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?
I was worried, at the top of this thread, that I was going to have to post this. Thank you.
Thrawns people do
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.
Star Wars tech manuals say it’s not a misnomer. They actually do have to hit lightspeed before entering hyperspace.
I assume this is from the same people who said TIE Fighter “wings” are solar panels.
Hmm, I suppose you’re right. I don’t know why sci-fi purists are okay with that explanation when logically nothing can move faster than the speed of light. I’ve seen more debate over whether a blaster is a laser weapon or a plasma weapon. I guess they had a hard time reconciling the line from Han about how the Falcon does “Point five past light speed”. At this point, I’ve accepted that hyperspace and FTL travel in Star Wars is basically just the wild west and nobody is trying to clarify how any of it actually works, they just want to have cool scenes.
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.
That’s the most interesting bit of Star Wars lore I’ve heard.
It’s Legends, mind you. New canon is more or less the same, but it’s a calculation problem rather than a specific gateway out.
That makes it consistent with Trek because TOS has a galactic barrier.
Maybe they’re the same universe. After all StarWars is a galaxy far far away.
But nothing beats Discovery’s mushroom drive (incidentally that’s also what the writers had before writing it).
Wanna make your own hyper space jump not using hyper space lanes? Bring one of the talented young ladies of Thrawns species, you will be fine until said young lady is no longer young
“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?
Cleary a comic book fan
Honestly that’s the other thing in my mind. I know Adams was very clear he just wanted to change up the story but it was either him or some major comic writer who specifically said adaptations being the same story over and over are just boring.
That’s a very silly take imo, I’ve watched some movies 20 or more times, and if I go watch a movie from a book I would like to see the story from that bloody book.
Then complain that the book was a departure from the radio play he based the book on lol
So you are saying I don’t even know the real thing, now I’m really pissed off. My point is if uou want to tell a different story, give it a different name.
He even wrote most of the movie. Including the bits that really pissed off book fans.
I know it went through a lot of rewrites after he died but i never really heard what of his survived. what was his that pissed people off the most?
The one I saw get brought up a lot was the Arthur/Trillian romance. He had actually experimented with that in drafts for other versions, too, but the movie was the first time it got all the way to the final product.
aaaaaaaaaah yeah. that definitely pissed people off.
I was mad that they removed all the good jokes
Absolutely. And Stephen Fry, for all his faults, does a great job narrating.
What are his faults?
Genuine question.
Wouldn’t condemn the views of JK Rowling. Thinks abuse victims should “Grow up”, among other crap.
Well, I read both.
Seems a bit sensationalist. I don’t consider him any worse than before.
I can’t read anything from the Hitchhikers Guide without reading it in the authors voice
I thought the answer was 42
But Ludicrous Speed is supreme to all other speeds. The Plaid Life is the life for me.
What’s the matter, Colonel? Chicken?!
You sure buddy? I saw some plaid speed, and all it had was some concussions. You know what happens at warp 10?
Lizard. Fuckin.
Come at me with this plaid shit when janeway goes all reptile style on ya. Until then, we know it’s “Paris or bust.”
It could be the 40K fan in me, but warp speed sounds like a drug the inquisiton should take a look at.
You’re thinking of the acid drive
Also totally sounds like a drug you could gland in The Culture
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:
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.
An even easier explanation is that they’re speaking Basic, not English, so any words that have different meanings are just different in that language.
Nope. Han Solo was just lying about how fast his ship can go, but fans came up with some bullshit because, just like Luke, they didn’t know enough about space to catch it.
There were eventually three explanations:
1: Han Solo is lying to the hicks who don’t know how space works. The original one that is actually quite obvious if you watch the scene again and look at Obi-Wan’s reaction to the lie.
2: Lucas’s cope, because he didn’t want to admit that and pop part of Han Solo’s fan bubble: it’s actually a brag about his ship’s computer being able to navigate an ultra precise course.
3: EU explanation: it’s a brag about how good the engines are, allowing the Falcon to be physically closer to the black holes and take advantage of spacetime distortions.
