I had originally moved all of my most competents into the fleet, I now had to slowly roll them out. It wasn't a bad thing. I just implemented a schedule. The competent military commanders where still dedicated traders, while I would need a military core, I would also need a military spirit. That meant that ALL of my captains and most of my fleet was expendable. Luckily this venture was insured... in more than one way. I stopped trying to remove critical failures and consolidated them into one reinforced block. When the command ship exploded everything would stop. However, that didn't mean I wanted to lose ships, the two other ** would be able to leave. I also had two of the new .

  I loved and hated these beautiful things. While these early drafts only had oversized heavy turbolasers instead of the spinal mounted ultra heavy turbolasers they could still tear through a ** in a small fleet. But they weren't designed for their purpose. They made absolutely terrible patrol craft. Oh sure, when faced with that kind of heavy firepower any ship would piss it's pants and turn around, but it was supposed to be a heavy escort. And it made a terrible escort when you had to turn and face every threat head on, let alone chase them down. No, these were dedicated raiders. Which made their roles in the coming war all the more stupid because they were never used as such. I did not look forward to what people would use the for...

  Since I had all the time in the world, and absolutely none, I decided to start throwing designs around. I actually did like the munificents spinal mounted up classed turbolasers. However, they did not make a good frigate, at least as an escort. So I didn't start building a frigate for an escort. Instead I started with the **. This was a design that had lasted 4 thousand years. Mostly because the Corellions had not made the CR70 or CR90s to replace them. These vessels, and their empire mirrors, because Kuat would not admit that anything that was not their design was good, would dominate the poor old ship. But I did not have the specs for them, because well, they weren't built yet. But I could update the hammerhead by removing it's distinctive hammer head design. Not only was the Design old, but just updating the ships systems would remove a lot of the necessary redundancy and streamline the design, shrinking the command area, and removing the need for the above and below deck.

  I decided to take the Munificent pilot house and pretty much drag and drop. This left the command exposed, so I added heavy blaster shutters. Ironically, when these blast shutters were down, the ship could ram into a capitol ships armor and bypass it all together, a dagger to the hammer... head... I was not going to call it the daggerhead! now the only problem was the spinal mounted guns. There would be no point in a redesign if I didn't add heavy blasters to a cruiser of all things! But if the guns were open they would be vulnerable. Thinking about the blaster shutters I already had, I decided to make the whole thing popup. This mean that the ship would be heavily armored when it was charging headfirst into blaster fire, and could sit back and snipe at range. This also skirted the reforms since, what they didn't know, couldn't be reported...

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  I then realized I was stupid, and added several ports on the pilothouse. This allowed boarders, particularly my B1s to simply deploy into another ship. But under the pilothouse would be two sets of deployable 'vampire fangs' that my boarders could deploy from. What I ended up with looked like a goofball vampire, that was upguned, but couldn't shoot out it's way from a furball if all the fighters lined up in front of it single file. It was ironic that my escort would need an escort, but it was never a lack of fighters the Trade Federation needed. Deciding to put credits where my mouth is I put the councilor class engines on, they were cheep, available, and functioned better than the hammerhead engines, updated the power plant too, and then added a small external hanger. It would do for anything but droids, couldn't even fit the port for a pilot to drop in, and looked more like a strange missile launcher with a door on front, but it would do for fighter support.

  I was still playing around with the design to make it functional when my meeting was approved. I decided to visit the IGBC while I had the time. It might be very un-Niemidian to not count the profits in hand, but I had business to take care of. I needed to get into contact with , Sidious's master. However, I didn't know who he was. I did know that his secret identity was high up in the IGBC however. So it was a simple matter, bungle some negotiations in the IGBC and see what happens. Sidious only killed his master because he drugged him with some potent wine, and killed him in his sleep after he let his guard down because Sidious completed a major milestone in 'the grand plan'.

  I was pleasantly surprised when I had a meeting with one Hugo Demask! He is a big shot in the IGBC, one of 5 chair members, and worth more than several entire sectors of the outer rim combined!

  ** Lucrehulks were originally unarmed/disarmed, then they were armed with a very small compliment of weapons less than the prototype munificents. The wookieepedia page doesn't reflect this design history. Though the lucrehulks remained underarmed throughout the war even when they went full battleship, and even the full battleship refits that removed the exterior carrier space yet still had plenty of internal space to spare.

  ** The Wookieepedia page doesn't really do this ship justice. I like the non-canon mods for star wars: empires at war, forces of corruption, specifically the republic at war mod, which I will base a lot of ships off of. Unfortunately, there isn't a wiki for the clone wars era mod, only the waring states era mod. If you want to see the clone wars canon appearance of the tagge battlecruiser you can look it up, it's the goopy star destroyer with the cylinder on top, can't miss it. But, this is a ship that could take on an entire fleet, even pre full galactic civil war refit.

  ** So, this is the design that was around twoish eras from the clone wars. However, there is a joke in the starship design industry that does 'At least it's not designing another hammerhead'. And this is because the hammerhead has been around and updated for 4k+ years. In other words, even though it says it's a new design, it is not, just the latest version that is set 40-70 years into the future.