Last night’s episode of The Mandalorian was
a bit of a rollercoaster, complete with an arachnophobe’s delight, casual infanticide, and
Dave Filoni being an actual character. The plot of the episode revolved around an interesting little
bit of lore - sublight travel. In the episode, Din Djarin reluctantly agrees to transport Frog
Lady and her eggs to a neighboring sector at sublight speeds, which is to say without using
hyperspace. He’s quite apprehensive about this, and clearly regards sublight travel as extremely
dangerous. For more casual Star Wars fans, this may beg the question of why. In this video,
we’re going to be answering that question. First, we need to understand sublight travel
and what differentiates it from hyperspace. Contrary to popular belief, entering hyperspace
isn’t just when a starship goes really fast, nor is it travelling at the speed of light.
Travelling at the speed of light is, in fact, impossible, while travelling just shy of the
speed of light is counterproductive due to general relativity. What’s casually referred to
as “lightspeed” or hyperspace travel is actually a method of faster-than-light travel achieved
by essentially entering another dimension. Hyperspace is sort of like a scaled-down
dimensional reflection of realspace, in a sense. All objects in realspace, or the main dimension,
cast what’s called a mass shadow into hyperspace, a gravitational presence that has an effect
on objects in hyperspace. However, the scaling of these mass shadows and the distance between
them is different from what it is in realspace; mass shadows are essentially much
closer together in hyperspace, and they have dramatically increased gravitational
strength. This change in distance scaling means that a ship that’s able to jump into hyperspace
can achieve a sort of faster-than-light travel, as a short distance in hyperspace is
essentially a much larger distance in realspace. If you’re familiar with Minecraft,
it’s pretty much how Nether travel works. There are dangers to this, of course. Hyperspace
isn’t the most stable of dimensions, and if you screw up hyperspace travel, you’ll likely crash
into a mass shadow, which has tremendously destructive consequences. Ships travelling through
hyperspace have to travel along incredibly precise routes calculated in advance by an onboard
navicomputer, as it’s all but impossible to not hit a mass shadow otherwise. But despite
the huge theoretical dangers of hyperspace, in practice hyperspace travel was quite safe for most
of Republic history, as navicomputers usually did their jobs well, and the dangers that encountering
other beings would normally pose was eliminated. It was, after all, impossible for two ships to
make contact in hyperspace save through collision. Hyperspace travel was the backbone of
civilization in the Star Wars universe. Galaxies are pretty massive spaces, and even at
the speed of light it would take a ship a hundred thousand years to go from, say, Coruscant
to Tatooine. Hyperspace meant that it was possible to complete such journeys in
a few days instead. For this reason, hyperspace travel was generally the norm in the
civilized galaxy - but it wasn’t the only option. All starships had sublight drives, propulsion
engines that allowed craft to move through space at speeds slower than the speed of light. If
a starship was unable to go into hyperspace or its pilot, for some reason, didn’t want
to go into hyperspace, it could attempt to make it over to the next planet at sublight
speeds. Sublight is just regular space travel, though in the Star Wars universe it’s
much faster than it is in the real world, as even slower vessels travelled at
respectable fractions of the speed of light. But this generally wasn’t
done, for a variety of reasons. As Din Djarin pointed out in the
latest episode of The Mandalorian, there were a ton of dangers to sublight
travel, especially if you were being tracked or were otherwise being hunted by someone. The
most obvious danger was that it took forever. More time spent travelling is more time
someone has to catch you on the road, as the latest episode showed with those New
Republic X-Wings. If you’re trying to lay low, hyperspace provides some degree of security and
allows you to cover your tracks a bit, while realspace has no such guarantees. Additionally,
the longer you spend travelling, the more time The Child has to eat your passenger’s children whole,
and infanticide is generally not a good look. But there are other, less obvious dangers
to sublight travel as well. For one thing, realspace didn’t just make tracking easier because
you were travelling slowly. It was impossible to track someone through hyperspace unless you
