corporation, while Galactic Battlegrounds features the world of Reytha, the so-called "Breadbasket of the Empire"; the Dark Empire Sourcebook mentions that much of the galaxy's yeomanry have been converted into "virtual serfs for macro-farming giants like the Tagge Restaurant Association, Core Foodstuffs and the Imperial Fruit Company" by the Imperial State's "agri-sector maximization policies." The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, Second Edition estimates the Republic's population of sapient beings at about 100 quadrillions. According to the Imperial Sourcebook, Second Edition, "all sapient inhabitants of the Empire" are Imperial citizens, and the Dark Empire Sourcebook states that "most Imperial citizens" live in Mussolinified "clean, orderly police-state planets," enjoying a standard of living marked by "hermetically sealed, environmentally sculpted corridors and mallplexes." It is a sobering thought to imagine the infrastructure necessary to maintain "most" of 100 quadrillion beings in a comfortable "luxury liner" standard of living. Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters quite rightly adds that "a complex system such as this is impossible without a huge fleet of freighters able to transport goods from one world to another."
"Merchant marine" or "merchant navy" is the collective term for a state's shipping industry (a “fleet auxiliary force” or “fleet auxiliary” being a specific part of the merchant marine charged with providing support to the warfighting Navy and owned by the state defense establishment). Private corporations actually own and operate the ships of the merchant navy, while such matters as ship inspection and certification, licensing, safety standards, and the training and qualification of officers and crew is regulated by the state. Training for officers in the Republic’s Merchant Service was offered by 'the Academy' (notice the lack of further description), which the scholars describe in the Star Wars Encyclopedia as an "elite educational and training institution" that "turned unseasoned youths into highly trained members of the Exploration, Military, and Merchant Services." Apparently, the Academy was actually a university system; the scholars mention that the prestigious Raithal Naval Academy – which must be distinguished from the Raithal Academy, one of the Imperial Army Officer Training Academies – was part of the Academy. With the establishment of the Empire, the Academy was re-designated the Imperial Space Academy, and the scholars write that it became increasingly used to train officers for the Imperial Navy. The Paradise Snare establishes that the Imperial Space Academy maintained at least one very prestigious campus on Carida (not to be confused with the Military Academy at Carida, a private institution occupying a small segment of Imperial Military Training Base Carida), while The Hutt Gambit mentions Imperial Naval officers on its faculty, and most of its graduates – including Han Solo, Soontir Fel, and Tedris Bjalin – received commissions as Naval officers. Nevertheless, the Space Academy was not a Naval institution. In Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, it is firmly established that graduation from the Academy did not result in commissioning as an Imperial Naval officer; one recent graduate, Biggs Darklighter, told his friend Luke Skywalker that he had graduated the Academy and was commissioned as a matter of course, and was signed on as first mate of the freighter SS Rand Ecliptic (“first mate” is an officer in the merchant navy, second-in-command to the master; in most jurisdictions, a first mate is legally required to be qualified to command a ship in the event of the master’s death or incapacity), and assured his friend that “I’m not going to wait for the Empire to conscript me into its service.” Skywalker replies that after he graduates from the Academy, “I won’t be drafted into the starfleet, that’s for sure.” This makes very clear that the merchant navy was separate from the Imperial Navy, although the Navy didn’t hesitate to press mercantile officers into its service. In fact, it appears that the Academy’s regiment of midshipmen underwent some training at actual Naval Academies. “In the Empire’s Service” and “The Making of Baron Fel” establish that Captain Soontir Fel (later Baron Fel of the Empire) was assigned as an instructor at the Imperial Naval Academy at Prefsbelt IV, and claim that Biggs Darklighter, Derek “Hobbie” Klivian, and Tycho Celchu were among the students he trained (Darklighter and Klivian graduated to become first and second mates aboard SS Rand Ecliptic, while Celchu joined the Navy and became a Naval Aviator; all three defected and became rebel fighter pilots). Since Klivian and Celchu specifically state in “In the Empire’s Service” that they were students at Prefsbelt IV when Fel instructed them, it seems that mercantile midshipmen like Darklighter and Klivian spent some time there, despite not being enrolled at a Naval Academy.
Consistent with the scholars’ claim that the Academy was being used to train Imperial Naval officers despite not being a Naval institution, “Darklighter” shows an increasingly militaristic merchant navy, wearing Navy-style uniforms, operating Navy-grade combat equipment (including TIE/ln space superiority starfighters), undertaking armed patrols of space, and engaging pirates and armed insurgents; when Darklighter arrived at the Academy, he discovered that “the Emperor’s in charge, and he runs the academies.” The Academy’s instructors and the members of the regiment of midshipmen wore Imperial uniforms and trained on Imperial equipment, and were expressly encouraged to identify themselves as Imperial rather than commercial officers. The entire training experience was very similar to outright Naval training, and it seems likely that this was done so that merchant navy officers would have many of the same skills and qualifications as their Naval counterparts, making it far easier for them to be impressed and integrated into the Navy. Despite Darklighter’s and Skywalker’s stated intent to avoid impressment, it seems that the merchant navy was actively being used by the Imperial State as a sort of bait-and-switch trick.
