Saga How Fast is the Millennium Falcon in Hyper-drive?

So was interested to see how fast the Millennium Falcon is in Hyper-drive or any ship going Hyper-drive.

Found some calculations by some nerds here:
http://www.tor.com/2014/12/08/star-wars-how-fast-is-the-millennium-falcon/

They figured out from canon and non-canon sources that Tatooine and Alderaan are 50,855 light years apart. That means if we know exactly how long it takes for the gang to get from Tatooine to Alderaan then we can give a speed estimate for the Falcon. However, we don't know how long they spent making the trip. We assume a few hours since they were playing chess and doing some lightsaber training right?

Here's a chart that determines the speed of the Falcon based on how long we think the trip took:



So if we say the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan took half a day that means the Falcon was going 4237 light years per hour.

That's a heck of a lot faster than "she'll make 0.5 past light speed".

Since there are about 8760 hours in a year that means the Falcon was going 8760*4237 times the speed of light or light speed * 37,116,120.

Holy wow that's fast. Light speed can already go around the earth 7 times in 1 second. That means the Falcon is going fast enough to fly around the earth about 260 million times per second...

Is my math right? That's beyond "Ludicrous Speed".

 

Bear in mind that the incorrect "jump to lightspeed" is synonymous with the correct "jump to hyperspace" which suggests that "jump into lightspeed" is just another erroneous colloquialism like "laserblasts".

I could never make head or tail of that "0.5 past lightspeed" figure. What's the reference unit? It's like you say it's 10 degrees hotter than usual but fail to indicate whether you refer to Fahrenheit, Celsius or Kelvin. Probably Luke and Ben understood but we don't because we don't know what these "0.5" units stand for.

The trip from Tatooine to Alderaan can only be estimated by the time lapsed between Solo's arrival in the hold area, his return to the cockpit and the ETA figure "1400 hours". It seems to suggest several hours at most.

In ESB Piett reported that "if the Millennium Falcon went into 'lightspeed' it'd be on the other side of the galaxy by now". How long did it take Captain Needa to leave his bridge, embark on his shuttle, fly to the Executor and meet Vader in the Operations Room there?

Surely he wasn't exaggerating at his own expense, making things worse than they were already, so we can take his statement in good faith.

 

Good points, that also proves the Falcon goes beyond "Ludicrous Speed".

I can only assume the "0.5 past light speed" is without hyperdrive. Ie...in normal flight in can achieve 0.5 past light speed.

 

No, no object with mass can't attain lightspeed. The closer you get to lightspeed the energy required to do so becomes literally infinite. Lightspeed or c is the ultimate velocity in the real universe.

That's why "hyperspace" was invented for scifi storytelling purposes, it's some sort of another and exotic dimension which cuts dow interstellar distances, like a "wormhole".

Or you compact the structure of space itself, that's essentially what Star Trek's warp drive does.

 

Lol, now my brain hurts.

 

One of my favorite fan-explanations/handwaves of this comes from the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a series of essays on various SW topics written by real-life astrophysicist Curtis Saxton. They cover everything from a taxonomy of TIE fighters to the mechanics of hyperspace. Hosted on TFN, in fact. Bear in mind that these date from 1995 to about 2002 (?), so they reference the pre-prequel EU and its depictions in addition to the OT, which can differ from PT and new-canon depictions.

Star Wars Technical Commentary on Hyperspace

 

As far as Lucas was concerned, they were the same thing. Don't confuse what was in the old EU, or in "Spaceballs" as factual.

 

Thank you for posting that link, Lt.Cmdr.Thrawn. I had forgotten about those.

I wonder how Dr Saxton feels about how the 'Falcon breached Starkiller Base.

 

Conclusions from the link:

The time thing is interesting. Maybe without the "time alteration technology" Luke would be an old man by the time they reached Alderaan.

