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Impaler
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 Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2025 7:47 am Post subject: A Radical Reinterpretation of Hyperdrive Classes |
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In this post I will describe a new interpretation of the Hyperdrive rating system which I think adds tactical and strategic depth to games and more logical consistency to the setting while respecting as much of the onscreen evidence as possible.
BACKGROUND
StarWars hyperdrive is key part of the fictional setting but the core movies scrupulusly avoid giving any numbers for a travel time between locations or even any hint of a speed scale which could be used to compare different vessels or trips. This stands in stark contrast to that other well know science fiction franchise which has long spilled out many (illogical and contradictory) transit times and is constantly stating a vessels speed in a numerical scale which explicitly operates on larger numbers being faster but but with an elusive exponential factor relating the scale to the speed of light. While the overall scale is explicity canonical having been handed down word of god style from the creator it has been subject to retconning.
StarWars developed almost completly the opposite. The scale used to describe speed is not canonical (in the strick sense of never being in a movie), indeed it was a developed entirely by secondary writers, games etc to do the kinds of book keeping and presision which the movies materials scrupulously avoid doing. And it is numerically inverted with smaller values being faster. Lastly it lacks any defined anchor to known factors like the speed of light, only relative speed/time values can ever be given.
What we DO have is very explicit description by Lucas hiself that travel time in hyperspace is determined primarily if not exclusivly by navigational efficiency https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y0VjDuR6Sww, thus the Falcon is faster then other ships due to superior navigation capability, not due to the mechanics properties of the hyperdrives system such as more energy output or technobabbles particles per second etc, thus (kind of) explaining how a mere tramp freighter can be the fastest ship in the galexy.
How we arrived at this scales development would be an extensive dive through the works of many EU writers, RPG makers and technical manual retcons and beyond my limited understanding. But it is generally belived to have all been built upon a single now famous line in ANH.
| Quote: | | "she'll make point fire past lightspeed" |
So much has been interpreted from this one line of dialog that I am compelled to go into great depth. First she'll is a contraction of she will, and she is the Falcon so this is effectivly "The Falcon will", 'make' is common slang for a vehicles ability to reach a certain maximum speed, but it is NOT nessarily sustaining that speed for long durations. Lightspeed is clearly NOT 'c' the speed of light in real physics, but rather an in universe slang for hyperdrive as Han repeatedly uses 'jump to lightspeed' to refer to the process of initiating hyperdrive which is clearly thousands to millions of time faster then actual light, as not all hyperdrive is the same speed he can only be refering to some kind of benchmark for hyperdrives. Lastly the heart of the phrase 'point fire past', point fire is short for 'zero point five' or 0.5 aka a decimal expression of one half of an unknown unit, and 'past' which has hithertoo been interpreted as 'faster than'. So in totality we have "The Falcon will achive speeds 0.5 units faster then benchmark speed"
From here the Expanded Universe authors had two different interpretations they could have made for determining a scale. Was the number 0.5 the DIFFERENCE on a speed Scale or was it the the Falcons VALUE on said scale. If interpreted as a difference then it would be nessary to establish what it is relative too, presumably some anchor value like 1 and the Falcon could have been 1.5 and presumably cover 50% more distance in a given time. Conversly an absolute value of 0.5 would normally imply a scale starting at zero which is extreamly odd for human language as it would have every ship in existence occupying the values between 0 and 0.5 and whole numbers never get touched.
The rather creative solution arrived at by the EU authors and RPG makers like WEG was to do BOTH, the Falcons value on the scale is 0.5 and it is 0.5 units 'faster' then a standardized 1 because lower values are faster rather then slower. This also allows a very simple time to destination calculation by multiplying the value by a standardized time increment between two locations to get the duration of a trip at any given hyperdrive rating, very convenient for RPG's.
The downside is that the systema in universe origin is counterintuitive, it would have required that at some point in the past an arbitrary speed that was far far higher then the current technology allowed to have been selected as the benchmark of 1 and then become universally adopted by multiple species which independently invented hyperdrive technoloy. Setting up a scale with an inverted relationship is also weird, most people would express a vessels speed in X units of distance per time, where as this scale seems to have been X units of time to cover a distance. We could chalk this up to an alien (Duros perhapse) different phycology/culture. Perhapse they chose an important route such as reaching the Corellian system from their homeworld, and expressed the number of time units needed to reach it, that's the most generous interpretation I can produce but it still has no reason to have become universal.
