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How was Dromund Kaas hidden for so long?


EAFSAMWISE

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The lore in this game regarding Dromund Kaas indicates that it was supposedly "forgotten" and "hidden" and that this is allegedly what allowed the Sith Empire to grow under the Sith Emperor for over a thousand years. But this makes little sense if you check a map of the Star Wars galaxy and also see where the planet and its system are described as being located. Planets like Mon Cala and the Tion Cluster were even further out from the core than where Dromund Kaas is described as being located. In fact, it is described as being roughly in the same sector as Korriban, the location of which was known to the Republic since the Great Hyperspace War which took place over a thousand years before the events in this game.

 

How then would explorers have missed the newly Reconstituted Sith Empire for **centuries** while it constructed a massive invasion fleet and built up a military this whole time which in turn occupied planets like Ziost? Given its implied location, there's quite literally no way the Republic could've gone on for over a thousand years not somehow discovering the location of this hidden "Empire" unless there was somehow a dark-sided force-induced "shield" which kept it from being discovered but no such thing has been directly implied.

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Keep in mind that the same lore states that Tython, by the map almost right next door to Coruscant, capital of the Republic, was missing for thousands of years after the hyperspace lanes leading there were lost until Satele Shan got a Force Vision that guided her to rediscovering the planet.

 

All The Emperor would have to do to hide Dromand Kaas would be disturb the hyperlanes so that the Sith couldn't be followed, keep the Empire in systems off the known hyperlanes, have any explorers who discover it quickly killed so they can't lead anyone to the Sith doorstep.

 

If I recall my KOTOR lore correctly, Revan discovered the Star Maps, which led him to the Star Forge, which ultimately led to his and Malak's investigation of the Outer Rim that brought them into contact with and corruption by The Emperor. If Revan was looking at the Star Maps and noticed a bunch of systems that modern maps didn't show, right - as you say - next to Korriban, that would be reason enough for him to investigate, I'm sure.

 

For another possibility, in another franchise, a nebula between its equivilents of the Core Worlds and its own 'outer rim' kept an entire army-slash-civilisation hidden for over three hundred years, so we also can't discount simple stellar phenomena having a role in anything, either.

 

Ugh... looking back over what I've written, it's confusing and disjointed since I wrote as I thought. My apologies for that...

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Honestly there is a much simpler explanation for this.

 

Assuming that the SW galaxy is the same size as the Milky Way, there are around 100 billion stars in it.

 

Now let's say you could accurately survey 1 planetary system per day to determine if it was inhabited by Sith. That would still take you 2.7 million years to survey the galaxy (ignoring hyperlane problems at that)

 

Now let's say someone was smart enough to limit their search to the area around Korriban. Let's say an area 1/100th of the volume of the galaxy. We're still looking at 27k year search time to search them all (so let's say an average search time of 13.5k years). Still a problem.

 

Then comes the last and biggest problem of them all: No one was actually looking for them. They were believed to be extinct by the Jedi

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Then comes the last and biggest problem of them all: No one was actually looking for them. They were believed to be extinct by the Jedi

 

The main issue though is that there were known planets further out from the core than Dromund Kaas such as Mon Cala and Zyggeria, both of whom sported enterprising populations. We should also remember that this is a galaxy filled with sentient space-faring populations in planets all across it (unlike our galaxy, at least as far as we know) so that could considerably make it much more likely that **someone** would've discovered Dromund Kaas sooner or later. By the time of the events in this game, the Mon Calamari have clearly joined the Republic and there are characters of that species present in the game but if you look on the galactic map, their homeworld of Dac was much further out from the core than the coordinates where Dromund Kaas allegedly is.

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The main issue though is that there were known planets further out from the core than Dromund Kaas such as Mon Cala and Zyggeria, both of whom sported enterprising populations. We should also remember that this is a galaxy filled with sentient space-faring populations in planets all across it (unlike our galaxy, at least as far as we know) so that could considerably make it much more likely that **someone** would've discovered Dromund Kaas sooner or later. By the time of the events in this game, the Mon Calamari have clearly joined the Republic and there are characters of that species present in the game but if you look on the galactic map, their homeworld of Dac was much further out from the core than the coordinates where Dromund Kaas allegedly is.

 

New York is also further away from California than North Dakota. Doesn't mean you're going to travel through North Dakota if you are driving to New York from California. And in hyperspace, you could skip right past an inhabited planet and not even notice.

 

Being "filled with space faring populations" is entirely relative. Look at the senate chamber of the Republic. It could host what, a couple thousand different species? Compared to 100 billion stars, that's nothing (obviously the vast majority of planets even in the most generous estimates are going to be uninhabitable)

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Being "filled with space faring populations" is entirely relative. Look at the senate chamber of the Republic. It could host what, a couple thousand different species? Compared to 100 billion stars, that's nothing (obviously the vast majority of planets even in the most generous estimates are going to be uninhabitable)

 

More than that, at least by the time of the Clone Wars - even with a fair chunk of chamber empty because of planets being in succession - the signatories of the Petition of 2000, the two thousand Senators/planets that wanted Palpatine to surrender his Emergency Powers and step down from the Chancellorship in accordance with term limits, were only a fraction of the Senate's membership...

 

Still, hyperlanes; in 'Return', Nico Okarr is under arrest for smuggling Sith aritfacts off Korriban - which is under military/Jedi blockade. If the hyper-route to Dromund Kaas requires Korriban as a waypoint, and the system is under Republic interdiction, no one would be able to find it.

Edited by turbomagnus
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Honestly there is a much simpler explanation for this.

 

Assuming that the SW galaxy is the same size as the Milky Way, there are around 100 billion stars in it.

 

The actual diameter of the Milky Way is a bit fuzzy. According to NASA the Milky War is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter, but other estimates say between 100,000-200,000 light years. The Star Wars galaxy is listed 120,000 light years in diameter with approximately 400 billion stars and 180 billion star systems according to Wookiepedia.

 

Another factor is that when looking at a SW galaxy map it depicts the galaxy as a two-dimensional area plotted with Cartesian coordinates when it is in fact three-dimensional. Two planets may look close together on the map due to their X and Y coordinates but are far apart on the Z-axis. The Milky War is estimated to be approximately 1,000 light years thick.

 

That said, I think the best explanation for why Dromund Kaas could go unknown for so long can be credited to Douglas Adams.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
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Still, hyperlanes; in 'Return', Nico Okarr is under arrest for smuggling Sith aritfacts off Korriban - which is under military/Jedi blockade. If the hyper-route to Dromund Kaas requires Korriban as a waypoint, and the system is under Republic interdiction, no one would be able to find it.

 

I think it's fair to say that perhaps with some planets/areas, they were settled after whatever point this particular empire fell. Planets like Lothal, for example (one of the main worlds featured in 'Rebels') could fit this since it's much further out from Dromund Kaas and is far within what would've been Imperial territory at this point. I'm guessing a sizeable portion of what was considered "Wild Space" prior to the events in the game was most likely explored and/or settled in the next few millennia prior to the events in the main Star Wars movie saga. Not so "wild" by this point.

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