Post
by evillejedi » 2017-12-03 12:33am
Sorry for the Brain dump,
TLDR; not much in the last 4000 years, probably a lot in the last 25K years
Considering that the 'modern' era of the universe is 25K years and some form of interstellar travel was available the entire time it is interesting to wonder exactly what significant leaps were made. Obvious more ancient civilizations (rakata, celetials, etc) had the technology well before this time and it is mentioned that species like the Duros may have independently developed the tech prior to the 25K timeframe.
There are a few factors to consider
1. speed of hyperdrive
hyperdrive speeds are dependent on the quality/cost of the equipment (military and specialized drives are faster than commercial shipping and civilian transport) and backup hyperdrives are very slow according to in universe sources, but fast enough to not worry about dying from old age. We have some references that state that older hyperdrives are inherently slower, potentially years between important systems, but by the KOTOR era, travelling anywhere in the known galaxy is implied to be less than a few days if the route is safe. The movie eras imply that most trips don't even take more than a day as people wear the same clothes and even in the longest cases a galaxy spanning trip to remote locations imply that hyperdrive speeds are in excess of 1000LY /hour (still takes a few days to go from one end of the galaxy to another, which is slower than some 'Hero' ships have demonstrated from the outer rim to the core, navigational hazards, gravity wells etc notwithstanding.
2. the safety margins in the hyperdrive systems (backups, cutoffs,etc)
Gravity wells of planets, stars, and any mass required that hyperdrives have a cutout mechanism to drop the ship into realspace. Interstellar dust, nebulas and other diffuse masses seem to have an impact on travel and are best avoided. Given the superluminal nature of hyperspace it has been theorized by Saxton that hyperdrives act more as regulators for uncontrolled acceleration rather than motivators to achieve a specific speed once a certain level of superluminal velocity is reached (see the destruction of the Questor as an example), Interaction with more mass causes more cascading acceleration. This may be why sharp gravity well gradients are used to control the cut off functionality, especially since this is how interdiction fields are intended to work.
Just as a quick assessment, a 1000LY/hr velocity is over 17,500 AU in one second, one millisecond is the time to jump from the sun to somewhere between Uranus and Saturn. 20 Microsecond is the timing needed to get within 5-6 diameters of a planet like earth.
SW jumps in open space are seemingly accurate to within a kilometer requiring nanosecond timing and velocity estimation to match.
Until TFA, it was understood that jumping into or out of a gravity well closer than a few planetary diameters was essentially suicide, but with the accuracy needed to drop into a battle in formation at under 1 KM the main limitation seems to be how much risk one wants to take on adjusting the cutoffs when there is a known hazard.
This is an area that also seems to be highly developed by the KOTOR era and has not seen a major improvement in 4000 years.
3. 'quality' of navigational charts for plotting 'routes'
This one gets contentious around here, but we do know that hyperdrives have limits, going through the Core is hard, going to the outer reaches of the galaxy is hard and going someplace you don't have a map for is dangerous. Hazards like supernovas, blackholes etc are explicitly mentioned in the difficulty of hyperspace navigation. We also have references that 5000 years before current era hyperspace exploration was still on going and a profitable but risky career. By the Clone wars, the Jedi were so presumptuous that if a planet wasn't in their databanks, it didn't exist. Major trade routes do exist and were the stimulus for regional empires during the old republic (Hydian way, Corellian Trade spine, etc) Secret routes do exist and military planners can exploit them
Somewhere in the last 5000 years things improved. (not withstanding the relatively asinine unknown regions of the galaxy that still seem to exist) this could be due to more rigorous patrolling, record keeping and dissemination the knowledge, or due to improvements in sensing, computation and sensitivity of the systems.
so what can this mean? or at least give us guidance on.? Navigation charts/navicomputers and knowledge of the hyperspace environment exist and some effort is needed to determine efficient and safe calculations between two end points. Jumping blindly is considered suicide in all eras. If we take the hyperdrive regulator concept and extend it to exploration, it is easy to see a situation where unprepared explorers have to greatly dial back the velocity they travel at to prevent encountering mass that may cause uncontrolled acceleration. Or conversely, occasionally revert to realspace to get an absolute fix due to variances in position caused by the variable velocity. Any quality improvements in sensing,safety and speed of operation greatly improve the exploration rate. Infrequently used paths may have changes in mass allocation that might make for invalid jumps or missed targets. IF it is a small deviation, it requires a microjump locally (within the accuracy of the ships capabilities to execute that maneuver) or an expenditure of fuel to move in real space if the time lost is minimal. There is also the possibility that the warping of space time around mass may lead to deviations in X,Y,Z coordinates if they are not accounted for. Systems with unstable orbits, changes in mass distribution due to dust movement may greatly impact the efficiency and potentially the safety of hyperspace routes.
