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Mamatried
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 Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 9:22 am Post subject: Lightspeed vs Hyperspeed |
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Lightspeed vs Hyperspped
How fast is a hyperdriv/hyperspeede comapred to light speed?
We have Han solo say the falcon can go 0,5 past light speed, though tis makes no sense at all.
If we look to the distances, some being 1000s of lightyears, and yes they even in canon visited a companion galaxy, with a mere 0,5 times light speed this would take then over 70 000 years......they old yeah but not that old.
so how fast is hyperdrive/hyoerspeed |
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 11:03 am Post subject: |
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https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hyperspace/Legends
"A hyperdrive-equipped ship would propel off these ripples to "jump" into hyperspace, allowing it to traverse the galaxy at speeds of hundreds or even thousands of times the speed of light."
Like a lot of things Star Wars, it's left vague.
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Yora
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 2:49 pm Post subject: |
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Getting from Tatooine in the Outer Rim to Alderaan in the Core Worlds seems to take about 15 to 20 minutes in a fast ship. Make than an hour in a not so fast ship.
Assuming the galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across like ours, that would be 50,000 lightyears per hour. Or 438 million times the speed of light.
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 3:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Yora wrote: | Getting from Tatooine in the Outer Rim to Alderaan in the Core Worlds seems to take about 15 to 20 minutes in a fast ship. Make than an hour in a not so fast ship.
Assuming the galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across like ours, that would be 50,000 lightyears per hour. Or 438 million times the speed of light. |
Screen time is not real time. The training scene aboard the Falcon picked up in media res; the radio drama fills in a bit more of the training sequences leading up to it.
Speeding up hyperspace transit times in general was an unforced error on Disney's part, as the geo-political setting of the galaxy makes more sense if transit times take hours at best, and days or weeks at worst. Based on what we currently have, the best analogy is an autobahn or freeway interstate system, but one that is sustained by navigation data rather than paved roads and supporting infrastructure. The more well-traveled a route is, the more navigation data will be available, and thus the more safely a fast course can be plotted. The less well-traveled a route becomes, the more cautious ship captains have to be when plotting their routes.
Viewed in those terms, Tatooine is something like the dot-on-the-map town that few people know exists, but it's only a couple miles from the nearest on-ramp, and that's where the real time-saver comes in. Add in that the only on-screen trip was aboard "the fastest ship in the galaxy" and a trip from the Outer Rim to the Core Worlds in a few hours makes more sense.
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 3:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Yora wrote: | Getting from Tatooine in the Outer Rim to Alderaan in the Core Worlds seems to take about 15 to 20 minutes in a fast ship. Make than an hour in a not so fast ship.
Assuming the galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across like ours, that would be 50,000 lightyears per hour. Or 438 million times the speed of light. |
I'd say longer... they had settled in to Dejaarik and lightsaber training, and I don't see them doing that if it was a 20 minute ride. R&E gives the base time (p. 114) as 7 hours, so 3.5 in the Falcon, assuming Han wasn't taking it slow for some reason.
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Mamatried
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 3:33 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Yora wrote: | Getting from Tatooine in the Outer Rim to Alderaan in the Core Worlds seems to take about 15 to 20 minutes in a fast ship. Make than an hour in a not so fast ship.
Assuming the galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across like ours, that would be 50,000 lightyears per hour. Or 438 million times the speed of light. |
Screen time is not real time. The training scene aboard the Falcon picked up in media res; the radio drama fills in a bit more of the training sequences leading up to it.
Speeding up hyperspace transit times in general was an unforced error on Disney's part, as the geo-political setting of the galaxy makes more sense if transit times take hours at best, and days or weeks at worst. Based on what we currently have, the best analogy is an autobahn or freeway interstate system, but one that is sustained by navigation data rather than paved roads and supporting infrastructure. The more well-traveled a route is, the more navigation data will be available, and thus the more safely a fast course can be plotted. The less well-traveled a route becomes, the more cautious ship captains have to be when plotting their routes.
