Ok, yes, the Harvester bit deserves an answer. Basically, it was an in-joke for me.
There is an Acolyte in our game named Scrace who has a notoriouslly... 'dodgy' career, played by the most amusing of players. Scrace attempted to seduce Krisha on Jaglon Beta, killed an innocent man in his attempt to prove to her that he was actually a Dark Sider, got her killed by Kuylen when their plotting was revealed, whom he then bravely ran away from...
He went on to be out-forced by Ascar, comprehensively prevented from doing anything at all by Nebb, and came within an ace of losing an arm to Kuylen at Zeiton, and then after being thrashed by Balek at Neimoida, taught his Padawan the way of the screaming fear-obsessed coward, though only after teaching him that you should try and defraud the Neimodian authorities using the Mind Trick ("But I am trying to save the Republic money!"
. Sadly due to the moving away of his player, he finally met his nemesis at the end of Episode III of the second campaign, and pretty bad news it was too when it happened; He'll be much missed and any guest appearances he makes in future will be welcomed, but as to which side of the Force he'll be on by then, we don't know. But anyone whose presence caused Swordsman Kumar to give the standing order to his Padawan Sunda "If you have any doubts about Scrace, kill him; he's virtually a Dark Sider anyway" HAS to be worth having in a game.
Anyway. As I have intimated, there is always an attempt made to write people's backgrounds and Merits into the game as best we can. However, Scrace's player, right from the very start, over four years ago, took a Contact with the "Omni-consumer tractor factory." Try as he might, my brother has never ever been able to write his tractor contacts into the game on any meaningful level, which over the years has become a source of amusement for the rest of us, as we try and figure out when it could possibly be useful, leading to us constructing a theoretical plotline of the Sith trying to subvert the Republic's agricultural policy with a stealth takeover of all tractor companies with their own Sith Tractor device. The references to 'Sith Tractors' by the players were pretty regular.
Now, whether by coincidence or design, in Episode III of the second campaign, just about everything all the players saw (and there are three plotlines in that game, which this time aren't linked because Episode I did that trick already) seemed to point towards the likelihood of the common link being tractors. Obviously this weas nonsense, but we had an incredible amount of fun extending that beyond all logic. As Kumar was clearly investigating something incredibly dangerous, we formulated the idea that the bad guy in question (due to several reasons that actually formed a genuinely coherent argument) was some form of Tractor God. At which point, we had the comment "Do you think it was a Sith Tractor God?"
(pause)
"AAAAAHHHHHHHHH! Sith Tractors! Run awayyyyy!"
Anyway, awash with visions of the dark legions of Sith Tractors running across the landscape, we put together an idea of what the dark Sith Tractor God, their leade,r looked like. Basically a black tractor, of course, but with a large exhaust pipe at the top through which he could speak in clouds of exhaust, saying HA HA HA NOW YOU DIE JEDI or words to that effect, and eventually we decided that he had combination blades at the front made out of Lightsabres designed to eliminate Jedi.
He was nicknamed, inevitably, Darth Combine. We haven't found him yet but we are sure that he and his army of Sith tractors are out there somewhere.
Anyway, when Richard wrote the prequel storyline for you guys, he threw in an enormous combine harvester as a bad guy, and in the notes for me called it Darth Combine, purely as an amusement. So the evil Sith Tractor God is finally revealed! Err, as a guest star in your game, anyway. Of a sorts. If it was not for those Omni-Consumer Tractor company contacts, that whole bit would never have happened...
So yeah, that's why that was there!
..funny