Waymancy Storm

By 7811 BBY, the Galactic Republic had been leading settlement efforts in the northern section of the region known as the Rim. As a result, civilians were present on such celestial bodies as Barenth, Caursito, and Upper Brightday, which were connected to other locations via Rim-based hyperspace jump beacons such as Sooncanoo Beacon.

Meanwhile, inside the Waymancy Hollow region—which shared its name with the Inner Rim's Waymancy system—the group known as the Sisters of the Machinesmith had studied Republic technology for a millennium leading up to that year. Through the Sif-Alulan process, they subjected the Republic designs to a wide variety of improvements, resulting in the development of extremely efficient power generators. That in turn led to the creation of warships, including cruisers, that could fly farther and faster than those of the Republic as well as laser and pulse-wave weapons—both starship-mounted and personal-scale—that had more powerful armor-piercing capability and significantly faster rates of fire than the Republic's weaponry.

In 7811 BBY, the Republic established first contact with warships associated with the Waymancy Hollow. The encounter resulted in the destruction of the former's ships by fusillades of the latter's laserfire. The ensuing conflict, which pitted the Republic against the Signatories of Waymancy, came to be known as the Waymancy Storm and was waged in star systems of the northern Rim, in what was later known as the Northern Dependencies portion of the Inner Rim and the Expansion Region.

The forces allied with the Signatories of Waymancy included the armadas of the Wives of Tingrippa, the mercenary army of Whirl-Point-Six, a Neshtabine nest on the celestial body Tantara, and at least one raider from the world Doshan and one thug from the planet Muzara. According to a later description by the Republic's Supreme Chancellor Nagratha, the beliefs of the constituent members of the Signatories included fanaticism, territorial cleansing, and the "cold logic of machinery."

Although the Republic armed forces outnumbered those of the Signatories a hundred to one, the superior military technology—which, per Nagratha, included "frightful killing machines"—possessed by the latter gave them a significant edge in combat that resulted in great losses for the former. The Republic found itself hard-pressed to counter the rapid-fire energy cannons used by the mercenaries of Whirl-Point-Six, and the fleets fielded by the Wives of Tingrippa sailed between the Rim's beacons, challenging the Republic to bring forward any starship hull design that their weapons could not penetrate or muster any counterattack that their deflector shields could not block.

During the Waymancy Storm, the Signatories of Waymancy targeted both the Republic's armed forces and its settlers, in the process ravaging the worlds of the northern Rim. As the war progressed, the actions of the Signatories became progressively bloodier. The Republic's enemy incinerated the lands of the settlers on Upper Brightday, resulting in the deaths of ten million colonists. At Barenth, the Republic mounted a defense that allowed for a near-complete evacuation of the world's civilian population, although an entire Republic battle group and its personnel was lost in the process. And when the Fortieth Flotilla of the Republic underwent a risky attempt to boost the shields of its vessels at Sooncanoo Beacon, the attempt failed, leaving the flotilla to float powerless in space, where the enemy subsequently massacred every crewmember of the unit.

According to Nagratha, the Republic placed a high priority on the welfare of its far-flung settlements and, accordingly, liberating the holdings seized by the Signatories of Waymancy. After a mourning period for the losses suffered on the northern Rim, the Republic experienced an upwelling of determination on the part of its citizens to respond to the Signatories' actions. The Republic's military saw an increase in the number of volunteers, and its factories in the Expansion Region busily produced armored galleons and crawler mechs for the war effort. The high morale of the Republic's soldiers was also demonstrated on the battlefield, such as during their refusal to desert the fortifications at the planet Paig or during a fleet element's actions at the Second Battle of Brightday.

Republic spies and codebreakers—including the group known as the Squill Sifters, of which Nagratha's mother was a member—placed intense effort into interpreting large quantities of intercepted enemy data. At some point, the Republic Navy also captured at the astronomical object Sif-Alula a quantity of the Signatories' weapons and starship generators. Subsequently, technologists at a Republic shipyard on the planet Axum attempted to reverse-engineer the technology, achieving scientific breakthroughs in the process.

