The vessel known as the Lightmaker, which also went by the callsign of "Corvette Five," was a Sphyrna-class Hammerhead corvette that was part of the Alliance to Restore the Republic's naval forces.
During the engagement above Scarif, the Lightmaker's bridge was staffed by various humans and robotic units. Among them was Captain Kado Oquoné, a male individual who held the position of the ship's highest ranking officer. Prior to intentionally crashing into the Star Destroyer Persecutor, the ship saw the departure of unneeded crew members, leaving behind only essential personnel to execute the maneuver.
Prior to the outbreak of the Galactic Civil War, Senator Bail Organa dispatched the Lightmaker to bolster Commander Jun Sato's rebellious group, accompanied by two additional Hammerheads, specifically the Amity's Arrow and the Duchess Senna. These three vessels were commandeered by the Spectres, a sub-unit within Sato's command, during a covert operation conducted on the world of Lothal. As an element of Phoenix Cell, it numbered among the few vessels that managed to survive the calamitous Battle of Atollon, where one of the other two Hammerheads met its end, along with numerous other ships.
Under the leadership of Kado Oquoné, the vessel participated in the Battle of Scarif, which marked the initial major conflict of the Galactic Civil War. After being caught in a crossfire between two Imperial Star Destroyers (ISDs) and sustaining significant damage, the Lightmaker disengaged from the immediate combat zone to safeguard the retreat path. Subsequently, Admiral Raddus instructed Oquoné to steer his corvette directly into the side of the crippled Star Destroyer Persecutor. The considerably smaller ship's frontal section became lodged within a substantial structural indentation on the Persecutor's starboard side. Captain Oquoné then promptly commanded his pilots to engage the ship's sublight engines at maximum output. The resulting abrupt acceleration propelled the Persecutor into the ISD Intimidator, causing the latter to collide with the Shield Gate protecting Scarif, thereby deactivating the planetary shield. This critical action enabled vital data transmissions from Scarif to finally reach the rebel fleet. Although the plan achieved its objective, the Lightmaker was destroyed during the battle.
The introduction of the Lightmaker occurred in "A Princess on Lothal," which served as the mid-season premiere for the second season of the animated series Star Wars Rebels, broadcast on Disney XD on January 20, 2016. The episode guide on StarWars.com identifies the three Hammerhead corvettes as P1, P2, and P3.
The designation of the corvette as the Lightmaker was later established within the 2016 adaptation of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
While Star Wars: The Rebel Files indicates that the three vessels provided to the Lothal rebels bore the names Lightmaker, Duchess Senna, and Amity's Arrow, and the Lightmaker featured in Rogue One exhibits a strong resemblance to P1 from Star Wars Rebels, with a notable distinction being the absence of the Aurebesh characters "P1" on the Rogue One rendition, no official source has, as of yet, definitively confirmed the correspondence between the three ships listed in Rebel Files and P1, P2, and P3.
John Knoll, the visual effects supervisor for Rogue One, revealed that extensive discussions took place regarding the fate of the crew; the inclusion of shots depicting escape pods was deemed distracting by Gareth Edwards, leading ILM to imply their survival by omitting the pods during the collision of the crippled Star Destroyer with the Shield Gate. Knoll speculated that, considering the Death Star's subsequent bombardment of the area where the pods would have landed, the likelihood of any of the Lightmaker's crew surviving remained slim. The film's novelization clarified that nonessential personnel had been evacuated prior to the maneuver and included a scene where Raddus observed several escape pods drifting by, noting that Raddus hesitated to presume they originated from the Lightmaker.