PROPOSAL
My reinterpretation begins by going back to thouse key words 'past lightspeed'. Past actually means 'the time or a period of time before the moment of speaking or writing', what if that's really what meant and Han is using a simple in universe shorthand for "prior time spent in hyperspace". Point Five of that would now be a reference to a RATIO between two intervals of time, the first spent in hyperspace and the other obviusly NOT in hyperspace aka realspace. What is being done in this interval of time in realspace, simple, THE NAVIGATION COMPUTATION for the next hyperspace jump. In other words the Falcon after emerging from Hyperspace flight of X duration can calculate a new hyperspace jump in a duration of 0.5X. As you can see this interpretation preserves the lower is faster relationship, the faster your nav calculations the lower your time spent in real space which is basically time wasted not moving. The Falcon will spend 2/3rds of it's time in hyperspase and 1/3rd navigating in realspace, while a Bulk Cruiser at a class 2 will do the reverse spending 2X units of time in realspace after X time in hyperspace, thus 2/3rds of its time in realspace and 1/3rd in hyperspace.
For this to work must also accept the notion that any travel beyond tiny in-system jumps is not a single calculation or single jump. Instead a ship is making numerous small jumps and recalculating another jump over and over along the course of the voyage. We have some evidence for this multi-jump nature in the literature but it's generally presented as optional or abnormal event, I propose it is mandatory under the logic that IF a single calculation were possible for a whole trip then their would be ships in the StarWars universe without their own navicomputers at all, they would just get given a route from high powered computers at the planet they are departing from, and much of the traffic along major routes would be of this nature, this would be an even better route then their own onboard systems could produce too as the planet side computers would not be limited in volume and power consumption. That no such offloading of navigation to planets or in space 'control towers' is EVER seen it implies the nessesity of bringing your own nav computer with out on even the most well traveled routes, and that means navigation is happening along the way when a ship may be in deep space between stars and far from any planet or computational aid, at best navigational boeys can provide location triangulation along well mapped routes but they can't do your calculations for you. Combined with the well established fact that a ship is blind in hyperspace and the entry and exit vectors can't be perfect, the tinyest perterbations from objects in space will always exist whivh means every jump will drift slightly from the ideal prediction. The longer the prior the jump the more drift and thus the more work to determine a location and the next safe jump. A ship must move like a man closing his eyes while walking and then opening them once stopped, proceeding in a stop/start bursts always guaging the safe distance and direction to travel in each burst of movement.
Note that these recalculation periods along the way will be substantially longer then the brief minute or less we see ships need to make the initial jump. Thouse calculations are from a known start location such as a planet or station and thus are orders of magnitute faster to perform, capitol ships can do them basically instantly and starfighters or other small ships do them very quickly. In contrast I am envisioning individuals jumps of 10-15 minutes a piece with realspace navigation periods from 5 to minutes to an hour depending on class and jump duration. One would naturally ask why this has never been seen before and the answer is that these stops and recalculations have no narrative value because you just sit drifting in space without any hope for contact. No ship (unless it's been pulled out of hyperspace by an interdictor) ever comes within astronomical units of another ship durring these nav stops as their dropping into realspace randomly across lightyears of distance within a corridor light-days wide, the chance of contact is astronomically small, and if you did your calculations correctly the chance of a realspace hazard is also trivial so these stops have simply never been shown.
The biggest downside of this interpretation is we lose the easy math of the WEG travel time calculation. Now we would need to take the standard travel time (T), divide it in half and then add too it an amount of time equal to that half time (T/2) multiplied by the hyperdrive class. For a class 1 that becomes (T/2) + (T/2 * 1) = T and we recreate the original time, but for the Falcon we get (T/2) + (T/2 * 0.5) = 0.75T. A Class 2 would be (T/2) + (T/2 * 2) = 1.5T, as you can see the overall effect is to significantly compress the differences. The Falcon is now only twice the speed of a typical Cruiser rather then 4x faster. This might be desirable or undesirable for certain people. I personally think it is more realistic that a civilian ship modified by two smugglers no longer outclasses top end military technology by such a huge amount.
