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Formless wrote:Hyperdrive speeds depend massively on who is writing at the time. Sometimes it takes a day to get from the outer rim to Coruscant, sometimes it takes weeks to do so. The movies don't help this, because on the one hand the prequels seem to give really fast times, on the other you have the Millenium Falcon's trip to Bespin which needed to have taken months to accommodate Luke's training under Yoda.

Actually its interesting to note that the fastest speeds in the movies are actually tied to the Falcon and to Jedi vehicles (at least the most *blatant* examples are, like Anakin in ROTS.) We never really see what we might call 'typical' hyperdrive speeds for your run of the mill civilian or other vehicles, nor are we explicitly given what tradeoffs and factors go into really fast travel (meaning we can invent all sorts of 'reasons')

I mean with the Falcon example Han boasts of how ludicriously fast compared to everyone else his ship is, but its also a notoriously unreliable piece of junk as well, so it could be he deliberately opted for raw speed over reliability. 'practical' hyperdrives in military or even civilian models could be much slower by comparison.


Edit: It also must be borne out that hyperdrive 'speeds' in Star Wars also depend on using the EU maps. Without those we don't really have much to go on that I recall (except for vague ideas of where places are.)

as an aside I would think that on the scale of things we could complain about as 'unrealistic' as far as Star Wars warfare goes, hyperdrive is not particularily high on my lists.

A slower speed for civilian and cargo transports makes sense also for obvious reasons. The only example from the films in regards to hyperdrive speeds that comes to mind right now comes from AOTC when Padme traveled with Anakin from Coruscant to Naboo. I don't recall the exact details though other than no specific timeframe for the trip was ever given.

Boeing 757 wrote:A slower speed for civilian and cargo transports makes sense also for obvious reasons. The only example from the films in regards to hyperdrive speeds that comes to mind right now comes from AOTC when Padme traveled with Anakin from Coruscant to Naboo. I don't recall the exact details though other than no specific timeframe for the trip was ever given.

There are.... several examples available.

For example, one of the larger number initially was from Darth Maul visit to Tatooine. A scale from the Guide actually gave a distance, which increased the speed estimate that was initially calced from Wong main page. Then someone else pointed out that if we used the scale, it gave an even LARGER distance...........

PainRack wrote:

Boeing 757 wrote:A slower speed for civilian and cargo transports makes sense also for obvious reasons. The only example from the films in regards to hyperdrive speeds that comes to mind right now comes from AOTC when Padme traveled with Anakin from Coruscant to Naboo. I don't recall the exact details though other than no specific timeframe for the trip was ever given.

There are.... several examples available.

For example, one of the larger number initially was from Darth Maul visit to Tatooine. A scale from the Guide actually gave a distance, which increased the speed estimate that was initially calced from Wong main page. Then someone else pointed out that if we used the scale, it gave an even LARGER distance...........

Oh yeah, I know there are. I should have been more specific. What we don't have are more examples of civilian hyperdrive speeds. I would throw Darth Maul's trip among exceptional/military taking into account the resources available to the Sith.

Formless wrote:The movies don't help this, because on the one hand the prequels seem to give really fast times, on the other you have the Millenium Falcon's trip to Bespin which needed to have taken months to accommodate Luke's training under Yoda.

Not necessarily. He may have gotten a little more of a crash course. ( Of course, it's commonly assumed that the Falcon made it to Bespin without any kind of hyperdrive, which effectively puts Hoth and Bespin super close to each other in the same system, so I think it's better to go with some variant of the "backup hyperdrive" idea, and that could always be slower. )
The hyperspace travel times are implied to be pretty fast in both trilogies; the Falcon gets from Tatooine to the vicinity of Alderaan in ANH in a matter of hours as opposed to days, and we also have Vader's "day long remembered" comment, while an officer's statement in TESB, even if admittedly hyperbolic in nature, also seems to indicate very fast hyperspace travel.

Having a backup hyperdrive with shoddy performance is likely the best explanation. Han distinctly said that Bespin is a separate system.

The old WEG galaxy guides mention Han did a combination of microjumps and sublight travel to reach Bespin as I recall - the Falcon had no 'official' backup hyperdrive per se because the falcon's systems tend to be a hodgepodge of systems slapdashed together. I think he had to run the calculations by hand because he managed to fuck up the navicomputer, too.