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In the Star Wars franchise, they can travel through hyperspace to other systems and planets. But Han in Star Wars: A New Hope said they needed to make the jump to lightspeed. And there have been several other instances where a similar phrase was used and they would say "...jump to lightspeed" or "...make it to lightspeed"

Now, this doesn't make sense as they are obviously traveling to locations multiple light-years away. And if they want to make it to their destination in less than 50 or so years, they have to be going faster than the speed of light. I mean, the Millennium Falcon is even said to be able to go ".5 past light speed" according to Han.

I am aware that they don't always say "lightspeed" but sometimes are known to have said "... jump to hyperspace" but why do they say "lightspeed" at all?

I am looking for specific examples of the term "lightspeed" being explained. And why it is said.

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Firestryke
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    Lightspeed does not mean the single speed of light. It means faster than the speed of light. – Paulie_D Aug 09 '21 at 18:03
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    That makes no sense – Firestryke Aug 09 '21 at 18:04
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    Every day people use hyperbolic language to describe speed - I’d say it’s less common to be literal when talking about speed. – Todd Wilcox Aug 10 '21 at 04:55
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    Because Stars Wars is fantasy with spaceships, not science fiction. Might as well ask why their spaceships can bank and explosions go boom, despite the fact that they're in space. And don't forget the infamous "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs". – jamesqf Aug 10 '21 at 05:20
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    The idea of having a ship that can either reach or exceed that speed is so contrary to everything we know about physics that we're happy to lump "at the speed of light" and "faster than the speed of light" into one concept called "lightspeed", because both seem equally fantastical, and presumably rely on some magical-to-us, hitherto-undiscovered thing that enables them. – Paul D. Waite Aug 10 '21 at 12:19
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    There is a perfectly good out-of-universe explanation for this. According to special relativity, if you can travel at 1.0001 times the speed of light, then that's actually equivalent, in another appropriately chosen frame of reference, to traveling at any finite speed, at infinite speed, or backward in time. –  Aug 10 '21 at 20:23
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    If that's not fast enough, there's always ludicrous speed... – Machavity Aug 11 '21 at 12:00
  • Before you can go faster than the speed of light, you have to get to the speed of light. And really, that's the hard part. – Reinstate Monica -- notmaynard Aug 11 '21 at 14:57
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    @jamesqf I much prefer the original intention of Han being a grifter who is spouting meaningless jargon to impress potential money sources. Similar, I prefer the original intention that Stormtroopers were deliberately missing in the first movie, rather than being hopelessly inept with their weapons. – Michael Richardson Aug 11 '21 at 15:03
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    Could it simply have been common terminology that slipped into common speech? If you are constantly using MACH as a speed reference, even if it's 0.5-0.9 MACH, you might talk about your MACH speed airplane, even if it doesn't (quite) go over the speed of sound. – computercarguy Aug 11 '21 at 20:41
  • @Michael Richardson: Yes, self-delusion is always popular :-) It would be a supportable argument IF there weren't all those other instances of ignorance of basic science. – jamesqf Aug 12 '21 at 16:57
  • @Reinstate Monica -- notmaynard: No, the real trick is in going faster than the speed of light without ever actually passing it :-) Which is sort of possible in some theories. See for instance tachyons. – jamesqf Aug 12 '21 at 17:00
  • How are making the jump to lightspeed and traveling through hyperspace contradictory? – Robbie Goodwin Aug 12 '21 at 23:29
  • @RobbieGoodwin because in hyperspace you have to be covering distance faster than light – Firestryke Aug 13 '21 at 14:51
  • @Firestryke Thanks and still, why d'you find "jumping to lightspeed" interesting, let alone a problem?

    You ignored the Question of how jumping to lightspeed and hyperspace travel are contradictory. Do you care, or not?

    When "they are obviously traveling to locations multiple light-years away" how does that not make sense?

    How is it a problem that to reach a destination in less than years means going faster than light, Millennium Falcon or none?

    How do similar phrases matter?

    Did your ship reach lightspeed, or not?

     – Robbie Goodwin Aug 22 '21 at 01:21

2 Answers2

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In the Star Wars universe, the term 'lightspeed' doesn't literally mean "traveling at the speed of light" (something that's actually scientifically impossible), it's simply shorthand for crossing something called the 'lightspeed barrier', a theoretical top speed for travel in realspace, into hyperspace.

But Tiran’s Theory of Universal Reference did not prohibit anything traveling 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.

Star Wars: Medstar I

Elsewhere in the EU it's been referred to as "The Big-L" and the "L-Barrier"

Big L: The lightspeed barrier, as in, “Once we jump the Big L...”

Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (2nd Edition)

