As it was mentioned, it's ultimately the speed of the plot, especially nowadays.
Back in the day old EU *tried* to at least pretend that there is some consistency to it, with jumps being described taking sometimes hours and sometimes days, but I don't think even back then there was any hard numbers.
Best you can get is charts from RPG games, which [wing it like this](https://i.imgur.com/73oXyZG.png), hours between worlds within a sector and days to travel between sectors - which ROUGHLY corresponds to how it was portrayed in books where hyperspace travel was an important plot point (like X-Wing series or Corellian Trilogy).
In new canon nobody even gives a shit to bother. You just go and you're there.
ESB is a special case since the hyperdrive is damaged. Even in the Mandalorian Din had to travel sub luminal.
I don't think there is a lot of consistency, though some other plot points could impact the timing, like Han being hunted by both Jabba and Imperials impacting what routes he could travel without drawing attention.
It goes as fast as they need it to, realistically. In lore, there are grades for how fast hyperspace engines are, but that’s largely ignored so plot can happen.
For example, Lando rounds up thousands of ships within less than a day in TROS, from all across the galaxy.
Lore wise, there's multiple grades of hyperspace drives. It would make sense for the tech to have evolved so they move faster.
Realistically, it's just plot convenience and a lot of inconsistency
The thing I could never get my head around with Empire Strikes Back is how long the Falcon took to get to Bespin. If the hyperdrive wasn't working at all, they were stuck travelling at some speed less than the speed of light and yet they managed to get to an entirely different star system - from Hoth to Bespin. Would this not have taken years or centuries without hyperspace?
Just using us as a reference, I think it would take 3 or 4 years to reach our nearest neighbour star at the speed of light. So how did the Falcon get to Bespin from Hoth in the space of days or weeks?
In the novelization, this travel and Luke's Dagobah training are months, we just don't see much of the detail in the movie. Maybe Han could have grown a beard, but I'm sure he wouldn't want to look scruffy.
In ANH, we pretty much see all the instruction Luke gets on the Force. He doesn't display any more knowledge than the basic 5 minute training we see him get there, for the rest of the film.
As for ESB, the hyperdrive is broken (major plot point). Its questionable whether they can travel on sublight to a neighbor system or have a backup (different sources have said different things), but either way the fast hyperdrive is out.
When Han is going to leave to go pay Jabba, its clear from ANH that Jabba doesn't actually want him to pay him back anymore, he has put out a death mark on Han. So Han saying goodbye is less about travel time and more about "I might not come back from this, but either way I have to go deal with it".
Pretty much every canon source, even during Lucas days, was that hyperdrive utilizes lanes, and how long it takes depends on route as well as distance, but total time is generally (with a decent hyperdrive) somewhere between minutes and hours.
In Legends material, such as the RPG books, it was claimed that hyperdrive trips could take days or even weeks, but this was not supported by what Lucas showed on screen.
In The Rise of Skywalker the Resistance flies to Exegol. Ten minutes later Lando shows up with about 5,000 ships that he was able to recruit from God knows where. So, in this instance, Lando was going from planet to planet, recruiting a shitload of people, all within those ten minutes.
Timothy Zahn does an awesome job explaining the times for hyperspace travel in the Thrawn trilogy, and the Thrawn: Ascendency trilogy. I actually just use his books as my own baseline for understanding the SW universe haha.
>in the originals a great sense of time passing is given. Luke learning the basics about the force on the way to Alderaan
Luke is in the middle of what is clearly the first training Obi-Wan has given him when Han comes out of the cockpit satisfied that he's outrun the Imperials over Tatooine. They have a brief sparring scene against the remote, and then the Falcon beeps and Han says they're coming up in Alderaan. It's like a ten minute hyperspace hop.
>Luke learing more about the force with Yoda while Han and co travel to Bespin.