This also makes a lot of sense as an in universe system which could be universally adopted because ratios can be arrived at independently, because they are dimensionless they are identical no matter what your unit of time or distance are, a bit like how the Specific Impulse of real rockets measured in seconds can be identical regardless of if you use imperial or metric to calculate it, you get instant convertability between cultures, laungagues. It also makes sense that in a system where navigational time efficiency is the principle thing that determines flight time that this ratio would become the target metric for technology development and thus become the hyperdrive class system we see. Lastly it solves the arbitrary anchor value of 1 being selected long before any ship could reach it. But it dose require an additional assumption. That the in hyperspace period of time is equivilent between all vessels, aka that they all make the same amount of progress in that time in hyperspace.
And that is exactly what I propose, that all matter and thus ships in hyperspace travels at a single universal hyper speed many times faster then 'c' (techno babble reason, matter in hyperspace acts like photons in realspace and visa versa which is also why we see all thouse weird lights in hyperspace because the light is acting like mollasas in hyperspace while the ship plows through it). This is supported by the instances in which whole FLEETS of rebel ships with known variations in hyperdrive rating (from class 1 fighters to class 4 transports) all jump together and then emerge together in formation as seen in RotJ. This would be impossible if the ships moved at different speeds once in hyperspace. One might argue that the whole fleet simply slowed down to the speed of the slowest ship, but this would be a gross tactical error on the part of the Rebels as their favorite transport the GR-75 in a class 4, meaning they would be giving up an enormouse amount of operational flexibility and incresse their risk of being caught by the Empire in order to bring these transports along under such an interpretations. Under my single universal speed assumption though their is no delay in hyperspace and once in realspace the other ships of the fleet would do the Nav calculation and simply share it with the slow transports effectivly allowing them to keep up. Effectivly hyperdrive ratings are only for the ship when traveling ALONE and fleets have different rules that I will descrive later to determine the speed they move at.
SIZE MATTERS
For consistency I feel I should also endevor to explain why large capitol ships should have slower hyperdrive ratings then 1-man starfighters. Surely large ships should be able to be packed with top end nav computers which can be fed with high presision sensor data for the fastest and best navigation possible. But large capitol ships have consistently higher and thus slower ratings which looks like a holdover from the WW2 pacific navel combat theme that pervades StarWars, in such a setting 'aircraft' would be faster then any surface ship, we even see a trend in SW capitol ships that the larger they are the slower they go, the Death Star gets a whopping class 4. While it was not nessary to have stated out the starfighters to be both faster in realspace AND hyperspace this is the direction that was taken and it presents a contraditions. An apeal to large ships physically hyperdrive systems being physicaly slower would have sufficed before, but I'm largely knocking that down, the physical hyperdrive dosn't cause the speed difference unless it's so grossly damaged that it can't charge durring the realspace interval, navigation and specifically the computational speed of the navigation is all that should matter.
Instead I'm going to apeal to the physical size of a vessel as a limiting factor. It's established right in ANH by Han that mis-nagivation in hyperspace will see you hittings hazards like stars and blackholes. It was very quickly pointed out by real astronomy nerds that space is far to empty for any real risk of impact to be more then a 1 in a billion chance, so the EU created the 'mass shadow' concept that these real space objects gravitational fields go into hyperspace and create hazards that are far larger then the physical objects alone would dictate. With arbitrarily large hazards the chance of collision can be raised arbitrarily high, all the way to making some regions of space totally choked with hazards to the point of impassability if desired. In any case it's straitforward to say that a large ships is just physically more suseptable to these gravity shadows because of tidal stress, effectivly inflating them even more. Tides in the ocean are caused by the differential gravitational force across an object and tidal stress is a real phenomena which can tear apart moons and comets as they pass near a massive body. It manifests as tensile force across a body and scales with the length perpendicular to the gravitational gradiant. Thus we can say the larger a ship is the more suseptable it is to damage by mass shadows and the more carefully it must be, additional caution would be warented for ships of very light construction such as freighters, while warships with more robust structures should be more resislient for the same size. In a nautical analog think of it like a large ship with a deep draft having to carefully and slowly follow the shipping lane with the deepest water, while smaller light ships can pass over the sand bars and shoals without being wrecked, we can postulate that this need for caution ramps up the computational cost of navigation at a rate faster then the growth in computer power available on a larger ship, thus a small R2 droid can quickly navigate for a starfighter, while whole rooms full of computers on an ISD are slower. Their is onscreen support for this theory as well. In the Malevelence arc of the CloneWars series episode 3 season 1 'Shadow of Malevelence' at 5:40 Plo Koon states "Their are many star clusters in that area, with a ship that big (Malevelence is 4.8 km long) he will not be able to chart a course less then 10 parsecs". This statement seems to directly imply that realspace hazards like starclusters are disproportionatly hazardous to larger vessels and force them to take circuitouse routes atleast in certain regions. This reinforces the famouse Kessel Run in 12 parsecs interpretation that Han was actually describing the Falcons ability to chart a shorter and thus faster course (primarily by flying dangerously close to the hazards), and not just flimflamming some guilible marks like the script actually says he was.