Viewed in those terms, Tatooine is something like the dot-on-the-map town that few people know exists, but it's only a couple miles from the nearest on-ramp, and that's where the real time-saver comes in. Add in that the only on-screen trip was aboard "the fastest ship in the galaxy" and a trip from the Outer Rim to the Core Worlds in a few hours makes more sense. |
My problem is figuring how long will it take to actually leave the galaxy and travel deep into the rishi maze, in canon the rebels had a base there, and with the extrememdistances of 100s of thousands of lightyears, and them not being 55years older travelling back and forth makes me wonder if hyperspace is more akin to "wormholes" where distance from a to be is much shorted than in "realspace" |
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 3:50 pm Post subject: |
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| Mamatried wrote: |
My problem is figuring how long will it take to actually leave the galaxy and travel deep into the rishi maze, in canon the rebels had a base there, and with the extrememdistances of 100s of thousands of lightyears, and them not being 55years older travelling back and forth makes me wonder if hyperspace is more akin to "wormholes" where distance from a to be is much shorted than in "realspace" |
Basically, I see hyperspace making the most sense as a place where relativity does not apply. You can exceed light speed, and you don't encounter relativistic time effects while in hyperspace. If I have an observatory on Pluto, and I'm looking at a Star Destroyer leave Earth orbit, that Star Destroyer is already at Pluto by the time I see it leave... it's not in two places at once, I just did not receive the light from Earth before the Star Destroyer arrived at Pluto through hyperspace.
It's a parallel dimension with different physical laws. Doc Smith's Lensman series used something similar... "Nth space" where nothing goes slower than light, which could be used to travel quickly and, occasionally, hurl planets at planets in realspace.
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 4:10 pm Post subject: |
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| MrNexx wrote: | | Basically, I see hyperspace making the most sense as a place where relativity does not apply. You can exceed light speed, and you don't encounter relativistic time effects while in hyperspace. |
I see that less as a natural feature of hyperspace and more a result of relativistic shielding. Stasis fields that can slow time almost to a standstill have been a thing since Han Solo at Star's End, and it's always easier to use highly advanced technology to explain why a setting seems to ignore the laws of physics.
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 4:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Mamatried wrote: | | My problem is figuring how long will it take to actually leave the galaxy and travel deep into the rishi maze, in canon the rebels had a base there, and with the extrememdistances of 100s of thousands of lightyears, and them not being 55years older travelling back and forth makes me wonder if hyperspace is more akin to "wormholes" where distance from a to be is much shorted than in "realspace" |
I don't see the problem. No one is saying it will take years to traverse that galaxy, just that it shouldn't take just a few minutes. If it's important to the plot that the Rishi Maze be reached relatively quickly, then it is. IIRC, the Essential Atlas put the Rishi Maze relatively close to the terminus of one of the major hyperspace routes.
My biggest complaint about hyperspace in the Disney films was that all jumps seemed incredibly abbreviated. This wouldn't've been so bad by itself (a short jump works if one is traveling to a nearby planet in the same sector, after all), but the story group doubled down and decided to make pretty much every jump be galaxy-spanning on general principle.
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Mamatried
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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Nod Nod, yeah I was thinking maybe a week or two, and the very long trips in know spce to be as long as months.
I can see travelling from outer rim to core taking at least a couple of weeks so yeah I think this makes sense.
and yea disnney sort of confused this up a bit I feel Nod Nod |
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 5:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Mamatried wrote: | Nod Nod, yeah I was thinking maybe a week or two, and the very long trips in know spce to be as long as months.
I can see travelling from outer rim to core taking at least a couple of weeks so yeah I think this makes sense. |
The longest jump in R&E corebook is 31 days, 15 hours... from Dagobah to Lianna. Dagobah to Gamor is 27 days, Coruscant to Tattooine is 22 days... but Coruscant to Corellia to Tattooine is 8 hours, so tip your Astrogator.
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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| MrNexx wrote: | | The longest jump in R&E corebook is 31 days, 15 hours... from Dagobah to Lianna. Dagobah to Gamor is 27 days, Coruscant to Tattooine is 22 days... but Coruscant to Corellia to Tattooine is 8 hours, so tip your Astrogator. |
Considering Coruscant isn't that far from Alderaan, and that it will almost certainly have well-mapped hyperspace routes leading to it, I'd be inclined to switch the Coruscant to Tatooine duration to 22 hours, or even halve it to 11.
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Yora
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 6:06 pm Post subject: |
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And there is the thing that Palpatine senses that Vader is losing the fight against Obi-Wan, gets on a shuttle to fly from Coruscant to Mustafar (which the maps place almost as far apart as two planets can be) and then gets Vader back to Corruscant where he gets his first medical treatment. That looks like the journey might just be 15 minutes each way.
| MrNexx wrote: | | Yora wrote: | Getting from Tatooine in the Outer Rim to Alderaan in the Core Worlds seems to take about 15 to 20 minutes in a fast ship. Make than an hour in a not so fast ship.
