Lit Palpatine's Plans for the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium?

What was Palpatine's ultimate goal with his scheming with the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium?

Backstory: Around 2 BBY (coincidentally the same year the GCW kicked off ), Emperor Palpatine appeared in a series of visions to the leader of the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium, the Shreeftut, offering him 'dozens of worlds and millions of Humans to capture' in exchange for sharing with the Empire the knowledge of their entechment technology. In response, they conquered G'rho, capturing and enteching the native Human colonists, with plans to further expand into Wild Space. All the while, the Empire would/did lie to the media, claiming said worlds were hit with plagues, disasters, etc, omitting the truth of the Ssri-ruuk and their involvement with the Emperor.

Question: How far would the Emperor have let them conquer? Did he explicitly list off a series of systems/sectors that he would "give" to the Srri-ruuk? Or did he just say they can conquer X amount in exchange for Y amount of entechment know-how, and they decided to pick the worlds they did?

Also, what would Palpatine have used entechment for anyway? I vaguely recall Umak Leth dabbling--and failing--to incorporate it into the Shadow Droid program. Is it possible entechment has a hand in the Terror Program seen in TFU II? The timeline and biodroid aspects match up.

 

I could see Palpatine wanting to know if a powerful Force User could retain all their powers when enteched - and considering the possibility of transferring his spirit into a super-powerful droid body.

 

The Eye of Palpatine used reverse Entechment to imprint preloaded template personalities and skills into instant troopers from looted populations.

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I suspect entechment was a curiousity to Imperial research, more then a key plot piece for Palpatine.

The real value of the relationship is the same as Palpatine's knowledge of the Vong.

Fear.

If you are a tyrannical autocrat on the backfoot in the face of an unstable and ungovernable populace...what could solve many of your problems at a stroke?

An outsider threat.

I suspect, had Palpatine survived Endor, the aftermath could easily have been him ordering the Endor Fleet to Bakura, with all the pomp and press the holonet could give it...as a Imperial Navy began a campaign against the aggressors.

The minor incident at Endor, forgotten in the buzz of the great war between the Empire and the Ssi-Ruuk.

Rinse-repeat for the Vong as needed.

Never let the people think they don't need you to protect them.

 

I second this. Totalitarian regimes need an "other" to war against to justify their draconian control over the populace. What's scarier than a race of lizards kidnapping your own people and using them as batteries for their ships and war machines? Palpatine was the master of the long con. Once the rebels were destroyed he could theoretically have had a few years of "peace" "stabilizing" the galactic situation before demonstrating that the Ssi-Ruuk were a problem that needed to be dealt with.

What better way to bring together a politically fractured galaxy in the aftermath of the defeat of the Rebel Alliance than through an alien threat? A short, victorious war against an aggressive species would be an easy way to score points with the galactic populace.

 

I think the underlying idea is that Palpatine was fascinated by the potential of entechment technology to contribute to his personal focus on living forever. He's already deeply involved in Sith alchemy, essence transfer, cloning -- a whole assortment of technological and supernatural techniques that he is experimenting with in hopes of finding a way to experience eternal life. He would naturally be intrigued by any technology that holds out the potential of contributing to his efforts, let alone a technology that is purportedly well-developed (meaning this is not an experimental technology -- it's the well-established basis of Ssi-ruuvi technology/economy/society) and reliably able to remove the spirit/soul/essence/whatever from the body and transfer it to a technological receptacle. It's a technology that strikes directly at his primary personal interest. Of course he would be willing to sacrifice a few worlds to entice the lizards to share their secret. Palpatine would love to have something like this to add to his experiments.

I honestly don't think he cared one bit about the Ssi-ruuk beyond getting his hands on entechment equipment. Palpatine already has the Rebellion for an external threat, and who knows what else is out there in the Unknown Regions. Plus he's already demonstrated he can conjure up a wartime threat anytime he needs to. I don't think the Ssi-ruuk really move the needle in that regard. And with as firm a grasp as the Empire has on the galaxy, what does he even need a threat for? Why risk it? The galaxy is already united in his firm grip. He's beyond the stage of justifications and explanations for the Empire's authoritarianism. No, he just wants the technology, and he's willing to give away a few worlds -- what's a planet at his scale? -- to get it. I'm sure that as soon as the Ssi-ruuk handed it over, he'd simply wipe out the Imperium.

 

I mean a Human Replica Droid body is basically a clone body that doesn't age. Imagine transferring your entire being to one of those, while retaining your Force Powers, without having to be tied down to Dark Side corruption.

Get some fidelity tests up for the final Palpatine return.