It's worth examining that both these instances involve hazard filled space, and the clear implication seems to be that the speed disparities are very context sensetive. The quality of hyperspace lanes is known to vary greatly through the galaxy with something like a Highway system of big well developed well charted 'mega' lanes and progressivly less well charted secondary and tertiary lanes all the way down to nearly uncharted 'wild space'. It has generally been interpreted that thouse low quality lanes are just uniformly slower for all ships, aka they are given a higher base time cost relative to distance in the WEG system. But I find this unlikely given the prior evidence, it really looks like the low quality lanes slow large ships disproportionatly more then they slow small ones. Think of this like a dirt bike and a semi-truck both going at full speed on a two lane interstate highway, but as the roads narrow and become lumpier the Semi losses speed much faster then the dirt bike. I like this interpretation because it provides a strong economic justification for the huge numbers of small and medium freight vessels like the Falcon, their are countless hyperlanes and destinations on thouse lanes which would uneconomical for super freighters to reach due to the slower transit times. On a related note it makes the Rebels fleets and ubiquitous pirates ability to evade the Empire more plausable as they mostly lurk in the outerrim which is mostly low quality hyperlanes so their smaller ships could actually be moving faster despite having for the most part the same class 2 hyperdrive of the ISD. Again this is a throwback the the golden age of piracy in the Caribean where smaller vessles could often evade capture by the Navy warships by utilizing shoals, reefs and other navigation hazards.
Thus we have good evidence that large ships are not taking identicals paths as smaller ships, but I don't think this can explain the full speed disparity seen in StarWars under the traditoinal hyperdrive scale. We have many instances of small ships being slow as well, the GR-75 again springs to mind, at only about 3x the length of the Falcon so it is far too small to be suffering from size induced slowness. Under the conventional hyperdrive rating the Falcon is a whopping 8x faster then this ship and it is very hard to imagine that it has to take a path 8 times longer just to avoid hazards, especially on a well charted lane which whould have been developed over centuries along the paths of least resistence and lowest hazard density.
So I'm going to propose that hyperdrive class of a vessel contains a built in asjustment for a vessels expected path inefficiency due to it's size and need to avoid hazards. This is probably only a significant factor in vessels of Frigate size and up. For example an ISD might be getting a 50% longer path then the Falcon and then have an actual hyperspace to realspace ratio of 1:1 so the flight duration is 3x the best path hyperdrive flight time and thus calculated as class 2. If the best most robust hyperspace lanes are used to determine this adjustment then the ship will indeed never show any speed faster then it's class, but it could go slower on poorer lanes. A formula for this is tricky because we need to give a class to lanes, for simplicity sake lets just number them in a similar way and call the value the 'width' of the lane, the best lanes are very wide, the best are 4 (Perlemian, Hydian Way etc), second best 3, third tier 2, 4th best are 1, and 0 for Wildspace or major hazards and nebula.
YOUR GAMES
Now we can circle back to fleet speeds and how to determine them. Under the path inefficency due to size paradigm a fleets path will obviously be restricted to the path that is safe for the largest ship in the fleet. At the same time that largest ship will have a navicomputer speed which will boost up any smaller ship which is slower, while any smaller ship that is faster will just have to wait, thus everything other then the largest ship can be ignored. If two ships tie for largest but have differnt hyperdrive classes this will be assumed to be a structural delicateness on the part of the slower ship and that can't be compensated for so the fleet takes it's slower speed. The hyperdrive factor of the limiting ship is then adjusted to the lane it is traveling on. Ships size tiers are numbered from small to larger the number indicative of what level of lane the ship needs to not be penalized, 1 for everything under Frigate, 2 for Frigate and Cruiser, 3 for Star Destroyer, 4 for Dreadnaugts and above (adjust to your own personel size class break points as desired). If the largest ship size tier value is greater then the lane width then add 1 to the hyperdrive class for each point difference. Think of that Big size ship having to squeeze through that narrow width lane and getting slowed proportionall. For example a Star Destroyer on a 3rd tier lane would be a width 2 lane and a size 3 ship and 3-2 = 1 and we add 1 and treat it as a class 3 hyperdrive for determining the flight duration.
