Summary
- Hyperspace travel in Star Wars involves traveling faster than light in a different dimension.
- The Empire used gravity well generators to pull ships out of hyperspace and strand them, creating "road blocks" on major hyperspace lanes.
- While entering lightspeed in a planet's atmosphere should be impossible, exiting lightspeed in a planet's atmosphere is not out of the question.
Traveling through hyperspace has always been an essential aspect of the Star Wars universe. Without hyperspace, the various character in a galaxy far, far away would never be able to reach each other. According to Han Solo in A New Hope, “traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops.” Instead, it was a complicated and risky maneuver involving precise calculations. Much like a voyage at sea, any miscalculation or malfunction could cause the death of the passengers. However, recent Star Wars projects have taken hyperspace for granted, ultimately confusing the audience as to how hyperspace actually works.
While some aspects of hyperspace are confusing, the basic concept still remains the same throughout the franchise. Essentially, hyperspace involves traveling faster than light. So fast, in fact, that the ship or being enters a different dimension where both time and space act differently. Within the hyperspace dimension, a ship can travel great distances in impossibly short amounts of time. Nevertheless, even though hyperspace was a different dimension, the gravity of planets and other objects with mass could still affect ships traveling in hyperspace. And if one’s calculations or trajectory were incorrect, it could cause the traveler to sling straight into a planet or a star.