 

Of course. That's why both the warp drive in "Star Trek" and the hyperdrive were designed around the notion that faster than light travel can happen, but they bend the rule of real world science. In the former, warp speed is referred to as Time Warp in "The Menagerie". This was dropped as the show went on, but the principles were the same. And that in Trek, a stable worm hole or a transwarp drive was necessary to traverse the Delta Quadrant in less time than a standard warp drive that can only reach warp nine can achieve. As it would take longer to do that. Seventy years to be precise. And this is without the help of the Q Continuum, the Caretaker and the Kelvans.

 

darth-sinister wrote

As far as Lucas was concerned, they were the same thing.

How is that possible? There are some people that erroneously believe that you can achieve a speed greater than the "lightspeed barrier" based on the "sound barrier" analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_barrier

But the basic concept of hyperspace is something completely different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspace_(science_fiction)#Star_Wars

And regarding "in-universe" information it would appear that by the time of ESB even George Lucas realized that only the traditional hyperspace concept would work.

Obviously one crucial component of jumping into hyperspace are the Falcon's "horizontal boosters" Han had Chewie tested trying to locate the flaw that made the hyperdrive inoperative.

Now, these boosters seem to serve the purpose to "boost" a ship into hyperspace (hence "jump"), visible best when the Avenger made its jump with the help of its four (otherwise inoperative) booster engines in ESB.

As the name "booster" clearly suggests, such rocket engines only serve the purpose of providing extra thrust for a limited period of time but not to provide continous thrust over extended periods of time (as attaining lightspeed and flying with lightspeed velocities would undoubtedly require, assuming that could ever work in the first place).

 

I don't know if this helps but the star wars RPG has tables for hyperspace travel times

http://www.scribd.com/doc/42947539/Star-Wars-RPG-Core-Rulebook#scribd

page 207

 

According to the article in the first post: "Alderaan at the northeast corner of the Core (speaking in terms of a top-down view) with Tatooine on a diagonal to the southeast in the Outer Rim"

The guide says it takes 96 hours to go from the Outer Rim to the Core. That's 4 days which is longer than I thought. That means the Falcon would be going 529 light years per hour or 4,634,040 x light speed. That also means the Falcon could travel around the earth 32 million times per second.

 

Because Lucas wasn't interested in hard science.

Paul Scanlon: So you do a Star Wars.

George Lucas: I was a real fan of Flash Gordon and that kind of stuff, a very strong advocate of the exploration of outer space and I said, this is something, this is a natural. One, it will give kids a fantasy life and two, maybe it will make someone a young Einstein and people will say, "Why?" What we really need to do is to colonize the next galaxy, get away from the hard facts of 2001 and get on the romantic side of it. Nobody is going to colonize Mars because of the technology, they are going to go because they think maybe they will be able... well, it is romantic, it is the romantic aspect of it that needs to be looked at for a second, which nobody had ever looked at before. I mean, everybody had looked at the hardware end of it.

Scanlon: You firmly establish that at the beginning of Star Wars with the words: "A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

Lucas: Well, I had a real problem because I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, "You know there's no sound in outer space". I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I'm concerned. I didn't want to make a 2001, I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes.

--Rolling Stone interview, 1977.

Not really. Lucas didn't map things out like the distance between Hoth and Bespin like various informative books have done over the last twenty some years. Stuff like what Curtis Sexton wrote was just done to appease the science fiction buffs who want to understand the inner workings of a hyperdrive, or a blaster.

First, that part was probably written by Kasdan. Second, it was most likely written to serve as Trek techno babble. Anything Kasdan wrote was probably just something that he pulled out of his ass to make it sound cool.

 

Many critical approaches to literature exist. Queer readings. Race readings. Gender readings. These readings have safe space to approach a huge data set from their own perspectives and to consume that data set and sort and query and compare and contrast and categorize and find general consistencies and find exceptions and locate where they are represented or misrepresented inside that data set and how that data set compares to like literary offerings. But try a science reading of Star Wars, and you have touched the third rail. There's no solution. Not on this forum. I get the view of the TFA gushers who could not talk to each other for long without a TFA basher coming in and speaking stentorian authority. I guess even once is hard to ignore. (Do I repent of my part in that? No, not at all. No apologies, for this movie was a missed opportunity beyond wildest imagination. But I GET the feeling. I can apply that from here on out.)

