Martio Batch

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Martio Batch, in the Star Wars Expanded Universe was one of the 12 original Imperial Grand Admirals appointed by Emperor Palpatine after the Battle of Yavin. He was nowhere near as well known as Grand Admiral Thrawn, or Grand Admiral Declann, as he preferred keeping a low profile aboard his Imdaar Alpha research station, the better to work on his personal projects; this disinclination for politicking and socalizing led to the doubly accurate nickname of the "Invisible Admiral".

His largest success was with developing a novel cloaking device which used hibridium- unfortunately, this new cloaking device had the distinct disadvantage of working both ways: It was double-blind in that the cloaked ship was invisible to outside observers, but the outside observers were invisible to the cloaked vessel as well. Deeply frustrated at what amounted to failure, he took another path to a useful cloaking device (Batch's cloaking device plans would not be lost, however. They would be stored in the Emperor's private warehouse at Mt. Tantiss, where many years later, Thrawn would recover them and make brilliant use of them despite the double-blind drawback.) Previously, cloaking devices had been possible, and very effective in use- Darth Maul's personal vessel, a Sith Infiltrator named "The Scimitar" was cloaked by a cloaking device that predated Batch's design. Unfortunately, the old design relied utterly on stygium crystals mined from the planet Aeten II in the Dreighton nebula, the supply of which had been mined out decades ago. The Grand Admiral took Grand Moff Tarkin's prototype Death Star superlaser, embodied in the "Tarkin" weapon platform, and in an ironic fulfillment of the Death Star's official justification, simply blasted the planet, making mining an abundant amount of stygium crystals possible.

With a large, assured supply, Batch began experimenting in cloaking all sorts of vehicles, to see which combination would produce the most effective warships, since, while his supply of crystals was large, it was not renewable. Eventually, he settled on outfitting modified TIE fighters with them, for the maximum combat-effectiveness. He killed two birds with one shot when he requisitioned the Super Star Destroyer Terror (built shortly after the Battle of Hoth) under Admiral Sarn to both guard the rubble of Aeten II, and for setting up his production facilities for the TIE Phantom aboard there under his personal command; as part of its preparation, it became the first Star Destroyer to ever be equipped with a cloaking device. The Phantom was developed near the planet Dreighton, under the personal supervision of Darth Vader himself; in combat tests, they acquitted themselves extremely well, defeating almost all their enemies and suffering no casualties- they possessed slightly more firepower than production TIEs, and they had a unique feature in that they automatically cloaked in between firing their laser cannons, rendering them invisible almost all the time. These preliminary successes and from the other perspective, debacles, alerted the Rebel Alliance, and they sent a task force to destroy the Terror and end this mortal threat to the Alliance. At Imdar Alpha, two Rebel pilots, Rookie One and Ru Murleen, infiltrated the Terror by stealing the supply shuttle Epsilon Four. They stole one of the V-38 TIE Phantoms, and left through a rather unconventional exit, via the superstructure and out the engines. Terror sustained critical damage, and Vader personally executed Admiral Sarn before fleeing the ship in his TIE Advanced. The Terror was successfully destroyed, and one of the prototypes successfully stolen- but both successes proved of little aid for the Alliance, overconfident that they stoled the prototype, shortly thereafter it self-destructed.

After this colossal failure, Batch stole the remnants of the forces attached to the Terror and fled to the Outer Rim in his personal Imperial-class Star Destroyer Meniscus, where eventually, his executive officer/new second-in-command, blaming him for the loss to the Rebels, and the subsequent death of Admiral Sarn, betrayed and executed Batch. The second thereupon joined Supreme Warlord Harrsk's group deep in the Core.

Though never published and thus not canonical, Star Wars Insider author Daniel Wallace indicates that Batch's personal Star Destroyer was named Meniscus. Further non-canonical information from Daniel Wallace's unofficial "Grand Admirals: What Have They Got in Their Pocketsses?" suggests that Syn regularly carried a stygium splinter. See here and here.

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