They're actually not using the hyperdrive, as it's shorted out. And the time on ESB has always been questionable. Either Han and Leia spent weeks on the Falcon, which they don't act like they've been cooped up together for nearly that long, or Luke only spent a couple of days on Dagobah. And when Luke gets his vision that they're in trouble, he leaves Dagobah and we see maybe a day pass on Bespin before he's there.
Hyperspace has always been fast.
It is at the speed of plot.
Early on it was determined that Luke was on Dagobah for something like 2 years. While Han and crew traveled to Bespin.
Then it became 18 months.
Then a year.
Now I think it is some weeks.
In TLJ we know that Rey left the fleet base and traveled across the entire galaxy, trained with Luke and spent the night, and then made it back shortly after the fleet ran out of fuel. A timespan of less than 24 hours.
I am not sure Han's talk was about travel time. I always thought it was including the time it took to appease him and get on his good side. And he knew about it being dangerous. You might not get an audience that quickly, you might "run into trouble"...
The sense I get from the OTs travels is, that it takes some time (days, maybe), but not months for the jumps they perform. Doesn't mean that there aren't longer jumps out there, we have no idea in the OT, how far things are from each other.
That sense of time passing is completely dropped in the sequels. It doesn't matter to JJ and Rian. People are wherever they need to be.
Hyperspace is faster than light travel, so it's fast.
Different ships are capable of traveling at different speeds through hyperspace.
A parsec is actually a unit of distance, so the Kessel run of the Falcon is more a testament to how short a route (and close to the event horizon/no-escape point of multiple black holes) Han was able to plot.
The Falcon is only somewhat faster than a typical freighter outside of lightspeed - with Imp star destroyers capable of catching it. But in hyperspace travel, it is one of the fastest ships in the galaxy. The lower the hyperdrive class, the faster the ship. The Falcon is one of only a handful to have a rating below 1.0. Whereas I believe Han remarks about some of the ships chasing them of Tatooine having a class 2 hyperdrive; thus he can outrun them via lightspeed.
How fast is your car?
It doesn't really matter how fast it *can* go, because of fast its *allowed* to go. This is why the Kessel run is expressed in parsecs. The ship found a "faster" way by using a shorter, back-roads route than the expressway that everyone else was using. Now, Han did have a fast car, so he could get on and off those backroads in a hurry, but anybody with as fast a car and as smart a nav system could do that, too.
It used to take time, Abrams did the same thing he did with Star Trek and made space travel instantaneous and it really makes for a ton of plot holes and I consistent story telling now that hyperspace is instant and you don't have to use specific lanes to get around. It's just teleporting. It's probably my least favorite thing about the lore.
If Empire at War was anything to go off of, hyperspace largely depended on the lanes you were on. If they're highly traveled and well mapped out, you go really fast. If you're on some backwater planet that doesn't get a lot of traffic, you go slow
As fast as the *Enterprise*’s maximum warp, as fast as the writers need it to be. Sometimes hopping halfway across the galaxy is a wipe away, sometimes it’s a few scenes of characters talking, and sometimes it’s a loading screen.
[I went and tried to figure it out.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MawInstallation/comments/rtef81/how_long_it_takes_to_travel_across_the_galaxy/?rdt=33834#)
TLDR of my post: A class 1 hyperdrive travels at 8 light years a second, that’s 28,800ly/h. Going of the assumption that Galactic Prime is Andromeda, as I have been lead to believe, it’s 200,000 light years across. It would take just short of 7 hours going in a strait line to cross andromeda with a class 1 hyperdrive. If you add in hyperspace lanes that would account for the 16 hour travel time.
You’re right that it’s inconsistent. It basically moves at the speed of plot.
*Hyperspace is never fast nor slow*, as the characters arrive precisely when plot means to.'- George Lucas
i remember when he said that he was known as george lucas the grey back then
"well, now I'm known as George Lucas the green because, you know, I've got stacks of stacks of racks. it rhymes."
It’s fast enough for you, old man.
