The Maw
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In the fictional Star Wars Expanded universe, The Maw is a seemingly unstable and mostly unnavigable cluster of black holes. It is located near the planet Kessel. The Maw was the site of Grand Moff Tarkin's Maw Installation to build the first prototype Death Star. Tarkin knew that the Maw's near-inaccessibility and remoteness made it easy for him to hide the project.
The installation was actually located within a safe zone inside the cluster discovered just prior to the start of the project. The remaining area of the Maw is saturated in radiation, plasma, and strong gravitational forces. Any who got near the edge of the Maw would notice pieces of their ships being pulled apart, and some brave smugglers and criminals used it as a shortcut past the Kessel Run.
For millennia it was believed that the Maw was an inhospitable and strange anomaly, although early in his tenure as a Moff, Tarkin learned that, amazingly, probes had discovered a stable and safe center to the Maw. Deciding that such knowledge could be extremely useful if only he knew about it, he arranged for all official references to this discovery to be erased and anybody aware of the discovery to be eliminated. Such an opportunity arose when Emperor Palpatine gave Tarkin control over the Death Star project. Using the vast resources he had available under the heading of the Death Star program, he had a series of prefabricated modules and asteroids towed into the stable center of the Maw, and elite scientists (selected as people with no families or patrons to miss them) selected to man this facility. Tarkin's own protégé (and reputed lover), Admiral Daala was left in charge of the facility with four Imperial-class Star Destroyers (the Basilisk, Gorgon, Hydra, and Manticore) to guard the facility.
Once construction was complete, he set his think tank to work, as he arranged for the construction crews of the base itself to die by not taking a safe route out of the Maw and falling into a black hole. The Maw Installation reported only directly to Moff Tarkin, with nobody else in the Imperial hierarchy even aware of its existence (it was unclear if even the Emperor himself knew of the facility). Updates and research were transmitted out via probes that would leave the intense interference of the Maw itself, transmit an encrypted signal, then self destruct. They were under the strictest orders to never break radio silence otherwise, and to never under any circumstance leave the Maw.
In this total blackout, they built an early prototype for the Death Star and refined the design. Once they had prototype which showed the feasibility of the plan, Tarkin took the finished plans to begin construction, while leaving the Maw with orders to continue to produce weapons far worse than even the Death Star. When Tarkin died aboard the Death Star, the Maw was left with nobody to receive the coded updates they regularly transmitted. Development continued on superweapons potentially even more dangerous than the Death Star. Routine crew replacements and scheduled troop rotations never arrived, and over a decade passed with no word from the outside world. Suggestions to send a shuttle to investigate the silence were always sharply refused by Daala, who obeyed her orders to the letter. The Maw continued on as an Imperial Navy installation, not knowing that in that time the Empire had fallen into ashes, Palpatine was dead, and Daala's own small contingent of Star Destroyers was one of the stronger single remnants of the Imperial Navy.
In 11 ABY, the secret installation was discovered accidentally by the New Republic, which lead to the prototype superweapon known as the Sun Crusher that was under development being released upon the galaxy. Admiral Daala attempted to rebuild the Empire using her own forces once she realized her own standing orders from Tarkin were moot. Upon her defeat and exile, the Maw Installation was destroyed by Daala.
Many years later, during the later parts of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, in 29 ABY, the Jedi Academy temporarily relocated to the Maw as a refuge after the destruction of the Academy facilities on Yavin IV, as the Maw was known to be one of the most inaccessible and secure locations in the Galaxy. Jedi children were housed within a new installation hidden within the Maw.
The stability of the cluster itself is something of a , with some believing that an advanced civilization must have constructed it, rather than it merging together like a normal cluster would, since the odds of two astoundingly unlikely events are together not worth considering and nigh-impossible (that is, the odds of multiple black holes far away from the Core being close enough to attract one another; and that they would occur in a stable configuration). Others believe that in the sheer volume of the universe, with the raw size of the galaxy, such a strange occurrence could happen, albeit it would still be extremely unlikely. The ability of the ancient relic known as Centerpoint Station to tow entire planets through hyperspace to construct the Corellian system, and the artifact known as the Star Forge tend to support the theory that the Maw was constructed in antiquity. There are some indications that the Killik may have been the race that built the Maw (and Centerpoint Station) countless millennia ago, although it is more likely that these were constructed by a different race which co-existed with the Killiks at some point, and some members of whom became Killik joiners.
The Maw Installation
The Maw Installation was a research facility financed by Grand Moff Tarkin, and was used to develop superweapon designs. Bevel Lemelisk and Qwi Xux were the two scientists that developed most of the designs. Among these are the classic Death Stars, World Devastators, and the invincible Sun Crusher. Bevel Lemelisk, later adapted the Death Star designs into the Darksaber weapon. The Maw Installation was situated in the middle of the Maw Black Hole Cluster, with only a few navigable routes through the maelstrom. It was defended by Admiral Daala and her fleet of Star Destroyers: Gorgon, Hydra, Basilisk, and Manticore. The Maw's secret existence was exposed after Han Solo and Kyp Durron, fleeing the nearby Kessel, found themselves inside the cluster. As the Maw Installation was to be a secret it had not received any news of the destruction of either Death Star or the end of the Emperor and with him the main power or the Empire. After Admiral Daala found this out she went on a brief guerrilla assault against the New Republic. It was later destroyed in a self-destruct, but not before Daala returned and stole all the new weapons concepts from the main computer. The installation's fragments were later used to build Shelter, a Jedi facility located in the installation's former position.The Parsec Mistake
In , Han Solo boasts about the speed of his ship, the Millennium Falcon. When Solo tells Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Falcon, Kenobi asks if its a fast ship. Solo says; "Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs!"In real-life astronomy, a parsec is a unit of distance, and not a measure of time or speed. Solo's use of a parsec as a measure of speed here is incorrect. However, when author Kevin Anderson wrote the Jedi Academy Trilogy, he created the concept of the Maw Cluster to possibly explain away Solo's mistake.
Navigating the Maw is extremely hazardous. Ships making runs must take long complex courses to avoid the dangerous singularities and gravity distortions of the cluster. However, it is speculated that Solo brazenly shaved by the gravity wells, thus achieving a run under a distance of 12 parsecs where a safer route would be much longer. This shorter run, by necessity, would require a faster ship than more circuitious routes, since a slower ship would not be able to resist the gravitational pull of the closer black-holes. This, however, still fails to explain why, in a galaxy far, far away, the inhabitants are using a measure of distance based on the orbit of the earth.
The question of whether Solo was boasting about the speed of his ship, or his skillful abilities at piloting is still debated amongst fans. One could also look at the wording of the quote and consider Solo may have been mentioning another aspect of the Falcon's fame that is unrelated to its speed - that she earned prestige for surviving a dangerous short-distanced Kessel Run, as well as being "fast".
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