Lightspeed?

Okay, in the Star Wars movies, people refer to going to lightspeed, meaning, obviously, the speed of light. Well, if that's true, and they are traveling at the speed of light, then a lot of things don't add up.

Most planets aren't just a short drive away. They're light-years apart, meaning, traveling at the speed of light, it'd take years to get from one planet to another.

I've seen maps of the Star Wars Galaxy, and the planets are very far apart. One case that really is mind-boggling comes to mind.

In Attack of the Clones, Yoda goes to Kamino while Mace Windu and the others go to Geonosis. Somehow, Yoda manages to make the trip from Coruscant to Kamino to Genosis in a few days, which, by Star Wars logic, seems impossible.

What do you guys think? Are they traveling faster than light or did George just skip some science classes?

Please reply.

 

Here we go...


The units of distance measurement employed in the Star Wars galaxy are metric, based on the meter. In the A New Hope novel, for instance, Darth Vader is described as being over two metres tall, lightsaber beams are a meter long, and womp-rats are two or three metres in size. Starfighter pilots and their targeting computers use metric metres, eg. Luke Skywalker's reference to womp rats in A New Hope; General Dodonna's reference to a thermal exhaust port.


For special purposes, such as interstellar travel, there are supplementary units in use. One is the parsec, which is an astronomical unit characterising the distances between stars. A parsec is defined to be the distance at which the average separation between Earth and Sun would subtend an angle of one arcsecond (1/3600 of a degree) on the sky. The corresponding unit in the Galactic Empire would be based on the orbit of Coruscant rather than Earth. We don't yet have any way of determining what that measurement is; it could just as easily be slightly less or slightly greater, depending on the mass of Coruscant's sun. We provisionally assume that the orbital semimajor axis is the same. A terrestrial parsec equals 3.086x1016m. Han Solo boasted that his freighter, the Millennium Falcon, was capable of accomplishing a feat called "the Kessel Run" in "less than twelve parsecs". (The 'Run involves travel through or past an unnavigable region; taking a route of shorter distance requires a good ship and skillful pilot.)


A light-year is the distance travelled by light in one year. An Earth-based light-year is 9.461x1015m. However this is not appropriate in a Star Wars context, because the galactic standard year is derived from the orbital period of Coruscant rather than Earth. As referenced in numeral sources, the standard year is slightly longer than the terrestrial equivalent. We assume that the standard second exactly equals the usual metric second. Therefore when a citizen of the Old Republic, Galactic Empire or New Republic quotes a distance in "light-years", the unit is actually 368/365.25 times our version of the light-year. (It is about 0.75% greater.) By the Coruscant definition, a light-year is approximately 9.531x1015m. In Shield of Lies, Lando Calrissian states that the galaxy is 120,000ly in diameter.

Therefore:

m km ly pc
m 1 0.001 1.049x10-16 3.240x10-17/a
km 1000 1 1.049x10-13 3.240x10-14/a
ly 9.531x1015 9.531x1012 1 0.3088/a
pc 3.086x1016a 3.086x1013a 3.238a 1



With the value a=(Coruscant orbit semimajor axis)/(Earth orbit semimajor axis) is assumed to equal 1.





Ken Kenobi- And you have a nice day

 

Thank you, Professor KenKenobi.