Travel Time in the Clone Wars

I didn't see any plaid, so I'm skeptical of this.

 

I don't think travel time is something that is meant to be over-analyzed in any "Star Wars" installment. I mean, look at "A New Hope"; it just seemingly takes a few hours for the Falcon to get from The Outer Rim to the Core. Same goes for "The Clone Wars". Looking at "Lightsaber Lost", once again it just seems to be later that day. Of course that isn't realistic by our standards, but nothing in the saga has much wiggle room for travel time. You can only do so many interesting things on a ship.

 

Sure, they don't have to show the trip as taking a long time, if it doesn't have any real relevance to the plot. In ANH they could have taken an hour or a week to get to Alderaan and it wouldn't make much difference. The problem is when the plot requires someone to cross the galaxy and back in less than an hour and he manages to do so.

 

While some of them are, there's often no direct route between them. I'm an EU-fan but I can't recall if there's anything quantifiable. However, the Wook states (which pretty much jives with the movies) that there's no reliance on hyperlanes for travel if the pilot knows the destination (the navicomputer calculates the jump).

 

When I first saw this thread, i thought it was about time travel in the Clone Wars...

Wew...

Anyway, this has bugged me a lot. Most sources show that travel time, even between one side of the galaxy and another, is fairly short...

but if it were so short, there would be no such thing as "strategic" planets or "out of the way" planets. Everywhere would be easily reachable from anywhere else. All wars would be about rushing the capital as soon as possible, and there wouldn't be specialized trade planets.

Fortunately, there is are a few fairly easy, and canon, ways to hand-wave away any inconsistencies.
1. Different ships have different hyperspace speeds.
2. Hyperspace routes matter. A straight line will go pretty quickly. Having to constantly start and stop to get around obstacles makes travel time a lot longer.

With this in mind, I think the best explanation is that the hyperspace around Vanquor is maze like, except for a nearby hyperspace route that goes straight to Coursicant, in which it might have taken R2 a lot longer to reach a friendly republic world that is physically closer, but in a turbulent area of hyperspace.

 

Uhm, that's why navicomputers are used.

 

I assume that it simply takes less fuel to travel in a more-or-less straight path at hyperspeed, while having the navicomputer plot a twisty course will result in more fuel used up.

 

We do indeed see maps in the movies: Two maps of the galaxy are shown in AOTC (one of which, the Jedi Temple map, shows much of the galaxy 'boxed in'). Furthermore, it's not just the EU: The movies hammers the point that SW takes place on a galactic scale over and over again. The EU have different maps.

That's actually a very good idea!

 

Oh, I see...

 

I like this idea, but it would only work if the show followed some sort of continuity. Of topic, I'm getting sick of the narrator starting out the episode telling us how the Seppy's have scored another victory and the Republic is in further disarray, because I don't see it.

 

I really hated this in the episode. It was really hard to get past that fact and enjoy the episode (which I did not enjoy) but has it ever been specifically mentioned that it was an Outer Rim planet (I don't seem to recall it, but I don't have a good memory to start with)? It could have been a Deep Core planet for all we know.