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This question:

How do you go from Naboo to Tatooine without the hyperdrive?

seems to be making an assumption about the speed of travel for mainstream craft in the Star Wars universe without using hyperdrive.

What exactly is the maximum speed without hyperdrive in canon?

Is it possible to get arbitrarily close to the speed of light?

This should be in canon, and not using some loophole alternative to hyperdrive which is still FTL.

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ThePopMachine
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  • This isn't a fair question if you exclude the loophole alternatives, because you assume that FTL travel is impossible. –  Jan 07 '16 at 16:58
  • "In Star Wars, what is the maximum speed achievable with just sublight engines" – Valorum Jan 07 '16 at 17:09
  • @Richard I'd have to guess sublight speeds. :D –  Jan 07 '16 at 17:12
  • @CBredlow - See the linked question and answer set. The hyperdrive was damaged, not destroyed. – Valorum Jan 07 '16 at 17:53
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    @Richard: It doesn't matter to this question. I'm just giving the context of why I'm asking the question. It doesn't matter if the premise of the linked question was wrong. – ThePopMachine Jan 07 '16 at 17:55
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    I think we can definitively state that the majority of small craft can do, at most, 12 parsecs per Kessel – Yorik Jan 07 '16 at 18:08
  • @Yorik Egads! That's less than 14 parsecs! That ship's... uh... well-planned? –  Jan 07 '16 at 18:10
  • @Yorik - But how many miliparsecs are there in a point of lightspeed? – Valorum Jan 07 '16 at 18:37
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    Time and distance in SW universe are completely inconsistent, it's all set up in a fairytale-like fashion, to avoid all the waiting. Basically, you can get everywhere before the audience gets bored. Also, communication transmission appears to be instantaneous. – orion Jan 07 '16 at 20:55
  • The last issue of Chewbacca has a line "with the main hyperdrive offline, we're weeks from the nearest imperial base". – ibid Jan 08 '16 at 02:39

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Legends: Just short of the speed of light

From The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia (2008):

Travel between star systems was made possible by moving through this alternate universe—not all that different from realspace—in which superluminal velocities were easily reached. In ancient times, this had been thought impossible, since the legendary Drall scientist Tiran had proven conclusively 35 millennia before the Galactic Civil War that time and space were inseparable, and that the speed of light was an absolute boundary that could not be crossed. But Tiran's Theory of Universal Reference did not prohibit anything moving faster than light; it only disallowed traveling at the speed of light. If the "lightspeed barrier" could somehow be bypassed, one could theoretically shift easily from realspace to hyperspace and back.

(Source: The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia (2008), Vol II (H-O), page 70, entry "hyperspace")

The entry goes on to explain that the hyperdrive was what first allowed this theoretical speed limit to be exceeded.

Milo P
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