Assuming the galaxy is 100,000 lightyears across like ours, that would be 50,000 lightyears per hour. Or 438 million times the speed of light. |
I'd say longer... they had settled in to Dejaarik and lightsaber training, and I don't see them doing that if it was a 20 minute ride. R&E gives the base time (p. 114) as 7 hours, so 3.5 in the Falcon, assuming Han wasn't taking it slow for some reason. |
Certainly. There's some incongruity with Obi-Wan and Chewbacca acting like they've settled in to kill time for an hour or two, while Han walks in like they just left Tatooine 5 minutes ago.
When I decided how I want to measure travel distances, I went with 90 minutes for the Tatooine-Alderaan reference point. But whether you want to make it 1 hour or 10 hours, the point stands that you'd be able to cross the galaxy in about a day if you can get a clear and relatively straight path.
I think the best analog to think of with these numbers is like comparing traveling between planets in the galaxy to flying between cities on Earth. Many flights within Europe or within North America are 2 to 4 hours, but if you want to go to the other side of the world it will take more like 18 hours.
And while it wasn't possible in World War 2, which is the stylistic reference for space combat in Star Wars, we do now have larger military planes that fly halfway around the globe to make an attack and return back to base without landing at an air force base or on a carrier. (Though those would be space transports in game terms, not starfighters.)
| MrNexx wrote: | Basically, I see hyperspace making the most sense as a place where relativity does not apply. You can exceed light speed, and you don't encounter relativistic time effects while in hyperspace. If I have an observatory on Pluto, and I'm looking at a Star Destroyer leave Earth orbit, that Star Destroyer is already at Pluto by the time I see it leave... it's not in two places at once, I just did not receive the light from Earth before the Star Destroyer arrived at Pluto through hyperspace.
It's a parallel dimension with different physical laws. Doc Smith's Lensman series used something similar... "Nth space" where nothing goes slower than light, which could be used to travel quickly and, occasionally, hurl planets at planets in realspace. |
I've come up with the idea that Hyperspace also massively amplifies the gravity of stars and planets. In real space, it's almost impossible to pick any direction in the sky and hit something before you leave the galaxy unless you specifically aim for it. I've seen calculations that say there is a more than 50% chance that when two galaxies collide with each other, there won't be a single case of two stars hitting each other. To accidentally fly into a star in real space is almost impossible.
But say the gravitational effects of stars are thousands of times greater in hyperspace, then the safe gaps between them become much smaller and you have to take a very winding path to avoid getting too close to any.
Since stars are constantly moving at very considerable speed, and are gravitationally interacting with each other, precise measurements of their position, vector, and velocity have to be repeated regularly. The older your data, the more uncertainty about their exact position, and the greater the distance you have to keep from their estimated position to avoid an accident.
When there is a lot of traffic between two or more systems, it becomes economically practical to make new measurements of the starts at shorter intervals, which is how you get hyperlanes. The position of stars near hyperlanes is very precisely know, so ships don't have to keep as much safety distance, and can fly in much straighter paths.
I feel this is a model that manages to include a good majority of the established facts about hyperspace travel, which resulted from Han Solo's technobable that was thrown together from random space sounding words. 
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 6:48 pm Post subject: |
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| Yora wrote: | | And there is the thing that Palpatine senses that Vader is losing the fight against Obi-Wan, gets on a shuttle to fly from Coruscant to Mustafar (which the maps place almost as far apart as two planets can be) and then gets Vader back to Corruscant where he gets his first medical treatment. That looks like the journey might just be 15 minutes each way. |
This explained by two factors: 1) Force Users are precognitive, and can sense events before they happen. Sidious sensed that Vader would be in danger in advance, and was en route when the actual fight took place. 2) The sequence of action in the films isn't necessarily the sequence in which they took place in the in-universe time flow. The fights may have occurred several days apart, but were spliced together on screen for dramatic effect.
| Quote: | | Certainly. There's some incongruity with Obi-Wan and Chewbacca acting like they've settled in to kill time for an hour or two, while Han walks in like they just left Tatooine 5 minutes ago. |
Depends what he was doing in the cockpit. He might've decided to stay at the controls on the off-chance that the Falcon got interdicted, but after several hours of nothing happening, decided that the Empire hadn't been able to get an Interdictor into position to intercept, or that he'd plotted a sufficiently convoluted course that the Empire hadn't been able to calculate his route and/or destination.
