StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I was wondering about the speed at which ships in the Star Wars universe accelerate at in hyperspace. I happened to be re-reading Zahn's "Dark Force Rising" and came across his speed reference for a Victory-class Star Destroyer. It seems that Zahn based thed Star Wars Universe hyperspace speeds off of a 0.0 system. The hyperdrive classification system is based off of 0.0+ for ships. The closer a ship's hyperdrive rating is to 0.0 then the slower the hyperdrive. The adverse of which, the closer a ship's hyperdrive rating is to 1.0 then the faster that ship is. Based off evidence from Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy we know that a Victory Star Destroyer has a normal flank speed of .45 ("Point Four Five) and that its captain pushed the engines to their maximum, reaching as high as a .5 speed. According to Zahn's character, that .5 speed put the Victory Star Destroyer moving at 127 light years per hour. From that we can extrapolate the speed ratings.

Your thoughts?

First off I tend not to read too much into hyperdrive ratings, since those things have seemed ot change depending on how a person, source, whatever tends to interpret them, and its gone lots of different ways in the past.

Secondly the differences in hyperdrive speed have been noted (including the HTTE/DFR ones you mention) on the main site under the Technology section under Hyperdrive. As Mike noted, hyperdrive 'speed (and the time it takes to cross different distances) is highly variable due to a number of factors.

This is quite reasonable. The Hyperdrive is the thing pushing the ship, but it evidently it does so against varying resistances that can influence hyperdrive speed (in addition to having to plot around or navigate by realspace hazards and anomalies, having to plot the courses, etc.) We know that hyperdrives can reach *potentially* very high speeds - tens of thousands of light years in a matter of hours - but that is not neccesarily the routine speed every single vessel with a hyperdrive in SW can achieve.