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| Propulsion Technologies | |
| Sublight Engines | |
| 21.0 | "'General Calrissian has a very fast
ship. Range to fighters?'
'One hundred thousand meters and opening quickly,' Taisden said. 'Someone on the Tobay forgot that TIEs have solar-electric ion boost engines. Not much out here for them to eat. They won't catch us.'" [ "Tyrant's Test" p.187 ] First of all it is obvious from this that 100,000 m (100 km) is not considered "caught" by the fighters - which means that their weapons range is less than 100 km. Second, the note on TIE engines is quite interesting and informing. |
| 21.1 | "A cloaked warship's own sensor beams would be as
useless as those of its enemies, leaving it to flail about totally
blind. Worse, if it were under power, the enemy could locate it
by simply tracking its drive emissions." [ "Dark
Force Rising", p. 48 ] SW engeneers have obviously not been able to solve this problem, unlike their ST counterparts. Of course the ones in ST have been working on this for around 100 years. |
| 21.2 | "'If this field keeps growing at the present rate,
it's going to blanket the entire Corellian star system.'
'The whole system?' Leia asked. 'That's impossible. No one could generate an interdiction field that big.' 'Except someone is, ma'am. And when that field reaches full strength, nothing is going to be able to get within a light-week of this star system in hyperspace.'" [ "Ambush at Corellia", p. 305 ] "He pointed through the viewscreen toward the still-distant point of light that was the star Corell, at least two months' travel away at sublight speeds." [ "Ambush at Corellia", p. 307 ] "Luke and Lando had discovered the interdiction field when the Lady Luck was abruptly decanted out of hyperspace on the outskirts of the Corellian system, far out enough that the journey in toward the planet of Corellia would take months at best. No one had ever managed to generate an interdiction field a hundredth, a thousandth, as large as the Corellian field." [ "Assault at Selonia", p. 20 ] " 'But with the interdiction field in place, you can't use hyperdrive in the Corellian planetary system,' Lando said. 'It could take months to travel from the edge of the field to the inner planets via normal space.'" [ "Assault at Selonia", p. 44 ] "The navicomputer told her the trip from the edge of the interdiction field to the planet Corellia would take her three long months at the Gentleman's best sublight speed, but Tendra half-expected she would not have anywhere near that long to wait." [ "Assault at Selonia", p. 181 ] "In theory, there was nothing preventing her from dropping out of hyperspace deliberately, here and now, and sailing toward Corellia in normal space. But suppose she was a billion kilometers off? That would add another week or ten days to her transit time, and after only a few days aboard the Gent, she was quite certain she did not want to extend the trip if she could help it." [ "Assault at Selonia", p. 195 ] It takes (most - including military) SW ships at least 2 months to travel only 1 lightweek on sublight drives. |
| 21.3 | " The skeletal Superior
General had chosen a small world on the outer fringe of the habitable band
from its sun, an arid place of rusty sands, barren rocks, and labyrinthine
canyons left over from ancient, long-dried floods." [ "Darksaber",
p. 136 (paperback p. 150) ] "An armored fast transport from the fortress hangars took Daala and Pellaeon, along with a contingent of their suspicious stormtrooper guards, away from the planet. Colonel Cronus himself piloted the armored transport, transmitting recognition signals into deep space. Leaving Daala's battleships behind, Cronus took them straight up out of the system, perpendicular to the ecliptic and toward the sparce commetary cloud. [ "Darksaber", p. 139 ] " 'I need to make a brief hyperspace hop,' Cronus said, 'to get us far enough to the edge of the system - unless you'd rather we spent weeks at full burn of our sublight engines?'" [ "Darksaber", p. 139 ] " 'Here we are, Admiral.' Colonel Cronus flicked the hyperspace controls that dropped them back into the normal universe. Blackness washed around them, and the distant sun appeared as a bright point at the center of the system." [ "Darksaber", p. 140 ] It would take weeks for a shuttle to get from the outer edte of the habitable zone to edge of the system. |
| 21.4 | "She rubbed her hands together, then reached out to
the right, rolling her fingers over the floating-ball control of the
inertial compensator. 'Strap in,' she ordered, and she dialed it down to
95 percent, as fighter pilots often did so that they could gain a tactile
feel to the movements of their ships." [ "Vector
Prime", p. 7 ] " 'Z-95 Headhunters,' Mara said derisively of the closing craft, an antiquated starfighter, and she flipped off the comm switch and looked back at Leia. 'Can't shoot what you can't catch,' she explained." [ "Vector Prime", p. 7 ] From the further descriptions of the battle it is apparent that the people in the ship felt accelerations no larger than about 3 g's, which means that the shuttle was capable of around 60 g's. Furthermore, since Mara fully expected to outrun the Headhunters, they obvious are capable of smaller accelerations. |
| FTL Engines | |
| 22.0 | "Wedge hit some keys on his datapad and the
holoprojector it had been linked to served up the image of a solar
system. At its heart lay a yellow star; seven planets orbited
it, three outside an asteroid ring that marked the halfway point between
the system's outer edges and the star at its hub.