What was actually a great detail in the Solo movie is that they canonized all three explanations.
The Falcon gets a droid brain that is one of the best navigators in the galaxy. It sets the (shortest) distance record when that navigator plots a course out of the black hole trap using the Falcon’s souped up engines, and Han tells us what the record they just set is…
And that number was bigger/worse than what he told Luke and Obi-Wan in the cantina. So he still lied about it.
Honestly a pretty great cinematic interaction of fandom and writers that the vast majority of viewers, even huge nerds, will never catch.
You can even see Obi-Wan make a face when Han says the parsec bit.
You think some guy in a bar would just make shit up to sound cool?
Not very. The Millennium Falcon is about the size of a Runabout. You’re not making those turns in a battlecruiser.
The Defiant could handle it just fine, and obliterate the Millennium Falcon on its way through.
Possibly. But not with the “stock” sluggish engines.
The Millennium Falcon is way more maneuverable. They are not the same class of ship. I looked up their sizes. The Defiant is supposed to be as thick (the shortest way) as the Millennium Falcon is long. You are comparing a military destroyer to a relatively large speed boat.
Isn’t the Millennium Falcon a suped up small freighter? There are no other ships like it AFAIK, it’s a custom job. A galaxy class starship (The Enterprise) would be more comparable to a star destroyer. The Defiant is also a one of a kind ship, created to fight the Borg. I’m confident it would completely obliterate the Millennium Falcon, since the Falcon barely has an armament, doesn’t have shields TMK, no cloak, no torpedos, no transporter, and no cloaking device. Its only advantage is maneuverability, which is negated by tracking computers.
Just teleport an armed torpedo on board the Falcon and detonate it.
Ok holup why don’t they do this more often?
In the Star Trek world, teleporters cannot go through shields. In a few episodes when they lose shields they have boarding parties attack.
Star Wars ships don’t have shields, they have area deflectors. A ship like the Enterprise could simply teleport active torpedoes into whatever Star War ships they encounter at a critical location and take out every ship with ease.
What I really want to know is why the Defiant is vaporizing the Falcon in the first place. It isn’t like Starfleet to shoot first and open hailing frequencies later.
I’d expect it to go more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKJa8lIiWHg
Then either followed by this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7jWqD3Zs9Q
Or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23vTQDS36dM
…depending on the writers.
The Falcon has shields and missiles. Pretty much every ship in Star Wars except for TIE Fighters use shields. TIEs specifically don’t because the Empire is wasteful, stupid, and arrogant.
Everything else comes down to the exact amount and kinds of energy the ships can generate and protect themselves from, and what speeds they can move. Those answers probably exist, but who knows what they are.
TIEs specifically don’t because the Empire is wasteful, stupid, and arrogant.
Well, also because the TIE is a light fighter built for both speed and mass production, which meant stripping out everything other than engines, guns, and controls. Similarly fast fighters with more features seem to have been made in comparatively small numbers and were issued specifically to either elite Imperial pilots or Jedi depending on the era.
Yeah, thats what the Empire said but when you’re losing dogfights with 2:1 odds or better because all your pilots get clapped in one shot and never have a chance to gain experience against an outgunned and outmanned insurgency your strategy is just bad.
We know that was the rationale but we also know they were hilariously wrong.
The Falcon is much bigger than a runabout. 23.1 meters by 13.7 meters for the runabout, 34.7 by 23.8 for the Falcon. It’s 1.5 times longer and 1.7 times wider.
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!
“Sir, you better buckle up!”
They’ve gone to plaid…!
I thought warp speed is the speed of light. Anything above warp 1.0 is faster than the speed of light.
I think they called it “warp factor”. And Warp factor 1.0 is indeed equal to light speed.
Yea but warp 9 isn‘t 9x the size of light but much much more (somewhere between 800x and 1600x, depending which source you believe. But it’s not like trek canon is consistent there).
I suppose it’s somewhat logarithmic, since Warp 1 is c and warp 10 is infinite speed. probably gets a bit annoying in the Warp 9.975 range.
