Starships apparently use something known as “hyperspace” in the Star Wars books and movies to move around the galaxy. This form of travel is apparently so efficient they can cross from one end of the galaxy to another in a matter of days,
My question then, is why haven’t they gone out of the galaxy and into neighboring galaxies? If they can travel an entire galaxy in a matter of days, it couldn’t be difficult to leave the galaxy entirely and begin exploring other galaxies.
I’m guessing though that there’s some sort of catch to the hyperspace travel, because this scenario is just too obvious if there weren’t a catch.
Actually, the Empire doesn’t span the entire galaxy, just a small portion of it. There are literally millions of unexplored stars left in the galaxy, so why waste the time a resources to find yet another galaxy? Also, the distance between galaxies is an order of magnitude greater than the distance across a galaxy. And finally, in one of the novelizations, it’s revealed that just such an expedition was undertaken, shortly before the rise of the Empire. It was never heard from again.
The simple (in continuity) answer would be that using hyperspace requires you to know where stuff is located. Han makes a couple of references about landing inside a planet or passing through objects while in hyperspace.
The other answer is, because George Lucas never needed them to.
Some EU (Expanded Universe… y’know, the novels and games and such) make reference to a supposed “hyperspace barrier” that surrounds the galaxy (whether this is considered an actual, physical barrier, or just a region where hyperspace is “rocky”, is never specified). Of course, this “barrier” isn’t mentioned when discussing the Outbound Flight Project, an attempt (prior to the time of Star Wars: A New Hope) that tried to send six Jedi Masters outside the galaxy.
My theory? Outside the galaxy, hyperspatial travel is a lot less predictable, For Some Reason[sub]TM[/sub].
Miller…
I don’t know if you can call it a “small” portion. Twelve million systems or so, not counting useless systems with no planets or significant stellar bodies. Although, remember, there are over a hundred billion stars in the galaxy…
Yeah, the Outbound Flight Project (mentioned in the first Zahn trilogy). Palpatine had it destroyed just after it left the galactic plane.
Actually it could be, since it’s only descibed as a galaxy far, far away from the point of view of the narrator of the story who could be in a different galaxy telling of events here fom a point far in the future.
How much greater? If they can travel across an entire galaxy in days, I don’t think it’d be impossible to equip a ship for a month or so long trip, in fact I’m sure they could prepare a ship for a journey lasting several years.
I guess the “catch” though is, is that they don’t know what’s out that far so making a hyperspace jump could be risky since they could collide with something.
I go back to the thing about Han Solo too. He said you have to map out your path so you dont end up popping out the other side inside an asteroid or something… ok so Im not that huge of a fan to quote him but I get the jist of it.
Eh, not really. Our galaxy is maybe 100,000 light-years across; various sources list the Andromeda Galaxy as being about 2 or 3 million light-years away (and the Andromeda Galaxy is not by any means the closest galaxy to our own; the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are both within 250,000 light-years of Earth). That’s only 20 to 30 times the diameter of our galaxy. For comparison, Mars at its closest approach comes within 35 million miles of Earth, or about 140 times the Earth-Luna distance. The Empire of Star Wars may not be a genuinely galactic empire, but a true Galactic Empire (like that of Asimov) ought to be able to mount intergalactic explorations without any real difficulty, barring some sort of Star Trek-style “great energy barrier at the ‘edge’ of the Galaxy”.
Here is a table listing distances to other galaxies in the Local Group, as well as a few other relatively nearby galaxies.
As for Han Solo’s line about not ending up inside a star: In our galaxy, space is really empty. The jump from interplanetary flight to interstellar flight is huge; Alpha Centauri (the nearest other star to our own sun) is over 7,000 times further away than Pluto is (and for that matter Pluto is over 12,000 times further away than Earth’s own moon). On the other hand, in the Star Wars universe (or the Star Trek universe), you can’t hardly swing a space cruiser without hitting an “M-class” planet (or moon, or “planetoid”) with a breathable atmosphere, so maybe things work differntly in those universes.
You’re absolutely right, in the real world. The distance from our Milky Way galaxy to the next major galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, is about 30 times the size of the Milky Way itself (like I see MEBuckner said). So if you can cross our galaxy in a week, you can get to the next galaxy in about eight months. Also, it’s doubtful that you’d have to worry about intergalactic asteroid fields or anything like that. It’s pretty empty out there. Of course, in real life, asteroid fields look nothing like what they do in Star Wars. Here, the chances of successfully navigating one are about 99.99%. That’s if you don’t do any steering.
Well, it’s not known what the real number is, but it’s expected to be a lot higher than that. However, in Star Wars we know it is, because in The Phantom Menace Anakin asks if all the stars in the sky have planets, and Qui-Gonn says most of them do.
Ha ha, yeah, but this isn’t a matter of messing with the spirit of previous canon (e.g. Midichlorians) or doing something dumb (e.g. virgin birth). There’s no reason to disregard that particular line except for the fact that it’s in Episode I.
It may be true that most stars have planets, but how many of them have planets capable of supporting life? It could be that 99.9% of planets are gas giants or cold airless rocks.
I was poking around starwars.com, and they have an interesting hyperlinked database of many if not all the characters and places and objects and such of the SW universe, including the Expanded Universe. Apparantly, in some of the books alien invaders from another galaxy have attacked the New Republic or whatever is the post-Return Of The Jedi situation. So, there is a way to come in from another galaxy, and a reason to go out of it (to attack the aliens). I assume that this database is canon, but I’m not enough of a fanboy to make that judgement.
According to the maps provided in the New Jedi Order novels, most of the galaxy has been claimed by either the New Republic or the Empire. There are some isolated zones that belong to minor interstellar states, such as the Ssi-ruuk Imperium, and a relatively small unexplored area creatively dubbed the “Unknown Regions,” but the vast majority of the galaxy has been explored and is controlled by one of the major political forces we see in the films and books. There is the implication that most star systems are either empty or contain too few resources to be worth colonizing, but there are definitely major settled worlds scattered throughout the galaxy.
There’s some unspoken rules about hyperspace - for instance, everyone assumes you can’t go too fast too near a gravity field, or that you go faster the futher you go.
I can’t think of a justification for not going to another galaxy, though, other than “you just can’t” or “What if there’s the star-destroyer/terror/borg/dragons there?”