So how fast is the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive, anyway?
We know—unlike Obi-Wan Kenobi, seriously wizard don’t you read SmugglerFeed?—that this is the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. But we also know that a parsec is a measure of distance, and since Han doesn’t specify how long it took the Falcon to make this sub-12 parsec shortcut, we don’t actually get an idea as to how fast the ship can go.
Oh, but she’ll do “.5 past light speed” which…doesn’t tell us much either. Obviously ships in the Star Wars galaxy can go faster than light speed otherwise there’d be no movie, but how fast is .5 on their hyperdrive scales in terms of light years traversed per day?
This train of thought was kicked off after I stumbled across an old diagram on Slate that compares the speeds of several different spacecraft in genre fiction. I was surprised to see the Falcon beat out nearly every other ship and especially surprised to see how much faster Han’s craft can go in comparison to the fastest ship that the Star Trek franchise’s Starfleet can muster. While growing up watching Star Trek I always got excited when the crew took the ship to warp 9 and beyond because now…now we were going fast! In my head, the Falcon and the Enterprise could equal each other’s speed if pushed to their limits, so it was surprising to see the Falcon leave it so completely in the dust.
The Slate diagram admits that its speed for the Falcon is an assumption since the evidence for it is so scanty. This is in contrast to the speed limits assigned to starships in the Star Trek universe, which are precisely detailed. For example, the warp speed scale from Star Trek: The Next Generation has a starship climb in speed gradually until topping out at Warp 9, at which point speeds increases exponentially. This means that a speed like Warp 9.5 would actually be 50% faster than Warp 9 (essentially what you would get by adding the speed of Warp 9 and Warp 5 together). Even at Warp 9, it takes a day to travel just 4 light years. Here’s the scale from Memory Alpha:
| Warp factor |
|---|
Calculated speed (*c)
Distance traveled in 24 hours (*light years)Travel time from Earth to Alpha Centauri
0.50.0990.000343.64 years110.0034.33 years210.0790.028156.91 days338.9410.10740.61 days4101.5940.27815.57 days5213.7470.5857.4 days6392.4981.0754.03 days7656.1351.7962.41 days810242.80437.07 hours91516.3814.15225.03 hours
Obviously, Star Trek’s “.5” is different than Star Wars’ “.5”. The former’s doesn’t even make it past light speed, for one, and the latter touts the number as an example of top speed within all spaceships commercially available in the galaxy. While Star Trek puts .5 at the bottom of its faster-than-light scale, Star Wars puts it near or at the top.
This is where my attempt to deduce how fast the Falcon is runs into the barrier between fiction and reality, even though I’m already talking about a theoretical concept within a piece of fiction. George Lucas obviously didn’t have any underlying factual worldbuilding worked out when he wrote A New Hope and it’s clear that it was never his intent to do so. He wanted to tell a story about spiritual forces, empires and rebellions, daring fighter pilots, and hero’s journeys. Everything that could possibly call for a measured explanation, like a lightsaber, a space station the size of a moon, or the speed of the Millennium Falcon, was thought up in service of the spectacle of the Star Wars epic. The only explanation behind having Han establish “.5 past light speed” as the Falcon’s speed is that it makes Han sound cool. “.5” is an arbitrary number and doesn’t signify a scale or speed.
But it circles back in a neat way with what I’m about to investigate, so keep it in mind.
Since we don’t have any testimony as to how fast the Falcon can go, we’re left piecing together its speed through clues left in the narrative. To do that we need a sequence in the movies where the Falcon takes a hyperdrive journey that we can fit within a range of time. For this purpose, the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope provides an ideal example. Its placement in the first movie in the saga sets up a precedent for the Falcon’s speed that has not (yet) been superseded. Because of that, we can consider the conclusions we draw from this example as close to “canon” as we are liable to get.
As we see in the movie, the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan is made almost entirely and continuously via hyperspace; not in an irregular series of jumps like the Falcon’s pursuit through the asteroid belt in The Empire Strikes Back. We can also infer that Han is flying the ship through hyperspace at top speed since A.) That is what Luke and Obi-Wan are paying for, and due to the urgency of Leia’s message Obi-Wan would insist on top speed. B.) Han is eager to collect the sizable fee Obi-Wan promised him once they reach Alderaan, since Jabba has demonstrably marked him for death if Han doesn’t pay up, and soon. Finally, we get scenes from within the Falcon during the trip, giving us a minimum time of how long it spends in hyperspace, plus a theoretical maximum given the occupants and size of the ship.
So we have a range of time but now we need a distance and for this we’ll need to consult supporting material of a wide range of canonicity. First, we’ll need a map. Specifically, we’ll need the latest map of the Star Wars galaxy, contained in the official Star Wars Essential Atlas.
But hold on…how do we know this map is canon and that the locations of Alderaan and Tatooine are where they were always envisioned to be? The authors of The Essential Atlas, Daniel Wallace and David Fry, answer the first question on their own site, where you can take a walk through the various LucasFilm-approved sections of the map, including planets that were added at LucasFilm’s suggestion.
The location of Alderaan and Tatooine can be confirmed as correct (as far as fictional galaxies go) as well because, well, they’ve never been located anywhere else in relation to each other. Each canon and non-canon Star Wars map has placed 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. LucasFilm has had numerous instances to correct the placement and never has, therefore we can assume that their positions within the galaxy are correct.
The Essential Atlas map satisfies these requirements and is the most up to date. But, even when enlarged, the above image of this map is too small for us to detail through this post where Alderaan and Tatooine are. If you have the book handy, Aldeeran is in the Core, at the top left corner of square M10. Tatooine is in the Outer Rim, at the bottom of square R16.
Here’s a section including the two planets plus the distance between them:
It looks like most of the way between the two planets consists of established space lanes, which is handy for our purposes. It assures us that the Falcon traveling at top speed would have been a simple affair since the route is mostly established and clear of stars, supernovas, asteroid fields, and other objects that would require trickier navigation.
The route also forms a familiar shape!
It’s a right triangle! And thanks to the magic of the Earthly Pythagoras, that means we can calculate (c), shown above as the rough route the Falcon took in A New Hope, by knowing the distance of (a) and (b). And that’s where this Essential Atlas map really shines.
