How fast can they travel in the Star Wars galaxy

I read that the Star Wars galaxy is supposed to have a diameter of about 120,000 light years. But yet as far as I know the fastest they can travel is at light-speed. So is all the colonies in the galaxy that the films and the EU depict chunked pretty close together. Or can they travel faster than light-speed and that is what makes traveling through the entire galaxy possible. Or is it just something that we are supposed to look the other way on.

 

However fast the story requires them to travel, basically.

As I always say Star Wars is Space Opera, its no Sci-Fi, so sceintifcally many, many things fall down. Like the way everyone travels from planet to planet in seemingly a few second in ROTS. Thats because, that angle isn't supposed to be taken seriously at all because Star Wars doesn't adhere to the rules of proper science. Of course EU may have added their own thoughts on how fast shuttles do in Hyperspace, but thats a differant issue. As far as theatrical Star Wars goes, which in the end is the purest form of Star Wars because its George Lucas's very own story, its just however fast the stpry requires.

 

They use Hysperspace, short answer is they go many times faster than the speed of light. Some starships have faster hyperdrives than others.

 

Oh ok, it's kind of confusing because in the original trilogy they only use the term 'lightspeed' to describe how fast they are going.

Was the term hyperspace (in which they travel faster than lightspeed) developed in the expanded universe to make it make more sense that they could so freely and quickly travel throughout the entire galaxy.

 

"Travelling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy."

 

Yes but on several occasions they also just use the term lightspeed. May be in the films hyperspace is just another term for lightspeed. But only in the EU it became faster than lightspeed.

 

I don't think it's ever really said what they mean by lightspeed. Han even says "she'll make .5 past lightspeed" and then later says that they're about to "make the jump to lightspeed." It's just shorthand for "going into hyperspace."

 

Well as I understand it, Hyperdrive travels through hyperspace which involves actually kind of creating it's own wormholes tunneling through space drastically shortening the distance between two points in normal space. Since the dimensions of hyperspace and physical laws governing it are different than normal space they can travel lightspeed or even a little faster through hyperspace. Combine light speeds with shorter distances and you've got much shorter trips. However, I do agree that the use of the word lightspeed is somewhat misleading or confusing.

 

Well considering that the SW galaxy looks to be about the same size/type as our Milky Way and Han claims to have crossed it ("I've been (flown?) from one side of this galaxy to the other" - this may be hyperbole, but the planets visited in the films are distant from each other as well) they'd HAVE to be traveling many times lightspeed in order for the story to unfold within the lifetimes of the characters (as the OP noted). So Hyperspace allows a way to do this, and "lightspeed" may be faster in Hyperspace (the laws of nature may be different there, as it is not apparently part of "this dimension/universe"). Or maybe going to lightspeed (and thereby achieving infinite mass) is the catalyst that allows entry to Hyperspace (what do we make of Han's ".5 past lightspeed" comment then?). I enjoy discussing these technical things, but I always keep in the back of my mind that Star Wars is myth, not SF, and as such is more focused on the story, not the story mechanics.

Also, this isn't gospel but it is interesting discussion from someone who has some idea of what they're talking about: Hyperspace.

 

Agreed about SW being more about mythology than technology, etc. But for those who would SLEEP BETTER about it, I've always considered "lightspeed" and "hyperspace" as separate terms in the SW universe.

In my way of thinking, when Han "brags" about the MF being able to "make .5 past light speed," I imagine he's talking about how fast the MF can go WITHOUT using a hyperspace drive, whereas "hyperspace" is akin to "warp speed" on "Star Trek," in which space is "warped" or "folded" to make the trips shorter. I also like what someone said about how a hyperspace drive allows a ship to make its own "wormhole," also making for shorter trips.

In other words, when Han talks about the MF and lightspeed, he's actually bragging (which is so in keeping with his character at that point) that his ship can go that fast WITHOUT engaging the hyperspace drive, which actually makes all ships go much faster than light speed. Otherwise, if he had been saying, "My ship can make .5 past light speed WITH the hyperspace drive," Luke would have laughed, "So? Almost EVERY ship can go WAY faster than that! It's still a piece of junk!"

