@ ErikB: How about people who are less damaging to their own argument in their intended audience's eyes? For the new advocate for playing the setting straight with the Rebels as the good guys and the Imps as the bad guys... I nominate myself.
Mind you, some of what just got described underneath your post is "in their Imp days before defecting", i.e. all three of the PCs described in Shakespearian Soldier's campaigns... but if you really don't have a problem with that campaign premise, then why bother 'im over it? They're the very same sort of PCs that you called "Rebels who don't know it yet"!
Ditto for non-Alliance but just as anti-Imperial campaigns... there's long-standing precedence in Garm Bel Iblis' own faction, running its own private guerrilla war against the Empire on account of Garm Bel Iblis' distrust of Mon Mothma. He described it to Lando as "I didn't join the Alliance", but The Force Unleashed has him being one of the founding members of the Alliance in 2 BBY, effectively retconning it to him having left the Alliance instead and to "the Alliance as we know it" being a very recent thing, while the planetary resistances have long-standing histories stemming back for well over a decade... and the old Dawn of Defiance Campaign is about Bail Organa's own such Alderaanian Resistance!
Agreed. It's funny but I'm pretty much a lifelong light-sider/pure paragon - my friend in the US brought me a Vader/Palpatine Republican t-shirt just because he knew it would irk me... Yet ErikB is actually making me like the Alliance less with his hectoring. When you can't even preach to the choir, it's time to take a different approach.
@ Jon D: That's actually got a real-world parallel in one view of "the Somali pirate problem", albeit one which correspondingly really draws the "USA/UK/the West as the Galactic Empire" parallel... and there's probably quite a bit of obscure EU lore that also draws a similar parallel, however unintentionally or ahead-of-time.
@ copperbell: What you described is essentially what happened to Despayre, and "hidden systems" has no small precedent in EU lore, i.e. the censoring the existence of Honoghr and the Noghri from the wider galaxy, and if one considers the prequels canonical the similar censoring of Kamino revealed in Episode II!
For more superweapons for the Rebels to go sabotage...
Basically right after the destruction of the first Death Star, Emperor ordered both the Eclipse and Eclipse II , then both the second Death Star and what would become the Tarkin , this last item being both to hide the second Death Star and a prototype testbed for the ship-mounted superlasers on the Eclipse -class design.
Death Star prototype : Jedi Search and Champions of the Force (and thus the Jedi Academy Sourcebook ) had it as built first, but after George Lucas' off-hand remark on Episode III DVD commentary that Episode III actually showed the original Death Star, The New Essential Chronology treated his remark as canon and retconned the prototype to actually have been built concurrent with the first Death Star. In any case the prototype was just a testbed for the planet-destroying superlaser concept, and after the superlaser was successfully fired, thereby proving the concept, it was simply left alone in the Maw.
(Oddly enough, according to the Star Wars Technical Journal , " Actual effective work on the station took less than two years " regarding the first Death Star, meaning that the nineteen-year stretch between Episode III and Episode IV was essentially on account of a mix of design and supply problems, multiple sabotage attempts... and of all things, labor union disputes.)
Eclipse and Eclipse II : Based on Forces of Corruption , both had their superlasers installed and functional by 4 ABY, but the Emperor's death and the subsequent power corruption "significantly delayed" both ships; the Eclipse was built over Kuat and the Eclipse II over Byss.
Galaxy Gun : I couldn't find any development history predating the events of Empire's End , suggesting that it was very much a recent project relative to that comic (also 10 ABY) and thus well out of the scope of EotE/AoR.
Sun Crusher : Based on a comment in Qwi Xux's article about her having spent eight years designing it, its design or her participation therein dates back to 3 ABY.
Tarkin : Designed by Bevel Lemelisk and his team, who then moved on then moved on to designing the second Death Star, while actual construction was carried out at an orbital drydock over the planet Hockaleg in the Patriim system, with the crew living planetside in a spaceport. Note that in canon the Alliance only found out about its existence after the events of The Empire Strikes Back (Marvel's Star Wars # 51) but destroyed it soon afterward in the next issue.
World Devastators : Designed by Umak Leth, previously designer of the Universal Energy Cages for confining Force-sensitives. Note that prior lore such as the D6 Dark Empire Sourcebook seemed to imply-by-omission-of-other-details-and-the-New Republic's-surprise that it was a recent thing (relative to DE, set in 10 ABY), but the Death Star novel -- although of questionable veracity -- dates them as being in development before the first Death Star's completion , thus possibly retconning the reveal in Dark Empire to merely the first operational deployment that the New Republic knew of.
Nevertheless, that leaves noticeable leeway for a GM to do whatever they will with the status of the World Devastators, and the Dark Empire Sourcebook also had Umak Leth having become the new "Master of Imperial Projects" after Bevel Lemelisk was discredited by the loss of the first Death Star, so there's a "high value target" (HVT) for Rebels who become aware of him and his role!
Also, according to the Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader video game for Gamecube, the Alliance suspected the Maw as an Imperial site as early as 3 ABY, although the post-Battle of Hoth mission to the Maw was an attack on the Imperial prison (on a planetoid in the Maw) and not on the R&D installation.