The Pengauani was an infantry unit employed by unknown factions during the Galactic Civil War.
An avian creature standing approximately one meter tall, the Pengauani was equipped with goggles of unknown function and a large rifle. It was also fitted with a harness bearing some sort of electronic device.
The Pengauani's origin and purpose is still not known.
Behind the scenes[]
The Pengauani's only appearance is as a set of model and animation files in Star Wars: Empire at War. There is no usable code in the game XML files to enable it, and its intended purpose remains unclear. It may have been used internally by the developers as an equivalent for Simon and the Bongo Marauder, for debugging or demonstration purposes, or simply as a joke.
It is speculated that the Pyn'gani from EAW were originally intended to use the Pengauani model, and had this been the case, would've explained a few uncertainties in the game in regards to them. Particularly, why the Pyn'gani (who are made up of the human snow-dweller model, yet do not spawn from the typical snow-dwelling human structure, but rather their own igloo-like ones) are the only "humans" in the expansion game that can be enslaved by the Zann Consortium. The similarity of the words "Pyn'gani" and "pengauani" are also notable.
The name of the Pengauani's model is "NI_PENGAUANI.alo". The "NI" is a sorting descriptor that represents "Neutral Infantry".