 

Interesting speculation - and that would also make it possible for the events of ESB to actually occur (ie, the gang in the Falcon traversing at least 3 star systems and the distance between them [Hoth, Anoat, Bespin]) without a hyperdrive. I suppose it's possible that they hitched quite a distance on the Avenger, but certainly not all or even most of the voyage.

Though... Assuming that those systems are neighbors (like the Sol and Proxima/Alpha Centauri systems - ~4 light years distant), depending on what ".5 past lightspeed" means, it still may take an extremely long time to traverse the distance from Hoth to Bespin, especially considering the amount of time they spent hidden in the asteroid field.

 

To borrow a line from J. Michael Straczynski (sp?), "They travel at the speed of plot."

 

I always thought the "jump to lightspeed" was either slang for getting around fast or you have to make a jump to actual lightspeed to enter hyperspace.

The old game mechanic of .5 being a multiplier of travel distance always irked me since they went ahead and did it counter intuitive backwards and such with larger numbers being slower. They could just as well have done it in linier fashion, .1 past lightspeed being five times slower than .5 lightspeed, or make it geometric so maybe .1 lightspeed is one hundred times slower or whatever. But NOOOOOOO, they had to make it backwards for the game.

I have seen folks make estimates in the "millions of times lightspeed" range, anywhere from 5 million to as much as 50 million times lightspeed, and to get around the galaxy the way they do then those figures would be somewhere close enough for suspension of my disbelief.

 

I think if you take what is said in the film literally .5 past lightspeed would be 50% faster then lightspeed. That would be 279,000 miles per second. That would still take 60 years to travel the galaxy like Han mentions. But the 120 Lightyears across galaxy is EU. The galaxy could be smaller or you just have to believe they can because it's fantasy.

 

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but no, "point five past lightspeed" is easily 5000 times (or more) the speed of light, and is probably a logarithmic throughput factor, rather than an inline speed measurement. This is definitely what would be required for all of those cross-galaxy trips in the Saga, trips which never take more than a couple of weeks (refugee transport in AOTC, Falcon's sublight run to Bespin, etc), and many are probably more like hours and days. (Compare to the Star Trek world, where a pretty fast ship in the fleet, Voyager, is to take several decades just to cross a portion of a similarly sized galaxy, our own Milky Way, but where the Borg Trans-Warp seems much faster than even the Star Wars Hyperspace.)

Related to this, the signals making up the holonet and other comms networks, like the holograms we see transmitted across the galaxy, are travelling many hundreds of thousands of times the speed of light in order to be "simultaneous" and "real-time" for communications across the galaxy. Mind boggling (and you have to throw out the "traditional wisdom" handed out by the Einstein zealots, but that's another forum)!


Put in perspective, the best we can do in our world right now, involves something like a 7-minute comms delay between Houston and Mars (in SW they communicate in real-time across the entire galaxy), and our fastest experimental ship would take several hundred years just to get to the nearest star system (in SW it would take a minutes/hours). So, Star Wars technology is just incredible and awe-inspiring, to say the least!

See the SW Technical Commentaries here on TF.N for much more on the technical aspects of Star Wars, including Hyperspace...

 

Didn't Han say something like this about the MF, "She goes .5 past light speed"? Now is .5, five times faster than lightspeed? Or more? It would make sense since some galaxies are over 100 years lightspeed from one end to the other, that would mean if a hyperdrive made a ship go five times faster than light speed it would take them go from one end of the galaxy to the other in twenty years. That seems awfully slow considering it doesn't take them much more than a few days to go from Naboo to Coruscant. So, I bet they travel way faster than five times the speed of light.

So, for me I use this to make me "sleep better": You can travel both. Lightspeed without hyperdrive, making maybe trips to the moon or somewhere near in the galaxy so you don't have to overextend your hyperdrive (just like in our universe you travel some distances with your car and than sometimes you fly). Than you can travel in hyperspace which I could see using its own wormhols or such and also in hyperspace travel in the speed of light to even get places faster.

