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Notes -
"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations we might fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
This is admittedly George Lucas dialogue, but from the first, 1977 film. It suggests at least the possibility of randomly hitting solid (plasma) objects. If this is true or possible, the Holdo ship ramming thing has to be possible.
Now, as to why this kamikaze or automated hyperspace trick isn't used regularly, no idea. I'm sure there are EU authors somewhere scrambling to find a rationale. I could probably think carefully and come up with a few myself if I had the motivation, which I do not (not out of any dismissal of your question).
There are a lot of random issues even in the original trilogy. Tie bombers going over the asteroid field. A space slug with, inexplicably, a mouth full of incisors. The boats on a wave phenomenon of spacecraft floating upright in the same angle. To say nothing of sound. I suspend disbelief, as the saying goes, willfully. Until I don't.
I can think of a lot of potential narrative fixes that could work, if they'd been integrated properly into the movie we all saw. Like, they're in a super-weird region of space with anomalous hyperspace physics; they didn't want to go in there in the first place as the localized threat of hyperspace collisions makes it near-suicidal, but they had no other options and the imperials are arrogant enough to follow them in. Or the super-cap imperial ship has some sort of experimental, super-powerful hyperspace jammer and hyperspace ramming is a unanticipated side effect, or when they infiltrate the supercap they tweak its hyperdrive to create a resonant frequency with the cruiser, allowing an otherwise impossibly-precise ram jump to be programmed, etc, etc... But the common thread of all these is that they establish an explanation for why this is going to be a one-time thing, because it really, absolutely has to be a one-time thing or else all space combat in the setting breaks forever.
The problem is that the movie that we actually got does none of these, nor does it really leave room for anything like them in the story as delivered. I like to think I'm something of a storyteller myself, and technobabble is a thing I've done before. I don't think the issues raised by the holdo manuever can actually be technobabbled.
Authors can make that suspension easier or harder, though, based on what they write and how they write it, and this is a big part of the difference people perceive between good and bad writing. There's a degree to which "I suspend my disbelief willfully, until I don't" is a fully general answer to any complaint about any element of any story, no matter how incongruous or poorly thought out.
Give me a scene where the whole focus is on the tragic death of one of the main characters, and then two scenes later they're suddenly alive again and the story carries on as though nothing happened, and this is never explained or addressed again. Maybe this is some super-subtle 3d-chess thing where the death is supposed to be read as metaphorical, or maybe the author is intending this as a demonstration that something else is going on behind the scenes; maybe the world is actually a simulation. Funny Games did something like this by injecting blatantly incongruous, nakedly-unjustified cartoon logic to abruptly reverse a pivotal character death, very clearly on-purpose and with an obvious narrative intention. The problem with the holdo manuever is that it's very nearly as disruptive to the story and setting as a character literally re-winding another character's death with a VCR remote, and the disruption is never addressed; there's no evidence the authors even understood why it would be disruptive. To the extent that "bad writing" is a meaningful category, this is about as central an example as I've ever seen of bad writing. It makes suspension of disbelief hard enough that there doesn't seem to be a point in trying; if I'm going to have to rewrite the whole story in my head anyway, I might as well do that from the start and just write my own from scratch.
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Not necessarily. Stars and supernovae (which contain neutron stars) both have strong gravity wells. There is an RL theory out there that the reason gravity's so weak is that it leaks into hyperspace (as in, literally, 4th+ spatial dimensions), and that dark matter is normal matter out in other membranes whose gravity is leaking into our membrane through hyperspace.
I don't have my copy of the original Star Wars novel to hand, but I seem to remember "black hole" being used in this line.
Not to geek out, but this is the passage from the book:
“Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy. Ever tried calculating a hyperspace jump?” Luke had to shake his head. “It’s no mean trick. Be nice if we rushed it and passed right through a star or some other friendly spatial phenom like a black hole. That would end our trip real quick."
So the book was ghost written by Alan Dean Foster from the story by Lucas. I assume the only reason "star" and "black hole" are used here are because they're things in space, and "there's a lot of space out in space" (thanks, writers of Wall-E.)
Anyway as I say this point can be discussed at length and I am sure on reddit and other places it has been, but my point is it always made sense to me based on my viewings of the films and having read the book.
I am also sure that it never crossed Lucas' mind to have ships doing hyperspace kamikaze jumps, and that this decision by Rian Johnson or whoever wasn't great. But it wasn't a dealbreaker for me.
Quotes like that exist pretty early on but it's easy to interpret them as "shit IDK they need to avoid a gravity well of large objects?" instead of "constant direct interaction with objects in real space is a thing."
But once you have use the technique you need to explain why you aren't using it all the time. Was Holdo the first one to think it up? Did they have to override some navigation settings? Are shields somehow just that powerful so it doesn't make sense most of the time? All of these explanations are bad and the fundamental problem of the original trilogy is under resourced group needs to blow up something big......which is easy to do this way.
They didn't even put it in a line with a bad explanation they just didn't think at all.
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