The Imperial State maintained other training institutions, as well. Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments from the Rim mentions the prestigious Institute of Starship Engineers (ISE), and notes that although the Imperial Engineering Academy is more prestigious, the Imperial Navy still required Academy graduates that entered the Navy to receive biannual certification from the ISE, and that "many corporate concerns take a similar standpoint" regarding ISE accredited qualification (the fact that not all graduates entered the Navy establishes that the Engineering Academy, like the Academy, was not a Naval institution). The ISE charged some 15,000 credits per semester, and in addition to its huge main campus on Coruscant maintained branch campuses on Corellia, Sullust, Alderaan, and Perithal VI; Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments from the Rim adds that "the majority of students attending the Institute are receiving post-academy training in accordance with Imperial Navy requirements." Like their deck department counterparts graduating from the Academy, mercantile engineering officers were also subject to some degree of bait-and-switch.
Although there were other shipping companies operating at the time – e.g., Viraxo Shipping, the Baobab Merchant Fleet, Valorum Shipping and Transport, Xizor Transport Systems – the shipping industry was dominated in the last days of the old Republic by the Trade Federation (TradeFed), which had originally been incorporated in 315 BrS as a consortium of merchants and shipping interests; by the 0s GR, it had become a literal trade federation, a federation of "key resource worlds" which had joined the TradeFed as "signatory members," giving the shipping consortium exclusive shipping rights and the right to represent them in the Senate and receiving in return access to "lucrative trade opportunities," as seen in Cloak of Deception. The TradeFed's fleet was best known for the highly modular Lucrehulk-class cargo hauler, a superfreighter manufactured by Hoersch-Kessel Drive, Inc.; at least two variant models are known, the LH-3210 (seen in The Phantom Menace) and the LH-1740 (seen in Attack of the Clones). The overall cargo capacity of the Lucrehulk class is not known, but Attack of the Clones Incredible Cross-Sections states that the LH-1740 control core (or "core ship") had approximately 66 million cubic meters (2.3 billion cubic feet) of cargo space, and sufficient berthing space to accommodate 60,000 trade representatives, and the Revised Core Rulebook states that a modified LH-3210 ‘battleship’ has a cargo capacity of five million tons and can accommodate over 100,000 passengers. The TradeFed employed other ships as well; Rogue Planet mentions both the TradeFed heavy munitions cruiser and midsized cargo haulers ("smaller than the ungainly craft that had blockaded Naboo {i.e., LH-3210s}, but of the same type"), and Outbound Flight mentions TradeFed escort cruisers. Overall, the TradeFed had enough ship's to conduct a massive blockade of Naboo in 3 GR, as seen in The Phantom Menace. The TradeFed's converted 'battleships' (modified LH-3210s and LH-1740s)were so numerous that they formed the backbone of the Confederate Navy during the galaxy-spanning Clone War (13 - 16 GR), and in fact Yoda: Dark Rendezvous shows that it was so dominant of the Confederacy of Independent Systems that many people referred to the entire CIS synecdochically as the TradeFed. "Trade Federation Signs Treaty: Nationalization Underway" shows that on 16:5:24, Sentepeth Findos, Acting Viceroy of the Trade Federation, signed a treaty that surrendered ownership of all TradeFed assets to the Imperial State; The New Essential Chronology adds that the Commerce Guild was also Imperialized. "Trade Federation Signs Treaty: Nationalization Underway" mentions that its holdings were expected to be handed over to Loyalist companies "such as Kuat Drive Yards, Sienar Systems, TaggeCo, and Merr-Sonn," and "Baobab, Mungo" states that "shipping firms loyal to the new Empire were awarded the most plum contracts" after "interstellar shipping transformed with the Imperialization of the Trade Federation."
The Empire had regulations in place for the conduct of interstellar commerce. “The Free-Trader’s Guide to Sevarcos” mentions the Imperial Ministry of Intergalactic Transit, which was responsible for monitoring and licensing the interstellar transportation of substances and commodities, while Platt’s Smugglers Guide mentions the Imperial Space Ministry, which promulgates the Imperial Spacefaring Regulations and publishes the Spacers’ Information Manual (SIM), issues the various licenses and permits required for spacers to operate commercially (via the Bureau of Ships and Services, or BoSS), conducts inspections of starports, and maintains the Empire’s astrogation databases, including “astrogation charts and routes, new areas mapped, as well as new and updated planet profiles.” This latter function is especially important, given the nature of hyperspace travel: Attack of the Clones Incredible Cross-Sections mentions that “changes in astronomical conditions can make routes unsafe,” and the TradeFed had gained a virtual monopoly in some regions because it “aggressively protects” its extensive interstellar data charts, and “only the Jedi and the Office of the Supreme Chancellor can afford to maintain more comprehensive charts” (consequently, the Imperialization of the TradeFed gave the Imperial State a high degree of information dominance vis-à-vis interstellar travel). The Imperial Customs Office enforced space regulations, with additional support from the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Office of Criminal Investigations’ Sector Rangers and Special Enforcement Officers (SEOs).