According to Wookieepedia, the Star Wars galaxy is 120,000 light years in diameter. It’s a big galaxy, bigger than our own, which clocks in at 100,000 light years across, but smaller than the monstrous Andromeda Galaxy, which covers 200,000 light years at its widest. This number comes from the Atlas as well and while the book could really say whatever it wants in regards to the size of the Star Wars galaxy, we can grant certain qualities to the galaxy from what we saw at the end of The Empire Strikes Back and from a library map we saw in Attack of the Clones. Our heroes live and struggle in a big galaxy, big enough to have dwarf galaxies orbiting it, so a light-year diameter in the six figures is not at all unusual to postulate.
If we accept the 120,000 light year measurement then that means we can use the map from The Essential Atlas to measure distance within it, since it comes pre-gridded into squares. Whoo! Specifically, the Star Wars galaxy is 22 squares tall by 23 squares wide. If 23 squares is as long as the galaxy gets, then we just divide 120,000 by 23 to determine that each square is 5,217.39 light years on each side.
In the above triangle, (a) is roughly 5.8 squares tall and (b) is roughly 5 squares across. If a square is 5,217.39 light years on each side, then (a) = 5.8 x 5,217.39, or 30,260.86 light years. By the same measure, (b) equals 26,086.95 light years.
Now that we have (a) and (b), we can use the Pythagorean Theorem to find the hypotenuse, otherwise known as (c), otherwise known as the distance Han, Luke, and company traveled between Tatooine and Alderaan.
Help us out, Pyramid Head.
(Pssst, it’s a squared plus b squared = c squared.)
Thanks to our dark eldritch powers of basic geometry, we can determine that (c) equals 39953.08 light years.
Since their journey doesn’t exactly follow the hypotenuse and takes a concave route, let’s GO DEEPER and split their journey out into more exact segments.
These two triangles and three segments follow the major galactic traffic routes except for the segments departing Tatooine and approaching Alderaan, at which point I assumed they cut straight across “rural” space on access routes too small to visualize in the map. Measured out in Photoshop, each square of 5217.39 light years is 5/8ths of an inch, which means 1/8th of an inch equals 1043.478 light years, which gives us a small enough scale to be more exact when measuring the distance of their route.
When measuring and tallying everything up, the Tatooine to Alderaan route is 50855 light years long. (50855.07573743552 light years, actually.)
Now that we have a distance, we can create a formula that will allow us to plug in times to determine the Falcon’s likely speed!
The top number is light years. (t)d = The number of days. (MF)d = How many light years the Millennium Falcon travels per day. Plugging any number into (t)d will get you an answer. If you want to get more precise, you can then divide (MF)d by 24 to get how many light years the Falcon travels per hour.
This is an easy formula to plug into a spreadsheet, so let’s see how the numbers work out.
With our answers above, we can now spot out a likely range of the Falcon’s speed based on how much time we think Luke and Obi-Wan spent hanging around with Han and Chewie. We know they’re on board for at least a few hours, because they’re killing time playing chess and training with lightsabers. It’s also conceivable they’re on board for a full day. At most, one could probably say they were traveling for five or six days, because any longer would stretch credibility in terms of fuel, food, and other resources. It also seems unlikely that the events we see happening on the Death Star would take longer than that, though it’s possible. Finally, from a character standpoint, Lucas would have probably written the characters differently if he was insistent that they were in space together for more than a work week. They’d be more familiar with each other, for one, and less distrusting of the abilities of the other after having had sufficient time to get to know each other.
So let’s say they were on the Falcon for 1 to 5 days, with it being more likely that they were on board for only a day or two. Any longer stretches credibility in the movie and any shorter, well, any shorter most likely results in the Falcon’s destruction!
The results we get from the speed formula become very interesting once you pass the threshold of a single day. The increase between light years spanned becomes drastically larger even as the decrease between time shortens. Observe the results graphed out:
Once the Falcon makes the Tatooine-to-Alderaan trip in less than two days then the speed increases dramatically per hour. If you shave off one day then the Falcon’s speed doubles and you become capable of traversing nearly half of the galaxy in that day. Shave off 12 hours and you can span almost the entire galaxy in that time. Past that, the ship jumps straight out of the galaxy itself.
Before that increase, though, the Falcon’s speed becomes untenable, as hyperdrive becomes too fast to allow the ship and its occupants themselves to react to any possible sudden dangers. You are flying faster than you can actually think, possibly faster than any automatic system can shut down and restart, and faster than the ship’s mechanisms can move to alter course and thrust. The Falcon would constantly be starting and stopping several times a minute just to navigate around gravitational obstacles that would otherwise destroy it, and we obviously don’t see that happening.
In essence, this “speed-of-thought” limit also directs how fast a hyperdrive can be, and the Falcon taking less than a day to go from Tatooine to Alderaan breaks that limit. Since we’ve determined a limit past which all ships in the Star Wars galaxy couldn’t go, or rather shouldn’t go, we can take another look at Han’s boast that his ship will do “.5 past light speed.” Giving Obi-Wan and Luke a number implies that hyperdrive technology in the Star Wars galaxy hasn’t yet become capable of going fast enough to hit the “speed-of-thought” limit. Otherwise, wouldn’t Han just say something more general, like, “She’ll go as fast as universally possible. That’ll get you where you’re going”? It’s easy to believe that Han has one of the fastest ships in the galaxy, but it’s doubtful that Han has the fastest ship possible.
So let’s revise our estimate to better fit the graph above. Since the curve accelerates too fast past the Day 2 mark, let’s say that the Falcon made the trip, at top hyperspace speed, in between 2 and 3 days. Since it probably wasn’t exactly 2 days (they’d be asleep upon hitting Alderaan, wouldn’t they?) then let’s round down to get an exact number. This is still an arbitrary number, because I like a clean, round numbers, but it’s within the likely range of speed for the ship:
The Millennium Falcon’s top speed is 25,000 light years per day, 1041.66 light years per hour.
