Covert Shroud Maneuver

"You don't have a shroud. You make one."

―Han Solo before Chewbacca creates a shroud by destroying a TIE fighter^[1]

The Covert Shroud Maneuver was an escape tactic developed by starship pilots to avoid being caught in a tractor beam. The maneuver called for the fleeing starship to eject a cloud of reflective particles that actually reflected the beam in various directions, allowing the starship to break free of the beam and escape. This resulted in a loop snarl in the tractor beam system, which shut the targeting system down completely.

A variant of the maneuver was a last-ditch escape or infiltration plan. It employed a smaller ship hidden inside a larger one, obscuring the true mission of the smaller vessel. When the larger ship became caught by a tractor beam, the crew set the larger ship to auto-destruct, creating a cluster of reflective pieces that confused the tractor beam targeting system. This allowed the crew to escape in the smaller ship. This maneuver was popular during the reign of the Galactic Empire because it was virtually impossible to counteract.

720 Shroud — The covert shroud gambit, as employed by Luke Skywalker.

Grand Admiral Thrawn once assigned newly promoted Lieutenant Rejlii Mithel the objective of discovering a way to break it, after Mithel nearly recaptured Luke Skywalker's X-wing. When Lando Calrissian used the trick on a Star Destroyer 10 years later, the Star Destroyer countered it, implying that Mithel could have discovered the correct way to beat it.

Behind the scenes[]

This maneuver was used by Luke Skywalker in The Last Command along with the fact that the destruction of the ship created reflective particles that would distract the tractor beam computers, with the targeting computers trying to lock on all of the particles at once and went into a loop snarl. This trick is also called the Covert Shroud Maneuver for some reason, being also called by this name in several other stories as well. A mistake at some point must have caused both of these tricks to be called by the same name.