Lit When did Emperor Palpatine plan on officially transforming the Galactic Empire into the Dark Empire?

Assume Palpatine wins at Endor, and has broken Luke. The details of such are irrelevant.

We know that at least around the time of ROTS Palpatine always intended his Empire to transmogrify into a dark side magocracy.

The question is, when? Why not make greater leaps towards this during the 19 years between the DOANO and Endor?

True, in some cases he was doing it slowly. Such cases like Sarcev Quest “infiltrating” the Imperial Ruling Council along with Sim Aloo and Janus Greejatus.

Could he assume maybe this would truly begin rolling out, say, 5 years after a victorious Endor? 10 years? And how would the non-force sensitive Imperial brass react? Could this spark another Galactic (Imperial) Civil War?

 

The Palpatine that died on the Death Star was not the same Palpatine that reincarnated on Byss a year later. I doubt the Dark Empire was a priority for the pre-Endor Palpatine. Post-Endor, he was furious that his Empire had failed him and was planning sweeping changes to reform the Empire to serve him more directly.

 

As early as the first Weg books with the Tarkin Doctrine/Death Star proposal we get an in-Universe direct quote from Tarkin to Palps indicating that they were still "decades away from a force vast enough to secure every system simultaneously". So, even early on (and surely well before the actual coming of the Empire) the plan was to have every System in the Galaxy locked down. Given that the later EU had Palps and select few of his most loyal servants knowing about the Vong far in advance (Pestage, Doriana, Thrawn, probably also Dangor), the continuity implications are that the vast military build-ups were as much an ongoing attempt to fortify as much of the Galaxy as possible in advance of the Vong storm as it was to usher in the oppression of the Dark Empire.

The Force Unleashed Campaign Guide also has a few mentions about the Dark Side elements of the Empire and that they were in the early Empire "decades away" from their "Galactic deployment".

Interestingly, an often overlooked line from Dark Empire 2 straight from Palps about the Galaxy Gun is that "we should have thought of it decades ago", meaning that not only was it something devised by the Byss forces directly (not the rest of the Empire), but that it did indeed change whatever the earlier superweapon calculus was. Cracken's Threat Dossier outright says that there was to be a Death Star for every Galactic Region (so about a dozen in all), and what besides the Vong could justify such a force?

Palps knew about the Vong, surely Sate Pestage also did, as also did Thrawn. I've never seen anything to indicate that Vader was in the know about the Vong, and whether either Isard (Armand or Ysanne), any of the Ruling Councilors, Lords, Tarkin or any of the other Grand officers (Moffs and Admirals) had any knowledge of the Vong isn't clear.

It's also not clear who knew the extent of the Byss developments besides Pestage, Dangor, Vader (he was there in the comics, though to be fair it probably would have killed him to warn Luke about Byss!) and various Dark Siders.

What would inevitably have happened is that the Byss forces and the eventual darker Galactic Empire would have collided with the Vong whenever they did invade. At that point, one could see large parts of the Galaxy actually welcoming the Vong as liberators against the evils and oppression of the technological terrors and Dark Side vampirism of the Dark Empire. I really wish that we'd gotten that comic storyline even as an AU/Infinities. I'd love to have seen World Devastators becoming Worldship Devastators, and Jedi and Rebels fighting alongside the Vong!

 

Well, for the Bringer of Chaos to emerge, Centerpoint would have be destroyed. Which I suppose the Vong could manage. Though I don’t think Abeloth would have a very easy time fighting Darth Sidious and his Empire. She lost against Grand Lord Vol and Darth Krayt. A true Sith Master would be more than a match for the Beloved Queen of the Stars.

Though I must admit, I’d enjoy seeing Vader and Sidious team up against the Mother.

 

The destruction of the Vong, destruction of the rebel alliance-and any other viable resistance are all guarantees.

If he had lived-I suspect, he might have encouraged one final coup attempt-to get rid of imperial elites who would have opposed the dark empire.