'This is he Corvis Minor system. The third and fourth planets are inhabited. The third is a semi-arid world with temperate zones at the poles, and the fourth is a water-rich tropical world.'" " Wedge hit another button and the image shifted. The focus moved past the asteroid belt to the fifth planet. Then it zoomed in, revealing a gas giant with a half-dozen moons in orbit." "'Because of the gas giant, the various moons, and the asteroid belt, jumping into that area is going to be difficult. We have a limited number of entrance and exit vectors, and they will change, so we need to work up a variety of exit solutions.'" [ "X-Wing: Isard's Revenge" p.163 ] Even in this more or less simple system - definitely average - it would be very difficult to enter or exit it. |
| 22.1 | "'Tell me I'm wrong, but I don't think an Interdictor
could cross ninety-one light-years in four hours -- not on its best day.'
'You are correct,' Gant said, reaching out and collecting the recorder." [ "Tyrant's Test" p. 13 ] A pilot and a colonel of New Republic Intelligence comment on the speed of an Interdictor - apparently less than 22.75 LY/hr. |
| 22.2 | "At a guess, she had managed to travel all of a few
hundred thousand kilometers in hyperspace, and in something roughly like
the right direction. At an eyeball estimate she was on the
opposite side of the planet than she had started out from, and perhaps
twice as far away from it. She could just as easily have been
thrown completely out of the galaxy, or into the dark between the stars."
[ "Ambush
at Corellia", p. 59 ] Possible results of an uncontrolled hyperspace jump without precalculation. |
| 22.3 | "It took the Chimaera nearly five days at its
point four cruising speed to cover the three hundred fifty light-years
between Myrkr and Wayland." [ "Heir
to the Empire", p. 39 ] The cruising speed of an ISD is 0.4, which is equivalent to less than 2.9 light-years per hour. |
| 22.4 | "Conventional military wisdom frowned on this
business of picking a spot just outside the target system as a jumping-off
point - it was considered dangerously easy for one or more ships to get
lost on the way to such a rendezvous, and it was difficult to make an
accurate hyperspace jump over so short a distance." [ "Heir
to the Empire", p. 95 ] SW hyperdrives consider 2.9 light hours a very short distance, and it is quite hard for them to jump accurately over it. |
| 22.5 | " It wasn't
good. Luke's reverse-triggering of the acceleration compensator
had caused an unanticipated feedback surge into both hyperdrive motivators
- not enough to fry them on the spot, but scorching them badly enough to
cause sudden failure ten minutes into their escape. At the
Point Four the ship had been doing at the time, that translated into
approximately half a light-year of distance." [ "Heir
to the Empire", p. 187-188 ] From this we can see that at 0.4 SW hyperdrives achieve approximately 2.4 LY per hour. |
| Miscellaneous Information and Technologies | |
| 23.0 | " 'We have spent some
time developing a device called a hyperwave inertial momentum sustainer
or, as the technical staff insist on calling it, HIMS. I prefer
the term hyperwave sustainer. It uses a gravitic sensor that
provides a fast cutoff for a ship's normal hyperdrive, causing it to shut
off instantly before it can risk being damaged by the interdiction
field. It simultaneously activates a static hyperspace bubble,
produced by a hyperspace coil designed to burn up and blow out in
the presence of an interdiction field.
'The static hyperwave bubble cannot provide any thrust, of course, but it can hold the ship in hyperspace while the ship's forward momentum carries it along. The first blowout coil activates the second, the second activates the third, and so on. In effect, the ship flickers in and out of hyperspace, jumping into it and being thrown back out of it, over and over again, until its forward momentum carries it clear of the interdiction field, and the normal hyperdrive system comes back on-line.'" [ "Assault at Selonia", p. 169 ] A description of a device that can defeat a gravity well. |
| 23.1 | " 'It has a remarkably
fast start-up sequence,' Karrde remarked as Luke joined him in the
cockpit. 'Two minutes, maybe three, and we'll be ready to
fly.'" [ "Dark
Force Rising", p. 341-342 ] Three or four minutes is a remarkably fast start-up for a ship!??!?!? Do they have to warm up their boilers or something? |
By 'Elim Garak'
