Nothing much to say here, I just wanted to repost some cool artwork I encountered over the weekend, when “Star Wars Day” was generating a feverish amount of related material:

Click to see it in its full-sized glory.

If it’s not immediately obvious to you, what we have here is a fleet of Imperial Star Destroyers in orbit around Coruscant, the galactic capital world seen in the prequel trilogy (“…the entire planet is one big city”). Besides being a wonderfully rendered piece of kick-ass imagery (pretty much anything featuring a Star Destroyer is going to kick some ass), it’s also a nice visual bridge between the two trilogies… certainly more elegant than the ham-fisted revisionism that substituted Hayden Christensen’s youthful self for the more venerable Sebastian Shaw in the “holy trinity” of Force ghosts at the end of Return of the Jedi!

I imagine the more casual fans in our audience might be wondering about the ship in the bottom left of this picture, the one that looks like a Star Destroyer suffering from boils. Unless I miss my guess, that’s an Interdictor, a class of ship that’s appeared in a number of Expanded Universe novels and comics. Interdictors are capable of generating an intense gravity field that yanks passing starships out of hyperspace, so they can be easily detained or destroyed by Imperial forces. Of course, postulating such technology opens a big old can of worms, namely, why didn’t Darth Vader’s battle fleet have an Interdictor when it was trying to blockade Hoth? Things would have gone very differently for Luke Skywalker and Friends if they’d been unable to jump to lightspeed! (God, I’m such a nerd!)

Sadly, I don’t have any info on who created this image, whether it’s digital or a painting, or what context it originally appeared in, so I don’t know if it’s a fan-made piece or a licensed piece created for Lucasfilm. It’s cool, regardless…

Tip of the hat to Jaquandor for posting this one, along with a lot of other fun stuff, on the Fourth.