Why exactly? DE Palpatine was planning on using the galaxy's population as soul batteries, for his eternal power ups. Assuming this actually works, Palpatine defeats abeloth, and secures his empire.

TBH-I see the Vong loitering outside the galaxy and then invading after the DE had been formalized, ironically invading too late, and being destroyed.

The biggest issue for Palpatine is not the rebels or the Vong, its the imperial upper echelons that want to rule the empire or don't want to see a secular empire replaced by a dark side magocracy than runs on soul/life force draining. Palpatine needs to destroy or pacify these elements, somehow-ideally in one full swoop to prevent a longer civil war.

 

I like to assume that the Imperial Mutiny wasn’t just to “weed out the weak” but more to kill off people who would oppose the dark side theocracy that was about to unleash from the Deep Core. So the Mottis, Trachtas, and the like would end up with a suspicious blaster bolt at the back of the head.

 

From reading above, it would seem that many feel Palpatine's primary intent was to fortify against the Vong, with the tertiary result being total galactic subjugation.

I think the reverse is far more likely. While Palpy was aware and even planning for the encroaching Vong, I think his end game was the Dark Empire.

Perhaps the Vong were his means to that end.

The easy logic would be to assume that the fleets and weapons from Byss were set up to beat the Galaxy into final submission.

Maybe it is just as easy to assume the Byss weapons were the bulwark against the Vong, and as the scourge reduced trillions of independent sentients across the galaxy. The Vong would have a heck of a time reaching Byss, let alone taking it. So long as the fortress worlds held, the Empire would be ready to counter-punch the thinning Vong forces.

In the end, the Dark Empire forces would eradicate the Vong, enslave a weakened galaxy, and leave good guys wondering what hope there could possibly be.

If the Vong never became that level of threat, I suspect the transition from secular/bureaucratic autocracy to metaphysical domination of mind and spirit of every living thing that exists...would be very gradual and nearly imperceptible.

People would vanish, come back changed. Whole cities would have joint nightmares, visions. Wars between cultures would begin and end with no one knowing why. Families would betray one another, friends would be feared. In some ways, the "Empire" of stormtroopers and TIE Fighters would be reassuring...a sign of strength and normalcy. The Order would be clung too compared to the terror in the dark.

But eventually, the last light would go out.

 

The notion Palpatine cared about the Vong at all is bad fanon.

He did not. His knowledge of them was at best extremely cursory, if not outright abstract and speculative.

The Vong were an obstacle, and if the Dark Empire had been successful, he would have run over them like any obstacle is run over.

I seriously doubt Palpatine even gave the Vong that much consideration.

 

The fact he never once mentions them in the Book of Sith seems to solidify the idea he didn’t care about them.

 

That was always my impression as well.

Most of what we have on the Empire's awareness of the Yuuzhan Vong comes through Thrawn and the Empire of the Hand, with Thrawn first informing Doriana that his people have encountered a weird armada of "Far Outsiders" during Outbound Flight, and various later EOH officers saying that their empire was created as a bulwark against the Vong or something like them. In which case, it's interesting to see how little difference they end up making in the end. The actual Vong invasion doesn't even go through the Unknown Regions, in fact it bypasses them entirely and heads straight for Coruscant, with the Imperials (Remnant and Hand alike) being mostly spectators for a good chunk of the war. This is not the creation of someone with a solid understanding of the threat involved.

My guess is Palpatine only ever had a very vague understanding of, or interest in, the Yuuzhan Vong. To the extent that he thought about them at all, he categorized them as one of the myriad "here be monsters" unknowns of the Unknown Regions. He figured that Thrawn carving a bulwark against them into the Unknown Regions would probably handle the problem, but it's also the kind of thing he'd have eventually wanted to do anyway (I don't see him leaving any part of the galaxy out of his control long-term, unexplored or not), and the specter of an alien bogeyman just makes it easier to make the natives (like Thrawn) accept it. And he almost certainly figured that if they ever did show up, he could turn them into part of some convoluted scheme or other, like he tried to do the Ssi-ruuk.