So there we have it. If this is the top speed for Han’s ship, and it represents a max speed for all commercially available starcraft in the galaxy, then it gives a believable range of speed that allows for the actions we witness in all 6 released Star Wars movies, as well as a majority of the Expanded Universe “Legends” stories.
Heck, it could even make Han’s “.5” comment make sense. If “.5” is shorthand for “25,000 light years per day” then .4 could be 20,000 light years per day, .3 could be 15,000 light years per day, and so on. Being able to do “1 past light speed” would mean you’re traveling more than 50,000 light years per day, which is past the likely “speed-of-thought” limit, making 1 unattainable. This is very similar to the Star Trek warp scale chart in use from Next Generation and onwards. Warp 1 through 9 follows the same scale of increase, but then past Warp 9 speed increases drastically as time shortens, leading to a drastic curve up to Warp 10, which is infinite velocity, and just as unattainable as “1” would be.
Still, 25,000 light years per day is tremendously fast, even by fictional Faster-Than-Light Drive standards. Even if our galaxy was impossibly distant from theirs, at a truly far far away distance of 100 million light years away (By comparison, the Andromeda Galaxy is “only” 2.5 million light years away.) then a generation ship from the Star Wars galaxy with the Falcon’s engine would still only need 11 years to get to Earth.
Maybe that’s why it took this long to get a real sequel to the original Star Wars trilogy.
Chris Lough is pretty sure this is the most fun he’s ever had with right triangles. He writes about a lot of things on Tor.com and is ominous on the Twitters.
In the old West End Games, they used a system of “hyperdrive multipliers.” That is, a trip between Alderaan & Tattooine would take a base number, multiplied by the hyperdrive. So 15 days becomes 45 days for the X-Wing’s x3 multiplier hyperdrive. The Falcon has a 1/2 multiplier, which I thought was a nice nod to the .5 reference.
The old West End Games Star Wars RPG said that there was a “standard” hyperdrive speed which was just 1, and they had a chart saying a spaceship travelling at “1” would be able to make a trip from X to Y in Z hours (it’s been years – I have no idea what the locations/numbers were). A ship capable of “.5 past light speed” would make those trips in half the time. It was a multiplier for the “standard” travel times. The Star Destroyers had something like a 2, the Death Star had something like a 10.
Yeah, I also found this hyperdrive chart which posits a reverse numerical order for hyperdrives, with 5 being slowwww and zero being the unachievable speed.
I’ve heard that Lucas’s intent behind the “Kessel Run in 12 parsecs” was to suggest that Han was a blowhard and con artist who didn’t know the difference between a measure of distance and a measure of time. At least, that’s the excuse he’s used when questioned about the mistake, that it was Han’s rather than his.
As for the Star Trek warp scale, it doesn’t actually correspond to anything onscreen. The actual warp travel times shown onscreen have always been much faster than those computed from the so-called official warp scales. In the original series, the behind-the-scenes books said that warp speeds were the warp factor cubed times the speed of light, but the distance-and-time figures given in “That Which Survives” are nearly 1000 times faster than that formula would suggest. And much the same is true for the 24th-century warp scales. The published scales in the TNG tech manual and encyclopedia contain a footnote saying that the actual warp velocity may be above or below the listed figure depending on the local conditions of subspace, but for some reason, tech fans always ignore that part and treat the numbers as absolutes.
Bottom line, fictional starships almost always travel at the Speed of Plot.
Does anybody remember how West End Games used to do it?
4. ChristopherLBennett
That sounds like Lucas’ “the original series was old men fighting disable people & disabled people fighting kids!” headcanon retcons.
In Ann Crispin’s Han Solo books, the Kessel Run comes up and there is a standard route and a number of more dangerous routes closer to the Maw (a series of black holes), so when he made the shorter run, it was because he was skirting that much closer to the maw.
Also, Wookieepedia.
It’s a lovely map and all- but if hyperdrives are really that fast, then the galaxy is going to be a different place. With five day edge to edge travel times, there aren’t any uncharted regions, or need for regional fleets. The Imperial fleet being dispersed in a vain effort to engage the Rebels isn’t a very big operational impediment. The ultimate fear of the Death Star as a proxy for an actual Imperial presence seems questionable if an Imperial presence can arrive fatter than an Amazon package.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the adventure yarn DNA that clearly powers Star Wars, with Solo as tramp freighter captain, and the Rebels in exotic hiding places from a remote Empire, was built on steamers that were a bit more like six-weeks-from-England (or New York) to anywhere.
Going with that math- that a quick hyperdrive can cover the 62000 light years from the Core to anywhere in six weeks- gives us about 62 light years an hour, which is about 540,000 times light speed.
It seems look a good speed. It means that the vast majority of stars that you can point to in the night sky are reachable within a day’s travel of about 1500 light years, sort of tran-American road trip across the naked eye universe. Given the Lucasian love of the American road, there’s some fair poetry in that.
Vader’s fleet storming around with its enormous mothership hunting for the Hoth base makes sense- if they are weeks from home, then this is a vengeful expedition, not a police action, and visiting zero presence locales like Bespin and bring along a mobile support city like the Executor makes a little more sense. And if the events of at least New Hope take place in a slightly smaller fraction of the galaxy, it preserves a bit more of that small-people-in-larger events feeling that seems important until at least Jedi.
And really, if half a million times the speed of light isn’t adequate to the purposes of your science fictional universe, well…
@@.-@: I don’t follow what you’re saying about that retcon, but I think the explanation about the “parsecs” line was one he was making back in the late ’70s or early ’80s.
The West End Games system suggested that any ship could go very fast if it had excellent navigational data and a top-quality navicomputer. The Falcon’s “point-five” refered mostly to the quality of its computer, which allowed it to _SAFELY_ travel in half the time of a standard commercial hyperdrive. Other ships could do so at the risk of bouncing too close to a star or flying right through supernova, and that would end their trip real quick.
The route from Alderaan to Tatooine was well established enough that ships could travel very quickly.Practical speed in the game is based solely on how to safely navigate, not engine power.
The Kessel run was not well established, but the Falcon’s computer found a 12-parsec route. (Or Han decided to take that route despite its danger.)