One might choose to use this lane and ship size adjustment either alone atop the traditional WEG system or in combination with the earlier ratio based math, or even that ratio system alone. The two alterations somwhat cancel out. The former compresses the speed difference between ships (making it Easier for Imperials to catch Rebels), while the later will expand them again but only in the fringes and backwaters of the galaxy (letting the Rebels run away again). If your settings largely consist of light transport hero ships mucking about in the rim they effects are probably negligable and not worth the additional calculations. As my interest revolve around grand-strategy fleet on fleet evasion and counter manuver, the effects are very profound as they add complexity to the galactic map while allowing fleet compositions like thouse shown onscreen and provide strong homefield advantages to each side in the core/rim respectivly. Note that StarWars Rebellion videogames were a major inspiration for me, it uses a custom hyperdrive scale running from 30 (Falcon), 60 (Mon Cal Cruiser) to 100 (GR-75) which roughtly approimates the speed differentials my ratio system produces. From my experience speed is KING in a grandstrategy fleet game and the speed differences of the WEG system would make many ships crippling unplayable in a real game, likely why SWR did not copy the already well established hyperdrive classes for the ships featured in the game.
Last edited by Impaler on Sun Oct 12, 2025 3:03 am; edited 4 times in total |
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FVBonura
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2025 10:06 am Post subject: |
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I have a great amount of interest in this topic as well as a great deal to say. I will try to express this in small increments:
The factors I see as most important are implementation, adoption by the gaming community, and teachability to players.
Your research paper needs to be polished, with citations and references so that the potential reader can double check your work independently. I recommend a PDF or other preferred document format so that your work is more shareable with other GMs and players.
The proposal needs several paragraphs that condenses all this content into a form you might see in an actual rulebook. Lastly you need to hand those rules off to a gaming group and watch them implement (playtest) those rules and make adjustments accordingly.
More to come.....
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Impaler
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2025 8:24 pm Post subject: |
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I'm eager to hear your thoughts, I do tend to be longwinded and that can often make for a poor presentation.
To a degree their are two seperate parts to presented, the raw head cannon and argument for WHY, and the more mechanical HOW of any rule changes. I'd certainly appreciate feedback and help with either or both
I also lack any play group which could test rules, so I'd be dependent on farming a rule set out and getting feedback on how they work (another reason to make the rules well presented). I do have a programming project that aims to make a SWR like game in which I intend to implement this rule set, but its far from playable.
EDIT: changed the lane quality paragraphs to reverse the numberical scales of lanes and ships to be more intuitive and use the term 'width' to describe a lane. |
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FVBonura
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2025 11:42 pm Post subject: Re: A Radical Reinterpretation of Hyperdrive Classes |
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| Impaler wrote: | | StarWars hyperdrive is key part of the fictional setting but the core movies scrupulusly avoid giving any numbers for a travel time between locations or even any hint of a speed scale which could be used to compare different vessels or trips. |
Unlike J. R. R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, and J. K. Rowling, George Lucas was a storyteller, not a world builder. George did not prioritize franchise leadership (watch and study the production decisions of the SW Holiday Special for context) and left critical standards to be arbitrarily mitigated the roleplaying community to hash out inconsistent solutions to the problem. Mr. Lucas could not fathom our needs executing our campaigns with cogence and consistency.
As I have said many times all over the internet, I lament a proper map of the galaxy was not started in 1985-86 prior to the launch of the First Edition of the SWRPG instead of waiting till 1998 to begin the "Essential Atlas" project that took over a decade to complete. Such a wasted opportunity for profits selling updated galaxy maps to us gamers. I know I would have purchased them all.
| Impaler wrote: | | What we DO have is very explicit description by Lucas himself that travel time in hyperspace is determined primarily if not exclusively by navigational efficiency, |
Citation, and source, at your convenience please.
| Impaler wrote: | | How we arrived at this scales development would be an extensive dive through the works of many EU writers, RPG makers and technical manual retcons and beyond my limited understanding. |
In a similar attempt to inject scholarship to the RPG, I am working on a "Rosetta Stone" to translate PC game metrics to RPG stats in my thesis.