had a transmitter installed aboard their ship, but the same wasn’t true for realspace. While
hyperspace travel left no trail and ships couldn’t be detected by conventional means while
in hyperspace, by nature of hyperspace being a different dimension, this wasn’t true at all
for sublight travel. Someone tracking you at sublight could easily pick up your ship from any
nearly world unless you had jamming systems or a cloaking device, and most forms of sublight
travel left easily-detectable energy trails. Additionally, it was much easier to determine
where someone was going in subspace. If your quarry was about to jump into hyperspace,
you could make an educated guess at where they were going by cross-referencing their
trajectory with star charts, but this method of tracking was easily foiled by just
making multiple jumps at different trajectories. With sublight travel, however, it was
always obvious where a ship was going, and hyperspace-capable ships could even exploit this
to get to a target’s destination before they did. A prime example of several of these aforementioned
dangers would be the Millennium Falcon’s flight to Bespin after the Battle of Hoth. At the time,
the Falcon didn’t have a functioning hyperspace, which the Heroes of Yavin only realized when
they were coming up on the Hoth system’s asteroid belt. After seemingly evading
the Imperial fleet that was chasing them, the crew of the Falcon had little choice but to
limp along at sublight speeds to Bespin, a world that was just up the Ison Corridor from Hoth. This
journey ended up taking several weeks due to the slow speed of sublight travel, even for a ship as
fast as the Millennium Falcon. Because of this, Boba Fett was able to catch the Falcon as it
was sneaking away, allowing him to calculate its trajectory and inform Darth Vader. As Fett
and Vader’s ships had functional hyperdrives, they got to Bespin first and had
plenty of time to set their trap. The last danger of sublight was, perhaps,
the scariest of all: the unknown. Hyperspace allowed ships to bypass uncharted space,
but sublight travellers had no such option, which comes with plenty of danger in its
own right. If something were to go wrong on a trip through realspace, you could very
easily end up on a totally uncharted world. This is what happened to Din Djarin and
Frog Lady in the most recent episode. Luckily for them, the Razor Crest wasn’t totally
destroyed when they crashed on that ice planet, but if it was rendered inoperable, they
would have been totally out of luck. This was always a risk with space travel, but
travelling at sublight drastically increased that risk. It was also a pretty terrifying
prospect - if you crashed on an unknown world, it was entirely possible that you would never be
found. If a ship was damaged enough in the crash, the occupants may well have been stranded
on that world for the rest of their lives, with no options but to start a
new civilization from scratch. This wasn’t an easy task, and it was
a terrifying prospect for most people. Furthermore, unknown planets came with unknown
dangers. The Mandalorian showed us this as well, as the ice world the Razor Crest crashed on was
apparently home to huge colonies of nightmare spiders. This was far from unusual.
If an unknown world was inhabitable, then the odds were that it was inhabited and had
some kind of local ecosystem, and every ecosystem has its own apex predator. Those predators ranged
from giant spiders to bloodthirsty hounds to Lovecraftian nightmare creatures, and there was no
way that marooned pilots could know which a planet had to offer in advance. It’s bad enough to have
to fend for yourself against terrifying beasts, but it’s even worse not knowing what those
beasts are like until they’re trying to kill you. For these reasons, pilots rarely travelled
between star systems at sublight speeds, and doing so was considered foolish, if
not suicidal. But that didn’t mean it never happened. Din Djarin and the crew of the
Millennium Falcon did it, as aforementioned, and they were far from alone in doing
so. There are even examples from galactic history of ships that were forced to do so. For
example, at the end of the Pius Dea Crusades, the Crusaders’ Cathedral Ships were seeded with
rogue navicomputer code that sent them out to the middle of nowhere and rendered their hyperdrives
inoperable. What became of the Crusaders is unknown, but they are presumed to have all
died, lost and alone, out in uncharted space. So, that’s our look at the true horrors of
sublight travel. But what do you think? Did you enjoy the most recent Mandalorian episode?
Would you like it if a fifty-year-old toddler were to eat your children whole? Feel free
to post your thoughts in the comments below.
