How do hunks of junk like the Millennium Falcon are completely non
aerodynamic ships like a TIE fighter
Manage to fly? I'll be covering all the basics of flight in the Star Wars universe both in atmosphere and in outer space in today's
Star Wars lore video
(Intro music plays)
Hey guys, this is Eckhart's Ladder hello and welcome to another technology-based Star Wars lore episode today
We will be covering the basics of flight as it exists in both Legends and Canon and it's actually fairly easy to cover both
Continuities in one video because really the basics here haven't changed at all with the transition to Disney Canon in this video
I'm going to cover the main pieces of technology that Star Wars ships use during flight and explain. How it works
I'll be doing all of this from an in-universe perspective
I won't explain the physics behind these various pieces of technology and whether they'd work or not in the real world
I'm just gonna keep it to Star Wars only
I'll also try to organize the topics I cover in this video in a sort of sequential manner
We'll start with how a ship takes off. How it flies within atmosphere
How it flies outside of atmosphere and then how it jumps to hyperspace?
So let's start with takeoff and really the basics of flight within the Star Wars universe
Besides for the hyperdrive likely the most important piece of starship based technology within the Star Wars universe is the antigravity
Engine now presumably anti-gravity engines come in several different varieties
However the one that we're exposed to more often is the Repulsorlift
Repulsorlifts are used by everything from speeders and sail barges all the way up to large ships
They basically allow a vessel or a thing to achieve lift without having to worry about gravity however
Repulsorlifts and anti-gravity lifts generally aren't used for more than just achieving a few feet of flight
Depending on the strength of the lifts themselves repulsorlift technology can actually be used to fly a vehicle
Basically anywhere within atmosphere the standard speeder that you'd see flying around Coruscant
or even the Rebel Alliance's militarized snow speeder would use repulsorlifts exclusively for propulsion often vehicles
Which aren't meant to work outside of the atmosphere are called repulsorlift vehicles or sometimes speeders.
Some speeders despite not being designed to operate outside of atmosphere
nonetheless would have a secondary drive these engines would often be called thrusters and would operate fairly
similarly to the main propulsion devices on starfighters.
The rebel V-Wing is a good example of this (Shows and describes a K-Wing)
It's an air speeder and is not able to operate in space however
It does not use solely repulsorlift technology
but has a dedicated ion engine and
Secondary boosters my point is that speeders would have varied quite greatly some would have used only
Repulsorlifts while others would have had a primary and perhaps even secondary engines moving now to ships that were meant to leave the atmosphere
And this includes everything from star fighters to Star Destroyers. Repulsorlift technology
Was still very very important on these ships without
Anti-gravity tech the Rebel Alliance's X-wings would have never been able to take off and fight at the Battle of Yavin
However the fact that these ships are meant to operate out of atmosphere
requires some sort of other propulsion
Many ships in the Star Wars universe use what is called a "dual drive engine" this means that they have both
hyperdrives and sub-light drives sub light drives are the most common appearing on every starship and
Allowing a vessel to not only break through a planet's atmosphere
But also fly through space sublight engines within the Star Wars universe are fairly advanced most ships will be able to leave a planet's atmosphere
Within several minutes of takeoff this is actually necessary because the main form of interstellar travel within the Star Wars universe
Hyperspace can only be used once a ship has escaped a planet's gravity well
There's not really a whole lot else to say about sublight engines within the Star Wars universe
I guess the only other thing to mention is that the most common variety that we hear of are, ion-engines
for more on sublight drive technology I recommend reading any book that focuses heavily on the Millennium Falcon
including the old Lando Calrissian trilogy
And any of the Han Solo books the other component of the dual drive engine is the hyperdrive this allows ships to travel
extraordinary distances in very short amounts of time when using the hyperdrive a ship transitions from real space
Which is the actual physical universe to hyperspace
Hyperspace travel was no easy task and generally required a ship's navigational computer to perform
extensive calculations and plot a jump route based on inputted coordinates
This could be a very time-consuming process and depending on how sophisticated
And advanced the navigation computer is plotting a hyperspace jump could take anywhere from
seconds to dozens of minutes if multiple ships needed to make the same jump one common tactic would be to have the
navigational computer on a larger more advanced ship do the
Calculations the route could then be shared with accompanying ships who could jump without having to calculate everything
Again the main danger of jumping through hyperspace without a well-prepared or route
Is that gravitational bodies can actually pull you back into real space
And if you're unlucky enough you can crash into one of those bodies and die so those are the main propulsion
systems used by ships within the Star Wars universe
There are however a few other pieces of technology that I'd like to briefly touch on the first is dampeners
dampeners allow pilots to pull off incredible maneuvers without being killed by the inertia because acceleration
Exists in space as it does in atmosphere dampeners are used so pilots don't pass out when they pull massive G's after doing crazy maneuvers
Another key technology is the flight computer
Which allows a pilot to easily interface with the ship
Starships have thousands upon thousands of components the flight computer
Helps the pilot control the ship and also perform secondary functions sometimes the ship's
Navigational or weapons computers will be lumped together as part of a general flight computer finally
We have shielding shielding in the Star Wars universe takes many varieties
But primarily you have ray-shielding which protects against energy and particle shielding which protects against particles any ships meant to do long range
Travel should at least have particle shielding to protect them from small asteroids and other space debris
all types of shielding can generally be referred to as
"Deflector-shields" in legends ships in atmosphere could use deflector shielding to achieve perfect
aerodynamics. This would allow things like X-wings to fly extraordinarily quickly in atmosphere
I'm not sure if that's been carried over to Canon
It was only ever mentioned briefly in Star Wars legends so take that with a grain of salt
Shielding was also used for a variety of purposes including sealing in hangers and just generally protecting from the vacuum of space
Anyway, those are the basics of space and in atmosphere flight within the Star Wars universe
I hope you now have a better understanding of both the mechanics
and the
Technology involved this idea was given to me by someone on my twitch stream last night. I tried to answer it there, but I thought
It would make for a fun full-length video
Let me know if you liked it down in the comments and by liking this video of course. I will be again streaming some
Star Wars Battlefront 2 today on my twitch account you can find that at twitch.tv/ECKHARTSLADDER
Also make sure to join the discord at discord.IO/ECKHARTSLADDER and follow me on Twitter
I'm sure again. You can guess the URL anyway
Thank you so much for watching guys this has been Eckharts Ladder may the force be with you