Also, the game said that every ship has a backup hyperdrive for use in emergencies that had a much more basic navicomputer, but was rugged enough to serve you when you’re stuck in the Hoth system and need to get to Bespin in less than 100 years. It was a handwave to explain how the Falcon travelled at all in Empire with the hyperdrive not working.
Others have mentioned the WEG gazetteer, so I’ll just point out that the journey between Tattooine and Alderaan in the Falcon took three days, according to conventional fanon (I knew this in the 80s, and I’ve seen others cite it, but I can’t recall where I heard it first). Lucas just compressed it into one scene for brevity’s sake.
So, going by the WEG system, a normal top-of-the-line military ship (with an x1 hyperdrive) would’ve taken six days to cover the same distance (“You can forget your troubles with those Imperial slugs. Told you I’d outrun ’em.”).
Time frames within the star wars universe are the number one issue. Could Luke learn all he did in only a day or two? no. reality would have it be a week or two minimum. I have heard that epmpire strikes back basically takes place over several months so why wouldn’t A New Hope take place over a month or two. There is just not concept of time that is implied in any of the movies.
Frankly the larger the travel times, the more understandable the overall story.
You just forgot one thing: when the Falcon is pulled aboard the Death Star they remark that it “Matches the description of a ship that blasted it’s way out of Mos Eisley this morning.”
@12: Those last two words are not in the movie.
@10: Curiously, the first printing of the West End Games book gave travel time in days, (7 days for 1x hyperdrive from Tatooine to Alderaan) but it was soon revised to make that hours (So 3.5 hours for the Falcon, according to the later numbers).
I second Speed of Plot. Otherwise Star Trek is too frustrating at times, especially the the first episode of Enterprise, where Archer establishes a time in days for a round trip to the Klingon homeworld from Earth, and this is in a ship that has not reached it’s projected Warp 5 capability yet, presumably under the “old” warp factor cubed scale. The problem is, with the numbers Archer says, that puts the Klingon homeworld closer to Earth than Alpha Centauri.
Star Wars seems to be even more guilty of Speed of Plot, given that, yeah, Alderaan is supposed to be near the core and Tatooine is in the Outer Rim (although that is not established in the movies, I suppose: Tatooine is in the “Outer Rim Territories” as mentioned by Biggs in the replaced scene, so it depends on the cut of the movie you watch, and otherwise doesn’t show up until Phantom Menace. I don’t know if it’s ever said in the movies that Alderaan is near the core). Anyway, my point being, people can get headaches trying to determine the speed of the Falcon or how it can get from Hoth to Bespin in the course without hyperdrive. Obviously it’s clear they could spend time on the Falcon in A New hope, but given the numbers you’ve come up with here, we might also consider that this galaxy map should be questioned.
Or just forget about it and enjoy the movie.
Anyway, a nitpick with your Star Trek warp speed chart: What exactly is your purpose of putting 0.5 warp on there? From the numbers, it looks like that value is literally 0.5 on the warp scale (i.e., you plugged 0.5 into the x^(10/3) formula). The thing is, Star Trek ships use impulse power when travelling at sub-light speeds. Full impulse is 1/4 lightspeed according to the manuals/dictionaries, so even half impulse would be 0.125 times the speed of light. So if a ship were to create a space warp of 1/2 cochrane, they would move the ship at a rate slower than the impulse engines are capable of. This wouldn’t seem to make much sense. Also, there’s a chance that the formula also changes for speeds below warp 1 (one cochrane) on this scale, as it inexplicably does for speeds above warp 9.
If your purpose was just to compare the Falcon‘s 0.5 to Star Trek, it seems entirely unrelatable other than in terms of the number. I never took Han’s line to mean half the speed of light, or less than lightspeed. He says “point five past lightspeed” (emphasis mine), which could mean 1.5 times the speed of light, if you’re not assuming a complete lack of a frame of reference. In anycase, if you were to assume a form of hyperdrive scale was implied by this, there is no reason to assume that 1 on the Star Wars scale is the same as 1 on the Star Trek scale. This is especially true when you consider that 1 on the Star Trek scale is lightspeed, and Han seems to be saying his ship is going faster than lightspeed.
EU fans, I can’t remember if it was estabished that in the SW universe, there are hyperdrive corridors, or areas of subspace consisting of wormholes that ships can use to go faster.
@14: “Full impulse is 1/4 lightspeed according to the manuals/dictionaries, so even half impulse would be 0.125 times the speed of light.”
I’m sorry, but this is a common fan belief that is completely and egregiously wrong. It comes from a misreading of the TNG Technical Manual, which states on p. 78 that “normal impulse operations are limited to a velocity of 0.25c” to avoid time-dilation problems — but in the very next paragraph mentions impulse velocities of 0.5c as the approximate cutoff at which impulse efficiency declines below 85%, and just three pages earlier says, “High impulse operations, specifically velocities above 0.75c, may require added power from the Saucer Module engines.” So how fandom confused the preferred limit on normal operations with “full impulse” is beyond me.
Even aside from the letter of the text, the idea of a fixed impulse “speed limit” makes no sense. In space, there’s no friction to speak of. If you apply thrust, you go faster. The only way to maintain a constant velocity is to shut your engines down and coast. So “full impulse” is not maximum speed, it’s maximum acceleration. Even at low impulse power, you could reach arbitrarily close to the speed of light if you maintain thrust long enough; full impulse just gets you there faster. But the faster you go, the less efficient impulse thrust becomes (because your relativistic mass/inertia is increasing and it takes progressively more thrust to gain an equal amount of velocity) and the more time dilation becomes a problem. Thus, in normal, non-emergency operations, it’s preferred to keep below a quarter lightspeed. And if you need to go much faster than half lightspeed, it’s more efficient and faster to use warp drive than impulse (plus you avoid time dilation that way).
So really, this “full impulse is a quarter lightspeed” thing is the Trek equivalent of “we use ten percent of our brains” or “Columbus proved the Earth was round” — a complete fallacy that just won’t die.