 

All we need to know is that it's not as fast as LUDICROUS SPEED!

 

Too fast to realistically not smash into Starkiller Base at sublight.

 

The early EU went with a fairly slow (compared to "cross galaxy in hours" speed) for "point five" - 127 light years per hour. If it needed to be "sped up" then one could invoke major hyperlanes, and the idea of them being faster due to being better mapped.

 

127 light years per hour... At that speed it would have taken them 17 days to get to Alderaan in ANH.

 

Usually in those days it was like a week to get from Coruscant to Yavin 4. This doesn't match up to ANH, where it is portrayed as being more like a forty five minute trip.

 

Thankfully Tattooine is right next to a major hyperlane - the Corellian Run:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Corellian_Run

and one could justify the 127 l-y.p.h speed as "cross-country" so to speak.


It first appears in the Zahn novel Dark Force Rising - and, given that Zahn was writing very early in the EU, the distance between the named systems has ended up being a bit higher than Zahn would have originally intended.

The two systems were Abregado-rae and Endor - the timeframe was 22 hours - that comes to 2794 light years - less than 3% the diameter of the 120,000 light year wide galaxy.


But with its location in the Core Worlds (lower section)

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Core_Worlds/Legends

and Endor's in the lower left part of the Outer Rim:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Outer_Rim_Territories/Legends

then Endor looks more like 30% of the galaxy's diameter away than 3% - 10 times as fast, using Zahn's timeframe.

 

I think it's obvious that next to Piett's report in ESB the scene in ANH clearly suggests the little amount of time it must have taken the Falcon to travel from Tatooine to Alderaan.

The problem is that it's an uninterrupted long but coherent scene:

LUKE Are you all right? What's wrong?

BEN I felt a great disturbance in the
Force... as if millions of voices
suddenly cried out in terror and
were suddenly silenced. I fear
something terrible has happened.

Han Solo enters the room.

HAN Well, you can forget your troubles
with those Imperial slugs. I told
you I'd outrun 'em.

HAN Anyway, we should be at Alderaan
about fourteen-hundred hours.
...

HAN Look, going good against remotes is
one thing. Going good against the
living? That's something else.

Solo notices a small light flashing on the far side of the
control panel.

HAN Looks like we're coming up on
Alderaan.

Han and Chewbacca head back to the cockpit.

To significantly extend the duration of the scene and Luke's training we have to assume

• There was much more going on during that scene, but several events were edited away (because it's really odd that Solo announces they'd arrive at Alderaan at "1400 hours" while he could just have said "in ten minutes")
• Solo spent much more time in the cockpit after their jump into hyperspace (this is obvious because Chewie already sat down and started this holo-game with the droids)
• the preparations to leave hyperspace take extra time
  
  

 

Shortly before the Sequel Trilogy debuted, I worked up my own travel times chart, assuming using the fastest hyperspace routes, in Legends and the Essential Atlas, such as the Hydian Way and Corellian Run. Also, assumed that each Class of hyperdrive was twice as fast as the previous one. So class 0.5 would max out at 12,708 light years per hour (some 120 million times lightspeed) at ordinary performance levels; whilst Class 1 would be only 60 million times lightspeed / 6354 light years per hour;
Class 2 would be be half that again, 3177 light years per hour.
Working down from that:
Class 3: 1588.5 ly/ph
Class 4: 794 ly/ph
Class 6: 198.6 ly/ph
Class 7: 99.32 ly/ph (almost 1 million times lightspeed)
Class 8: 49.64 ly/ph
Class 10: 12.41 ly/ph
Class 12: 3.1 ly/ph
Class 15: 0.388 ly/ph and so on.
Travelling off the main routes, journey times will often be 20 times slower, in some cases, though, I figured.

 

17 days? Man we're not gonna last 17 hours!

 

Yeah, supposedly it was 7 hours, not 17, in West End Games material: and that was implied, vaguely, to be class 1, not class 0.5, which might even do it in three and a half...?