Saga Hyperspace as a means of evading pursuit

I don’t remember the exact wording of all the relevant dialogue off the top of my head, but from the movies I got the impression that what makes the Millennium Falcon so special in terms of escaping from Han’s many enemies is more based on its unique capabilities at light-speed than its capabilities at “regular” speeds. This seems to imply that hyperspace is where the “out-running” happens. If we follow that train of thought, this suggests to me that the Star Destroyers on Tatooine have the ability jump into hyperspace along the same trajectory as the Falcon left on, but at a certain point the faster speed of the Falcon would put enough distance between them that they would no longer be detectable on the Empire’s scanners and thus at the next “intersection” the Empire would have no idea if they turned “left” or “right”. The idea that ships can detect one another nearby while in hyperspace would explain how they avoid collisions while traveling along the same routes. This would also explain line that has always confused me when Han says it’s impossible for the Death Star to be tracking them but we see that’s not true at all. It’s because he’s only thinking about this method of tracking and for whatever reason doesn’t consider the possibility that they placed a homing device on board(Tarkin is also somewhat dubious about the success chance of this plan). Another thing this might reconcile is Ackbar’s order to retreat in ROTJ even though the Imperial fleet is supposed to be preventing their escape. Perhaps they can still jump to hyperspace but they’re not fast enough to prevent the Imperial fleet from following them. This doesn’t really gel with “we only need to prevent them from escaping so the Death Star can blast them”, but Lando’s only objection the suggestion of retreating is that they won’t get another chance to destroy the Emperor and/or the Death Star 2. So even if they are physically able to jump to hyperspace the Empire still wins in the end. Finally this could also explain the Trade Federation declaring “it’s impossible to locate the ship [because] it’s out of our range” after the Naboo Cruiser jumps to hyperspace. Thoughts?

 

I do agree this thinking does help make sense of the "impossible to locate the ship, it's out of our range" comment in TPM. I always thought that was odd...but if the Nubian was particularly fast (which, why not?), then it's sensible it could've exceeded tracking distance. Also, hyperspace tracking wasn't a technology that was being researched until the imperial era, and not actually developed until the events of the ST.

 

The original film (ANH) has specific dialogue to the effect that the Empire put a tracking device in the Falcon. This was Vader's plan to let the princess escape, so they could track her to the base. He apparently prevailed on Tarkin to go along with it in offscreen dialogue after he said "They must be trying to return the stolen plans to the princess. She may yet be of use to us."

Incidentally this is why the stormtroopers kept missing all the time, they were clearly under orders to pursue the heroes but not kill any of them. So they fired scattered shots but missed wildly, a fact that was made very apparent in certain scenes. Anyway, that's a digression but I am continually annoyed by the common notion that stormtroopers have bad aim. They don't. It's just that this plot point was made sort of indirectly, and not everyone picked up on it.

 

Well, that is DEFINITELY an explanation...

 

Just to be clear, the theory that I am hypothesizing is that short range hyperspace tracking exists in the form of literally following the ship at light-speed closely enough that you can see it on your sensors. In terms of animal tracking this would be the equivalent of seeing a deer and sprinting after it as it runs away as opposed to the common definition of “tracking” where with a trained eye you can trace an animals path some time later by detecting evidence it left behind, such as footprints or snapped branches, etc. This would explain why Han dismisses the idea that the Death Star is tracking them, because the Millennium Falcon is too fast for it to keep up(Speaking of Star Wars pet peeves, and maybe there should be a thread for those, it’s 0% Leia’s fault that the Death Star finds Yavin IV). Otherwise it’s never really made sense to me that Han is so confident that the Falcon cannot be tracked if he’s referring to homing beacons, because clearly the Empire’s homing beacon works just fine and the movie doesn’t bother suggesting that it’s some unique property of this particular beacon that allows for this.

 

I'm quite serious. It's the real explanation. I made another whole thread about it in the classic trilogy forum.

 

Obi-Wan uses a tracking device in Episode II, just like what the Empire did in Episode IV. The point is that you can track them only if you attach something to the ship that sends signals for you to follow. Otherwise you can't follow.

 

That also matches the Falcon's escape from Tatooine; sometime after the jump to hyperspace, Han walks back and finds Luke and Obi-wan training, apparently they've been there for at least a few minutes, and he announces that they've shaken the pursuing star destroyers. My interpretation of that sequence of events is: Falcon jumped to hyper, destroyers followed using what you called "short range hyperspace tracking" to follow the ship at light-speed, but eventually the Falcon's superior hyperdrive left the destroyers behind, out of immediate sensor range, at which point our heroes were safe and Han could leave the cockpit and proclaim their escape complete. It also jives with Vader's destroyer pursuing Leia's blockade runner from Scarif to Tatooine; apparently the blockade runner didn't have the hyperdrive power it needed to completely lose Vader.

 

It goes against the novelization and old EU materials, but technically the dialogue in Episodes I and IV do allow that it might be possible to pursue a craft in hyperspace. However Han Solo has already been shown to assume Luke and Ben are rubes who don't really know anything about space travel, so he may be putting a little extra shine on a situation that was really quite simple.

Incidentally I have always been partial to the theory that the scene aboard the Falcon there is a "condensed" narrative and that they took more than several minutes to reach their destination. The sequel trilogy seems to suggest otherwise, indicating that hyperspace travel is outrageously fast--crossing the galaxy in a few minutes, or certainly in less than a day. I suppose dialogue in Episode V supports that. Admiral Piett does say, "If the Millenium Falcon went into lightspeed, it could be on the other side of the galaxy by now." This happens right after Vader kills Captain Needa for losing them, and it seems like only a few hours (at most) have passed.

