How does Hyperspace work?

[garhkal]

[CRMcNeill]

[CRMcNeill]

[CRMcNeill]

[Bren]

[Whill]

[CRMcNeill]

[Bren]

[CRMcNeill]

[garhkal]

[Bren]

[vanir]

George Lucas stated the order of canon as I recall, when asked directly about the time of the Timothy Zahn novels. It was, "Myself, then the movies, then EU." I got writers guidelines from LucasArts about then, which were about two pages deep about what you can and can't touch. Those have changed frequently however, except the policies about whom they will let publish fan material commercially.

As for Hyperspace in Star Wars, technically it's just relativistic normal travel. People don't understand application of lorentz contractions for relativistic factors though, so don't realise you can actually follow current physics and run around like you do in Star Wars. It's just that it would be prohibitively expensive and difficult, but the physics are mundane.

What the "hyperdrive motivator" generally deals with in this hypothesis is relativistic mass and time dilation among the galaxy at large, that's the wow factor.

See here's the whole game, lengths contract in the direction of travel. At a relativistic factor of 2, which is something like 0.86c it takes half the time for me to travel 1LY. Go faster it takes even less time. From my perspective, since it takes me less than a year to make 1LY distance, I'm already well exceeding the speed of light and doing it using regular everyday physics in normal realspace travel, just moving very very quickly.
This was proved by the muon experiment. Normal travel has you going as fast as you want to, there is no speed limit to the galaxy.

...except for relativity. See the reference frame for my originating point, from which the distance is originally measured and navigated, well for that place it ages as if I were doing 0.86c without a relativistic length contraction.
So from that point of view time dilated, lengths didn't contract. I got to my 1LY destination more than a year later, but had aged far less than a year.

So Star Wars doesn't fluff the travel part or the SFX on the screen for doing it either. What it fluffs is the fact that every individual sector of space functions within its own frame of reference, time travels at varying rates throughout the universe. Time is not a constant, that's why relativity makes c the galactic constant. It's really just syntax, quite misleading at that.

Interstellar travel is no problem for physics. Still having an existing universe around you when you arrive at a distant destination however...that is something physics definitely has a problem with.

This is handled within a fictional piece of scifi canon: passage of Time is a galactic constant, not c in scifi physics. Almost all scifi physics.




- actually and I vaguely recall GL retracted his canon for the Falcon doing "point 5 past lightspeed" in an interview.
Doesn't matter though, I'm sure we could creatively incorporate it anyway.
Oh and Star Trek uses subspace, which is from the Brane theory crowd, not recognised in current application of physics. In that negative values in lorentz application represent an alternate dimension of travel (where time flows backwards or some such). You would still have relativistic issues approaching those speeds however, which they fluff by "transmitting craft directly into subspace from normal (non relativistic) speeds in realspace." Or something along those lines.

[Whill]

Armchair cosmologist here. Sorry vanir, nothing personal, but not all of that is correct and most of that is irrelevant to travel through Hyperspace in Star Wars. I don’t want to get into a big debate on physics, but I’ll say a couple things. Special Relativity is self-consistent and switching between frames of reference requires an adjustment in the definition of the present. It is true that everything in the galaxy is always is in motion, but the relativistic effects of moving through space much less than the speed of light are negligible, so the only thing that really matters to the observation of time dilation in a galactic civilization is ships moving at “relativistic” speeds (near but not exceeding the speed of light), relative to all the planets (that aren’t).

Hyperspace exists to violate the laws of real space physics, as relevant to the planets’ frame of reference. It takes light thousands of years to travel from Tatooine to Alderaan. But the Falcon makes it from Tatooine to the Alderaan system is much less time. From the Alderaan frame of reference, the Falcon travelled much faster than the speed of light (FTL) from Tatooine. Hyperspace is an alternate dimension of existence in which the speed of light can be exceeded relative to the planets in real space. The equation for calculating time dilation of FTL travelers with respect to the planets' frames of reference (even bringing in unnecessary minutia such as length contraction as you did) yields imaginary numbers and thus do not directly apply to FTL travel. Hyperspace travel was hand-waived into existence by the SW Creator because it was necessary to do so. The physics of normal real world travel through real space cannot possibly explain what we see in the films.

