While war of stars isn’t exactly hard science fiction, space travel is a massive part of the franchise. war of stars is full of some of the coolest ship designs in sci-fi, from freighters to fighters too mighty warships. Fans love the massive battles between spaceships as it adds dimension to the movies, shows, comics, and books that fans don’t get often.
Even so, the rules of space travel are pretty much everywhere in the Star Wars universe. While science fiction like Star Trek has specific rules, Star Wars rarely exists and even then those rules can change depending on what the story calls for, especially in the current Disney Canon.
10 Fuel is an extremely inefficient way to power a spaceship, and any technologically advanced society shouldn’t need it
Much of the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story was a fuel robbery. While some suspect that part of it exists primarily to explain The Last Jedi’s slow chase and the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run at Galaxy’s Edge theme park, it doesn’t make any sense either. Fuel is an extremely inefficient means of propelling a spaceship, and any technologically advanced society shouldn’t need it.
Fusion-based power plants could use anything from water to free-floating hydrogen and other gases in space to power ships, so no special fuel would be required. Space travel on the Star Wars level would not be possible without fusion-based power plants. The amount of fuel the larger ships would need takes that down sometimes impractical vehicles from war of stars and make them even more impractical.
9 Hyperspace traces make little to no sense
Hyperspace travel is not easy and the galaxy far, far depends on hyperspace trails. These lanes represent safe corridors of space through which ships can travel without navigational hazards. However, the whole concept is kind of nonsensical.
Things that move in space stay moving forever. What is keeping the lanes away from debris? Is that even important? What makes it safe Do they shift and move over time? Space is not a city with multiple highways, but a moving four-dimensional construct through which all kinds of gases, energy phenomena and matter float. The safety and security of hyperspace trails is a mystery.
8th Hyperspace traces would make invasion nearly impossible
Star Wars is very dependent on the wars, battles that are associated with it powerful ships designed for battle as much as they do land battles. When ships mostly travel through hyperspace trails and there are only so many safe ones going in and out of star systems, how are defended systems ever attacked? Hyperspace trails seem like perfect chokes.
Basically, a defending force would only need to strongly defend the ends of the hyperspace trail of the systems protecting it, and hit ships when they exit hyperspace when they are least prepared to attack.
7th Navigation computers should be completely useless
Ships in Star Wars are equipped with navigation computers that allow them to draw hyperspace jumps, with smaller ships depending on astromech droids some of the smartest droids. Here’s the thing – how do navigation computers even work? In no case are they connected to a real-time network that is constantly updating the conditions of interstellar space – which would be impossible to construct given the vastness of space.
So what are they doing beyond the motion of stars and planets, which would be very well known for mapped systems, and how do they work? There are far too many variables that are unknown in real time for a computer to work.
6th Exactly how fast are ships out of hyperspace?
In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive is deactivated and it must switch between the Hoth system and the Bespin system without a hyperspace jump. How fast is it moving? Does the distant galaxy follow the rules of a relativistic universe, which means that time flows differently the closer you get to the speed of light?
How fast are you? Starfighter, one of the most common weapons of war in Star Wars? Are they so fast that they cause time dilation effects? How does physics affect space travel?
5 How do ships deal with navigational hazards?
Space is full of things, especially around planets that are full of gas, star ejection, asteroids, meteorites, and things like satellites and debris. How do ships deal with it? Sure, they have shields, but the number of knocks a ship would be exposed to in interplanetary space would deflate the shields quickly, and frankly, shields in Star Wars don’t seem to really protect from anything.
Also, dust and dirt would play hell with any kind of sensor system, clogging the physical sensor apparatus and constantly filling the touch screens with trillions of hits, with the computer working to figure out which are benign and which are a problem.
4th The Starkiller Base shouldn’t be able to hit constantly moving targets with such accuracy
Starkiller Base eats stars to refuel their main weapon, but that’s not the worst. The worst part is how the gun works in the first place. The explosions split up sometime after somehow fired, and then somehow again travel through hyperspace to their targets and hit them, even though they are constantly moving in multiple orbits and missing something in the way.
Even if you accept all of this, what about planets or stars that are on the path of the rays? How do you draw the ray path through hyperspace? How could humans see the rays hitting light years away?
3 Is hyperspace travel instantaneous or not?
The Sequel trilogy is full of inconsistencies, both internal and with the rest of the saga (maybe because of the way they were made.) One major inconsistency, however, is how hyperspace travel works in terms of run time. It seems to take time to get from point A to point B in the original trilogy, prequel trilogy, and TV shows, but not in the sequel trilogy.
Hyperspace travel is portrayed as instantaneous in the Sequel trilogy. This is a huge departure from just about any Star Wars medium, and one wonders why this is and how it works.
2 Why didn’t the first order just send ships in front of the last Jedi’s Resistance Fleet?
There are many things about The Last Jedi that have drawn criticism, but two of the biggest have to do with space travel. The first of these has to do with the slow chase between the First Order and the Resistance. The biggest question is why the First Order didn’t just send ships in front of the Resistance Fleet and pinch them up.
Is there a practical reason for this or was it just a decision made because Rian Johnson needed artificial tension? It was a moment that completely disrupted the immersion and made the First Order or Johnson look incompetent.
1 The holdo maneuver makes no sense as it is explained
The other great space maneuver that the audience broke in TLJ is the Holdo Maneuver, when Admiral Holdo used the Resistance’s flagship as a Hyperspace Aries. It’s a great looking scene, but it doesn’t make any sense at all. It is explained that it can work due to special shields, but what do shields have to do with anything in this case? It only rams one ship ahead of a hyperspace jump. The shields shouldn’t have anything to do with it.
The problem with this is why it has never been done. It would be cheap and effective to use hyperdrives and droids to control them on asteroids and kill fleets with them. Why send fighters to the Death Star when you could just ram it with a large enough ship or a series of asteroids in hyperspace? If the shields work, then who designed shields that would work a kamikaze maneuver? It seems to defeat the purpose of shields.
About the author
David Harth
(905 articles published)
David Harth has been reading comics for almost 30 years. He writes for multiple websites, makes killer pizza, goes to Disney World more than his budget allows, and has the cutest daughter in the world. He can prove it.