The evidence indicates that, like all merchant navies, the Imperial merchant navy was a combination of state- and corporate-owned shipping. Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters states that most interstellar shipping in the galaxy is done by large bulk freighters, container ships, and space barges, the majority of which are corporate-owned, but it is quick to mention that "the Empire maintains its own fleets of such vessels” (i.e., the ships of the Empire’s spacelift command, of which the fleet auxiliary is part). In fact, Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters explicitly states that “the Empire controls virtually all of the bulk cargo vessels plying the spaceways,” either “directly through Imperial ownership” (the spacelift command and fleet auxiliary) or “indirectly through intimidation of large shipping corporations” (the rest of the merchant navy), and goes on to say that “roughly one-third of the large ship cargo carried in the galaxy is war materiel for the Empire’s forces,” including “weaponry, equipment, supplies, fuel, and whatever else needs transporting.” Shipping not handled by the Empire’s spacelift command or by large shipping corporations is handled by tramp freighters, i.e., independently owned and operated vessels with no fixed schedule or ports of call; the Empire does not have nearly as much control over this part of the merchant navy, and consequently tramp freighters are commonly involved in smuggling. Tramp freighters cannot, however, compete with the merchant navy in terms of tonnage or volume; “Recon & Report: The Journey to Coruscant” is quite clear that many systems throughout the galaxy “depended heavily on Imperially influenced or controlled corporations to supply goods not normally available to that system,” and although “free-traders quickly cashed in on the needs of abandoned systems” after the merchant navy discontinued service to many such worlds in a massive realignment of Imperial forces in 39 GR, they “could not come close to filling the market with the quality of imports these worlds required.”
A fleet auxiliary force typically operates hospital ships, fleet tankers, stores and replenishment vessels, ammunition ships, and forward repair ships. The ships are owned by the defense establishment, but the crews are civilian members of the merchant navy subject to naval discipline, and are obligated to serve under warlike conditions. The composition of the Imperial fleet auxiliary has not been well-documented, but it presumably includes a great deal of freighters, supertankers, and cargo haulers formerly owned and operated by the TradeFed (it is not known how much of the TradeFed’s assets were redistributed to Loyalist companies and how much was kept for the Empire’s own spacelift command; The New Essential Guide to Droids mentions that TaggeCo. “absorbed many assets of the Trade Federation and the Commerce Guild once Palpatine nationalized the commercial entities”). Black Ice does describe the composition of Imperial Replenishment Fleet DK-209 in the Mortex Sector, which contained a protective force of five Lancer-class frigates and three Nebulon-B escort frigates providing protection to three ‘maintenance carriers,’ six bulk freighters, two container ships, and one container train, the titular IFA Black Ice. Black Ice is described as a product of Rendili StarDrive, fully 7.8 kilometers long and capable of storing close to one billion metric tons of high-grade starship power cell fuel (sc., the container train has nine container spheres, each 600 meters in diameter and capable of holding up to 110,000,000 metric tons of cargo, giving the ship as a whole a cargo capacity of approximately 100 million cubic meters and 990 million metric tons); the transfer of power cell fuel from the planetary refinery at Refrax to Black Ice took about 36 hours to complete. The Imperial Sourcebook, Second Edition describes a different model, the Loronar Corporation’s field secured container vessel (FSCV), whose container spheres are 800 meters in diameter (approximately 268 million cubic meters), and for which “20 or more field spheres are not uncommon,” giving the vessel as a whole approximately 5.36 billion cubic meters of cargo space, substantially greater than the old LH-1740 Lucrehulk-class core ships (to be fair, of course, the LH-1740 would have additional cargo space when not acting independently). It is especially noteworthy that the Imperial Sourcebook, Second Edition mentions that a standard-configuration Sector Group contains one support fleet, which is composed of “at least 500 vessels,” and “a quarter of them are the huge Loronar FSCVs” (i.e., each Sector Group includes 125 FSCVs, or 670 billion cubic meters of cargo space).