 

Yeah, and besides this being SOP for totalitarian regimes, it also really meshes with what we know of Palpatine after the prequels, the way he conjured and then discarded the Separatist thread. The Ssi-ruuk were just the latest in line for the same treatment.

And the timing, as you say with the defeat of the Rebel Alliance, really works out. As far as Palpatine knew, the Rebel threat was about to be wrapped up for good at Endor. So, time for a new bogeyman. Enter the Ssi-ruuk.

Palpatine certainly doesn't need the Ssi-ruuk - if they weren't there, he'd just invent something. But since they are there, and since he wants their entechment technology, why not kill two birds with one stone? They're offering to give you their technology, in exchange for some of your worlds. Perfect, you get their technology, then you use their attacks into your worlds as the latest threat and eventually rally your government to strike back against them. It fits the kind of convoluted plans he lives for.

As for being beyond the stage of justifications and explanations for your authoritarianism, is any dictatorship ever really beyond that? The Kim dynasty has a tighter hold on North Korea than Palpatine ever did on the galaxy, and it's been going on for so long that hardly any of their subjects even remembers - much less can imagine - a world in which they're not the god-emperors of everything. They still feed their people horror stories about the monsters on the other side of the DMZ coming to kill them all if the Dear Leader wasn't there to guide and protect them. It's how regimes like this roll.

 

Except in this case, the Sri-ruuk genuinely are monsters lol. I'd imagine even some Rebel officials would have turned a blind eye if the Empire wiped them out, assuming any survived after Endor/Chandrila-Dac's destruction.

 

Palpatine never used the ultimate "Far Outsiders are coming, only I can save the galaxy from them" argument to influence the populace and Thrawn's campaign against Esva and other outside threats was little-known, so it is seems unlikely to me that campaign against lizards would've been used for propaganda.

 

It's not an ever present drumbeat...that was not how the Empire operated.

They would simply permit an attack to happen, allowing the fear to ripple through the region/galaxy, which would in turn increase support for a strong military hand in the response.

People would become numb to ever-present danger. To be truly impactful, the Empire needed and strategically scheduled series of "random" crises to "overcome".

Of course, this is all retcon for how Palpatine could've allowed such things to be, with the assertion being he always has a plan. Particularly in cases where the threat in question was not being "exploited" directly by the empire for material ends, political ends seems the next most likely choice.

At least, in the past. New material seems to press a steady sense of the fear of the remaining separatists and insurgents...I can understand the disconnect now.

 

As Havac noted, the Ssi-Ruu were very much related to Palpatine's main interests. That is finding a way to live forever. I expect if further contact had been made with the Ssi-Ruuvi, he would have sought to acquire and study entechment technology. This could have had a lot of implications for his plans in Dark Empire, especially as it came to draining or seizing life essences.

Eventually he would have turned on them, as Sith always do. But he would have been fine allowing them to take as many Imperial worlds as they needed to acquire what he wanted from them.

Palpatine is not concerned with the empire at all. And he'd have disposed of it and the bulk of its personnel and institutions within a generation if Endor had not happened. The Ssi-Ruuvi though provide insight on how the soul or life force might be stolen or manipulated, especially on a mass scale. Losing worlds and populations in exchange for what could be crucial information on his own personal quest is not even a bargain.

 

I'd assume Palpatine's ultimate plan was something like "commence primary ignition." Imperial control rests on an illusion of absolute control - that the Empire can't even be challenged in the slightest, so why fight back? So, manipulate and twist and scheme, and when you have what you want - Death Star.

 

Eventually no. He would have used every living being as a battery to fuel his own ascension to godhood.

Bit surprising a few folks in this thread seem to be ignoring that Palpatine never intended to continue running the empire as another autocrat until he passed away. But that he had universal ambitions, as well as ambitions of total mastery of life and death and the force.

 

One doesn't exclude the other. I like to think Palpatine was a standard autocrat up to his death, but one that intended on living forever*. This isn't that strange. He can want a standard totalitarian Empire, non-Sith, while still wanting immortality for himself. After his death, presumably he spends some time with Sith spirits that have him embrace his Darth Sidious persona again.

*The Empire, including the Fel Era, wasn't really a standard constitutional monarchy anyway. It was more like the Roman Empire or Bonapartist France in which its basically a populist military dictatorship with the pretense/trappings of a monarchy.

 

Apparently Palps knew about the Vong. Maybe he also wanted to use the Ssi Ruuvi against them.

