Endo Frant

Endo Frant is a minor villain in the Star Wars comic story Tooth and Claw in Age of Rebellion: Grand Moff Tarkin #1. He serves as the Canon answer to Tenn Graneet as the chief gunner aboard the w:c:evil:Death Star commanding the battle station's superlaser gunnery crew from the overbridge.

Biography
Frant was born on Alderaan but moved to Coruscant as a boy to attend university. He consequently did not feel any real cultural ties to his homeworld. After receiving a leg injury in a grav-ball tournament, he joined the Imperial Navy rather than pursue a career in sports. He trained as a gunnery officer and became an Imperial Navy Trooper, and was one of several such troopers handpicked by Grand Moff Tarkin to serve aboard the Galactic Empire's new DS-1 Orbital Battle Station, the Death Star. He along with another Death Star Trooper, Corporal Ansin Thobel, operated the superlaser control stations on the Death Star's overbridge during Director Krennic's test of the weapon, destroying Jedha City with a single blast from orbit. It can be presumed that Frant and Thobel also operated the superlaser when Tarkin ordered it fired against the Imperial Citadel on Scarif.

Later, Tarkin wanted to see how his gunners would react when commanded to destroy an entire planet, not just a single target on its surface. He had Admiral Motti select the neutral world Rango Tan as the planet to be destroyed in a simulation. Several gunners, including Frant, hesitated when the order came, forcing the simulation to be aborted. An angry Tarkin ordered every gunner on the station assembled in the hangar where he confronted them over their refusal to fire the superlaser in the simulation. As Frant was chief gunner, Tarkin singled him out for ridicule, accusing him of weakness because despite being bigger, younger and stronger, the chief gunner didn't have any battle scars. After a vivid fantasy in which he challenged Frant to a vibro blade duel and killed him, Tarkin told him and the other assembled gunners to either resign or never hesitate again.

Not long afterward, Frant was on the overbridge when Tarkin and Darth Vader were questioning Princess Leia Organa about the location of the Rebel base. Frant became uneasy when the Grand Moff threatened to destroy Alderaan if Leia refused to comply, visibly relaxing when the Princess broke and told her captors that the base was on Dantooine. Much to both Leia and Frant's horror, however, Tarkin reneged on his promise to spare Alderaan and ordered it blown up. Although he hesitated briefly, Frant, remembering the dressing down he'd received earlier, snapped into action and relayed the order to fire. Alderaan was obliterated.

What Frant didn't know was that after the failure of the Rango Tan simulation, Grand Moff Tarkin had had Admiral Motti install scanning devices in the helmets of all of the gunners without their knowledge. These devices recorded whether or not the gunners hesitated in carrying on the firing order. Frant and several other Death Star Troopers who'd hesitated were herded into an airlock for execution. Frant protested that he'd carried out the order, but Tarkin merely responded that he needed men who wouldn't hesitate at all. An enraged Frant asked Tarkin what he would do if ordered to fire on his own homeworld of Eriadu. Without missing a beat, Tarkin responded that he'd do it "With pleasure," then jettisoned Frant and the other dissenting Imperials into space, where their bodies floated among the debris of Alderaan.