Another class of ship specifically known to be used by the fleet auxiliary is the 1.15-kilometer-long modular taskforce cruiser, manufactured by Tagge Industries Shipyards Ltd., a multi-task medium transport introduced in the Dark Empire Sourcebook; the basic ship cost a mere 2.5 million credits, and modules costing anywhere from 425,000 to 6.3 million credits made it easily reconfigured to serve as a hospital ship, long-range exploratory surveyor, observation and intelligence-gathering platform, salvage and underway repair ship, or planetary subjugation platform (the latter module being equipped with several weapons of mass destruction). When configured as a hospital ship, the modular taskforce cruiser was capable of caring for up to 23,350 patients, with 2,750 in bacta tanks and 1,000 in quarantine, in addition to 5,000 metric tons of cargo space; when configured for salvage and underway repair, its cargo capacity was increased to 40,000 metric tons. Dark Empire II adds that the modular taskforce cruiser could be configured to serve as a fast spacelift ship (or possibly as a roll-on/roll-off ship). Like many fleet auxiliary ships, the modular taskforce cruiser was armed; the base cruiser itself was equipped with 15 medium turbolasers. “Darklighter” identifies the freighter Rand Ecliptic as a fairly large ship resembling an Acclamator class trans-galactic military transport ship – in fact, the freighter is referred to as a “Class II frigate” and even a ‘battlecruiser’ (much as the TradeFed’s modified LH-3210s were styled ‘battleships,’ this could be an accurate description of her firepower as far as armed merchantmen go; ‘Class II’ could signify that she was not a proper warship) – and she was known to carry at least seven Navy-grade starfighters. The Imperial Sourcebook, Second Edition describes a type of Imperial armed merchantman, the Kuat Drive Yards (KDY) Star Galleon, a 300-meter long combination cargo hauler and escort frigate able to carry up to 300 troops and 100,000 metric tons of cargo, protected by10 turbolasers and a concussion missile launcher (Pirates & Privateers mentions KDY’s 50-meter long Armored Transport, capable of carrying 30,000 metric tons, as an older example of an armed support ship). Ebenn Q3 Baobab mentions in the Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide that “an Imperial StarTrain container was abandoned after the Battle of Endor, with 300 new factory-sealed {Lambda-class T-4a} shuttles on board.” Given that the Technical Journal of the Imperial Forces states the T-4a Lambda to be 20 meters long, and using the derived height (from the keel to the topmost part of the sail) and beam of about 25.6 and 16 meters, respectively, and supposing that each shuttle were stored in a box about 8,192 cubic meters in volume (i.e., the volume of a rectangular prism of identical length, height, and width), this would require a vessel with no less than 2,457,600 cubic meters in cargo space – to wit, a StarTrain container cannot have less than slightly less than 1/27th the cargo space of a LH-1740 Lucrehulk core ship, about 1/40th the cargo space of an RSD container train, or about 1/2181st the cargo space of a Loronar FSCV.
In addition to the fleet auxiliary, the Empire would have maintained a spacelift command, composed of those ships and vessels either owned by the Imperial State or privately-owned but operating under charter to the Imperial State, charged with responsibility for providing spacelift and space transportation for all Imperial military services and government agencies – that is to say, whereas the fleet auxiliary handles replenishment and supply operations in support of the Imperial Starfleet, the spacelift command provides transport services to the entire Imperial State. One particularly noteworthy operation undertaken by the spacelift command is mentioned in Slave Ship, in which the following is noted:
The oceans of Gholondreine-ß had been sucked down to the last molecule of saline liquid, then transported by a fleet of massive Imperial freighters to an orbital catalysis plant near Coruscant. Economy hadn’t been the motivating factor – it was far more expensive to ship that amount of water than to synthesize it – but punishment had been. The coastal and inland democracies on the planet’s land masses had been irritatingly slow, in the eyes of Emperor Palpatine, to divest themselves of the last vestiges of allegiance to the old Republic. Now, beneath the flat glare of cloud-purged skies, dust wound through the cracked and empty streets of the deserted cities.
To wit, the spacelift command had sufficient volume to transport the entire hydrosphere of an inhabited planet, whose oceans had covered sufficient expanses of the planet’s lithosphere that it had been divided into discrete continents, suggesting that oceans had been the primary feature of the surface prior to the punitive removal of the hydrosphere. The result of the operation, predictably, was the complete disruption of the planet’s environment, reducing an ocean-dominated planet to a desert, devoid even of sufficient moisture to form clouds. In his (non-canonical) article “Star Wars: Imperial Industrial Capacity,” Mr. Mike Wong notes that “if Gholondreine-ß was similar to Earth, then the mass of its oceans would have been roughly 1.4E21 kilograms,” and makes the following conclusions:
Even if the transport fleet was composed of a million ships, each vessel would have had to carry 1.4 trillion tons of water! The density of water is roughly 1 metric ton/m3, so each ship would have needed at least 1.4 trillion cubic metres of cargo space. If the transports were cylindrical in shape, they had to be 5 km in diameter and at least 71 km long to have that much internal space! Even if each ship took 1000 round trips, the operation would have required a million-ship fleet of vessels measuring 1 km in diameter and 1.8km long.
Note that it would take about 261 Loronar FSCVs, 14,000 RSD container trains, or 21,212 LH-1740 core ships to transport 1.4 quintillion tons of water, and that the Imperial Sourcebook, Second Edition states that each SECTGRU support fleet is only in the neighborhood of 500 ships, only 125 of which are Loronar FSCVs (collectively only capable of carrying up to 670 billion tons of water). Nevertheless, assuming that the FSCVs do not make up the vast majority of the support fleet’s cargo space, it would take only two support fleets to equal the cargo space required of this single “fleet of massive Imperial freighters,” and there are known to be thousands of supply fleets (one per SECTGRU), meaning that the Imperial State actually had more than enough cargo space to simultaneously dehydrate hundreds of ocean-dominant worlds.