I imagined it like this: the Star Wars “Galaxy” is an exceptionally large star system (well past Binary) which would explain how they were able to get from Hoth to Bespin without Hyperdrive
They call them “hyperspace lanes”… the implication was always subspace corridors, since Interdictors with gravity wells could “pull ships out of hyperspace”. This is re-canonized in the new book Tarkin, in which Interdictors are first taken off the production line and used, about 10 years before the events of A New Hope.
But no, they don’t travel fixed routes with fixed wormholes at each end in Star Wars. The Hyperspace generator creates a field that allows them to enter hyperspace and return to realspace, but points of significant gravity in realspace can force a return to realspace… where wormhole travel is generally depicted as instantaneous, at least to the perceptions of the person traveling through the wormhole.
I’ve never liked FTL travel in Star Wars for this very reason. It can’t be retconned to any standard that isn’t laughable in the SciFi world. As has been said, Star Wars isn’t Sci Fi, though, its “Fantasy in Space.” Its no less believable than traveling across a continent on a horse in a few weeks, or an army traveling more than 5-10 miles in a day, both of which happen in nearly every fantasy novel I’ve ever read.
But hey, we’re talking Jedi, should we be surprised that there is hand-waving going on?
@15, ok, so strike the tech manual part of it then. Also strike the “dictionary” part, because I actually meant encyclopedia. The Star Trek Encyclopedia’s warp speed table does explicitly list “full impulse” as 1/4 lightspeed. So this probably has more to do with that belief. There is a note attached, which reads, “normal maximum impulse speed.” So somewhere along the line, the limit of the tech manual got interpreted as “full impulse is a term applied to maximum normal operations.”
When I was a kid, I answered this question by picking up my Falcon toy, saying “It goes this fast –swoooooshhh!” while swinging it about my head. That’s how I still feel as an adult and why I’m very excited for the ew movie :-)
I see, so that’s where it comes from. It’s odd that they would’ve used such a misleading term for it there, considering that the Tech Manual and the Encyclopedia had author Michael Okuda in common.
I just looked up the entry for “impulse drive” in the Encyclopedia as well. The relevant line in the entry is, “Normally, full impulse speed is one-quarter the speed of light.” The use of “Normally” here is an odd choice that might imply ambiguity as to what “full impulse” actually means.
@21: Hmm, perhaps it’s by analogy with American nautical usage. Wikipedia says that flank speed is a vessel’s true maximum speed and that “full speed” is less than that, somewhere between standard and flank speeds. So “full” would mean the fastest non-emergency speed, the maximum safe or recommended speed, but not the actual maximum that the vessel is capable of being driven to. But to the layperson, “full” implies the absolute, pedal-to-the-metal upper limit, hence the confusion.
Even so, though, the tech manual says that the 1/4-lightspeed limit isn’t about engine performance so much as avoiding time dilation effects, and that engine efficiency stays high up through about half lightspeed. So using the term “full” for .25c is still kind of odd.
This is not coming from any books, magazines, etc., but just from what I rmember thinking the first time I watched Star Wars:
I had assumed that the “point five beyond light speed” quote was the maximum speed the Falcon achived outside of using the hyperdrive. In other words, the Falcon could push itself past the light speed limit using pure brute force.
Once you get into hyperspace you are at the mercy of how well your nav computer can do its job and how well any anomalies on your proposed traveled course had been mapped before-hand. This is where the calcualtions before-hand are critical as to keep you from destroying yourself in the interveneing flight.
@22: Yeah, I’m not sure what anyone is intending with the terminology, or if it really was just a mistake or misinterpretation that got inserted in there somewhere. But time dilation is another major factor that the starships have to contend with. So it seems that even if they are using “full” to mean “maximum recommended speed” rather than “maximum possible speed” then engine efficiency is not the only concern in determining that speed. Certainly I’d be very concerned with time dilation; that whole concept just freaks me out. As for why Starfleet settled on 0.25c as the appropriate balance, it seems to me that it may be just as arbitrary as other cut-offs that humans determine for things, and over time is just accepted as convention.
The one argument I could ever think of was Han’s line up entering the room: “Well, you can forget your troubles with those Imperial slugs. I told you I’d outrun ’em.” I used to assume that meant they’d gotten away from Tatooine fairly recently, but it occurs to me now that he could not only be talking about that pursuit outside of Tatooine’s orbit, but also any ships that might have tried pursuing them in Hyperspace. Enough time has passed that they’ve realized no one is going to catch them.
I’m not sure how closely Lucas was thinking about time in that scene, anyway. Han says “Anyway, we should be at Alderaan about 0200 hours.” Which is apparently in about five minutes because they get to Alderaan at the end of the scene.
@@@@@ crzydroid Don’t forget in “Star Trek: the Motion Picture” the V’Ger Cloud was traveling at Warp 7 and was at the Klingon boarder and was 3 days away from Earth, using the cube factor that comes to 343 times the speed of light, making the Klingon board little more than 2-3 light years away!
@27: Yup — like I said, the “warp factor cubed” formula reported in the tie-in materials never corresponded to anything onscreen. I don’t know where it came from, since they never used it on the show.
It can go as fast as the plot demands. Please don’t ask for sense from the Lucasverse.
@17: “Its no less believable than traveling across a continent on a horse in a few weeks, or an army traveling more than 5-10 miles in a day, both of which happen in nearly every fantasy novel I’ve ever read.”
Didn’t the Roman legions travel further than that in a standard day’s march?
Not to be that asshole who took way too many physics courses, but when you get anywhere near the speed of light, the velocity equation you used becomes invalid – you used the time as measured from within the spaceship and the distance as measured from point outside the spaceship, say, from one of the planets you’re traveling between. You’d need to change one of those two or convert between them, which isn’t too hard with a computer.
@31: You’re talking about the time dilation that occurs as one accelerates toward the speed of light. But all the discussion here is about ships using various kinds of faster-than-light drive, such as warp engines or hyperspace, and time dilation doesn’t apply there.
I believe the dangers Han Solo described when it came to hyperspatial travel, was relevant to the entry and exit to and from hyperspace, less so, during the actual trip through hyperspace. The ship does decelerate through realspace for a good couple of seconds, where it approaches the speed of light, before it breaks into hyperspace, proper. In hyperspace, the only real danger is large gravity well, and the system is designed to automatically exit hyperspace, if one is detected in its path (pirates and other groups often exploit this, by using a gravity well generator, a device which generates a false gravity well signature, used to force ships out of hyperspace).
