The Ultimatum was an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer under the command of Captain Rae Sloane during the reign of the first Galactic Empire. Assigned to Death Squadron, the personal flotilla of Darth Vader, the Ultimatums career was cut brutally short when it suffered a direct collision with an asteroid in the Hoth asteroid belt.
An Imperial I-class Star Destroyer, the ship was equipped with a communications tower and two deflector shield generator domes, as well as engines.
Eleven years before the Battle of Yavin, the Ultimatum was deployed to Gorse to assist Count Denetrius Vidian in mining thorilide. Following the Gorse Conflict, the Ultimatum was placed under the permanent command of Rae Sloane from its previous commander, Captain Yale Karlsen, who was on a construction committee during the conflict.
The Ultimatum joined Death Squadron by the time the fleet chased the Falcon.
In 3 ABY, during the Galactic Civil War, the Ultimatum was under the command of Commodore Rae Sloane, though Captain Canonhaus was temporarily placed in command whilst Sloane undertook a weeks-long inspection of new shuttle technology at the Fondor Shipyards. The Ultimatum joined Death Squadron, the personal fleet of Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Vader, by the time of the Battle of Hoth, and chased the Millennium Falcon through the Hoth asteroid belt alongside the rest of the fleet.
The Star Destroyer's command tower was obliterated by an asteroid.
During the asteroid pursuit, the Star Destroyer was serving as an escort to the Executor, and Canonhaus joined Captain Lorth Needa and another Imperial officer in a hologram report to Darth Vader. As Needa was relaying the last time the Falcon appeared in any of his scopes, the Ultimatums command tower was hit by an asteroid, obliterating it. The ship was then instantly engulfed in massive explosions, which destroyed it. As such, the captain's hologram disappeared from Vader's view as he was killed, although the Sith Lord ignored this disruption. Subsequently, Needa suggested that due to the amount of damage Death Squadron had sustained, the rebel freighter must have been destroyed, although Vader correctly maintained that it was still intact.
The Ultimatum was created by John Jackson Miller for his 2014 canon novel, A New Dawn. The novel's cover, illustrated by Douglas Wheatley, provides a visual depiction of the Ultimatum. The vessel later appeared in Seth Dickinson's short story "The Final Order," published in the 2020 anthology, From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, which confirmed that the Star Destroyer that was struck by an asteroid in the 1980 original trilogy film, Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back, was in fact the Ultimatum. In the Star Wars Legends continuity, the vessel first appeared in the The Empire Strikes Back novelization by Donald F. Glut, released prior to the film in 1980.