The fleet auxiliary and the rest of the Empire’s spacelift command are, of course, only part of the merchant navy, although Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters does make clear that the Imperial State still has considerable influence over the corporate shipping companies that make up the majority of the merchant marine, to the extent that it “indirectly” controls them and their shipment of freight. There is not a great deal of information available about the great shipping companies of the Empire, although a handful have been identified, along with a few smaller companies. The Expanded Universe has also described a number of different types of freighters and cargo haulers, and Pirates & Privateers contains a convenient listing of many common classes, the most significant of which are listed hereafter with the manufacturer, cost, designation, length, and cargo capacity: The Incom Corporation’s 325,000-credit X-23 StarWorker space barge (38 meters, 5,000 metric tons) and its armed variant, the 400,000-credit X-26 StarHaul (55 meters, 5,000 metric tons), the Corellian Engineering Corporation’s 200,000-credit CE-2 transport (100 meters, 50,000 metric tons) and 1.5-million-credit Superlift ore hauler (155 meters, 90,000 metric tons), Sienar Ships’ 500,000-credit Mark I bulk transport (50 meters, 60,000 metric tons), Gallofree Yards’ 350,000-credit medium transport (90 meters, 19,000 metric tons), Ghtroc Industries’ 1-million-credit Cargo Empress-class Super Freighter (110 meters, 50,000 metric tons), TransGalMeg Industries’ 800,000-credit Xiytiar-class transport (164.8 meters, 5,000 metric tons), the Corellian 945,000-credit Action IV transport (100 meters, 75,000 metric tons), 975,000-credit Action V transport (115 meters, 80,500 metric tons), and 1-million-credit Action VI transport (125 meters, 90,000 metric tons), EoBaam Shipping Lines’ 775,000-credit Rin Assid bulk hauler (350 meters, 100,000 metric tons), and lastly Kuat Drive Yards’ 35-million-credit Super Transport XI (840 meters, 25 million metric tons), although one suspects that if a 840-meter-long freighter can hold 25 million metric tons of cargo, the 3,170-meter-long modified LH-3210 – which is said by the Revised Core Rulebook to be capable of hauling only 5 million tons – must have sacrificed a great deal of its original cargo space during its conversion to a ‘battleship.’
One of the largest known shipping companies in the Imperial merchant navy was Xizor Transport Systems (XTS), sometimes referred to as Xizor Transportation Systems. The Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook calls the Prince Xizor of Falleen “owner and president” of XTS, while “XTS Cleared in Freighter Explosion” names him “Chairman of XTS” (the titles ‘president’ and ‘chairman’ actually refer to different roles in a corporate hierarchy; as the owner, it is quite possible that the Prince Xizor was both chairman of the board and president of the company). Shadows of the Empire notes that “Xizor’s legitimate shipping operations were quite extensive, among the largest in the galaxy,” and that “much of the money from Black Sun’s illicit activities had been funneled into Xizor Transport Systems, and XTS alone was enough to make him a wealthy and powerful man.” The Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook states that XTS was “an immense shipping megacorporation worth billions of credits” that “maintains fleets of huge container ships and bulk freighters to haul cargo throughout the galaxy (note that Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments from the Rim explains that of the “millions of corporations in the galaxy,” only “thousands of them are big enough to count as megacorporations, some of which own systems or entire sectors of space”). It adds that XTS’s “extensive shipping operations include Imperial contracts for transporting supplies to garrisons and bases in the Outer Rim Territories, as well as supporting covert Imperial military construction projects,” and that “many Vigos {i.e., the Prince Xizor’s senior Black Sun lieutenants} utilize Xizor Transport Systems’ network of freighters to covertly move equipment, personnel, and contraband to different operations throughout the galaxy” and to “funnel and launder money from Black Sun’s other, less legitimate, operations.” In addition to shipping, XTS is known to maintain refueling depots throughout the galaxy, as indicated by “100 Metric Tons of Ryll Seized,” and was stated by X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter to manufacture the 254-meter XQ4 space platforms, which the company used as cargo depots, as well as manufacturing very common generic cargo containers, ranging in size from 75-meter-long Class-A containers (CN/As) to 26-meter-long CN/Gs, which were commonly used to store miscellaneous cargo (CN/A), vehicles (CN/B), volatile gases (CN/C), bulk dry goods (CN/D and CN/G), factory goods (CN/F), liquids (CN/H), and large finished items (CN/I); CN/Es were specifically designed for use with Allegra Enterprise Systems’ 127-meter modular conveyor. X-Wing Alliance adds the XTS-manufactured cargo canister (C/C), container hangar (a “specially constructed hangar base designed to accommodate multiple Xizor cargo containers”), CN/K and CN/L, pressure tank (Pr/Tk; used for “propane and other gases”), and 200-meter-long container transport, a lightly-crewed “medium-sized freighter” that was “specially designed to carry Class-A Cargo Containers” (note that this ship’s eight-man crew is significantly fewer in number than the equivalent aboard a similarly-sized Naval ship, such as the RSD-manufactured 200-meter-long Neutron Star-class bulk cruiser, whose ship’s company numbered more than 2,000 officers and enlisted personnel; it is very common for civilian shipping to have much smaller crews than warships).
