Ahh, but in Star Wars, "Light Speed" is exactly as fast as the plot demands. Checkmate, science dorks!
In Starwars they travel through hyperspace, hitting light speed is how you get into it!
I just assumed light speed was a colloquialism for hyperdrive.
At any rate, hyperdrive blows warp out of the water in raw speed. A trip across the galaxy is just a few days. The downside is that you're pretty much limited to already charted safe routes unless you want to test your luck with potential ship-killing hazards that can't be detected before hitting them.
Y’all noobs don’t even have guild navigators.
You mean there's no weird creatures created from humans by the effects of FTL?
Hold on, I gotchu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DBk2ejb6i8
Warp ten baby, infinite velocity!
I always thought it was weird that the evolution of humans led to us being giant axolotl‘s.
Reject humanity — return to axolotl?
It's both. I think "jumping to lightspeed" is an in-universe misnomer for jumping to Hyperspace. Han Solo misuses the terminology the first time we're introduced to the concept (so does Kenobi, for that matter), but in that same scene he does make a distinction between lightspeed and hyperspace. The ship still needs to accelerate to something very close to light speed to slip into the parallel hyperspace dimension, so it kinda tracks between the two concepts.
You also can't leave or enter the galaxy Star Wars takes place in, except for a small perforation called Vector Prime. There's a galactic barrier in place that causes hyperspace to just kinda...stop working.
But nothing beats Discovery's mushroom drive (incidentally that's also what the writers had before writing it).
"The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing interstellar distances in a few seconds, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. As the Improbability Drive reaches infinite improbability, it passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe almost simultaneously. So you're never sure where you'll end up or even what species you'll be when you get there. It's therefore important to dress accordingly. The Drive was invented following research into finite improbability often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap one foot to the left in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy. Many physicists said they wouldn't stand for that sort of thing, partly because it debased science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties." Hitchhiker's Guide
I know a lot of die-hard fans have a lot of problems with the movie but personally I love it, especially these narrated animated bits.
People were mad it didn't follow the book when Adam's was very insistent all versions of Hitchhiker's should be different.
Yeah. The radio play, books, TV series, and film were all different.
isn't he the one who flat out said its boring to just tell the same story again?
Absolutely. And Stephen Fry, for all his faults, does a great job narrating.
I can't read anything from the Hitchhikers Guide without reading it in the authors voice
But Ludicrous Speed is supreme to all other speeds. The Plaid Life is the life for me.
What's the matter, Colonel? Chicken?!
It could be the 40K fan in me, but warp speed sounds like a drug the inquisiton should take a look at.
The ship is actually not even moving. Space moves around the ship.
In United Federation of Planets, space move around ship.
How fast can the Enterprise make the Kessel run?
This fast:
They're such a cute couple. Better not leave their babies behind!
Depends. Are you asking about the canon Kessel run, or the objectively superior EU version?
In the EU pre-Disney, Kessel was a black hole and there was a race around it. The more powerful your engines, the closer you could get to the black hole. Which is why Han used a distance measurement instead of time (of course, the most likely in-universe fan theory is that Han was BSing the two farm yokels by throwing out space technobabble, but Star Wars authors never settle for the easy answer when they could write an entire book to fill in the plot-hole).
Never made sense in the EU. You get yanked out of hyperspace way before you need to account for that kind of gravity. My headcanon was always that it's just some spacer jargon we don't have the context to parse. Like how a 12 second car is fast, even though time is not a unit of speed.
Stronger/faster engines could get closer to the gravity wells but there are also lines about running into stars so at the end of the day it was all fan cope to explain away something that had a simpler answer:
Han Solo was very obviously lying to the hicks about how fast his ship could go.
Obiwan knows, Luke is clueless. It's one of the best character defining scenes in the movie and most viewers didn't catch it.
Head over to YouTube and watch the clip, you'll see Obi-Wan smirk at the lie while Luke buys it.
Even as a kid I knew that, and hated the “light speed” references.
Later on, I justified it as imprecise use of language, which happens all the time anyway. “Light speed” became a generic term for “going super fast”. Or something.
Just ignore "light speed", "ludicrous speed" is where it is at.
Jammed!
Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry: Lone Starr!
I've lost the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps!
I thought warp speed is the speed of light. Anything above warp 1.0 is faster than the speed of light.
It depends on your frame of reference.
From inside the ship, light speed is faster. You travel arbitrary distance in an instant.
Outside the ship, everyone else sees you moving 1 light year per year, but for passengers, the voyage is essentially a forward-only time machine.
From outside the ship, warp speed is faster. Observers will see the warp bubble with a ship inside it moving >1 light year per year, and because it will arrive at its destination before light from the ships own past will arrive there, it acts like a view-only backwards time machine.
To be clear, even if you're moving at 1000x the speed of light, and have figured out a way around relativity so that you don't have time dilation (and so you can, y'know, go faster than the speed of light), galactic distances are still so vast that interstellar traffic is largely not feasible. Our galaxy--one of billions, trillions, or more--is about 2M light years across. Going all the way across the galaxy at 1000x the speed of light would still take 2000 years.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, six thousand light years thick
But out by us, it's just a thousand light years wide
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe
...And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'cause there's bugger-all down here on earth.
Milky Way is much smaller than that. The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5M light years away. Maybe that's where you got 2M from. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light year diameter.
Warp speed and light speed are overrated. It's all about rule of cool and Elite's Witch Space has the coolest name.
"She'll make .5 past lightspeed."
Lightspeed seems to be a catch-all layterm that means the speed of light and everything faster. Hyperspace is a better description of what's happening. And different ships traverse hyperspace at different speeds depending on their engine.
"I've outrun Imperial starships. I don't mean the local bulk cruisers, I'm talking about the big Corellian ships now."
Which is faster? I guess it would depend on which ships you're comparing to each other.
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