X-Wing Alliance Translation Thread
If you are to sell (i.e. succeed in promoting wide adoption) this new approach to the gaming community, you need to master the topic. You need to know more about hyperspace/hyperdrive than any of us. I have been working for years compiling data, finding errata, and interviewing WEG employees, and SW authors to consolidate exhaustive information for my thesis. I recommend the same.
More to come.....
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Impaler
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| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2025 2:59 am Post subject: Re: A Radical Reinterpretation of Hyperdrive Classes |
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| FVBonura wrote: |
Unlike J. R. R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, and J. K. Rowling, George Lucas was a storyteller, not a world builder. George did not prioritize franchise leadership (watch and study the production decisions of the SW Holiday Special for context) and left critical standards to be arbitrarily mitigated the roleplaying community to hash out inconsistent solutions to the problem. Mr. Lucas could not fathom our needs executing our campaigns with cogence and consistency.
As I have said many times all over the internet, I lament a proper map of the galaxy was not started in 1985-86 prior to the launch of the First Edition of the SWRPG instead of waiting till 1998 to begin the "Essential Atlas" project that took over a decade to complete. Such a wasted opportunity for profits selling updated galaxy maps to us gamers. I know I would have purchased them all.
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I'd disagree with the statement Lucas was not a worldbuilder though I think I understand what you mean, his worldbuilding is not detailed or rigorous in the way other authors (Tolkein and Herbert for example), rather it is done in an impressionist sense by dropping tidbits and hints, in this regard I'd say he is more like Rowling. Space and Time are clearly not things he ever concerned himself with and thus it's no surprize Lucas never cared to make maps. Ultimatly we got maps and they are reasonably sound now largely becuse the lack of hard data that could contradict them, in contrast it's basicly impossible to make an internally coherent StarTrek map.
| FVBonura wrote: |
Citation, and source, at your convenience please.
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The main source I have is a breif audio recording of Lucas discussing the 12 parsec controvery https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y0VjDuR6Sww
And their are quotations from 'The Making of StarWars' by J.W. Rinzler's
| Quote: |
"It's a very simple ship, very economical ship, although the modifications he made to it are rather extensive - mostly to the navigational system to get through hyperspace in the shortest possible distance (par-sect)."
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This book looks to date to 1974, so quite old. That said I don't have any faith that Lucas intended this interpretation at the time of writing the script and filming, it is likely a retcon at some level even if the basic concept that navigation was always crucial to hyperspace was older. Space Navigation being a super difficult/dangerous was a concept in a lot of contemporary sci-fi that got used as inspiration for StarWars after all (Dune). Lucas like many creative people will have a tendency to think that 'I always ment it that way' after a fuzzy idea of concept crystalizes and gets recorded. And when Lucas says things which don't jive with what is on screen, the screen takes presidence, in this case I see no contradition and am will to take this as true or atleast part of the truth of hyperdrive.
| FVBonura wrote: |
If you are to sell (i.e. succeed in promoting wide adoption) this new approach to the gaming community, you need to master the topic. You need to know more about hyperspace/hyperdrive than any of us. I have been working for years compiling data, finding errata, and interviewing WEG employees, and SW authors to consolidate exhaustive information for my thesis. I recommend the same.
More to come..... |
Becoming the internets formost expert on hyperdrive wasn't my plan and it sounds like I would need to study for years to get their. My intent was to do enough research to reasonably support my proposal, and for it to offer enough elegance of structure and logic, and as few pain points of contradition that it is desirable to adopt. I am defintily making proposals that can not be proven, at best I can hope that they are not easily disproven. And this is where I was hoping more knowlegable people could try their best to poke holes in it so that I might patch them. Obviously no one owes me their time, but if poking holes is something any readers here like to do by all means have at it.