In the Shadows of the Empire comic adaptation, the Galactic Emperor told Darth Vader that “the Imperial fleet alone cannot handle our delivery requirements” for “the new weapon” (i.e., the second Death Star), and ordered him to let a contract to XTS to supplement the spacelift command’s efforts; when Vader objected, the Galactic Emperor overruled him on the grounds that the Prince “controls the largest merchant fleet in the galaxy.” In Shadows of the Empire, Vader begrudgingly obeyed, and told the Prince, “We shall need three hundred ships {...} half of them tankers, half dry cargo transports,” and this was readily agreed to, giving an indication of the scale of XTS’s fleet. Note that XTS was only contracted to ship unprocessed raw materials (‘rawmat’); all construction for the project took place at the Sanctuary Moon, using self-replicating construction ‘droids, according to Inside the Worlds: Star Wars Trilogy; the same source states that the Death Star in question was “over 900 kilometers (550 miles) in diameter,” and Return of the Jedi states that it was “only half complete” by the time of the Battle of Endor in 39 GR. Presumably, then, about half of the battle station’s volume had been fully constructed, establishing the size of the combined Imperial/XTS shipping of unprocessed rawmats to the Endor system (a sphere 900 kilometers in diameter has a volume of about 381 billion cubic kilometers, or 381 quadrillion cubic meters). To give a degree of perspective: to move the same volume would require about 5.8 billion LH-1740 Lucrehulk-class core ships, about 3.8 billion RSD container trains, or about 71 thousand Loronar FSCVs. XTS’s fleet of 300 tankers and freighters must have reasonably expected to have provided some significant fraction of the total tonnage of the project, or else letting a contract to supplement the spacelift command’s efforts would have been unnecessary; supposing that XTS’s 300 ships were expected to move, say, one ten-millionth of the total volume, then the entire fleet would have to have a cargo capacity of 38 billion cubic meters, or an average of 127 million cubic meters per ship (giving each ship more than a quarter again the carrying capacity of RSD’s 7.8-kilometer-long container train). It would take about 577 LH-1740 core ships to move equivalent volume.
Crimson Empire II: Council of Blood introduced Ragez, Baron d’Asta, an Imperial loyalist who was described by a senior flag officer in the vestigial Imperial State at De-Purteen, Ord Cantrell, in 41 GR as a vitally important figure who “controls a strategically important planetary sector,” whose “companies produce most of the cargo ships on which we rely,” and who “commands the largest privately owned fleet in the galaxy”; Star Wars Handbook Volume Two: Crimson Empire calls him “a powerful shipping magnate who supplies the Empire with most of its cargo ships and is the controller of a strategically important planetary sector of the Empire,” and again calls his private navy “the largest privately owned fleet in the galaxy.” Presumably the Lord d’Asta’s companies were the chief manufacturers of the large freighters and tankers used by the Empire’s spacelift command – the repeated claim that he supplied the Empire’s cargo ships implies direct Imperial ownership over the vessels in question – but the description of the man himself as a “shipping magnate” also implies that he operated a shipping line independently of his role as chief supplier of ships to the spacelift command. In any event, he controlled sufficient territory, shipping, and influence that he was represented on the rump Imperial Interim Ruling Council that formed after the collapse of Operation Shadow Hand, and his support or opposition was regarded as being of vital importance to the regime. Details of the specific assets and capacity of the Lord d’Asta’s shipping interests are regrettably lacking, and it is consequently impossible to compare them to XTS except to say that XTS was larger while the Prince Xizor was still alive (it is in fact possible that some of XTS’s assets were absorbed by the Lord d’Asta after the Prince’s death over Imperial Center). Notably, neither the Prince Xizor nor the Lord d’Asta held the kind of power in the Empire that the old TradeFed had done in the Republic, despite the vast scale of their operations.
The Baobab Merchant Fleet was a privately owned shipping line headquartered at Manda, whose owners, the established and respected Baobab family, had a number of interests beyond merely shipping; the Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide is notionally written by the “distinguished author, traveler, humorist, adventurer, historian, and philologist” Ebenn Q3 Baobab, using materials “compiled by the Baobab Merchant Council,” and mentions a number of the Baobabs’ multifarious interests. The family-owned Baobab Archives kept extensive archaeological evidence relating to the development of Old Huttese into Modern Huttese, as well as selling copies of Sound Guide to Native Neimoidian and handheld vocabulators allowing non-natives to enunciate Neimoidian correctly, and sponsored the Baobab Archives Cultural Phenomenon Study Center; presumably, the Archives was the parent organization of the numerous Baobab historians and anthropologists, whose work included studies of the Neimoidian use of their species’s facility as disease-carriers to their advantage in contract negotiations, studies of the evolution of Gungans, and the translation of Old Gungan via study of the Gung Slabs (parallel texts in Old Gungan and Old Corellian). The Baobab Museum of Science had a sizeable collection of curios, including the restored Great Heep. The Baobab Research Council was investigating the “encryption of hidden messages in the audio envelope of droid speech” (and the possibility of Jedi involvement), and the Baobab School of Speed-Learning offered courses in Modern Huttese taught by “tenured professors” who had previously been “long-term hostages” who had “had a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the language for a period of two standard years or more.” The Baobab Work Placement Bureau “has been positioning many Wookiees in the corporate sector, has begun offering evening classes in Basic and Shyriiwook, and has launched a campaign demanding that employers provide adequate door height, seating facilities, and cruiser-size beds for these tall, furry specimens.” The family apparently operated a Baobab HoloNet at some point, and Baobab even goes so far as to claim that a member of the family, “the cyber-philologist Yperio Baobab,” had been instrumental in the creation of Bab-Prime, the communications protocol used almost universally by artificially-intelligent automata; he goes on to credit “a cybersociologist working for the Baobab Merchant Fleet” with the development of the variant Bab-Neo (“Babno droidspeak”), which imbued automata with “essence of personality” (i.e., near-sapience).