Oops, I meant to say, the ship does accelerate and decelerate in realspace during its entry and exit from hyperspace.
Clever as this is, I hate to tell you but Lucas clearly meant “parsec” as a measure of time. Look! It has seconds in the word.
This is the kind of bullshit gobbledygook that makes me hate Star Wars. It isn’t any harder to do it right so doing it wrong is just ignorant.
So, where would the Long Shot fall in all this? It would do a light year in “Five Fourths of a minute”. It was the Quantum II hyperdrive, a normal Quantum I hyperdrive shunt would do a light year in three days, which would be between warp 4 and 5.
I… I’ll show myself out now.
The Millenium Falcon made only two jumps to light speed in Empire Strikes Back, once escaping from Cloud City and the 2nd when Chewie and Lando went to find Han solo. It did not make any irregular jumps to the asteroid field as the hyperdrive on the Falcon was not working. Please research carefully :)
I always thought a parsec as a unit of distance to brag about how fast he can get his ship to go makes sense.
As in the idea of using a hyperdrive is to not hit anything or travel too close to things that would pull you out of hyperspace on your journey so most pilots would use well established space lanes.
However smugglers keen to save time may be a little more risky and plot their own hyperdrive routes, therefore it may have been a thing to brag about how much distance you cut off your journey.
I’ve always thought that “hyperspace” was in fact a sort of parallel reality and not a demarcation of speed. Thus a hyperdrive enables a ship to traverse the galaxy in a quantum state that breaks the laws of physics rather than accelerate to a point beyond which is calculable. Hyperspace then could be broken down by routes, rather than fixed distances, particularly if there were certain nooks or corridors of the galaxy that were free from spatial anomalies or gravitational disturbances that would prohibit travel. Another way of looking at it is that hyperdrive enables creations of localized wormholes. This would certainly explain the tunnel-like effects that we see in Star Wars. Hyperspeed in Star Wars then is really just a layman’s version of teleportation, particularly if one is bridging a large swath of space together.
@39/Gordon: Hyperspace, by mathematical definition, is 4-dimensional space, a higher-dimensional realm that allows movement in ways impossible in 3 dimensions. Hyperspace is to space as space is to a flat plane. The usual conceit of hyperspace in science fiction, therefore, is that it allows a shortcut bypassing curved space — the analogy is that if a flat sheet is curved or folded over on itself, then you can hop between two widely separated points by traveling through the third dimension. Hyperspace would provide a shortcut between points in normal space in the same way. (The part that gets conveniently overlooked is what would cause normal space to be so severely warped that a 4-D route would be shorter. It seems to me that if space isn’t massively distorted, a hyperspace journey would actually be longer.)
I used to think that the standard sci-fi universe was a 4-D sphere, thus making any trip through hyperspace shorter than the corresponding trip through normal space.
But then, the sphere would have to be so big that the time gain would be minimal, so I guess that doesn’t make sense either.
Here’s my take (ehem).
The Falcon goes .5 past light speed even without its hyperdrive. That’s how it got from Hoth to Bespin. Once Han shook Vader, he accelerated the Falcon with just it’s sublight engines for a few hours to 150% light speed. Fett’s like, “Uh-uh, nope…”. Relatively kicks in, sure… Luke and everyone else got old and likely died… but past lightspeed TIME RUNS BACKWARD! The Millennium Falcon’s speed pushes the clock back and they arrive at Bespin in, say, a week or two. Luke trains well enough with Yoda, Han schmoozes Leia to the point of loving him (same taste in men as her mom), Fett figures out where they’re headed, and reports to Vader who sets a trap with Lando’s help.
Plot hole averted.
Addendum (what, no edit function?): The Hyperdrive just cut’s out the acceleration time to lightspeed. That’s why the starfield stretches and the the inertial compensators seem to fail a bit.
@42/Bruen: Umm… but “sublight” means “below (the speed of) light.” Sublight engines that go faster than light are a contradiction in terms. A drive that goes faster than light is, by definition, a hyperdrive, whether or not it involves hyperspace. (Short for hyperlight drive, although it’s odd that we use a Latin prefix for slower than light and a Greek one for faster. It should be either sublight/superlight or hypolight/hyperlight. Well, to be really nitpicky about it, the Latin would be subluminal/superluminal, and I suppose the Greek would be hypophotic/hyperphotic.)
@44/Christopher: Hey, that happens all the time. E.g. “stratosphere” mixes Greek and Latin too.
@45/Jana: I was talking more about the oddity of using the Latin prefix for “below” and the Greek prefix for “above” in opposing usages. Usually we tend to stick to one or the other — hyperthermia/hypothermia, superscript/subscript, etc. Mixed pairs like hyper-X and sub-X strike me as uncommon.
@46/Christopher: Got it. You’re right.
OK, now I tried to find another such pair but failed. I did find subsonic/hypersonic, but that doesn’t count because there’s supersonic too.
I’d speculate that it’s not really a pair because hyperdrive stems from hyperspace, not from hyperlight, its original meaning being “drive that brings a spaceship to hyperspace”.
(It seems that “subspace” is also a mathematical term, but then, so is “superspace”… and I don’t understand the respective Wikipedia definitions, so I’m not sure how, or if, the three of them are related.)
@47/Jana: You’re right about “hypersonic” not quite counting. The original pair was subsonic/supersonic, to refer to speeds below and above the speed of sound; “hypersonic” was a later coinage (from the ’70s) to refer to speeds of Mach 5 and above. Originally, though, “supersonic” was used to mean sound above a human-audible frequency, which we now call “ultrasonic.”
I wasn’t sure “hyperdrive” was originally short for “hyperspace drive”; I thought it may have been short for “hyperlight drive” instead, and used more generically for FTL drives. But the sources I’ve checked seem to agree that it specifically means a drive that operates by sending the ship through hyperspace or some other realm of space outside our own.
