The Star Wars galaxy was a vast and wondrous
place, home to countless civilizations, and the backdrop to one of the greatest
stories ever told. Last year, for our three-hundred-thousand-subscriber special, we did
a rundown of the entire galaxy, providing a rough overview of everything within its confines.
But what about what lay outside the galaxy? Was there anything beyond its farthest frontier,
anything beyond the great starless void? Spoiler alert: yes there was, and in this video
we’re gonna be taking a look at all of it. Pretty much everything in Star Wars takes
place in or comes from one single galaxy, usually referred to simply as the galaxy or,
among fans, as the Galaxy Far, Far Away. This galaxy was about 120,000 lightyears in diameter
and contained roughly four hundred billion stars; our own galaxy, for contrast, is estimated to
be 150,000 to 200,000 lightyears in diameter, with anywhere between one to four hundred billion
stars. Almost every second of the Star Wars films takes place within the confines of this vast
galactic disk - almost. There are, in fact, a few exceptions to that rule. You may recall
a certain scene from The Empire Strikes Back, in which the Rebel fleet appears to be
outside the galaxy, or you might recall, from our video about the Kaminoans, that Kamino
was located outside of the galaxy entirely. Both of these examples, and most Star Wars
stories that involve something outside the galaxy, come from the galaxy’s satellites. The Star
Wars galaxy had seven satellite dwarf galaxies orbiting it at varying ranges. The closest
were Companion Aurek and Companion Besh, popularly nicknamed the Rishi Maze and Firefist,
respectively. The others were Companions Cresh, Dorn, Esk, Forn, and Grek, which were farther than
150,000 lightyears away from the main galaxy and, as far as we know, were inaccessible
for the galactic population. The dwarf satellites were considerably
younger than the main galaxy, and between that and their small size, they were generally
unfavorable for the development of sentient life. But we do know of a few sentient
civilizations from the satellite galaxies, and we know that a few powerful companies,
like the InterGalactic Banking Clan, established remote facilities in
the nearer satellites as well. This would suggest that it was entirely possible
that there were a good many civilizations in the dwarf satellites that we just don’t know about,
but they would probably be young and primitive. The Rishi Maze, the closest
dwarf satellite galaxy, was perhaps the most well-known extragalactic
object. Spacers could easily fly over to it from the main galaxy via the Zareca Sting, a hyperspace
route that began at Rishi in the Outer Rim. Most of the Rishi Maze was uninhabited,
used primarily by corporations and spacers for secret resource-gathering operations. It was
frequently used for illegal or seditious activity; the Rebel Alliance, for example, was known to have
maintained several facilities in the Rishi Maze, including Firebase Alpha, an illegal energy-mining
station. There was also evidence that the Sith once had facilities in the Rishi Maze as well.
It’s quite possible that the scene at the end of The Empire Strikes Back takes place in
the Rishi Maze, though that’s unconfirmed. The extragalactic planet Kamino was
located somewhere between the Rishi Maze and the main galaxy, fairly
close to the Zareca Sting. It was part of a small cluster of stars that
technically belonged to neither galaxy, which, contrary to what you might think, wasn’t
all that uncommon of a phenomenon. In fact, the Zareca Sting wove its way through a series of
these isolated star-clusters, which formed a sort of umbilical cord between the galaxy and the Rishi
Maze, caught between their gravitational pulls. Firefist appears to have been the most stable of
the satellite galaxies. Despite being the second closest of the satellites, it was still almost
entirely unexplored by galactic civilization, visited only by a few probots before the
Galactic Civil War. But it wasn’t uninhabited. A grand total of four species are known to
have been native to Firefist - the Nagai, the Tofs, the Maccabree, and the Faruun. These
four species had fully developed civilizations, and while contact between them and the
main galaxy was rare, it did happen. The giant, extraordinarily strong Tofs were the
first of the species of Firefist to take to the stars. In the early days of their civilization,
they were a seafaring people with a predilection for piracy. When they developed space travel,
they adopted deliberately anachronistic styles, speech patterns, and even warship designs. Bands
of Tofs went around pillaging every inhabited world they could find, defeating even the master
shipbuilders of the Faruun and the formidable Maccabree cyborgs. They nearly met their match in
the form of the warriors of the fearsome Nagai, but ultimately, the Tofs proved victorious in
that war, too. Nagi, the homeworld of the Nagai, was subjugated and reduced to rubble,
claimed as a monument of the Tofs’ victory. But the Nagai refused to accept defeat, and
allied with the Faruun and Maccabree. In the three hundred years after Nagi’s fall, they formed
a resistance movement, and began to fight back. The Tofs, however, proved much too
powerful for simple rebels to overcome. The resistance quickly began to run out of
