Post #887293

PRE-EPISODE I TIMELINE

113 BBY: The First Great Clone War begins. Otherwise known as the Mandalorian Civil War, it came about as a result of warmongering Mandalorian raiders ravaging Republic systems on the borders of the Unknown Regions. The purpose was to use the resources as fuel for their warmachine during conflicts with rival Mandalorian factions, as well as to glorify war itself, part of their religious beliefs. The Republic initially provided support for the less violent “legitimate” Mandalorian factions during what was essentially a civil war.

Republic interference earned the ire of the warhawks and in retaliation they decided to completely ignore Galactic law and produce “rapid-growth” clone warriors, which were known to have mental issues and instability. The maddened clones take on the Republic directly but in a series of brushfire wars and guerilla conflicts rather than the all-consuming galactic wars of the later Clone Wars.

The Mandalorians are not humans and as a result the first clones grown are not simple “human replicas” like the clones we see in the canon PT. They are some sort of near-humanoid sickly-looking beings with clear indicators of their artificial nature. Think tube-sockets and interfaces like the humans grown for The Matrix.

92 BBY: The Mandalorians collapse under their own maddened warriors, who turn on their commanders and essentially wipe out the Mandalorian race from within. The Republic moves in and does clean-up, claiming all of the left-over technology and war components as spoils of war. All of the fast-grown clones are exterminated due to their unnatural nature and mental issues.

79 BBY: The Second Great Clone War begins. The Hapes Consortium, Tion Hegemony and the Tetan Monarchy of the Outer Rim Region combine their forces to become the Alliance of Independent Systems, They attempt to secede from the Republic due to a perceived inability of the Republic to protect and defend planetary systems near the Unknown Regions after the devastation of the Mandalorian Clone War. They consider the AIS and the Republic to have irreconcilable differences and political divides.

Due to the small population of these isolated Outer Rim and Wild Space worlds compared to the Galactic Republic, they are forced to manufacture their soldiers rather than rely on recruitment or conscription. They predominantly utilise droid soldiers for the duration of the war by repurposing or capturing the many uninhabited “resource and manufacturing” worlds that exist on the edge of the Galaxy.

In response, the Republic decides to activate armies of “slow-growth” clones that had been captured from Mandalorian systems. The Republic hadn’t been able to legally destroy the clones due to a gray area in the law where the clones were considered simultaneously prisoners of war and also property. Instead, the clones had been placed into deep stasis freeze and since they were now essentially spoils of war owned by the Republic it was able to utilise them as soldiers instead of sending individuals against mass-produced droids. The use of mass-produced flesh against such droids was far more advantageous, politically speaking.

69 BBY: The Second Great Clone War ends after much grinding down of both sides and plenty of industrial sabotage and resource depletion. With both sides of the conflict exhausted, a final treaty is drawn up between the Republic and the Alliance, granting the Alliance conditional lease-ownership of the Rishi Maze dwarf galaxy that sits off the galactic rim. Many of the Hapan, Tionese and Tetan citizens and governments retreat to the Rishi Maze to establish their own quiet little government.

The decade-long war has made several corporate entities vastly powerful and rich thanks to the manufactured nature of the soldiers for both sides of the war. For almost two decades these trader barons essentially run the Republic, with the Senate being mostly beholden to these private entities through planetary debt, manufacturing contracts and plain old lobbying and corruption. In order to cover substantial war debts several systems sold their public cloning facilities to private companies to utilise clone labour for their businesses and production facilities.

These clone facilities become important to many companies, whose droid workforces are now looked upon with some degree of suspicion and resentment by many sections of the public after droids were used so extensively by the AIS during the war. Although droids have always been something of an underclass within the Republic, this is the main source of recent distrust in them and utility of them as little more than packhorses.

52 BBY: The issue of clone rights has become a major point of contention after the previous two Clone Wars. Concerns regarding whether to treat clones as property or people, and whether it is wise to put former military forces into private hands, ignite ferocious discussion and several trade restrictions and heavy economic sanctions designed to lessen the power of these private companies begin to be debated, deployed and ultimately enforced.

The trader barons, now used to having lived well off what are essentially clone slaves, do not enjoy this new change in the status quo or the attempts by the Senate to reintroduce bureaucracy and government as the real galactic leadership.

48 BBY: The Third Great Clone War begins. Incensed by what they view as constant government meddling with clones now legally owned by private companies, corrupt trader barons decide to form the Confederacy of Corporate Sectors, a group attempting to force more advantageous corporate laws and more lax taxes within their region of space, despite being nominally incorporated into Republic space.

44 BBY: Anakin Whitesun leaves the Jedi Order to return to his home planet and help his sister out in dealing with the criminal Hutt cartel, who have been expanding their operations boldly while the Republic is tied up worrying about a war.

43 BBY: The Republic begins to take refugee freeclones, beings who have been stripped of flash-imprinted programming or grown without it, and manage to recapture some of the privatised cloning facilities, which they forcibly deprivatise. Forces on both sides of the war end up utilising clones in combat, the Confederacy through forceful compliance or brainwashing and the Republic through clone volunteers who wish to see all cloned individuals freed, as well as clones produced as soldiers in a manner that makes them about as culpable of clone-rights abuses as the CCS has been.

38 BBY: Due to decreasing numbers of Jedi Knights through combat losses the Jedi Order decides to attempt to recruit former members to shore up their forces. Obi Wan is dispatched on a mission to the Outer Rim with the dual purpose of attempting to recruit former Jedi Anakin Whitesun and to make contact with the Hutt Cartel and negotiate for use of their hyperspace lanes by the Republic for the duration of the war.