Mathematically, a subspace is a subset of dimensions within an n-dimensional space. For instance, if string theory is right and our universe actually has 11 dimensions, then our 4-dimensional spacetime is a subspace of the whole, and the other 7 dimensions are another subspace of the whole. (As for “superspace,” I can’t help you. I tried looking at the Wikipedia article, and I don’t understand it either.)
That’s not really its intended usage in SF, though — SF works starting in the ’30s just used “subspace” to mean some hypothetical realm “below” space that could have arbitrary properties like allowing FTL travel and/or communication. Basically an interchangeable concept with hyperspace, but as sort of an analogy with submarines or subterranean travel, I suppose.
Interestingly, the original Star Trek only used “subspace” to refer to subspace radio and FTL communication. The first use of the term in connection with warp drive was in Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer’s science notes for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which he defined “a subspace” as the pocket of flat space that was inside the warp field and that moved FTL relative to the space around it. It wasn’t until ST:TNG that there were canonical references to subspace as a hyperspace-like realm of its own.
Oh, and there’s one other definition of “subspace,” apparently: It’s used in BDSM circles to refer to the self-abnegating mental state that a sexual submissive seeks to achieve.
Wow, that was a comprehensive definition. Thank you! Those different usages of “subspace” in Star Trek always baffled me.
So it can go around 25,000ly/day or 1,041.67ly/hr. That comes to ~9.855*10^15 km/hr. The speed of light (according to a google search) is roughly 1.079*10^9 km/hr. So that means the Millennium Falcon can go just over 9 million times the speed of light. The observable universe is estimated at over 46 billion light years. So even though the Falcon is very fast, it would still take about 5,000 years to cross our universe.
So I was just reading back through some of the star Wars Legends material (Bloodlines), and it specifically says the Falcon goes from Correlia to Couruscant, covering the 20,000 Light Years in 3 Hours. Of course this is years after the original material and the Falcon was rebuilt and upgraded multiple times, but I thought the extra information would be appreciated.
There’s a much simpler explanation:
Millennium Falcon goes 0.5 faster than light, or 1.5 times the speed of light, because Lucas wasn’t thinking about accuracy, and just wanted to throw a number that would sound sci-fi fast, without needing 5 books on Newtonian and Einsteinian physics for an explanation.
why do you say that .5 is arbitrary? In my book .5 means 0.5 or half.
Now if i give you .5 of my Apple that means half an Apple.
So the Millennium Falcon is capable of 1.5 times the speed of Light and not 25000 Light Years per day.
If it takes light one year to travel one light year, How do you expect a ship capable of doing 25000 in a day?
If the ship was capable of doing 1 light year in a day i would be doing 365 times the speed of light.
At 25000 light years a day it would be doing 9,125,000 times the speed of light.
Actually, the size of the Star Wars Galaxy, according to the Wookiepedia entry the above comment links to, is now ‘Over 100,000 light years,’ so you calculations may need adjustment.
By the way, which light years are we talking about here? I only ask as I believe that Light Years in Star Wars are based on the Galactic Standard Calendar year of 368 days, making the Galactic Standard Light Year 9,531,961,160,601,600 meters, or 0.75% longer than those used on Earth.
Okay, thanks to the webcomic Darths and Droids, I now have confirmation that the “Kessel run in 12 parsecs” line was intended from the start to be a misstatement:
http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0767.html
So it was never Lucas’s mistake (or if it was, it was pointed out to him by the time he wrote the fourth draft); it was meant to be Han’s mistake. But that was too subtle to come across in the final film.
Thanks, CLB, you’ve just taken away something that has allowed millions of astronomers to feel smugly superior for years. :-) Seriously, though, it’s a good bit of sleuthing; a simple production error seems a far more satisfying explanation than any of the others proffered over the years. I can barely recall seeing Kenobi’s reaction, so perhaps the blame should lie with the editors for cutting that scene too tightly thus preventing Ben’s bemusement to be more apparent? Still, this is such a simple, believable explanation that I wonder why Lucas (or Lucasfilm) never seemed to push it, and instead allowed huge chunks of the pre-Disney EU to be built upon theories attempting to retcon Han’s statement into something legitimate.
@56/Ian: No sleuthing involved — Darths and Droids just finished adapting/parodying Return of the Jedi and is in a hiatus before they dive into Rogue One, so I decided to reread the whole series to date and lucked across that entry.
As for Lucas pushing the explanation — if I’m not mistaken, I first came across it an issue of Marvel’s original Star Wars comic from back in the late ’70s, in the text material following the story proper, and I’m pretty sure it quoted Lucas himself explaining it that way. But later on, Lucas did seem to develop a tendency to rewrite history, to introduce a new idea and claim he’d always intended it even though there was documentation proving otherwise.
Considering how star wars works, I think it would be helpful to consider the galaxy to be a representation of earth during world war 2. For example, a Star destroyer would be like a battleship, star fighters would be like dogfighters etc. With that in mind, a planet would essentially represent a large city. The death Star would be like the planes that dropped the first atomic bombs. Travel on a planets surface would be equivalent to walking or riding a bike in a city. Sublight travel would be like driving a car between cities. Hyperspace would be like taking a plane or ship or a train between countries. During world war two it would be difficult to even fly across a single ocean without stopping in the middle. Hence aircraft carriers. In star wars, not every fighter had a hyperdrive. They would have to dock with a larger ship in order to travel large distances. The millennium falcon would be like one of the first jet fighters. In this frame of reference, realistic speeds are unnecessary in the star wars universe. Travelling across the galaxy is like taking a ship around the earth.
I actually came up to a somewhat reasonable idea for what .5 pay light speed is actually a measure of based off of some calculations I did in the game, Elite Dangerous.