Valorum
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    I’d often wondered if it was a moniker for going to hyperspace too. Kind of like today we say we are going to “jump on the freeway”. The freeway is another name for the highway and vice versa. “Need to jump to light speed” is just another moniker for going to hyperspace to get around the SW galaxy. – MissouriSpartan Aug 10 '21 at 03:48
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    "Elsewhere in the EU it's been referred to as "The Big-L" and the "L-Barrier" There is an official European Directive about that, if I could just find it. – David Tonhofer Aug 10 '21 at 09:37
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    @MissouriSpartan Alternatively, I’d always seen it as a kind of analogue to the use of the term ‘supersonic’ in the real world aerospace industry. The intricacies involved in safely transitioning from subsonic to supersonic speeds (physics gets rather strange between about Mach 0.8 and Mach 1.2) actually kind of mirror the implied complexities of jumping to hyperspace. – Austin Hemmelgarn Aug 10 '21 at 11:48
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    @AustinHemmelgarn: which I think illustrates why "lightspeed" feels like a decent term for travelling faster than light. If my vague understanding is correct, it's not like, physics-wise, you're fine up to about 80% of the speed of light, and then things get iffy — it takes a really, really large amount of energy to get anywhere near it, and going beyond it is, as far as we know, impossible. So to travel even near the speed of light probably involves figuring out a workaround to physics, including the speed limit. – Paul D. Waite Aug 10 '21 at 12:31
  • Note that in Star Wars the speed of light seems higher then the real world. The Falcon made the travel from the outskirts of Hoth to the Bespin System in weeks, despite no working Hyperdrive (the West End RPG explained it with ships having much slower emergency hyperdrives). The Mandalorian did something similar. And Han could watch Starkiller Base destroy planets in another System live. Nevermind the shoots themself travelling through realspace in the first place. – Christopher Aug 11 '21 at 10:46
  • @Christopher - It would appear that ships in the Star Wars universe can exceed lightspeed without entering hyperspace while simultaneously having a top speed that's in the region of hundreds.of MPH – Valorum Aug 11 '21 at 13:12
  • Who says in Star Wars, 'lightspeed' doesn't literally mean "traveling at the speed of light"?

    What else might crossing the 'lightspeed barrier' into hyperspace mean?

    When Tiran’s Theory of Universal Reference only disallowed traveling at the speed of light and did not prohibit anything traveling faster, what's your difference?

    Is the idea that if the “lightspeed barrier” could be passed, one could shift easily to hyperspace the only point here, or what?

    If you aim to make a distinction between passing the “lightspeed barrier” and "entering hyperspace" why not do that?

     – Robbie Goodwin Aug 22 '21 at 20:17
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Star Wars was released in 1977. Movies and TV from that era didn't lean towards scientific accuracy, as sci-fi wasn't a big thing back then.

The TIE Fighters make their distinctive engine screech... in the vacuum of space.

In The Empire Strikes Back, when the Falcon lands in the "Asteroid Cave", the protagonists walk about with no gravity issue and no pressure suits. For this to happen the Exogorth they were actually in would have to be a sealed environment, and produce its own gravity or the asteroid would have to be roughly the size of... well, a planet, to allow them to walk around normally.

Early sci-fi films don't stand up to modern scientific scrutiny. Although to please the community there have been attempts to describe or retcon various things to try and make it fit our science, rather than hand wave it away as "Movie Science".

As a side note of annoyance, even the Star Wars movies of modern age seem to do things that don't work scientifically:

  • Specifically the scene in The Last Jedi in which the First Order are chasing the Resistance ships in space stands out. Their main cannons seem to firing in an arc... like artillery on a planet where gravity applies... which is of no consequence in space.
  • And when some of the small ships "run out of fuel" they appear to stop moving... disregarding the concept of inertia.
DavidW
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    The lack of inertia could be (retro-)explained by the possibility that they were using subluminal warp engines, rather than classical Newtonian ones. The upside would be you can achieve very high apparent acceleration without turning your crew into pink mist every time. The downside is you have to spend continuous power to maintain velocity - plus you still need conventional engines to negate the relative motion of your starting point and your destination, but those can fire the entire journey and don't have to be particularly powerful. – John Dvorak Aug 10 '21 at 12:48
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    @JohnDvorak - Ships in the Star Wars universe travel through a mystical substance called ether. It explains how noises transmit and why ships have a top sublight speed – Valorum Aug 10 '21 at 16:05
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    Also the main character can lift a ship with his mind... – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Aug 10 '21 at 19:43
  • They are inside a giant space slug, so it might actually be pressurized (though unlikely). – Mark Rogers Aug 11 '21 at 01:22
  • "which is of no consequence in space" - well, not exactly. If you fire a canon in low Earth orbit the projectile will still follow a curved path. Same is true for any gravity well. It wouldn't look anything like TLJ though, unless maybe they were in low orbit around a black hole or something, or firing really slow projectiles. – Corey Aug 11 '21 at 04:41
  • @Valorum do you have a link or source for the Ether? I'm interested in reading more about it. If that's that case the the Last Jedi isn't ignoring physics, rather sticking to some obscure (or at least not widely known) lore. That's something I can get behind. – Matt Bartlett Aug 11 '21 at 11:05
  • @MattBartlett - https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/252482/20774 – Valorum Aug 11 '21 at 12:37
  • The comment from PH would every much put this in the Hand-Waving "Its movie science" category, rather than any real attempt of a in-universe explanation. *** PH - Only if you ⋆really⋆ need to, though. Like if it helps you sleep at night and whatnot. *** Its a straight-up "Stop thinking about it too hard". – Matt Bartlett Aug 18 '21 at 16:09
  • @Corey I used the wrong wording of "no consequence", as this vid will show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M I was more trying state that gravity in the open areas of space (where the scene is set) will have no effect on the relatively short (relative to the size of space) firing distances they were showing. – Matt Bartlett Aug 18 '21 at 16:15
  • The ships in the chase are all constantly firing their engines, so are constantly accelerating. When the small ships run out of fuel, they stop accelerating, so from the viewpoint of the remaining ships, fall behind. – Pete Kirkham Jun 02 '22 at 15:03
  • @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft Also the main character can lift a ship with his mind... Ya, but that was real. – End Anti-Semitic Hate Jan 24 '24 at 06:33