 

A few days? Isn't it more like a few hours?

 

Try five thousand times lightspeed.

Keep in mind, on a galactic scale like that, the speed of light is very, very slow. "Point five" is just a bit of lingo, like saying "My amplifier goes to eleven on the dial" (a la Spinal Tap). Han is saying the Falcon's drive can generate a slipstream through hyperspace, which (through some kind of logarithmic factoring of power output or field generation to the fifth notch) will slip us from Tatooine to Alderaan as if we were going 5000 times lightspeed through normal space.

 

aha, that works

 

I have a theory, which I put into practice in my recent rewrite contest win.


This is NOT canon...it's not from EU or the movies...though it would explain quite a lot....


A starship has two engines...a lightspeed engine and a sublight engine. It also has a Hyperdrive.

The Hyperdrive isn't an engine...rather it's a device that opens up a gateway between normal space and hyperspace and the only way to breach the barrier is by going at the speed of light. Hyperspace itself is like a wormhole...a shortcut through space.

So, in order to enter hyperspace, a ship must jump to lightspeed to break through the barrier, but if the hyperdrive generator isn't working, the ship can still travel at lightspeed, because the lightspeed engine and hyperdrive are two seperate systems.

This idea helps solve a few debates.

For example...In TESB, the Millennium Falcon's Hyperdrive isn't working yet it manages to get to Bespin pretty quickly (over a few weeks, given Luke's probable training time on Dagobah).

So, while it would take a few minutes or hours to get to Bespin through Hyperspace, it takes a month or so using through normal space using the lightspeed engines. (Using sublight engines they'd probably still be travelling as we speak)


Also, given how exiting hyperspace is portrayed from a normal space view (example - rebel fleet appearing at Endor) it can be suggested that breaking through the barrier from Hyperspace, back into normal space also requires lightspeed, so it's probable that travelling through Hyperspace involves lightspeed for the entire journey...hence the reason the Millennium falcon reached Alderaan within a few minutes of leaving Tatooine.

And so, the debate is ended, the problem is solved...except it's not because I haven't written any EU books to make it canon.

 

It takes place in a completely different galazy far, far from here. Who's to say the science applied to our galaxy is the same as theirs?

Hell, there could even be air in space in that galaxy.

 

Jedsithor, yes, I'd say that's exactly how it works. Except, you'd only need "sublight" engines (thrusters) and a hyperdrive, IMO. The lightspeed barrier is unapproachable, conventional mass equations indicate, due to acceleration forces, and even quantum drag (but don't get me started on that topic). Sublight engines could be quite fast, and then for seeming-faster-than-light travel, the hyperdrive is used (and there are several theories on how that would work).

Darth_Sidious-, very good point, and despite the current basis (arrogance, some would say) of Science, it is still a valid philosophical question. I wonder though, if there has been any indication that the GFFA is any different in principle from our Milky Way? Besides, GL seems to be using conventional movie assumptions, with things like sounds in outer space, rather than implying different physical laws.

 

The fastest quoted speed in the Star Wars Universe has been 20'000 light years being travelled in three hours (LOTF: Bloodlines). That should make Millennium Falcon speeds be about 6666.7 light years an hour.

 

However, hyperdrive speed isn't the only factor in determining how long a trip will take. The galaxy is full of obstacles, and most trips involve several hyperspace jumps as the ship changes course slightly. A ship in hyperspace can only travel in a straight line, so if they need to go a different direction, they need to come out of hyperspace and change course.

Systems that lie along the major trade routes such as the Perlemian Trade Route, the Hydian Way, the Corellian Run and others are easier to get to than systems that are in the "wilderness," so to speak.

For example, Tatooine and Alderaan lie along the same trade route, so a trip between them won't take very long, even though Tatooine is in the Outer Rim and Alderaan is in the Core.

 

So can we assume the same applies to Mustafar and Coruscant?