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Whatever his ambitions, Palpatine's power is constrained - he's a scared, scarred, damaged tyrant, perched in his wizard tower and relying on the skills of men like Vader and Thrawn and Tagge and Zaarin, women like Mara Jade and Tessala Corvae and Myrette Davani, and counterproductive delusionalists like Tarkin and Motti and Daala and Isard, and simple incompetents like Tol Sivron and Kendal Ozzel, and a tangled pile of innumerable scrapped TIEs and myriad idiots in white armour. The Empire, by its very nature, is incapable of competent responses. That's what makes it villainous. That's what makes it human. That's what makes it real.

The Ssi-ruuk are there. They're an alien tyranny, in a significant area of space where the Empire has no maps, who compensate for their slightly lower tech-level not only with dangerous Force-manipulating technology, but also with brutally well-organized resources and the will to use them - their limitations, scientific and psychological, limit their expansion, but their brutally attritional, industrial and aggressive use of resources to create weapons, which I'm sure Tyers intended simply as a straight-bat reference to "godless communism", also means that they would have a strong stance in a defensive confrontation with the Empire.

They're that blank space at the edge of the map that says simply Here Be Dragons. Evil Space Communist dragons with soulless Force-manipulating technology - and if you backfill some ideas that have only been made explicit in more recent canon, it's practically impossible to fly hyperspace in the Unknown Regions except with the Force, so they're probably using the low-level Force-sensitivity of whole groups of enteched consciousnesses to navigate their ships in the deep black, precisely because that's much more effective approach in the Unknown Regions than a normal navacomp...

In that context, the Empire would be taking a big risk by throwing a fleet of Imperial-class ships at them, hoping they can brute-force a useful hyperlane just to get there, and then sustain that hyperlane and win a campaign of attrition in space they have no maps for against opponents who know exactly what they're doing... and the Empire might just end up losing a lot of big pointy, and giving the Ssi-ruuk access to superior technology, and a lot of Imperial crewers to entech - and there's also a risk that the Empire might end up losing a seemingly insignificant bit of territory on the trailing end of the Outer Rim frontier that just happens to include a top-secret battlestation under construction around Endor,....

Palpatine lacks the capability to actually confront the Ssi-ruuk with confidence - but he can do what corrupt Senators do best, which is cut a deal.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Maybe it was no coincidence that the DS was parked there. It could stop them should they overreach, or at least have them fear annihilation if it might reach their homeworld. All the Imps need is one captured Ssi Ruu capital ship with coordinates to it.

Unless they enteched the DS2...

Maybe Palpatine parked other superweapons near other UR access points and storehouses/observatories.



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And because of all of this, they would be the perfect ally for the Empire under Palpatine against the techhating Vong. Even the Ssi-Ruuk should have realized this, if they had intel about the YV.

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Great write-up, and good points on them brute-forcing their way towards Lwhekk, but I don't think Palpatine would be the one to make the first move. I think he would have the dinos invade first, capture them, and then gain their information and technology, rather than the inverse that you posited on the Imperium capturing Imperial technology/personnel.

 

I’m sorry, I have to disagree here. Palpatine didn’t ultimately need Vader, the Moffs or the Hands to achieve his ambitions. The Ssi-Ruuvi are limited by the fact they are afraid to die off their homeworld, the P’weck species and their own as you noted somewhat lower tech level.

I expect he would have studied the process of entechment, acquired the technology, via his agents and then as his plans towards the dark empire advanced turn on the Ssi-Ruu while using it as an excuse for further development of super weapons and fleet building.

Palpatine is more than just a tyrant or a dictator, and I really dislike it when people try to make the man a more mundane figure-he isn’t. He is the dark side embodied; the greatest Sith who ever lived, the “beast that inhabits the world”, and indeed the central antagonist of SW. Making him into just another dictator degrades him and removes the majesty that surrounds the character.

 

"Hey Shreeftut, I heard you can literally put souls into machines... how about you help me put my soul into this machine (after which I, as a Force-sensitive moon-sized battle station, will totally not superlaser you in the back, promise)?"

Cue Palpatine's ghost vs. IG-88 death match inside the DS2's circuits...

 

Callista wants a word... the Eye of Palpatine would have been perfect to infiltrate Vongfleets and blast them up from the inside. Pity Luke had to get her out just to date a computer program. Agent Smith could relate...

So if IG-88 becomes a Death Star Abominor or Palpatine a moonsized Technobeast to make Belia Darzu proud, they all would truly be 'celestial' in proportions and power.

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He wanted to offer them as a sacrifice to Abeloth.

Trust me, guys. I’m a Star Wars expert.

 

All roads lead to Abeloth, if the theorists are right.

Which they aren't.