Brief Guide to Hyperdrive Range

[Jorus Merrill]

Numbers vary widely when it comes to hyperspace transit times. Some voyages take days or weeks; others take months or years. A lot depends on your source, and a lot depends on whether you're using a major hyperlane or not, or how close you are to the Core, or how fast your hyperdrive is. (Tatooine to Alderaan on a super-hyperlane with a class 0.5 hyperdrive took under sixteen hours, for example, while Coruscant to Alderaan dipped through a nastier bit of the Core and took about the same...but get lost in Wild Space and you'll be wandering for months.) There's a good deal of flexibility there, which is a nice way of saying there's not a lot of systematization in this aspect of canon. One well-established and little-examined aspect of it, though, is how far a given ship can go on a single 'tank of gas.'

First, let's talk galactic scale. The Star Wars galaxy is roughly 120,000 light-years across (roughly 37,000 parsecs). Hyperjumps are not straight lines, unless you're doing a short-range jump. So just by looking at the many Star Wars sector maps you can generally assume that a given route from point A to point B is roughly 1.2-3.0x as long as an 'as the crow flies' measurement. This means that getting from the Core Worlds to the far Outer Rim is roughly 50-60,000 light-years on a major route like the Perlemian or the Hydian. Without delving into 'highway' vs. 'urban' 'mileage', we get a pretty clear idea that each square on the Essential Atlas map I linked is about 5-6,000 light-years to a side. That's a very important number when it comes to figuring out how far different kinds of ship can go without fueling up somewhere friendly, or at least safe. (I'm betting the actual Essential Atlas nails it down to a specific number, but a rough estimate's good enough for our purposes.)

Caveat: I fully expect most of you won't care about this or won't feel bound by it. 'It takes as long as it takes.' Some people prefer to have more information.

Here are some sample ship ranges, least to greatest. Including drive speed just for kicks.

• Utapaun P-38 fighter: 3,000 light years, or less than 1 square across. Vanilla starfighter, minor government usage, with a class 2 drive.
• ARC-170 fighter: 5,000 light years, or 1 square across. Heavy line starfighter, major government usage, with a class 1.5 drive.
• Theta-class shuttle: 8,000 light year range, or about 1.5 squares across. Palpatine's personal shuttle, class 1.0 drive.
• Nubian H-type yacht: 20,000 light years, or 3-4 squares across. Light, fast luxury yacht with a class 0.7 drive.
• Recusant-class light destroyer: 30,000 light years, or 5-6 squares across, Core to the start of the Outer Rim. Light star destroyer with a class 2.0 drive.
• Invisible Hand, modified Providence-class flagship: 40,000 light years, or 6-8 squares across, enough to get a quarter of the way across the galaxy. Unique flagship with a class 1.5 drive.
• Venator-class Star Destroyer: 60,000 light years, or 10-12 squares across, maybe enough to get from the Core to the Outer Rim and back. Star Destroyer with a class 1.0 drive.
• Nubian J-type diplomatic barge: 80,000 light years, or around 14-15 squares across, almost enough to get from Naboo to Coruscant and back. Heavy diplomatic ship with a class 0.7 drive.
• Delta-7 Aethersprite Jedi starfighter: 150,000 light years, more than the diameter of the galaxy. Tiny, very fast Jedi expedition ship with a class 1.0 drive. Can get from the Core to Wild Space and back on a single tank of gas.
• Acclamator assault ship: 250,000 light years. A lot. Hyperdrive class 0.6. Dang.

So, here are some takeaway points, so far as we can generalize the above.

• Combat starfighters either have no hyperdrive or a quick drive with a low range, enough to cross a sector but no more. One square on the Essential Atlas map.
• Most capital ships can travel 30-60,000 light years, or 1/4 to 1/2 the diameter of the galaxy. Roughly 5-12 squares on the Essential Atlas map. That's more than enough to fight most reasonable campaigns in the short to medium term.
• Elite personal transports either have enough range to navigate a certain area without refuelling, like the Core or Tion Hegemony, or they have enough range to get from their home port to the Core and back. That's roughly 1/3 to 2/3 the diameter of the galaxy, or maybe 7-15 squares on the Essential Atlas map.
• Expeditionary ships (like long-range Jedi starfighters) and long-range strategic transports can go an obscenely long way without refuelling, on the order of 1-2x the diameter of the galaxy. Bastion to Tatooine and back, plus or minus fifty thousand light years.

