A thought on hyperspeed: The original death star blew up Alderaan and then almost did the same to Yavin 4 at the end of the movie. Fortunately for all of those in the rebel’s base, our hero Luke Skywalker had been hitting womp-rats back home in his spare time and with a little help from the force and an old Jedi Master put paid to Moth Tarkin and his band of merry cronies by shooting a plasma shot into a small thermal exhaust port and blowing the thing up. Oh yeah – spoil alert (hey, it came out in 1977 so I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you’ve seen it already – if not, go and do it!).
But here’s where it all falls apart – If we assume that Yavin and Alderaan are even in galactic terms ‘right next door’ – say a few tens of light years apart, then clearly the Deathstar had to use hyperspace (much like the millennium falcon does) to travel at faster-than-light between the two systems. If not, the rebels would have had a few hundred years to make their escape waiting for the Deathstar to arrive!). How come the Empire did not just come out of hyperspace closer to Yavin 4 and blow it up straight away or even better – just use the Deathstar to blow up Yavin itself? Instead they slowly orbit their way around Yavin until the moon the rebels are on comes into view – wah? Either of those two suggestions would have put an end to the rebellion then and there. I guess if they had just used hyperdrive to travel another second or two and come out in full view of Yavin 4 and then blown it up immediately it would not have been a very interesting trilogy after that….
Thoughts? I’m sure I wont be the first one to raise the question. If anyone has a plausible reasoning please comment! Was Yavin itself too big to blow up? Did the gas giant’s magnetosphere interrupt the complex calculations required to go into hyperdrive making it impossible to exit closer to Yavin 4? I’m spit balling here….