And regarding the concern of time dilation, it is obvious from the films that the passage of time in the frame of reference of the passengers on a ship travelling through hyperspace is intended to be approximately the same as it is to those in the frame of reference of the planets they are travelling from and to. So special relativity doesn’t really factor that much into interstellar travel as shown in Star Wars. And Holonet transmissions allow for live communication with someone across the galaxy, which means the messages move at speeds even much faster than ships in Hyperspace. And Holonet transmissions can exist between planets and hyperspace ships or between two ships moving independently through Hyperspace at different speeds in different directions. All planets all over the galaxy are virtually the same frame of reference to Holonet messages and ships moving through Hyperspace. This is typical of Space Opera.

Since the origin and destination systems are technically not in the exact same frame of reference for the passage of time, I can also just hand-wave a quality of Hyperspace that states that the frame of reference of the ship is the average of the start and end points. And when that Holonet transmission comes in from somewhere else, then there is possibly a 3rd frame of reference is factored into the average. But my point above was, the differences in frame of reference of time passage between any two points in space is so small on a relativistic scale that they’re negligible, so if you average 2 or 3 things that are virtually the same then your result is virtually the same as each thing.

However, there is a time when special relativity may come into play in SW: The acceleration to FTL speeds from non-relativistic speeds (the “jump” to hyperspace), and the deceleration from FTL to non-relativistic speeds when dropping out of hyperspace. If there were too much acceleration to or deceleration from FTL speeds in real space, then time dilation would stack up over time and frequent hyperspace travelers would noticeably age more slowly than everyone else. The EU does actually address this with the existence of “relativistic shielding” that inexplicably prevents time dilation, forcing the passengers on the ships jumping to and from hyperspace to experience time in the same general frame of reference as everyone else in the galaxy. Major hand-wavism there.

I choose a simpler explanation. If you are already going to accept the fantastic existence of Hyperspace and hyperdrives anyway, then to me it seems more reasonable to assign another fantastic quality to Hyperspace than to invent yet another implausible technology. In my SWU, the “jump” to hyperspace occurs before the ship actually accelerates to relativistic speeds in real space, and likewise, the jump from hyperspace occurs after the ship decelerates to non-relativistic speeds. Not only does Hyperspace allow FTL speeds, it also “suppresses” time dilation for relativistic speeds when accelerating to and decelerating from FTL (for the split-second you are accelerating or decelerating). This attribute would be consistent with there being no discernable time dilation while travelling FTL through Hyperspace. This also solves the exponentially increasing energy requirements needed to accelerate ships to relativistic speeds in real space. (The elongation of stars that is seen when about to jump is merely a visual effect that is a byproduct of these two dimensions connecting, but the actual acceleration and deceleration through relativistic speeds both occur within Hyperspace, for me).

This goes along with my theory of hyperspace that the “natural” state of objects in hyperspace is FTL with respect to planets in real space. You can be in Hyperspace for brief nanoseconds of time travelling relativistic speeds, but Hyperspace naturally “wants” to quickly accelerate anything that just entered it through “relativistic speeds” to FTL. Exactly how much FTL depends on the hyperdrive, the astrogation for plotting the jump, and the speed of the plot. Perhaps disengaging the hyperdrive motivator allows some element of “drag” from real space to influence the ship to pull it down to below the speed of light, which then naturally decelerates it through relativistic speeds on its way to “spitting you out” back into real space at the same momentum you had when you jumped into Hyperspace (with negligible time dilation).

And as a side note, I’ve noticed that the term “lightspeed” is misleading to some fans. It is not actually the speed of light because even that speed is still way too slow for the immense scale of distances travelled in Star Wars. So lightspeed by definition means FTL. In my SWU, the term lightspeed was derived from the original phrase “faster-than-light speed” to make the term lightspeed make more sense to me.
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[Bren]

[vanir]

Hey no offence taken Whill, I already stated pre-emptively,