CT maintaining control without the bureaucracy

How did Palpatine do it after the destruction of the first Death Star?

 

He didn't.

 

Exactly. The Empire under Palps after the destruction of the first Death Star only lasted about three and a half years, during which time the galaxy was in a state of full-blown civil war.

 

Each local Moff still had control over his own territory. Sure, having the Death Star was a nice terror-inspiring weapon, but each Moff still had a large fleet of Star Destroyers at his disposal. The Rebellion was still very weak post-Yavin, so Star Destroyers would have still been sufficient to quell any openly rebellious behavior. That's why the Rebels still had to have their bases on remote worlds.

 

Naked Gun Wars part Four and a Half: The Smell of Fear (....of a Black Planet)

Moff Jessup: "You WANT me in the Outer Rim Territories! You NEED me in the Outer Rim Territories!!!"

 

You can't handle the Force!

 

Maybe I'm just the odd one out, but would anyone else like to see some spin-off movies of this era by Disney?

I think it would be interesting to have films take place between ANH and ROTJ showing people reacting to Alderaan's and the Death Star's destruction and how this plunged the galaxy deeper into conflict.

Might be an unpopular opinion, but I always thought the OT's Rebellion plot was a little half-baked, especially compared to Luke's conflict.

 

Well, there is the EU, which does delve into a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff.

 

Yeah, but the EU comes with its own baggage - including (by this point) five different interpretations of the ANH-ROTJ era.

 

Care to explain?

 

Most of those refer to each other though.

You've got novels, and 3 or 4 different comic serieses- but lately, the novels have been referring to events from the comics- even the oldest ones.

Scoundrels, for example, released in 2013, makes references to the Crimson Jack arc of Marvel SW Comics (1977-1978).

 

Basically, there's been a whole slew of takes on the "Classic Trilogy era" in the EU. The old newspaper comics, the Marvel comics, and the more "modern" EU (modern meaning post-Zahn and WEG) are basically three separate continuities, and I'd say there's enough continuity conflicts in the modern EU to add a fourth "interpretation". The fifth is the recent Brian Wood ongoing comic, which is intentionally treating nothing beyond ANH as confirmed continuity.

Now, as Iron_lord points out, even more recent EU material has tried to incorporate it all into one timeline. But that's after-the-fact retconning, and it leaves the era so overstuffed with stories that someday I want to go through and try to figure out if there was even enough time for the main cast to fit in all of their adventures.

 

There's a thread for that in the Literature forum- but it's been quiet for a while:

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...f-the-gcw-events-occur-in-real-time.50010159/

 

I think it really depends as to how Palpatine disbanded the senate.

I don't really read much EU, so that never factors into my thought process except in a small number of cases.

But for instance, I don't know if Palpatine went in front of the senate, told them to all go to hell, and then disbanded the senate. The senate, if it's filled with a whole bunch of people of the same kind of wealth that Bail Organa and Padme had, would then be liable to throw all of their money and local influence behind the Rebellion.

I would think that perhaps Palpatine needed to get the senate to vote away it's own powers. Maybe he bribed key politicians absurd amounts of wealth to get them to vote away their final vestigial remnants of political power. Or perhaps he suspended the senate indefinitely following the apparent death of Leia (in ANH Vader orders for a distress beacon to be launched from Leia's ship and for it to be reported to the senate that all aboard were killed). So perhaps Palpatine used the incident to disband the senate "temporarily" until he could make a demonstration using the Death Star (which didn't exactly last too long).

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Death Star, I would think it wisest if Palpatine blamed Tarkin for going rogue and using the Death Star as part of a coup and making it look like Alderaan was a tragedy and not something the government endorsed. Or they could try and blame the Rebellion for taking out a "loyal" defenseless planet to try and terrorize the planet, turning Alderaan into a martyr for the Imperial cause (even though it was the Empire itself that destroyed it).

If enough people buy into that and agree that Palpatine needs complete freedom from the senate, then perhaps those feelings of patriotism would have earned Palpatine support for his decision to give the Moffs direct control over their territories (and then the Moffs would therefore fill the role of bureaucrats).

In short, the Moffs would fill in the vacuum left by the Senate, it would just be a matter of getting the population to accept this change. But having said that, the Empire's power definitely does weaken as the size of the Rebellion noticeably grows between ANH and ESB.

 

Apparently (in the EU) several different stories ended up being given for the destruction of Alderaan after the event. At least one of which was, as you mentioned "The Rebels did it".

 

I don't really know to what extent the Death Star was meant to be a substitute for the senate.

The dialogue goes like this:

From the PT we see that planets had local governments that were represented in the Senate. Palpatine needed the political machinery of the Imperial Senate as a link between the local governments and the central government to properly administer the far reaches of Imperial territory. The first part of Tarkin's answer to Tagge's question is that regional governors will take direct control and be able to administer their systems, so I think they are filling the bureaucratic void left by the dissolution of the senate.

In the second part of Tarkin's answer, that pertains to the Death Star, he says that fear will keep the LOCAL systems in line. It's not really elaborated on as to where Tarkin's jurisdiction begins and ends, though according to the EU apparently he's in charge of much of the Outer Rim, which is where the Rebellion seems to largely operate according to EU galactic maps. Which makes me think that Imperial control over the core worlds was pretty solid, and that the Death Star would only really be utilized in the Outer Rim where Imperial control was weakest. I don't get the impression that the Death Star was going to be patrolling the entire galaxy, or else I can't see why Tarkin would refer specifically to "local" systems.

Though it's also possible that there were to be multiple Death Stars each with their own jurisdiction. In the 2013 Star Wars comic (which takes place like 2 months after the Battle of Yavin) the second Death Star is shown to be well under construction already, likely beginning construction before the destruction of the first Death Star.

 

- "Alderaan was an inside job!!!!"

 

Choices of One also has a half-complete DS2 only a few months after Yavin, and The Essential Guide to Warfare also referenced it being "in the initial stages of construction" before the DS1 was blown up.

 

'Fear of this battle station'. Then of course the battle station was destroyed and people may have realized that the Empire isn't so invulnerable after all.

 

What control?