So Lucas is not at all bothering with actual speeds and making the numbers come out right. all squeezed in between the time Obi-Wan "fear something terrible has happened" and the Falcon arriving in the rubble-field that is formerly known as Alderaan. The Empire has time to blow up a planet, make a dash to Dantooine, search the planet, find a rebel base, examine it close enough to conclude that "it has been deserted for some time", and then report back to the Death Star. But it did not turn up any better, with embarrassing concepts such as "standard timeunits" or trying to say that it had something to do with skirting the rims of black holes and whatnot.Īnd when we start to look at other star ships in the Star Wars universe as well, then it becomes very obvious that they are all Travelling at The Speed of Plot.Īs I stated in another answer, here is an example of that phenomenon: Later - as your linked answers suggest - they tried to fix this and make it less willy-nilly, probably because the nerdy and more physics savvy fans started to object. Just like Douglas Adams's "fourty-two" or Nick Kershaw's "The Riddle" it had no actual meaning, it just sounded good for the time being and plugged up a verbal hole that needed to be filled, and any attempt to interpret those things as something substantial and meaningful is doomed to fail. It sounded cool, it had something to do with space, so he used it. The mention of "Parsecs" is in all likely probability a mistake, with Lucas assuming that "Par secs" had something to do with seconds, and "Par" being a prefix akin to kilo- or Mega. I'm sure it has a healthy audience of readers - all those hard SF wonks who jeered when Han Solo used ' parsec' as a unit of time.George Lucas was only after making the statement that the Millennium Falcon is very fast, not how fast it is. You should hear those pious warmongers curse a blue streak a parsec wide! live in a fantasy world if you must perhaps you should save your indignation for * actual warcrimes & corruption*, not pouting that language doesn't live up to your fantastical expectations? garsh diddily darn, if there aren't people who think the RAPE of the World & its international citizenry by the United States InvestorClass is somehow the * LESSER CRIME* than the language of allegory … ah, but there we have censorship: where whinging is their only art form & only means to exert influence over others.Īnd the fact that you managed to work the word ' parsec' in there makes it even more fun. To avoid this confusion, it's best to remember that the parsec is a fi xed unit, based on the distance to an object that generates a parallax of one arc second as viewed from two points 1 AU apart. (A parsec is the average distance the Earth has from the Sun, 93 million miles). Science Fiction or Science Fantasy: Who Ya Got? - Suvudu - Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, Movies, and Games 2008 In astronomy, the preferred unit of measurement for such distances is the parsec, which is defined as the distance at which an object will appear to move one arcsecond of parallax when the observer moves one astronomical unit perpendicular to the line of sight to the observer.Īnn Aguirre » Blog Archive » A day in the life – blog Jeopardy 2009Ī parsec is the distance equal to light traveling for 3.26 light years. Greedo: ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ Supervising Director Dave Filoni Knows Who Shot First » MTV Movies Blog 2010Ī parsec is a unit of length in astronomy, approximately 3.262 light years in length. Why, for example, does Han Solo boast about his ship's speed by saying that it can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs when a parsec is in fact a measurement of distance rather than time?
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