site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It suggests at least the possibility of randomly hitting solid (plasma) objects.

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.