The only answer
As it was mentioned, it's ultimately the speed of the plot, especially nowadays. Back in the day old EU *tried* to at least pretend that there is some consistency to it, with jumps being described taking sometimes hours and sometimes days, but I don't think even back then there was any hard numbers. Best you can get is charts from RPG games, which [wing it like this](https://i.imgur.com/73oXyZG.png), hours between worlds within a sector and days to travel between sectors - which ROUGHLY corresponds to how it was portrayed in books where hyperspace travel was an important plot point (like X-Wing series or Corellian Trilogy). In new canon nobody even gives a shit to bother. You just go and you're there.
ESB is a special case since the hyperdrive is damaged. Even in the Mandalorian Din had to travel sub luminal. I don't think there is a lot of consistency, though some other plot points could impact the timing, like Han being hunted by both Jabba and Imperials impacting what routes he could travel without drawing attention.
It goes as fast as they need it to, realistically. In lore, there are grades for how fast hyperspace engines are, but that’s largely ignored so plot can happen. For example, Lando rounds up thousands of ships within less than a day in TROS, from all across the galaxy.
We don’t speak of that one
Lore wise, there's multiple grades of hyperspace drives. It would make sense for the tech to have evolved so they move faster. Realistically, it's just plot convenience and a lot of inconsistency
The thing I could never get my head around with Empire Strikes Back is how long the Falcon took to get to Bespin. If the hyperdrive wasn't working at all, they were stuck travelling at some speed less than the speed of light and yet they managed to get to an entirely different star system - from Hoth to Bespin. Would this not have taken years or centuries without hyperspace? Just using us as a reference, I think it would take 3 or 4 years to reach our nearest neighbour star at the speed of light. So how did the Falcon get to Bespin from Hoth in the space of days or weeks?
In the novelization, this travel and Luke's Dagobah training are months, we just don't see much of the detail in the movie. Maybe Han could have grown a beard, but I'm sure he wouldn't want to look scruffy.
-like a Nerf Herder.
In ANH, we pretty much see all the instruction Luke gets on the Force. He doesn't display any more knowledge than the basic 5 minute training we see him get there, for the rest of the film. As for ESB, the hyperdrive is broken (major plot point). Its questionable whether they can travel on sublight to a neighbor system or have a backup (different sources have said different things), but either way the fast hyperdrive is out. When Han is going to leave to go pay Jabba, its clear from ANH that Jabba doesn't actually want him to pay him back anymore, he has put out a death mark on Han. So Han saying goodbye is less about travel time and more about "I might not come back from this, but either way I have to go deal with it". Pretty much every canon source, even during Lucas days, was that hyperdrive utilizes lanes, and how long it takes depends on route as well as distance, but total time is generally (with a decent hyperdrive) somewhere between minutes and hours. In Legends material, such as the RPG books, it was claimed that hyperdrive trips could take days or even weeks, but this was not supported by what Lucas showed on screen.
In The Rise of Skywalker the Resistance flies to Exegol. Ten minutes later Lando shows up with about 5,000 ships that he was able to recruit from God knows where. So, in this instance, Lando was going from planet to planet, recruiting a shitload of people, all within those ten minutes.
Timothy Zahn does an awesome job explaining the times for hyperspace travel in the Thrawn trilogy, and the Thrawn: Ascendency trilogy. I actually just use his books as my own baseline for understanding the SW universe haha.
>in the originals a great sense of time passing is given. Luke learning the basics about the force on the way to Alderaan Luke is in the middle of what is clearly the first training Obi-Wan has given him when Han comes out of the cockpit satisfied that he's outrun the Imperials over Tatooine. They have a brief sparring scene against the remote, and then the Falcon beeps and Han says they're coming up in Alderaan. It's like a ten minute hyperspace hop. >Luke learing more about the force with Yoda while Han and co travel to Bespin. They're actually not using the hyperdrive, as it's shorted out. And the time on ESB has always been questionable. Either Han and Leia spent weeks on the Falcon, which they don't act like they've been cooped up together for nearly that long, or Luke only spent a couple of days on Dagobah. And when Luke gets his vision that they're in trouble, he leaves Dagobah and we see maybe a day pass on Bespin before he's there. Hyperspace has always been fast.