resources. Desperate, the Nagai started to look towards the Skyriver, as they called the
Star Wars galaxy, for solutions to their problem. A few months after the Battle of Endor, the
Nagai learned that the Empire that ruled the Skyriver had splintered, and that the
galaxy had become disorderly and unstable. They saw this as an opportunity. In 4 ABY,
they launched an invasion of the Skyriver, conquering several worlds and coming into
conflict with the fledgling New Republic. However, their invasion was interrupted by
the Tofs, who learned of their plans and were positively delighted to hear that there were
millions of worlds waiting to be pillaged in the Skyriver. They launched their own invasion, which
prompted the New Republic to ally with the Nagai against them. The allied force defeated the Tofs,
following which both the Nagai and their sworn enemies agreed to leave the Skyriver. The New
Republic did maintain relations with the Nagai, however, and they even gave them the planet Saijo,
which the Nagai didn’t really do anything with. The Nagai went back to trying to retake Nagi
with the resources they had back in Firefist, having learned better strategies to use
against the Tofs alongside the New Republic. Additionally, they didn’t go back
alone - they had apparently made friends with a band of Mandalorians
during their invasion of the galaxy, and these Mandos went back with them to
retake Nagi. They were ultimately successful. There was little extragalactic action
beyond the Rishi Maze and Firefist, however, and for two simple reasons. The first
was a series of hyperspace anomalies that ringed the galaxy, much like those
that bordered the Unknown Regions; these made it very difficult to leave the galaxy
altogether, though not impossible. The second was the intergalactic void. Now, you might think
that voids made hyperspace travel easier; you could just cut straight across
without much of a hassle, right? Wrong. Even within the galaxy, travelling in large
stellar-poor voids like the Radama Void and the Open Sea was considered suicidal.
This was because hyperspace travel needed nearby stellar objects
for navigational purposes. In voids, it was very easy for hyperspace
navigation systems to cock up and get ships lost, effectively marooning. Hyperspace travel across
regular voids was possible, but extremely risky; hyperspace travel across the
intergalactic void was all but impossible. We only know of one example of a ship from the
main galaxy venturing into the intergalactic void. Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa ended up out
there once due to a hyperdrive malfunction, and encountered an enigmatic biomechanical vessel
simply known as Ship. Ship had fled another galaxy, which had been destroyed by war, seeking
solace in the starless void. It was initially skeptical of the Skywalkers, but ultimately bonded
with them, repaired their vessel, returned them safely to the galaxy, and blew up the Star
Destroyer following them for good measure. It then returned to its wanderings. No one
else from the main galaxy is known to have survived the intergalactic void, though the
starship Outbound Flight had been on a mission to attempt exactly that when the Chiss shot
it down a few years before the Clone Wars. Of course, there’s also the elephant in the room
here - the Yuuzhan Vong. As most of you surely know, the Yuuzhan Vong were a species from another
galaxy entirely, which invaded the Star Wars galaxy in 25 ABY. The resultant four-year war was
one of the most calamitous in galactic history, resulting in hundreds of trillions
of casualties. But that was nothing compared to what had happened in the Vong’s
own galaxy, far across the intergalactic void. That distant galaxy had once been home to a great
many species, the Yuuzhan Vong among them. In the distant past, their galaxy had once been
ruled over by two races of droids, the warlike Abominor and the refined Silentium. They waged a
massive war that devastated much of the galaxy, until one day, the meatbags got sick of their
Sith and kicked them out. It’s largely unknown where they went after that, except that one
Abominor, the Great Heep, ended up on Biitu in the Star Wars galaxy, and one Silentium,
Vuffi Raa, ended up being Lando Calrissian’s travelling partner at one point. Additionally,
there were still a fair few other Silentium left by the time of the Galactic Civil War, as
Vuffi Raa eventually left Lando to rejoin them. After the droids left, the inhabitants of the Vong
galaxy largely eschewed traditional technology, and shifted to organic alternatives. The
Vong’s biotech was extremely advanced, a gift from Yuuzhan’tar, their homeworld, which
was one living, sentient organism. The Vong used this technology to conquer their entire
galaxy. When there was no one left to fight, they turned on each other, ultimately resulting in
the Cremlevian War, in which they rendered their entire galaxy uninhabitable. That was 15,000 years
before the Battle of Yavin; after this event, they left their galaxy in massive organic
worldships, which travelled the interstellar void at sublight speeds, slowly but surely creeping
closer to the galaxy we all know and love. So, that’s what lay beyond the edges of the
Star Wars galaxy. But what do you think? Would you like to see more about
the Yuuzhan Vong, or perhaps the Nagai? Feel free to post your
thoughts in the comments below.