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FVBonura
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| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2025 8:17 am Post subject: Re: A Radical Reinterpretation of Hyperdrive Classes |
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You have my name on the top of one of the quotes I did not say in the previous post. You might want to clean that up to prevent confusion for other readers please.
| Impaler wrote: | | Ultimately we got maps and they are reasonably sound now largely because the lack of hard data that could contradict them, in contrast it's basically impossible to make an internally coherent StarTrek map. |
I mapped and measured distances, with 3D software, the main Essential Atlas maps of known travel times from from the RPG charts. To be polite, there is nothing consistent nor "reasonably sound" to be found in any comparative data. If the published travel time gazetteers are overlaid atop the Essential Atlas maps one must conclude hyperspace travel varies greatly in different regions of the galaxy OR there are parabolic trajectories above or below the galactic plane that are behaving like "shortcuts" or "express lanes" in hyperspace OR the Essential Atlas team ignored the RPG charts in their research and production the publication. At the very least I would advise you to study this data to attempt this project.
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CRMcNeill
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2025 10:53 am Post subject: |
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A related thread…
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The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index
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FVBonura
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| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2025 11:26 am Post subject: Re: A Radical Reinterpretation of Hyperdrive Classes |
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| Impaler wrote: | | Lightspeed is clearly NOT 'c' the speed of light in real physics, but rather an in universe slang for hyperdrive as Han repeatedly uses 'jump to lightspeed' to refer to the process of initiating hyperdrive which is clearly thousands to millions of time faster then actual light, as not all hyperdrive is the same speed he can only be referring to some kind of benchmark for hyperdrives. |
I agree its slang in-universe, just like the term "turbolaser". Regardless of nomenclature we are dealing with monstrous speeds many times faster than light.
| Impaler wrote: | | Conversely an absolute value of 0.5 would normally imply a scale starting at zero which is extremely odd for human language as it would have every ship in existence occupying the values between 0 and 0.5 and whole numbers never get touched. |
Clearly the Hyperdrive Multiplier stat was never intended as an in-universe term, but purely RPG nomenclature. D6 Space/Spaceships partly cured the problem by creating a reciprocal scale where faster speed is an ascending number. Lets not forget the RPG culture that grew out of AD&D and its descending scale for improving "Armor Class". Like D6 Space/Spaceships, Decipher used a stat called "Hyperspeed", in the Star Wars Collectable Card Game, that worked on a scale of 2-7 and faster ships in hyperspace had a higher Hyperspeed score. Clearly speed of play and ease of use for the new and veteran player were the priority but more on that later.....
| Impaler wrote: | | The downside is that the system in universe origin is counterintuitive, it would have required that at some point in the past an arbitrary speed that was far far higher then the current technology allowed to have been selected as the benchmark of 1 and then become universally adopted by multiple species which independently invented hyperdrive technology. |
Clearly a need for better nomenclature, for player roleplaying, became conspicuous to the GMs first, and game designers in the early 1990's but consider this. From an in-universe perspective hyperdrive was a millennia-old technology and speed limits were discovered and exploited centuries before the birth of our legacy star warriors. Any scale in existence in the classic rebellion era would be as well used and established as the 5,280 foot long mile is here on earth in 2025.
Also consider the "American Graffiti" angle of the franchise.
"Faster, more intense." -- George Lucas
There is a lack of romance in Han Solo's "Hotrod in space" making fast calculations on its nav computer. Being the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy is a boast of speed not computational power.
| Impaler wrote: | | In other words the Falcon after emerging from Hyperspace flight of X duration can calculate a new hyperspace jump in a duration of 0.5X. As you can see this interpretation preserves the lower is faster relationship, the faster your nav calculations the lower your time spent in real space which is basically time wasted not moving. |
You might want to survey the community to see if they are even using "the lower is faster relationship". In my game we use the Hyperdrive Multiplier Out-of-Character but when roleplaying in-universe use Class 1, Class 2, Class 0.5 etc. "The lower is faster relationship" was of such a low priority it was dropped thirty years ago by Decipher in the SWCCG and twenty one years ago by West End Games with D6 Space/Spaceships. Food for thought.
| Impaler wrote: | | We have some evidence for this multi-jump nature in the literature |
Once again we are going to need citation and source(s). Yes I know its a lot of work. I know from experience.
More to come.....
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FVBonura
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Joined: 24 Nov 2005
Posts: 318
Location: Central PA
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| Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2025 11:35 am Post subject: |
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Oh great more reading. 
I'm never going to get my thesis done.
Let me finish commenting on Impaler's initial post, here, and I will migrate and comment over there.
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