The Baobab Merchant Fleet is of course the most important of the family’s many holdings, and “Baobab, Mungo” states that it was a well-respected shipping company “in many sectors of the galaxy,” reputed as “one of the most reliable shippers.” It is known to have operated in the last days of the old Republic as well as the early days of the Empire, and maintained a large Baobab Merchant Fleet Complex on Manda, which “XTS Cleared in Freighter Explosion” mentions was so large that when a XTS-owned freighter exploded in the docking bays, it “killed over 2,000 employees and grounded 125 Baobab Merchant vessels.” Unfortunately, details are lacking as to the size of the Fleet’s ships, but it is known to have been a fairly large, pan-galactic operator. Indeed, according to Baobab’s Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide, the commonly-used “inter-system trade jargon” of Bocce – a pidgin initially mentioned in A New Hope as being one of the more than six million forms of communication with which protocol ‘droid C-3PO is familiar – was an auxiliary contact language “developed by the Baobab merchants” so that there would be “a common language among the highly diverse species of pilots and their crews” (practically the textbook definition of an auxiliary language); “Hagwa Cheeska Hutt: Words to Live By” mentions that Bocce “was developed by the Baobab merchants as a lingua franca for the many species who crew their trade ships.” Despite the scope of Baobab operations – their historians and anthropologists ranged from Neimoidia in the Colonies Region to Naboo in the Mid-Rim Region to Varl in the Outer Rim Territories Region – “Baobab, Mungo” states that the Fleet “was facing financial difficulties as interstellar shipping transformed with the Imperialization of the Trade Federation” and “shipping firms loyal to the new Empire were awarded the most plum contracts.”
Another family owned shipping concern was Twin Suns Transport Services, owned by the Azzameen family, as seen in X-Wing Alliance; Twin Suns was a “successful shipping operation” headquartered at Azzameen Home Base, a large 1.4-kilometer-long space station manufactured by VenteX Construction Yards (a subdivision of Golan Construction Corporation), manned by a crew of 120, with more than 325 other personnel on board (presumably pilots, technical support, and administrative staff), and also operated a Twin Suns Service platform in the Roka system, a Telgorn Corp repair yard 1.9 kilometers long, with a crew of 200 in addition to 100 engineers and 450 mechanics. X-Wing Alliance only shows a handful of Azzameen-owned ships, including a pair of Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 light freighters, a CEC YT-2000 light freighter, a GR-75 medium transport, a modified CEC Action VI bulk freighter, and at least one XTS container transport; the fact that the Service Station in the Roka system was “intended to provide a repair facility for Azzameen-owned ships” is a strong indication that Twin Suns owned a number of other, larger ships, or else such a large station supplementing the Home Base would have been unnecessary (the Azzameens supplemented their shipping business by providing the repair yard’s services to non-company ships as a side-business).
It is interesting to note that Twin Suns Transport Services was involved in a rancorous feud with another family-owned shipping concern, Viraxo Shipping, which was of broadly comparable size and scope, except with connections to the local Imperial government and elements of organized crime (in fact, the rivalry was so fierce that it not only included attempts to plant illegal stores of spice on the competition, but also frequently involved exchanges of laserfire, resulting in destruction of property and loss of life). Viraxo was known to maintain a few actual combat starships in its fleet – X-Wing Alliance shows Viraxo crews operating Sentinel class landing craft, ATR-6 Gamma class assault transports, two MandalMotors Pursuer class enforcement ships, a CEC CR90 corvette, a larger Republic Sienar Systems Marauder class corvette, and even two KDY Star Galleons – , in addition to its more usual freighters (known to include Mobquet medium cargo haulers, XTS container transports, and Allegra Enterprise Systems modular conveyors). Viraxo kept a cargo facility at Denbo, Viraxo 54, a VenteX cargo facility 1 (C/F1) 600 meters long with a crew ranging from as small as 1 to as large as 150 (considerably smaller than Azzameen Home Base, but this is to be expected as Viraxo 54 was not Viraxo’s headquarters or center of operations); Viraxo also had a pair of Telgorn Corp-manufactured 250-meter-long space platforms, an XQ3 and an XQ5, and a 909-meter VenteX industrial complex (VXO-33274), with a crew of 1,143. According to Cloak of Deception, Viraxo Shipping had been allied with the Trade Federation prior to its dissolution and the Imperialization of its assets.