In my head cannon two things occur to explain the 'unknown regions' and 'trade routes'
First, Unknown regions have been mapped, nothing was all that interesting (trillions of other minable rocks closer, no important civilizations or astronomical curiosities) and so the quality of the information was never brought up to 'commercial' levels. There are probably trillions living in the unknown regions, companies conduction business, but the level of galactic influence is non existent because nothing of note is there, great place to get away from it all, but bring your own support infrastructure. Areas like wild space are better mapped, but happen to have less galactic influence hence are great places for illicit activity, piracy and exploitation without consequences. In a nut shell, you probably have bunch of things in your attic , basement, cabinets, that you haven't used in years, but have no real good reason to figure out what they are. An ancient galactic civilization that has gone through many tumultuous wars and empires has plenty of spaces that just don't really matter (see Darth Plageius)
Second, Trade routes and most commercial hyperspace routes are the most energy efficient, least variable and most economically defined routes possible. We can put a boat anywhere in the ocean and go point to point, but it is easier to put commerce on routes that don't fight the current or introduce shoals or other hazards. Anyone with sufficient equipment, skill and money can go point to point. Some areas have more risk, the average person just dials in a planet on the map and lets the navicomputer do the work, commerce follows predefined routes to maximize profits.
4. Fuel and Efficiency
If is conceivable given the energy requirements of hyperdrives that the initial models were not only extremely inefficient, but may have consumed entire runs of fuel production for a single jump in the early days of the republic. However by the KOTOR era compact personal craft had hyperdrives. By the 'current' era anyone with means could have a hyperdrive equipped vessel and many independent contractors owned their own ships. The Star Wars Economic equivalent of a trucker owning their big rig or a moderately wealthy person having a private plane or a large boat. (Luke's comment in ANH that he could easily get a ship for the cost of transport and it was roughly 5x the cost of his souped up landspeed which they did not get market price for) Fuel is considered to be plentiful and there is limited notion that it is an extravagant expense, though it may be considerable. The KOTOR era offers limited hints that this same situation was roughly true. so once again, stagnation for over 4000 years
5. Use cases
In a commercial sense there are tradeoffs between fuel consumption and speed. Bulk materials don't need to be super fast as long as the supply is not interrupted, so in general efficiency and cost will be a dominant factor. Commerce wants the least amount of overhead to a product and supply chains can be designed to hide the commodity shipping duration from customers as long as there is economic stability and security.
Courier and transport ships would demand that the market bear the cost of fast travel, so there is a case that they would drive the development of faster hyperdrives, however given that the holonet is instantaneous essentially allowing any data transfer to happen in real time, there are limited items that require rapid transport and these would fall into elite and illicit categories, both of which may be large markets but do not have a significant drive on hyperspace development.
Bulk transport of Sentient beings would typically be slow, Cruise liners, refugee/colony ships only need to meet a minimum standard of transport time and are constrained by the market to pay for the transit, there will be tiers of quality with the vast majority being nearly unbearably long to be cheap. Rapid personal transport falls into the courier category and favors the important and the wealthy, but is again constrained to the resources of the organizations that engage in the activities.
In a military context we have the issue that an undefended system is essentially slag in hours if not minutes without a shield and defensive fleets and armament. A surprise attack over 10 LY is less than a minute so inter-system rivalries prior to the republic or during wars were probably insanely brutal to the general populace. If you are out of position there is not much you can do except hope to seek vengeance on the attacking fleet or supplement defenses. This does bring up interesting limitation on the usefulness of a attack like a BDZ, if the assumption is made that communications is near instantaneous for distress and mobilization times are less than a minute local forces to make emergency plans, An attakc ship like a ISD would have only a few minutes of unimpeded attack time to a target before ships within 100LY started arriving (going back to an ISD being able to do a BDZ in an hour, unless all communications was squashed, a sufficiently capable defender could prevent the attacker from executing the BDZ by drawing it off of its target to engage incoming forces. not to say the ISD couldn't make dozens of targets molten craters in the first few minutes though ) This means that tactically hyperdrive speed is much less important than pinpoint accuracy (not crashing into your own ships or the enemy or things in the theater, but still maintaining formation and gaining firing arc advantage as soon as possible)
Strategically hyperdrive speed is paramount as force positioning prior to an engagement or hostilities starting is critical. Similarly in force protection and posturing being in the right place at the right time may prevent the escalation of a conflict or eliminate it entirely. We know that ships like ISDs were constantly jumping between systems on multiple missions to handle multiple threats and operations and this all require the fastest hyperdrive that can be mounted on a frame without compromising other functions.
It seems like the military industrial complex would always be trying to one up one another on accuracy, down time and speed. However given that the major shipyards and technology companies are all colluding during the waning years of the republic there is no opposing faction (sith mainly) pushing for better performance, economic stagnation may have set in due to profiteering
In short it seems to me that at some point in the last 4000 years hyperdrive improvements became very marginal, potentially requiring great investment to become more precise or faster that only was spurred by major galactic events or initiatives.
