Members of the JCC, I ask you...

...how fast is sublight speed?

Various books have often differed on exactly how fast "sublight" speed is. Are we talking "a considerable fraction of the speed of light" (a la Stover in the RotS novelization)? I mean, The Han Solo trilogy has Han piloting a ship across an entire cluster of black holes in a matter of hours. Compared to "weeks" spent at full burn to get to the outer edge of a system in Darksaber. And then, of course, you have the movies themselves, which seems to feature X-wings going no faster than our modern day fighter jets (although it could be argued that they were in "attack" mode, and that an extremely fast velocity would be impractical for fighting).

In any case, you're obviously going to have contradictions when you have a situation like the EU. My question is, is there an official, "continuity" answer to the question of sublight speed?

 

That has to be, I would think.

OTOH, in ESB, with Han just "running away" from the Empire and performing some tricky stunts, 1) they run across an asteroid field, and 2) they travel so far that Leia doesn't even know where they are right before they're "dumped." So "sublight" has to be pretty darned fast, I would think.

 

Star by Star, Destiny's Way, and I think TUF all have starships travelling at fractions of the speed of light with conventional engines. Likely speed and manueverability are an inverse relation that ramps up quickly.

 

Not just likely: guaranteed. It's basic physics. Really, you're just as maneuverable as you were before - except that even if it were to take the same amount of time to affect your velocity (which it doesn't), your inertia carries you much farther along your original path as you turn, climb, etc. So it's blasted near impossible to have a decent dogfight at 80% of the speed of light, though it seems to work well as a hit and run tactic against larger ships.

And recall that the case of Darksaber is a bit different - their ship was damaged, and they were on lower power settings most of the time, so as to avoid unwanted attention.

- Keralys

 

If I can remember correctly your basic starship (i.e. capital ship, freighter, cruiser as well as starfighters with hyperspatial additions) has three main engines (not really engines but stuff that makes it go)

The repulsor engines, these act like an anti-gravity drive when you are inside the atmosphere of a planet

The sub-light engines, these are more from planet to planet and are used until you are far enough from a planet's gravitational field to use the hyperdrive. They are also used to ease out of lightspeed.

Hyperdrive, this involves lightspeed or fighter than light speed travel and the speed greatly depends on the individual ship.

If I am wong, tell me but I think that about sums it up.

 

Hmm. Sublight engines likely can run up to near lightspeed, before the transition into hyperspace. It takes a lot of fuel to do so, according to Rogue Squadron, but I assume that once you are at that speed, you can just cruise rather than make the jump.