Certainly there were other shipping companies, many of which were quite large (as “Baobab, Mungo” mentions that there were “shipping firms loyal to the new Empire” that profited handsomely by their connections to the regime, of which XTS and the Lord d’Asta’s holdings are only two). The vast multistellar conglomerate TaggeCo. had considerable interests in shipping and transport, and (as hitherto noted) acquired at least some considerable fraction of the defunct TradeFed’s assets; given its close ties to the New Order even before the Clone Wars, it certainly qualifies as a major shipping interest “loyal to the new Empire.” Han Solo and the Corporate Sector Sourcebook mentions Red Star Shipping Lines – “a major shipper in the Galactic Core and Colonies regions” that “owns a dozen ‘transport hub’ systems throughout the galaxy” – as having been a voting sponsor of the Corporate Sector Authority, a privilege that cost “an initial investment of over fifty quadrillion credits,” thus providing a useful indicator of the scale of Red Star’s operations (notably, neither XTS nor the Lord d’Asta is known to have had voting sponsor status). Shadows of the Empire mentions that the “wealthy and highly placed” Rendar family had owned a shipping company, and “Rendar, Dash” identifies this as RenTrans, “a growing and successful shipping company in the Core Worlds” (Stanton Rendar, a pilot in the RenTrans fleet, was killed in an accident that also resulted in the destruction of the Galactic Emperor’s private museum, and in punishment the family was banished from Imperial Center and barred from service to the Imperial State; RenTrans’s assets were subsequently assimilated into “the rival Xizor Transport Systems”). Phylon Freight’s 120-meter BFF-1 freighters – constructed by the Damorian Manufacturing Corporation (DMC), a smaller shipwright which also constructed the Carrack-class light cruiser – were common throughout the galaxy, as indicated by X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
It is noteworthy that many of these vessels are defense-equipped merchant ships (DEMS), fitted with weapons and defensive shields despite not being proper warships; some of them, like the "Class II frigate" SS Rand Ecliptic, are in fact armed merchant cruisers (AMCs), carrying sufficient firepower as to be easily mistaken for an actual warship in full commission, and even dabbling in the field of the merchant spacecraft carrier (MSC), carrying combat-grade snubfighters flown by Academy-trained pilots. Rand Ecliptic's ownership is unknown, and she may well have been owned by the Imperial Navy as part of its fleet auxiliary, or by the Imperial State as part of the spacelift command; as hitherto discussed, AMCs and MSCs of this sort are almost certainly part of a "bait-and-switch" approach to impressment. This is not, however, the sole reason for the widespread use of DEMSs, as even ships known to be privately owned and operated boast of weapons and shields. Pirates & Privateers mentions that the Imperial Navy wanted those DEMSs it did not control outlawed, leaving the Navy with a monpoly on spaceborne weaponry, but it was the fascist Commission for the Preservation of the New Order (COMPNOR) that "lobbied heavily to allow merchant ships to keep themselves lightly armed against piracy," and as a result it was perfectly legal for a privately-owned ship to equip weaponry provided that "they maintain licensure, are approved by appropriate agencies, and have no criminal record." Legally, a ship's arsenal was determined by the prevalence of piracy in the Sector in which it was registered, but a loophole allowed the master to "register in their home sector, say in the Rim, and operate anywhere in the Empire so long as they maintain registration in their sector of origin," making the Outer Rim Territories very popular for registering ships actually owned and operated in the Core Worlds. A prominent example of this is the firepower controlled by the aforementioned Lord d'Asta; in Crimson Empire II: Council of Blood, he controlled a fleet with enough firepower to simply overwhelm the defenses of the Imperial capital world of Ord Cantrell in 41 GR. The Lord d'Asta's fleet included snubfighters faster in atmosphere than the Empire's nimble TIE interceptors, and had enough firepower to destroy at least one Imperial Star Destroyer in direct ship-to-ship bombardment. Another prominent (albeit less impressive) example is found in Shadows of the Empire, in which the Prince Xizor's private navy was seen to include at least one unmarked corvette in orbit of Imperial Center and several fighter/interceptor-type starfighters, to the extent that the resulting dogfighting found them on equal footing with T-65 X-wings and TIE/ln fighters. Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds states that General Ulric Tagge commanded "a flotilla of Tagge warships" in the blockade of the Gordian Reach Sector, but during his actual appearances during the blockading action in "Return to Tatooine!", "Saber Clash!", "Thunder in the Stars!" and "Dark Lord's Gambit," he appears on the bridge of a large, multi-kilometer-long battlecruiser, the same kind that the Imperial Navy provided as Darth Vader's flagship in "Dark Lord's Gambit." In fact, The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, Second Edition even goes so far as to mention that a company called Novoil Cluster StarGoods offered "completely remanufactured Sienar Fleet Systems TIE fighters" for sale for use as "planetary patrols or convoy guard," with a discount for purchases at the wing level. Clearly, even if the rampant military proliferation of the Clone Wars era was ended, military-grade hardware was still readily available.