Was .5 past lightspeed really all that fast?

I have no idea what that really means... .5 WHAT past light speed? I know Han says its fast, but of course he's going to brag about the speed of his ship.

Are there any science people (*cough*DLM*cough*) here who know anything about this?

 

.5 past light speed?!

OMG EVERYONE KNOWS THAT ANYTHING FASTER THAN LIGHT SPEED (50% faster) is really not that fast!

Stupid Han.. what was he thinking?!

 

Let's not forget that this is the guy who talks about the Kessel Run in terms of parsecs.

(Yes, I know the EU explains what this means.)

Yay for science.




Rick McCallum loves you!

 

These are the kind of things that I don't want explained to me.

I like Star Wars better without all the explanations.

 

You'd better believe it was fast.

 

You could flip it over into a linear measurement so a larger number is faster instead of a smaller one:

.001 past lightspeed = 10,000 times the speed of light.
.01 past lightspeed = 100,000 times the speed of light.
.1 past LS = 1,000,000 X LS
.5 past LS = 5,000,000 X LS

I have no idea if the Falcon goes 5 million X LS, but some folks have calculated anything from 2 million to 50 million.

 

Like the parsecs line, I think Han is just trying to impress a farm-boy and old man with some off-the-cuff technical jargon mumbo-jumbo.

 

Lightspeed is pretty fast itself... I've never seen it travel.

 

.5 past lightspeed is pretty darned fast. If you need a visual image, think about those new "AOL high-speed technology" ads with the guys from American Chopper, and multiply by 100. That's what would happen to us if we tried to go that fast.

 

1 parsec = 30,900,000,000,000 km

 

.5 past lightspeed was fast enough to beat all other contestants, and that would be a win in itself.

Yes, it is fast.

 

The bottom line is .5 past light speed does not mean 1.5 c, and I doubt Lucas even thought about this. But let's speculate anyway, just for kicks.

My best guess is it's not actually a decimal of anything. It could be an exponential system like warp factors are in Star Trek. So .1 would be 10 c, .2 would be 100 c, and so on. That would make .5 100000 c, which seems like a lot, but is still not fast enough to make sense if Piett wasn't exaggerating when he said a ship like the Falcon could get halfway across the galaxy in just a few hours or days. That's doubly true if, as EU implies, you can't just jump straight across the galaxy because only certain routes are possible.

 

To clear up about the parsec line, here's what the OS says in Ask the JC.

Question: Han claims that the Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs -- but a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. What's the deal?
Answer: While Captain Solo is known to make boastful claims that seem to defy the basic laws of space-time physics, in this particular case, an understanding of the mechanics of the Kessel Run illuminates this statistic.

The Kessel Run is a contest of speed and endurance for smugglers. Those who undertake it must deliver specified cargos (usually illicit in nature) to a series of divergently moving transport vessels. The smuggler must deliver the cargo before the transports wander out of the free trade lanes into restricted Imperial space.

Solo's record is impressive, since the transport vessels covered less than 12 parsecs of distance during his hurried run between them, a testament to his piloting and the speed of the Millennium Falcon.

There is more than one way to smuggle spice out of Kessel. According to one tale, Solo left out the middleman and ferried the stolen goods himself, skirting dangerously close to the Maw Cluster, a baffling congregation of black holes. In doing so, he shortened the distance for the run, achieving an impressive record of under 12 parsecs.

Using either methodology allows Solo's claim to stand, but there are many, including the Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, who felt that the Corellian captain was just blowing hot air

 

i dont know what .5 means, but i calculated the falcon to go 18 times the speed of light. it was a scene in one of the njo books, they made a short jump and came out of it in one and a half minutes i think, i dont remember exactly how i did it, its been a while, but i checked the numbers with other people and they all agreed that acording to that bit of info my numbers were right.