Armed with newly improved offensive and defensive capabilities, the Republic forces eventually managed to turn the tide of the war in their favor. At the celestial body Immalia, the Republic cannonship Squintpipe, equipped with an experimental deflector shield generator and energy skin, ended the orbital bombardment the Signatories were carrying out and drove away their warships. Republic agents, including Chief Sergeant Saens Sukko, scaled a magnetic cliff on the astronomical object Mittoblade, where Sukko was instrumental in destroying the enemy structure known as the Clowse Glowstack.

The Republic's rocket pack–equipped Rocket-Jumper Elite Advance Unit also fought bravely in the Waymancy Storm, with it eventually becoming one of the conflicts in which their participation made the unit legendary. One of the actions carried out by the rocket-jumpers was the rout of the Tantara nest. Ultimately, the Republic forces committed to a final push that saw the reduction of the object known as the Waymancy bridal seat to a hyperspace sinkhole and, eventually, overall victory in the Waymancy Storm on what Nagratha characterized as a "solemn, glorious" day.

The Republic celebrated the victory in the Waymancy Storm each year for at least twenty-five years. At a commemorative service on the 25th anniversary of Victory in the Waymancy Storm in 7786 BBY, Supreme Chancellor Nagratha delivered a speech that was also transmitted to other Republic worlds. Nagratha acknowledged the critical role the veterans attending the service, as well as their fallen fellow soldiers, had played in the outcome of the war and thanked them for their service.

In the speech, the Supreme Chancellor gave a brief account of the conflict, focusing on the threat posed to the Republic's citizens by the Signatories of Waymancy, whom Nagratha characterized as "tyrants absent of conscience" and as a "force of evil" that unleashed "atrocities" upon the Republic, and the challenges faced by the Republic in opposing them. The Republic's leader viewed the war as a "necessary" effort with the goal of stopping the Signatories' actions. Nagratha invoked the Rim colonies that had been targeted during the Waymancy Storm and had since then become thriving worlds and members of a Republic that was steadily growing in defiance of the threat formerly posed by the Signatories. The Supreme Chancellor further expressed their conviction that the victory in the war would still be commemorated long after the lives of all the attendees of the service had passed.

According to Nagratha, during the Waymancy Storm, the technology used by the Republic was outclassed by that of its enemy more than in any of the previous or subsequent conflicts in the Republic's tens of millennia–long history. The Supreme Chancellor speculated that, while the Republic would not have been defeated without the technological innovations brought forth on Axum, it would have suffered a much higher number of casualties.

The Waymancy Storm ushered in a major wave of innovations in technology. After the Republic emerged victorious in the conflict, the Sif-Alulan process was reverse-engineered, and in the 7700s BBY, master crafter Lyns Skutroo unveiled the squintpipe process for improving the power generators used aboard starships. The subsequent improvements in energy weaponry resulted in rapid-fire turbolasers briefly outmatching all available defense technologies, with tacticians searching for stronger hull armor and retiring the use of larger capital ships in favor of overwhelming amounts of smaller gunships. Further refinements of the squintpipe process in the 7500s BBY, however, led to improved shielding technologies, and overall the process led to a golden age of warship construction across the galaxy and the eventual re-emergence of the combat use of capital ships.

The Waymancy Storm was introduced in a section of the 2009 Wizards of the Coast Star Wars Roleplaying Game sourcebook Galaxy at War authored by Daniel Wallace. An in-universe account of the Waymancy Storm was originally meant to be included in the 2012 reference book The Essential Guide to Warfare by Jason Fry and Paul R. Urquhart; however, the Wallace-authored section that would have mentioned the conflict was cut before the book's release. That section was later released in 2014 as part of Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare Author's Cut, a series of articles published on the StarWars.com Blog by Fry and Del Rey editor Erich Schoeneweiss containing various content cut from the book.

• Galaxy at War
• The Essential Guide to Warfare