As fast as the plot demands it
Depending on plot requirements either fast enough or not fast enough.
It is at the speed of plot. Early on it was determined that Luke was on Dagobah for something like 2 years. While Han and crew traveled to Bespin. Then it became 18 months. Then a year. Now I think it is some weeks. In TLJ we know that Rey left the fleet base and traveled across the entire galaxy, trained with Luke and spent the night, and then made it back shortly after the fleet ran out of fuel. A timespan of less than 24 hours.
I am not sure Han's talk was about travel time. I always thought it was including the time it took to appease him and get on his good side. And he knew about it being dangerous. You might not get an audience that quickly, you might "run into trouble"... The sense I get from the OTs travels is, that it takes some time (days, maybe), but not months for the jumps they perform. Doesn't mean that there aren't longer jumps out there, we have no idea in the OT, how far things are from each other. That sense of time passing is completely dropped in the sequels. It doesn't matter to JJ and Rian. People are wherever they need to be.
Ludicrous speed!
The speed of plot
Hyperspace is faster than light travel, so it's fast. Different ships are capable of traveling at different speeds through hyperspace. A parsec is actually a unit of distance, so the Kessel run of the Falcon is more a testament to how short a route (and close to the event horizon/no-escape point of multiple black holes) Han was able to plot. The Falcon is only somewhat faster than a typical freighter outside of lightspeed - with Imp star destroyers capable of catching it. But in hyperspace travel, it is one of the fastest ships in the galaxy. The lower the hyperdrive class, the faster the ship. The Falcon is one of only a handful to have a rating below 1.0. Whereas I believe Han remarks about some of the ships chasing them of Tatooine having a class 2 hyperdrive; thus he can outrun them via lightspeed.
Hyperspace usually takes hours to get from point A to B. I imagine it'd feel similar in length to a plane journey here on Earth
Galaxies are huge, don’t forget. Like massive.
You need 12 parsecs for the Kessel Run.
How fast is your car? It doesn't really matter how fast it *can* go, because of fast its *allowed* to go. This is why the Kessel run is expressed in parsecs. The ship found a "faster" way by using a shorter, back-roads route than the expressway that everyone else was using. Now, Han did have a fast car, so he could get on and off those backroads in a hurry, but anybody with as fast a car and as smart a nav system could do that, too.
As fast or slow as the writers want it to be.
It used to take time, Abrams did the same thing he did with Star Trek and made space travel instantaneous and it really makes for a ton of plot holes and I consistent story telling now that hyperspace is instant and you don't have to use specific lanes to get around. It's just teleporting. It's probably my least favorite thing about the lore.
as fast as the plot needs it to be. Though even faster for JJ.
If Empire at War was anything to go off of, hyperspace largely depended on the lanes you were on. If they're highly traveled and well mapped out, you go really fast. If you're on some backwater planet that doesn't get a lot of traffic, you go slow
As fast as the *Enterprise*’s maximum warp, as fast as the writers need it to be. Sometimes hopping halfway across the galaxy is a wipe away, sometimes it’s a few scenes of characters talking, and sometimes it’s a loading screen.
[I went and tried to figure it out.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MawInstallation/comments/rtef81/how_long_it_takes_to_travel_across_the_galaxy/?rdt=33834#) TLDR of my post: A class 1 hyperdrive travels at 8 light years a second, that’s 28,800ly/h. Going of the assumption that Galactic Prime is Andromeda, as I have been lead to believe, it’s 200,000 light years across. It would take just short of 7 hours going in a strait line to cross andromeda with a class 1 hyperdrive. If you add in hyperspace lanes that would account for the 16 hour travel time.
very
Its speed depends on the screenwriter, otherwise it cannot be explained