1862, Tang Xiao's Crowbar
Class divisions within Palpatine's Galactic Empire had become even more severe. Even among the great houses of the Inner Rim and Core Worlds, enormous fractures had begun to appear.
Take Cassio Tagge's Tagge family, for example. They could even maintain a massive private fleet of 5,000 small and medium-sized warships, while many other noble houses that had once been powerful were stripped of everything simply because Palpatine deemed them unreliable.
This stripping away was not done all at once, but like carving flesh with a small knife, bit by bit.
In the end, they could only hand over their wealth and resources to Palpatine piece by piece as protection money, letting them fall into the pockets of this Sith Lord, this Emperor of the Empire.
Only through such naked plunder and exploitation could the Galactic Empire gain the capacity to expand its fleet on such a massive scale.
During the era of the Galactic Republic, building a warship required approval from the Ship Supervision Committee. The results then had to be submitted to the Galactic Senate, which had to convene and pass them before procurement could begin. Costs had to be reported for financial review before funds could finally be allocated for construction.
How much embezzlement, how much deception from top to bottom took place in that process was impossible to count. As a result, the Galactic Republic's finances became increasingly overburdened and military spending rose higher and higher, only for them to discover in the end that they could still build only so many warships.
But what about the Galactic Empire? Palpatine simply issued an order, and a hundred warships went straight onto the production lines. Raw materials? Plundered, so they cost very little. Workers? All slaves—just feed them enough that they did not starve