History Literature / JediAcademyTrilogy

* GeneralFailure: Admiral Daala, whose sole achievements are killing a few dozen refugees on Dantooine, and destroying a floating city on the Mon Calamari homeworld. Not only does this massively pale compared to what [[Literature/TheThrawnTrilogy Grand Admiral Thrawn]] managed to achieve with only slightly more resources, even other characters with no military training whatsoever (such as Kyp Durron and Tol Sivron) manage to cause more mass-destruction in this very storyline. This went through several {{retcon}}s in later material by way of explanation: ''Literature/TheCallistaTrilogy'' states that she was a brilliant ''ground combat'' tactician, but Tarkin made her a naval officer [[TheMistress in order to help hide their affair from his wife]], while ''Literature/DeathStar'' states she suffered a traumatic brain injury during a Rebel attack on the Death Star's construction site (damage so severe she doesn't even remember most of the preceding year, including the attack itself).

The Jedi Academy Trilogy deals with Luke Skywalker and a couple of quasi-Jedi, with training even more incomplete than his, setting up a Jedi Academy on Yavin IV, seeking to train a selection of [[TheForce Force-Sensitives]] including, most promisingly, a prideful leader from a dying world, who rants about a "dark man", attacks Luke, is not reprimanded, and then is found burned to death in his room.

* TacticalSuperweaponUnit: The trilogy climaxes with a battle between a half-completed third Death Star (you know, because they worked out so well the last two times) and the Sun-Crusher, a starfighter with ArmorOfInvincibility and star-popping plasma torpedoes, and both of them fall into a black hole while ineffectually shooting at each other with neither superweapon able to harm the other.

** Snarky and grumpy artillery engineer Golanda's bitterness is because she was forced to come to the Maw Installation in the first place after being happy at a university think tank, and because the black hole's effect on gravity makes most of the experiments she was brought there to do pointless anyway. She is also the only high-ranking scientist to mingle much with the military personnel, and plays cards with them during her free time .

* MadeOfIndestructium: The Sun Crusher's hull is armored in a material that is, quite literally, indestructible. It's rammed through the bridge tower of an Imperial Star Destroyer and tossed into the heart of a gas giant with zero ill effects. [[spoiler:A glancing hit from a partially charged prototype Death Star superlaser seriously damages it, though.]]

* KingOfTheHomeless: ''Dark Apprentice'' features Jacen and Jaina wondering into an area of hte city with booby traps and secuirity cameras, inhabited by people who went into hiding from the Empire and never learned of its collapse. Their leader, the best-fed and clothed of the group, says that being king of his little band suits him better than being a bank clerk (AllThereInTheManual sources say he went on the run to avoid execution after making a typo that put Palpatine's name on a public list of loan defaulters) and he'd rather stay there. That being said, he is nice to Jacen and Jaina and returns them ot their mother without any trouble.

* ShoutOut: The glitterstim spice gives those who take it some measure of PsychicPowers. Mining it is very difficult and dangerous. It is only found on one planet, and is discovered to be the biological byproduct of a dangerous predator that lives only on that planet. That Kevin J Anderson would go on to co-write ''Franchise{{Dune}}'' books only makes the inspiration more obvious.

* HypercompetentSidekick: In the third book, the commander of the stormtroopers Daala left behind at the Maw Installation serves this role to Tol Sivron and the other scientific leaders. He is the only one who actually has any idea how to fly the Death Star protoype and often makes reasonable tactical suggestions while the others have no idea what to do.

* InformedAbility: Daala's supposedly magnificent military strategies that caught the eye of Tarkin in the past. Handwaved in two ways: she was a brilliant ground commander, so her abilities don't necessarily translate into naval command, and the ''Literature/DeathStar'' novel has her suffer some brain damage during a Rebel attack.

* WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds: Kyp Durron is literal example: as a child his parents were killed for speaking out against the Empire and he was thrown into [[HellholePrison Kessel]] for life. After he escapes, he manages to steal the Sun Crusher (a starship that can cause stars to go supernova) and uses it to blow up the sun of the Carida system and destroy all the planets there.

* SpannerInTheWorks: After her failure at Mon Calamari, Daala strips most of the crew and weapons from one of her remaining two star destroyers, intending to [[ColonyDrop crash it into Coruscant]]. The plan never gets off the ground: [[spoiler:Kyp Durron shows up with the Sun Crusher and blows up the star cluster she's staging in, incinerating that Star Destroyer and badly damaging Daala's flagship.]]

* ShatteredWorld: Anoth was shattered by some cataclysm in the ancient past, leaving it as three distinct chunks that remain in each other's vicinity due to their gravitational pulls. Two fragments are close enough together to share an atmosphere, which is wracked by constant storms as the fragments scrape together and generate immense static discharges. The third is further off a little more stable, enough so as to be able to host a small, compact outpost.

* ShatteredWorld: Anoth was shattered by some cataclysm in the ancient past, leaving it as three distinct chunks that remain in each other's vicinity due to their gravitational pulls. Two fragments are close together to share an atmosphere, which is wracked by constant storms as the fragments scrap together and generate immense static discharges. The third is further off a little more stable, enough so as to be able to host a small, compact outpost.

* OrbitalBombardment: In ''Dark Apprentice'' Daala uses her three remaining [=ISDs=] for a terror attack on Mon Calamari before a gambit by Admiral Ackbar costs her a second star destroyer and forces her to retreat.

** Otherwise {{defied}}. Kyp attempts to ensure this by [[LaserGuidedAmnesia mind-wiping]] Qwi Xux of the designs for the Imperial superweapons, so that no more could be made, and when the New Republic dismantles Maw Installation and and Kyp destroys the Death Star prototype (with most of the remaining Maw researches onboard) and dumps the Sun Crusher in a black hole, it seems that all information that could be used to recreate Imperial superweapons has been eliminated. However:

* BlobMonster: A humorous variant. The equivalent of horse races on the planet Umgul are run using specially-bred racing blobs compared to living lumps of phlegm in appearance. The race itself consists of a "blobstacle course" where the racers most slide down greased chutes, squeeze themselves through mesh gratings and swing between hanging rings while avoiding dangers such as patches of desiccant or accidentally colliding and melding together.