The Valorous was a Victory-class Star Destroyer of the Imperial Navy assigned to Black Sword Command. It was later captured by the Yevetha following an uprising led by them, and the ship was renamed the Devotion of Yevetha or simply the Devotion.
The Valorous had large numbers of weapons ports and paired starfighter bays on either side of the hull. The fighter complemment included a number of TIE/rc starfighters for long-range reconnaissance, and the ship's weaponry was capable of subjugating settlements of considerable size, such as that on Polneye. By 16 ABY, under Yevethan control, the ship's hull may have been painted black.
In 4 ABY, the Valorous was assigned to Black Sword Command and based in the Koornacht Cluster. Along with the Super Star Destroyer Intimidator, she was one of two Imperial warships seized substantially intact at N'zoth by the native Yevetha in their coup eight months after the Battle of Endor. Subsequently, together with a number of Type II Orbital Repair Yards such as Black Fifteen, plus a number of ships under construction and undergoing repair, they became the nucleus of the Black Fleet.
The surviving Imperial crewers from Valorous, along with their counterparts from Intimidator, were sent to Camp Pa'aal and forced to assist their captors with the reverse-engineering and copying of Imperial technology, and the two Star Destroyers were renamed and incorporated into the fleet of the Duskhan League. Valorous thus became Devotion of Yevetha. At some point, the young Yevetha named Tal Fraan served aboard the ship, working closely with the prisoners. However, unbeknownst to the Yevetha, the Imperial survivors they had retained for their technical skill, led by Major Sil Sorannan, secretly equipped every Imperial-designed ship in the Black Fleet with extensive slave circuitry which would eventually enable them to regain control.
Twelve years later in 16 ABY, at the onset of the Great Purge, Devotion was under the command of Primate Jip Toorr, serving as command ship of the other two Duskhan League warships in an assault on the Imperial world of Polneye, along with the similarly black-hulled Liberty and Honor. Jip Toorr ordered the Devotion to launch four TIE/rc starfighters under Polenye's atmospheric field to spot for the capital ships, but the Star Destroyer's did not anticipate enemy resistance, and Plat Mallar, a Grannan colonist flying one of the handful of TIE/IN interceptors left behind by the Empire, shot down one of the scouts. Jip Toorr dismissed the Tactics Master, who committed suicide. The Yevethan battlegroup was able to destroy Polneye without any further casualties, wiping out almost the entire planetary population and enslaving the rest, but Plat Mallar escaped in his lone interceptor, and was discovered by elements of the New Republic's Fifth Fleet.
In 17 ABY, as the Duskhan League and the New Republic moved to clash in the Battle of N'zoth and several other simultaneous engagements throughout the Koornacht Cluster, the Imperial prisoners made their move, and Valorous/Devotion was one of the ships that was designated to play a key role in their escape plan. The remaining Imperials aboard the Star Destroyer, led by an officer named Jaratt, seized control of the ship before she could open fire, and activated her slave circuits. Along with every other remaining Black Sword ship in the Koornacht Cluster, she responded to an unjammable hypercomm signal sent from Sorannan aboard the Intimidator, turning towards Byss and making the jump to hyperspace.
This ship appears in the novel Before the Storm by Michael P. Kube-McDowell, the first book in the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy. The ship is named as Devotion, and is stated to be transmitting the ID signal of the missing ship originally known as Valorous. In the next book in the series, Shield of Lies, the ship briefly appears, without being named, in a recorded image showing the events from the previous novel, while in a separate scene, the ship is referred to in dialogue under the full name of Devotion of Yevetha, as a vessel which the character Tal Fraan has previously served aboard. In Tyrant's Test, the concluding novel of the trilogy, the Valorous is mentioned under her original Imperial name as one of four key ships involved in the Imperial prisoners' escape plan.
The vessel later received two entries in 1998's Star Wars Encyclopedia, listed under both its original name and the Yevetha-bestowed Devotion. This is the first source to state explicitly that Devotion is the renamed Valorous, rather than a newly-built copy using a duplicate ID, and also asserts that the Valorous was one of the nine Star Destroyers captured at N'zoth in 4 ABY, whereas the novels leave open the possibility that this ship was seized elsewhere in the Koornacht Cluster, as the Black Nine and Black Eleven shipyards were. The same additional information was subsequently repeated in other sources, such as The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia in 2008.
- Star Wars Encyclopedia
- Starships of the Galaxy
- The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia