StarDestroyer.Net BBS

It was pointed out in a recent thread that SW Hyperdrive courses are NOT straightline only flights (GK's "portal" fanfic).

I myself thought it was straightline, or at least the ship follows a geodesic of spacetime.

What canon source material specifically states or implies maneuvers in hyperspace?

this thing won't stop saying it has new posts, I'm hoping posting in it will fix that.

On-topic: I remember something in one of the X-Wing novels about this... I will dig up quote later, maybe.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:That's still an example of traveling in a straight line, YT. Dropping from FTL to STL closer to a gravity well isn't that remarkable...

Capt.: Yes, they do.

Still a straight line, but he changed the exit-point coordinates. In flight. Another thing GK said was impossible.

Course corrections were shown in Dark Empire.

Hyperlanes are not straight.

Not canon, but official:
In Ann C. Crispin's Han Solo trilogy when Han enlisted with the Empire nonlinear hyperpace navigation was one of the areas of study that he needed instruction in. That would imply that it is possible to fly both in straight lines and not in straight lines.

In A New Hope, Han Solo was busy evading Imperial pursuit following the escape from Tatooine, even quite a while after they had entered hyperspace. I assume that means he wasn't just going in a straight line.

Would those examples typically be the exception, rather than the rule, though? On average, don't most ships, because of safety factor or whatnaught, drop out, reorient, and go off again?

That doesn't explain anything other than you can't "manuver" in hyperspace.

You need to turn it off and replot if you have a major direction change.

Hyperlanes are adventageous because they are enormous gravity-well clean strips of space where a ship can cruise on hyperdrive to get from point a to b without stopping a lot for course corrections.

In ¨The Courtship of Princess Leia¨ Luke and Isolder almost beat Han and Leia to Dathomir because Han took a long, circuitous route to avoid hazards and Luke plotted a much shorter course with the force.

If it was just a straight line then what's the nav computer for? I seem to remember reading some Star Wars Encyclopedia specifically stating that the Nav computer manuevers the ship through hyperspace because no human can react fast enough.

In ANH, Han spends several seconds under heavy fire from some ISD's getting co-ordinates from a his navigation computer to plot his hyperspace course. From this, you can extrapolate that in any given hyperspace journeys, there are a number of possible trajectories between beginning and end, not all of them safe...

We could go through a black hole or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?

A hyperspace course could possibly be a hyperbolic or a parabolic curve, or even include several different curves.

Han's comment about 'losing' the ISDs implies that it is possible to take a 'spoof' initial trajectory into hyperspace that misleads your pursuers about your actual heading. There is no indication in ANH that the 'Falcon' dropped down to sublight again to re-align and set off for Alderaan exept if you pre-assume that hyperspace trajectories are straight lines. Of course, the same part of the movie only implies curved trajectories if you pre-assume that such a thing is possible. Obviously, Han's boasting isn't much help.

I'll stick to my initial argument: The fact that Han had to plot a course to Alderaan indicates that hyperspace trajectories can be curved.

I also find it interesting that when you see a ship (seen especially well in the MF) engage the hyperdrive, that it isn't going in a striaght line prior to entrance but is flying a slight curve.

In TESB, it is very more extreme:
They (the MF) try to engage the hyperdrive (above Cloud City), but it was disabled. They are flying a slight curve while doing this.
They keep on flying a bit until R2D2 activates the Hyperdrive again.
They immediately jump to hyperspace - without orienting at first.

It could be that they simply microjumped (could be an explanation for this one case) - but that doesn't explain away why they were flying a curve when engaging the hyperdrive during normal situations (since AFAIK the level activates the Hyperdrive even a slight change in engagement time would drastically change the course the MF is flying).

I agree, apparently the plotted hyperspace course is somewhat independant from the entry orientation. The computer already had plotted a course, as soon as R2 engaged the hyperdrive, the ship jumped and then steered to its intended course.

If they can flyroutes other than a straight line what was the point of rouge squadron making several mini jumps to hide its starting location. I belive this was in the first book and they made several samller jumps realigning to a new vector each time. If they didnt have to fly a straight rought why wouldnt they have just plotted a circuitous route and stayed in hyperspace.

Hasler wrote:If they can flyroutes other than a straight line what was the point of rouge squadron making several mini jumps to hide its starting location. I belive this was in the first book and they made several samller jumps realigning to a new vector each time. If they didnt have to fly a straight rought why wouldnt they have just plotted a circuitous route and stayed in hyperspace.

Because you can throw off your direction more easily that way, as you can make sharper turns in realspace than in hyperspace. While in hyperspace, you'd have to make a long, sweeping turn at such a high velocity that you're brushing by multiple star systems per second.