| Quote: | | we do now have larger military planes that fly halfway around the globe to make an attack and return back to base without landing at an air force base or on a carrier. (Though those would be space transports in game terms, not starfighters.) |
I'm certainly in favor of Starbombers as a concept (Star Wars' WW2-in-space feel practically demands it), and have written up stats for some in the past. Just so long as it isn't the MG100.
| MrNexx wrote: | | I've come up with the idea that Hyperspace also massively amplifies the gravity of stars and planets. |
This. It dovetails nicely with other evidence to the effect that gravity can nudge a ship off course (see the rules for Gravity Well Projectors in Wanted by Cracken).
| Quote: | The older your data, the more uncertainty about their exact position, and the greater the distance you have to keep from their estimated position to avoid an accident.
When there is a lot of traffic between two or more systems, it becomes economically practical to make new measurements of the starts at shorter intervals, which is how you get hyperlanes. The position of stars near hyperlanes is very precisely know, so ships don't have to keep as much safety distance, and can fly in much straighter paths.
I feel this is a model that manages to include a good majority of the established facts about hyperspace travel, which resulted from Han Solo's technobabble that was thrown together from random space sounding words. |
Agreed. My theory (as mentioned many times previously on this forum) is that the link in all of this is the BoSS. Ships sell their flight recorder data (tracking radiation levels and bearing and strengths of gravity fields over the course of the flight) to the BoSS office at whatever starport they land at, in trade for a discount on the price of a navcomputer data update. The flight recorder data is then added to the BoSS database and compiled with dozens or hundreds of other ships' flight data to create a detailed picture of a given route. Thus, the more ships that travel a given route, the more data BoSS has to work with, and the more accurate the navigation data will be on those routes. As I said above, the navigation map of the galaxy is like an interstate highway system, but is based on data, not paved roads.
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Whill
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2020 7:41 pm Post subject: Re: Lightspeed vs Hyperspped |
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Yes, movies do not show the entire hyperspace journeys so you can't really judge them only by what you see in the films.
| Mamatried wrote: | How fast is a hyperdriv/hyperspeede comapred to light speed?
We have Han solo say the falcon can go 0,5 past light speed, though tis makes no sense at all.
If we look to the distances, some being 1000s of lightyears, and yes they even in canon visited a companion galaxy, with a mere 0,5 times light speed this would take then over 70 000 years......they old yeah but not that old.
so how fast is hyperdrive/hyoerspeed |
Ah, a fresh topic we've never discussed before: Lightspeed/Hyperspace.
In the films, "Lightspeed" is mostly in the phrase, "jump to lightspeed." "Lightspeed" is clearly short for "faster-than-light speed" and it refers to traveling through hyperspace. The films do not at all get into how much faster, the actual speeds (distance/time), we do not know the exact locations of these star systems and distances from each other.
Han said, "She'll make point five past lightspeed." That is completely undefined in the films and we have no basis for knowing what that means. However he did not say point five times lightspeed. Timothy Zahn defined a "Point" system make try to make sense of Han's statement, with Point One through Point Five if I recall correctly (with Point Five being faster than Point One). However, that doesn't really make sense with Han's phrasing because Zahn's Point Five is an exact speed and Han said "point five past lightspeed". I don't think Zahn ever defined "Lightspeed" itself as an exact speed. And even exact FTL speeds are still useless because we do not know the distances of most journeys.
To cover the distances that ships must travel, lightspeed is thousands to hundreds of thousands of times the speed of light. Speeds in Hyperspace are variable because durations are based on how well known the course is, in addition to distance travelled. WEG's interpretation of Han's statement referring to the class of hyperdrive (the hyperdrive multiplier, which is canon in Legends) is still problematic with the word "past", but it is just as good interpretation as any. Being a WEG fan, I go with that. "Hyperspeed" is not a film term and not so common in the franchise, but it seems to be simply another word for lightspeed that some authors have used for word variety.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lightspeed
| Quote: | | Lightspeed was slang referring to the threshold at which a starship first enters hyperspace, although in actuality, the potential velocities achieved whilst entering or traveling within hyperspace surpass the speed of light. |
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