My suspicion is that we can use these proportions and numbers pretty well in our era. Why?

• They fit most reasonable strategies.
• Starship technology didn't improve an awful lot between the Clone Wars and the Rebellion Era. It spiked by the Legacy era, but we don't have numbers for that, and the Dark Age was a thing. And in the end, I suspect development priorities in canon timelines would mirror ours: why improve your starship's gas tank size when you can improve its shields, guns, hangar capacity, and engines? Especially when average hyperdrive speeds haven't changed and travel time remains about the same?
• These numbers are inevitably going to increase if people start caring about them enough to use them in Factory subs, so why not start with numbers we know?
• They have more than enough flexibility for people to get crazy -- you want your personal fighter to go 200,000 light years on a single tank of gas? You've got precedent -- but they also provide a useful way to nerf aspects of ships you design. 'It's hypercapable, but it's got a 500-light-year range, so barring a lot of friendly and secure gas stations, it needs a carrier or it's stuck in a defensive role.' Great weakness right there. Factory judges are never going to reject more useful detail, as long as it's not ridiculous. Including a hyperdrive range in the description or the 'Hyperdrive' template line -- while completely optional and never before suggested -- is a great way to give some character to the way you use your ships, personally and strategically.

So, bottom line: if you feel like it'll add something to the setting of your writing, think about hyperspace and ponder the eternal truths of the gas tank.

 

[Coren Starchaser]

I love this. Its always been one of those things with Star Wars and transit times. Always have been tricky. But this kind of is just what we need as writers. Playing on the ship at lightspeed, and the amount of downtime, is IMO, a good way to expand your character. "Do they even lift, bro?" Or Dejarik, or nap....

But... you're saying I should look for FTL drives in the Unknown Regions?

 

[Naast'ika Laaran]

Good read!

Though, technically, I suppose I already did this once.


"The Prowler is capable of performing a natural hyperspace jump via a technique refered to as a 'starburst.' The exact nature of this ability is unknown or simply not fully understood to any but the Quellan scientist that studied the recovered Charon data. Though the technique seems to produce a less accurate hyperspace travel than conventional means, the Prowler and its Navibrain seems to have an instinctual understanding of how to travel to their intended destination. While the added benefit of being harder to track and detect than the hyperspace travels of conventional ships, there are other limitations to the technique. For starters, starbursting is rather exhausting for the bio-ship. A Prowler can only sustain a single starburst for long enough to travel a single galactic unit (one hex) at a time. Upon returning to realspace, a Prowler will then have to rest for twelve to fifteen minutes to recover its strength before making another jump. If particularly exhausted, it could take as long as twenty or thirty minutes. Moreover, it takes the bio-ship several minutes to find a hyperspace route that 'feels right' for a starburst. Humanoid crew can aid the bio-ship in this regard by providing secondary telemetry and using existing star charts, but the end result is a means of travel that is statistically slower and less reliable than traditional travel.

A starburst is significantly harder to detect via traditional sensors and biological sensors alike, which allows a Prowler-class Bio-mechanical ship to enter or exit a system with little fear of detection."

 

[Captain Larraq]

I'll keep this in mind for some future submissions / ship modifications.

 

[Orick T'ane]

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

As a writer that spend a LOT of time writing on the ship, this is good to know. The idea of stopping for gas and a chili dog seems fine with me. What it comes down to with me is how long does it take? I mean my ship is fast, but what does that translate into in actual time

Great read!!

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Orick T'ane"] - WIdely variable. You can easily spend weeks or months bumming around a backwater sector with poor hyperroutes. Some of the maps here have travel times. On the Hydian Way, for example, you can mostly go from end to end in a few days, but it took years of dedicated work to create.

 

[Orick T'ane]

[member="Jorus Merrill"]
Awesome, so It's up to me then, thanks. Also I like how you slipped in that little sales pitch to sell me maps, nicely done

 

[Laira Darkhold]

It varies depending on the route. One place I read (Will look for link) was that the Rating refers to the unit of time taken to traverse 1 light year or 1 Parsec (up to debate).

If that were correct it would take, and the units were minutes and parsecs respectively, it would take 26 days to go from one end to the other with a class 1 Hyperdrive. This would correlate well with the trip from Rhomamool to Coruscant taking several days for the Jade Sabre.

Again, this is a theory I read once.

 

[Jsc]

Extremely useful guide for SW storytelling and number-crunching. Always pondered about this after playing Elite Dangerous. 10/10

 

[Break]