 

Hmm, bear with me here. I was under the impression that .5 past lightspeed was twice as fast. ie: lightspeed x 2.
I understood that lightspeed=1 and higher numbers (2,3,4 etc) are slower. It works like a kind of reverse half-life if that makes sense, so that
1 = lightspeed
.5 = lightspeed x 2
.75 = lightspeed x 4
.86 = lightspeed x 8
etc, so that you can't actually get to '0'. Now I thought that I'd got this from A.C.Crispin's Han Solo trilogy, but as no-one else has mentioned it, I've now got no idea where the hell I read it
Ah well, it's a thought...

Oh, and remember folks, Lightspeed and Hyperspace aren't the same thing

{||||| ?||} -----------------------------

 

"Let's not forget that this is the guy who talks about the Kessel Run in terms of parsecs."

Um it's actually the audience who was confused not Solo. When I saw ANH I didn't know what that word meant. I went home and looked it up. Han's line makes perfect sense.




I'm not a scientist but I don't think you can go faster than light speed. Something about mass reaching maximum velocity or something like that. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Sort of. In real life, it's only possible to accelerate an object to the speed of light if it has zero mass (eg. a photon), because it takes an infinite amount of work otherwise. It's been theorized that there may exist matter capable of going faster than c, but there's no experimental evidence for its existence at this point.

i dont know what .5 means, but i calculated the falcon to go 18 times the speed of light.

I don't doubt that an NJO book said that, but it's still not nearly fast enough for interstellar travel. If the GFFA is comparable to ours, it would take several months to get from one star system to the next at that speed.

 

Well, regardless of how fast it actually was, it made for, in my opinion anyway, a great line of dialogue.

 

"it would take several months to get from one star system to the next at that speed."

I was under the impression that the nearest star system was four light years away.

 

Right, so it takes four years and change to get to Proxima Centauri when traveling at the speed of light, and that length of time has to be divided by 18. Come on, Eric, you can do it.

 

When the ships in the GFFA travel faster than light they are in hyperspace. Hyperspace appears to be a different plain or deminsion of space. Is it possible since the ships has to hit lightspeed to breach hyperspace they just continue to use it as a unit of measurement? I've always kind of assumed traveling through hyperspace was similar to folding space or a wormhole not necessarily traveling at the speed of light in normal space, like sunlight hitting the Earth.

 

When Han said ".5 past light speed", I always assumed he meant the speed of light plus half of what that is. So, if the speed of light is, let's say, 200,000 miles per second, then .5 past light speed would be 300,000 miles per second. That's the way I always thought of it, anyway.

 

At the speed of light(186,282 miles persecond) it would take just a tad over 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way galaxy.

Interesting that wormholes came up, since the tunnel of a wormhole that is traveled is called hyperspace.

A photon at lightspeed experiences no time. If you could transform into a coolection of photons you could travel to the nearest star in an instant, but outside observers would still measure you as taking 4.3 years to get there.
You would travel across the galaxy in an instant, but outside observers would still measure the trip as 100,000 years.

Time dilation

 

What if it just has to do with todays technology? Two hundred years ago who would've thought that bacteria caused gangrene in wounds, more specifically combat wounds? Now we know that there are small organisms that cause those infections and much more. So is it not possible that lightspeed/hyperspace is only impossible with what we know today? That in a few hundred years when our technology is far more advanced that it will be theoritical and/or applicable?

We live in a society where many things that we take for granted were once considered impossible. Space travel? Impossible. Automobiles? Impossible. If God wanted us to fly, then he would've given us wings! The mere thought of flying? Impossible! Round Earth? Blasphemy! Those are just a few examples, and is there any reason why lightspeed/hyperspace will not fall into that category a few hundred years from now?

 

Actually the lower the number the faster the drive.

Most Military Vessels have a 1 or 2. Salla Zend's and Dash's ships go 0.75, the Falcon goes 0.5. Here is an idea... it is not to multiply by, but a ration... so

Speed Variable / 0.5 > Speed Variable / 1

It could be power output for achieving a certain speed. Here comes my idea:

X= KiloParsecs/day
Y= power output to achieve speed

And let's say all ships have a net hyper rating of 1.

So...

As ship with Y=1, X/1 = 1000 parsecs/day

While the falcon is 0.5 thus...

Y= 0.5, X/0.5 = 2X...


It makes sense....