Granted this is speculation and elite dangerous has no bearing on star wars canon. Elite has two methods of fdl travel. Super cruise which is comparable to star trek warp drive with all ships reaching a top speed around warp 9.95 so roughly between Voyager and Prometheus, the fastest on screen Star ship, is used to get around systems. Frame shift hyper jump which is comparable to star wars hyper drive however varies on your ship build, based on things like weight, engine capacity etc. While you might have a hyper drive that does 20 ly jumps from star to star, because of variables like fuel scooping, and tank size, it’s hard to compare ships travel time vs distance on that idea. So I determined my ships normal jump things 45 seconds from jump point to jump point, and number of jumps before needing refuel at a main sequence star. In total it was seven jumps, one of which was 1:26 average time for scooping. Factoring this into an overall average is about 53 seconds per jump, so i could use this to determine a trip time based on number of jumps.
I also wanted to use this to calculate my light years per hour. Long story short, my Asp Explorer (one of the top five highest jump range ships in the game) has an average speed, factoring in all non pilot variables, of approximately .608 light years per second. In my head I joked, “She makes .6 past light speed” this allows for a reasonable amount of travel time in the star wars universe, that lines up well compared to The size of the galaxy.
Based on my method the falcon could cross the milky way edge to edge (about 100000 light years)in about two days. 100000/ .5 light years per second = 200000 seconds / 60 mins / 24 hour etc.
Who is to say that the speed of light is a constant throughout the entire universe?
It is possible that in the Star Wars galaxy light has a speed of 100 or even 1000 times faster than in our own, thus making “.5 past light speed” ALOT faster than our understanding of “Light Speed”.
Since the chronology is a “long time ago”, maybe the laws of physics have changed in the vastness of time and our universe’s current state cannot allow the speeds that occured then.
This is all speculative, ofcourse, but it is obvious that the physics of the Star Wars universe do not run parrellel with those of our own, or even that of the Star Trek universe.
Food for thought….
@60/Bud Fulton: “Who is to say that the speed of light is a constant throughout the entire universe?”
The entire body of modern physical law requires exactly that. Many observed and proven phenomena in relativity arise exactly because every observer must measure the exact same speed of light regardless of reference frame. The laws of physics only work if the underlying physical constants, including the speed of light, are constant.
Besides, it’s not just the speed of light. It’s the speed of a particle of zero rest mass, the speed at which the fundamental forces of electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong nuclear force propagate. Change the laws of physics to increase that velocity and it will affect gravity and nuclear bonds as well as light, and will also change the outcome of the numerous physical laws that include c as a key constant. Stars, matter, and life as we know it can only exist with the physical constants and forces being balanced very precisely; change their values or ratios by more than the tiniest amount and there would probably be no life, no stars, no planets. (Also no Jar-Jar Binks, so maybe it’s worth it.)
Still short of plaid… Lonestar still rules :)
wow… you guys are all SW fans from NASA or are you simply smart enough? That’s a great combination of being smart and geek. you guys rock.
And… yeah Lonestar rules, or rather Lord Helmet.
Just to let you know, I have recently found a copy of the Official Star Wars Fact File Galaxy Chart with Galactic Gazetteer, which states that the travel time between Tatooine and Alderaan for ships with a Class 1 hyperdrive is 7 hours, meaning the Falcon, with it’s 0.5 Hyperdrive, can do the trip in 3 and a half – well below the 0.25 days listed at the tob of the table in the article (more like 0.1458 days!)
Me again! I’ve just done a quick calculation and, if the Star Wars Galaxy is now 100,000 light years, instead of 120,000, the Tatooine – Alderaan distance is now approximately 42,379 Light Years.
By the way Brentodd – the hyperdrive ratings for the First Death Star were 4.0 (Main) and 24.0 (Back-up)!
I actually enjoyed reading this article. I thought it was explained very well. However, It does not account for length contraction or time dilation which occurs when traveling near the speed of light. If the distance on the map is 50855 lightyears. We can use the formula L=Lo (1-(v^2) /(c^2))^1/2 to determine the actual distance of the route. According to Einstein nothing can accelerate faster than light and because it is a movie, lets just extrapolate that .99c is the max length contraction that can be obtained in any universe. Being the case, L= 50855 (1-(.99c^2) / (c^2))^1/2 =7144. Hence if this is the case the distance from Tatooine to Alderaan would only be 7144 lightyears. If we could increased the velocity of the ship, the closer we approached light speed the closer the distance would approach zero.
I can give a simple answer as to how the ship goes .5 past lightspeed, while not also using it’s hyperdrive.
See Star Wars Galaxies game for this, as well… but… ships can have boosters for accelerating beyond their sublight engine speeds.
The Millennium Falcon is constantly seen “boosting” where you can actually see the blue engine glow/trail get significantly bigger. You see this prominently in ESB.
Either way, both Star Wars and Star Trek dwell in the realm of “speed of plot,” and any attempt to justify and/or explain away many of the inconsistencies/plot changes is futile…
I remember an episode of TNG, where Worf says they got hit on the port (left) side, bur you clearly see them hit on the starboard (right) side of the ship model.
I just watched an episode of Picard where they traveled “25 lightyears in 15 minutes,” which would be well over 800,000 times the speed of light, yet Star Trek Online doesn’t let you transwarp that fast, or even quantum warp/etc.
So, let’s not worry too much on how fast entertainment “plot-speed” vessels go. Many Star Wars and Star Trek “encyclopedias” are rewritten and/or contradictory to each other, designed to get us to buy the next one released etc.
Heck, I still remember when they said Home One was an Mc-85a and 3.2km, yet now it’s just listed as just another MC-80a… and those ships are 1.2km long. Yet, knowing the scale of x/a/y/b wings and ties, we can see that 3km+ would be a more accurate scale.
The Super Star Destroyer Executor? Often quoted as 8km, 11k, or 17.6k, or 19km… yet its scale still would make most sense at 17.6km, if 1.6km is the accurate size of the Imperator class ISD’s….
See where I’m going with this? They change everything—not just speeds— to fit the plotlines.
Here’s more fodder for analysis:
1. Anakin, Padme, and Obi-Wan are on Coruscant
2. Anakin travels to the lava planet in a few hours
3. Padme with Obi-Wan stowing away follows
4. during the duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan Palpatine comments that Anakin is in trouble and dispatches a rescue team that arrives shortly after the duel is over
5. Is the distance between these two locations known or could be calculated?
The trip took less than a day they left space port early in the day ..and arrived at their Destination at 2 Am ….