Five sleek warships escorted a group of transport vessels into the Yago-Dur system. After handing over the supplies aboard the transports, the five warships remained and joined Gideon Tarkin's fleet.
Vindicator-class heavy cruisers!
These heavy cruisers were 600 meters long and roughly triangular in shape. Their overall structure resembled the Galactic Republic's most advanced Knight-class Star Destroyers and Consul-class Star Destroyers, but their hulls were slimmer and flatter.
One particularly conspicuous feature was that, unlike the Knight-class Star Destroyer's concentrated arrangement of twenty turrets per main battery group, the Vindicator-class heavy cruiser used a dispersed turret layout.
They carried twenty single-barreled light turbolasers, twenty-five quadruple turbolasers, ten point-defense laser cannons, twenty point-defense light ion cannons, and three 100,000-ton tractor beams.
This armament made it abundantly clear that the Vindicator-class heavy cruiser had been designed specifically to fight small warships and starfighters. By comparison, the equally 600-meter-long Dreadnought-class heavy cruiser mounted eight single-barreled heavy turbolasers.
A powerful, cutting-edge fire-control system was installed atop the warship's tall rear bridge, capable of locking onto and saturating every target around it without blind spots. For small warships and starfighters, entering the Vindicator-class heavy cruiser's firing net meant almost certain death!
This was the first large warship independently designed and built by Republic Sienar Systems!
Before this, Republic Sienar Systems had primarily produced spacecraft engines, mainframes, and control systems. And because of the nature of the products it sold, the company had secretly supplied warship engines to the Confederacy of Independent Systems.
Later, Chancellor of the Republic Sheev Palpatine decided that Kuat Drive Yards was not entirely trustworthy either. Combined with Rendili StarDrive's betrayal, this led him to support another industrial enterprise. That enterprise was Republic Sienar Systems.
Palpatine seized upon Republic Sienar Systems' secret sale of engines to the Confederacy of Independent Systems and