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.
for the passengers it’s a backwards only time machine, since they travel back to a few centuries when they arrive, because that’s the speed it would take them with light speed
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
Can we have your liver then?
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.
If we somehow figured out how to travel at 1000x speed of light, I’m sure we’ll be able to increase that number to 1 million, 1 billion, and beyond. Until we just stopped using “speed of light” as a frame reference because it would be a completely different method of traveling (like instantaneous through a wormhole or something).
Americans will come up with some ridiculous unit for it, like 3 1/16 * 10^24 inches per lunar cycle
Or, y’know, warp factors. XD
Isn’t warp just light speed? I was under the impression that warp 1 is the speed of light, and eg warp 7 being 7x the speed of light
Nope! Warp factors aren’t linear, they’re logarythmic until like warp 9.6 where they go exponentially towards infinity at warp 10.
https://www.startrek.nl/sites/default/files/sbs/images/database/misc/warp_chart.gif
“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.
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.
In Star Trek or sci-fi in general?
Light speed is the theoretical maximum speed limit at which an object with mass can move within normal space. Hyperspace was a sci-fi invention that was used as a theoretical work around for this problem. So any space that allows you to travel faster than the speed of light is technically hyperspace, whether that be extra dimensional travel, or going through a wormhole.
In Star Wars. Sorry for not saying so explicitly.
“She’ll make .5 past lightspeed.”
This is an excellent reference; it’s one of the few times in the trilogy details are made in technical terms.
Point 5 of what? Is it just 450 million kilometers per second? Seems hardly likely, since they’re zipping between star systems in matters of hours. So is it, like in Star Trek, some logarithmic scale, where 1 is equivalent to warp 10, and you turn into a mudskipper.
However, The Empire is “The Galactic Empire,” and the intro to IV implies the events take place in a single galaxy “far, far away.” So all Wars travel is within a single galaxy. Trek ships travel the universe, visiting nebula and other galaxies. The distances between galaxies (millions of LY) dwarf those within galaxies (hundreds of thousands). Trek ships are vastly faster than Wars ships, by this measure alone.
Trek ships don’t go to other galaxies often, they specifically talk about it being incredibly slow to even go to tbe other side of our galaxy. That’s the whole premise of Voyager, they got stranded at the other end of the galaxy and it will take decades to get back. The exception of course being discovery with its spore drive. They have no issues leaving the galaxy, though they don’t do it often.
Huh. Memory Alpha confirms your outrageous claims. The Federation is only 8kly across‽ Absurd. That’s tiny! Why, one of the shortest Kettle Runs done was 12 parsecs - around 40ly - and that’s just a little trade route.
Warp speed and light speed are overrated. It’s all about rule of cool and Elite’s Witch Space has the coolest name.
Sound too. Especially when capital ships drop out.
god I wish I liked actually playing Elite Dangerous, because shit like this is so cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-OTVKg2xI0
The first time I saw a capital ship drop out of witch space into a conflict zone was something.
47 years later and I’m still not quite sure what “She can make point 5, past light speed.” means.
It’s dumb but it’s been retroactively taken to mean that it has a Class 0.5 hyperdrive, whereas a Star Destroyer has a Class 2. (Smaller class numbers are faster.) Light speed in Star Wars can be much faster than the speed of light.
But then, pretty much everything to do with specifications and numbers of Star Wars tech is a clusterfuck of technobabble that makes Voyager’s look coherent.
I don’t think you are meant to over think it
But see, that’s not something us techie nerds can do. We LIVE to overthink these things.
I always thought of it as 1.5 light speed
Which isn’t a practical speed for interstellar travel. It’s literally just over warp 1.
More practical would be to assume that there’s a k missing 1.5k (thousand) light speed is warp 9.975.
The cope for awhile was that it was 1.5x lightspeed while in hyperspace, which also distorted distances, so you got much, much faster travel speeds without messing with relativity.
Then they decided it was a multiplier applied to how long it took to travel a certain route, so lower was better.
I assumed that the SciFi show would adhere to the laws of Physics