This is extraneous from the films, but I always liked the notion from ancillary materials (specifically West End Games here, unless there is a source they had that I didn't know--one of the positive points they did well) that hyperspace travel takes time based not only on the speed of the craft but on how well-traveled the route happens to be. Major hyperspace lanes take fewer calculations and involve fewer stops to avoid obstacles and so forth.

 

This scene is exactly what sparked this whole idea in my mind in the first place.

 

I'd always figured that apart from hyperspace, light still followed relativity or something similar and there just wasn't a way to bounce a signal off of a craft traveling beyond lightspeed. That might not be the real interpretation. Once thing is clear, that relativity as such doesn't really apply to the galaxy in terms of time. Things can be genuinely simultaneous throughout the galaxy, which doesn't actually make sense with current modern physics. We just have to accept that physics in the GFFA really are different from our own.

 

Hyperspace has no real-world scientific equivalent yet so there’s no real basis for how it “should” work, but yeah I definitely wouldn’t go around assuming relativity applies in a universe where there’s sound in space and whatever a lightsaber beam is. Besides, technology in sci-fi movies is typically based upon the existence of some series of amazing discoveries or breakthroughs that makes our current understanding of science seem as silly as when the consensus was the sun revolved around the earth and health was dependent on things like keeping your humors in balance. Basically this is my long-winded way of saying, if George Lucas decides sensors that can detect the presence of a nearby ship in hyperspace exist in Star Wars, then they do and question of how they achieve this can be hand-waived by technobabble, in the same way that a person from 400 BC need not know anything about the existence and properties of electrons or even atoms to be able to understand the concept of a device that allows you to broadcast your voice to a receiver on the other side of the planet in essentially real time. As for these theoretical hyperspace proximity detectors specifically, if we assume (and again there’s a lot of unknowns with hyperspace so unfortunately we can’t do any better than assumptions in most cases) that two ships in hyperspace can run into one another and that the result would be bad, then such a technology would more or less need to exist for basic things like the whole Rebel fleet jumping from Sullest to Endor in tact to be feasible.

 

Except we from the end of Rogue One into the intro of A New Hope, the Empire is able to track the Tantive IV without attaching a tracking device.

 

This is also a post-Disney film. My point is about how the mechanics were described and received previous to this. It won't necessarily bother fans across the board, but this is one the the annoyances for me. I deal with it in my own way.

 

OK take Rogue One out of the equation. We have nothing to base upon any idea that the Tantive IV had a tracking device attached to it to allow it to be followed.

 

No, we don't know how Leia's ship was found after she got to the Tatooine system. For all we know, apart from taking Rogue One as part of the story, Darth Vader's ship could have been waiting for her there.

 

i thought i read somewhere that the Tantive IV had some kind of engine malfunction, causing it to leave radiation traces that the Empire could track?

 

You say this like it’s a given but the point is I’m not entirely convinced, at least not in terms of the “tracking” that I described. Now I’m not arguing that this form of “manual tracking” is a very reliable method, only that it exists. That is of course unless someone can present evidence to the contrary that I’ve overlooked.

 

I'm going by previous materials that said one couldn't do that, such as the novelization of the original film. That book also explains that hyperspace jumps have to occur away from a planet while antigrav only works in a planetary vicinity.

This might have been overwritten by more recent things including potentially some readings of the films. I found the deviations annoying because I'm a fan who paid attention from long before. But they do say in The Last Jedi that tracking through hyperspace is "impossible" and the technology is supposed to be emergent and new. It is a total surprise to the resistance leaders and only Rose and Finn figure it out.

 

I’ve never paid much attention to the non-film materials so that would explain why I wasn’t following. I would generally say I don’t pay the ST much mind in terms of the rules of hyperspace if for no other reason that the writers almost assuredly didn’t consult with George Lucas about what the rules actually are in order to maintain consistency. In this case it doesn’t matter though because the hyperspace tracking of TLJ is a different and much more powerful technology than what I’m proposing already existed in the OT. Functionally it would actually look a lot like the TIE fighter chase at the beginning of TROS, the difference is there would be no need for light-speed skipping to lose their pursuers, they would only need to put a little distance in between them via their superior speed in order for the TIEs to no longer be able to follow them.

 

Well, you are welcome to have your own headcanon.

 

It’s not about head-canon, it’s a theory I came up with based upon the scenes in the movies and I started this thread because I was curious if anyone else had ever considered this before and what their conclusions were, or if there was some evidence either for or against it that had slipped my mind.

 

Evidence against, in-film, is the dialogue from TLJ where Finn and Rose at first assume that hyperspace tracking is impossible. (Homing beacons aside) There is also material from the novelizations, but that can be overwritten by films. Also not everybody reads them anyway.

 

I feel like there’s a communication breakdown somewhere because we seem to be going in circles, but from my previous post:
1) I consider ST based evidence to be dubious at best simply because it was written by entirely different people than the first 6 movies and there’s no reason to believe they made any kind of specific effort to keep, in this case, the rules of hyperspace consistent with the original vision.
2) Even if you don’t agree with that, what I’m talking about is different than the technology the First Order uses in TLJ, so there’s no contradiction with it being a never-before-seen advancement. The Resistance think they got away only for the First Order to surprisingly show up on top of them. If the First Order had followed them using the method I described then the Resistance would know they were still right behind them by the same principle that the First Order knows that the Resistance is right in front of them.