The Beauty of Yevetha was the name given to a corvette captured by the Duskhan League from the Galactic Empire's Black Sword Command circa 4 ABY. The vessel was subsequently used by Nil Spaar to scout the Koornacht Cluster, and then formed part of Yevethan fleet.
The Beauty was a small capital ship. Airlock doors on the underside of the hull concealed a compact docking berth, designed to carry a pinnace, but capable of accommodating a small starfighter such as a Recon-X. A tractor beam was used to pull ships towards the bay, but mechanical docking clamps deployed at close range to pull them inside.
The original name of this Imperial corvette is not known, and the circumstances of the ship's takeover by the Yevetha are unclear. The vessel was presumably captured intact in one of the twelve Duskhan League systems when the Imperial occupation forces were overthrown in 4 ABY, in a similar way to the much larger Star Destroyers Intimidator and Valorous.
Renamed the Beauty of Yevetha, the vessel was probably the first ship with a hyperdrive to be brought into active service by the Yevetha. Nil Spaar took command, and used the vessel to explore the surrounding systems, with a crew including his loyal second, Dar Bille. The Yevetha were shocked to discover that the Empire had allowed other sentient species to establish settlements in the outer systems of the Koornacht Cluster, which they considered to be their own sacrosanct territory.
The Beauty subsequently formed part of the Black Eleven Fleet at Doornik-1142, but after the Yevethan Purge, the ship was based in the N'zoth system, and was eventually destroyed during the New Republic's reconnaissance survey of the Koornacht Cluster, by Lieutenant Rone Taggar of the 21st Recon Group.
The New Republic pilot's personal X-wing recon fighter was disabled during a pass above N'zoth by an ion cannon salvo from the Pride of Yevetha, and the Beauty was assigned to capture the pilot.
After being caught in the corvette's tractor beam, Taggar began the standard procedure by erasing his computers and detonating his astromech, but he sacrificed himself by delaying the starfighter's self-destruct sequence until his fighter was drawn into a hangar bay, and ensuring that the corvette was destroyed. The resulting explosion blew out the keel of the Beauty of Yevetha and triggered a larger blast which destroyed the ship completely, along with all hands aboard.
Nil Spaar, now the ruling viceroy of his people, was angered by the loss of his former command. Kol Attan, the Yevethan proctor of defense, was blamed for failing to take into account Taggar's choice of actions, declared to-mara, and told to seek a dishonourable death.
The Beauty of Yevetha is first mentioned in the novel Before the Storm, the first book in the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy by Michael P. Kube-McDowell, when Nil Spaar and Dar Bille reminisce about their past aboard the old corvette. In the next novel in the series, Shield of Lies, the ship is featured in a short action segment.
At the time the novels were written, the "corvette" designation was particularly associated with the blockade runner design from Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, but the reference to a docking berth on the underside of the ship may indicate that a different type of vessel was intended here.
The classification of the Beauty of Yevetha as a corvette has been queried by some fans, as the Black Fleet trilogy depicts the Yevetha purloining their Imperial designs from Black Sword Command, and the novel Before the Storm states that the order of battle for the forty-four missing ships from this fleet included nothing smaller than a 900m Victory-class star destroyer.
However, the novel states that this information represented the situation the better part of a year before the uprising in which the Yevetha obtained their ex-Imperial warships and shipyard facilities, and more than half the listed vessels were projected to have been rotated out of the yards there by that date, with the corresponding implication that other vessels would have been brough in to replace them. Reinforcing this implication, the ship captured by the Yevetha are also stated to include at least one Immobilizer 418 cruiser and apparently multiple Dreadnaught Cruisers, all of which measure just 600m long. Canon material thus fixes no hard lower limit on the size of the Beauty of Yevetha.
The statement that Beauty of Yevetha formed part of the Black Eleven Fleet is not found in the Black Fleet novels, but originates in 1998's Star Wars Encyclopedia. The same source indicates that the corvette was destroyed during the unsuccessful blockade of Doornik-319, a somewhat tenuous description of an event that occurred after the failure of the blockade, during a deep reconnaissance mission of a different system. Both statements were repeated in The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, published a decade later.
- Star Wars Encyclopedia
- The Official Star Wars Fact File30
- The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia