The discrepancy might be solved if we assume that it's more about the quality of the route than the distance. The worse the route, the more the drive has to make "adjustments", and more adjustments means longer journeys. These can still be cut shorter by a faster hyperdrive, but it does explain a lot of the instantaneous travel seen in the media. Routes also start to have value in the right hands.

That's not really an assumption. It's an actual in-universe fact. This is why there are specific hyperspace routes established, such as the Permilian Trade route and Corellian Run. It's much faster to travel along established routes than more risky ones.

Well, that's close, but it's not quite what I'm saying. I'm saying if all things are equal, distance is almost irrelevant. So those old grids and calculating travel times based on the galactic XYZ coordinates can be tossed out. With the right route and a good hyperdrive you can get across the galaxy within a few hours.

Exactly. This isn't an assumption. The routes I mentioned are exactly what you're describing. Travelling along well established routes, are much faster (and safer), regardless of the galactic coordinates between the start point and destination, than more rarely used routes even if the distances are longer with the well established route than with the less used route. However, you're still not going to cross the entire galaxy in a matter of hours. Using the travel times listed on table 7-14 in F&D, travelling between sectors on one of the five main established routes would take only about three days, whereas using a less established route will likely take a week or more.

Which is why it apparently took a while to get from Tattooine to Alderaan (yeah, coulda been half an hour, but there was time to break out the chess game and the training gear, I think it was most of a day, at a minimum), but it takes minutes to get from Yavin 4 to ... [spoiler redacted].

Which brings us back to the problem of why the Rim is so much harder to govern than the Core for the Empire. Can't be purely a matter of travel time, a few days of travel, even a week, really aren't enough to interfere with a government's projection of force.

Travel in the moves/tv series is always "speed of plot."

For example, right now, with Return of the Jedi on my TV, in the briefing scene, Mon Mothma stressed that, "The time for our attack is now ." How urgent would that be if Endor were a week or more's travel time away (explicitly, anyway)?

For that matter, the same goes for RPG's. The only real reason to stress a travel time would be if there's some sort of ticking clock or other deadline that might be missed. Hyperdrive speeds and modifiers are a mechanic provided to allow for ships to have travel times relative to one another, as opposed to the galaxy at large. For the most part, unless there's that ticking clock, even travel times in the game are, "OK, you got in your ship and took off. Aaand, now you're at your destination."

I can't agree with you on this. The speed of hyperdrives in my games is a very real concern, and taking a week or more to move vessels into position is something that we incorporate into our stories. We don't do "speed of plot" but instead make the plot work with the speed of the hyperdrives.

I would point out that he said speed of plot for movie/tv , he didn't say anything about in a campaign. And in entertainment, that is exactly how fast the ship moves...as fast as the writer needs it to go. If the cast needs to get there "just in time", then they go fast enough to get there just in time. If they need to be too late, then it's too late. They don't waste valuable screen time on being accurate with that kind of stuff, which is why nobody has ever actually stat'd out the speed of hyperspace in the official material of the movies. Because it doesn't matter.

In a game, sure it matters, when the story being told is nebulous and flexible, and can meander all over based on what the players decide to do, because they have agency in the narrative. Movies don't. They follow the script, which means they will always go the same way, at the same rate.

Bottom line though, in a game, it's still irrelevant to the plot. If you need there to be a choice between flying to X location and Y location, and they can only do one or the other, simply space them far enough that this would be the case. Space is huge, to me, trying to say that all travel in a galaxy, from one point to another, regardless of distance, can be done in 24 hours, just seems silly. But I don't see the point in trying to hash it out anyway. The game's already done that for us, so use that. Ballpark guess on distances, and give them in metrics of time for the players to use to decide how they want to proceed.

Who cares if it matches with the movies or not? They've never bothered to make sure their movie speed matches with the published game modules that have been out for decades, so why slave yourself to their system if you don't have to?

Travel in the moves/tv series is always "speed of plot."

For example, right now, with Return of the Jedi on my TV, in the briefing scene, Mon Mothma stressed that, "The time for our attack is now ." How urgent would that be if Endor were a week or more's travel time away (explicitly, anyway)?

For that matter, the same goes for RPG's. The only real reason to stress a travel time would be if there's some sort of ticking clock or other deadline that might be missed. Hyperdrive speeds and modifiers are a mechanic provided to allow for ships to have travel times relative to one another, as opposed to the galaxy at large. For the most part, unless there's that ticking clock, even travel times in the game are, "OK, you got in your ship and took off. Aaand, now you're at your destination."

I can't agree with you on this. The speed of hyperdrives in my games is a very real concern, and taking a week or more to move vessels into position is something that we incorporate into our stories. We don't do "speed of plot" but instead make the plot work with the speed of the hyperdrives.

I would point out that he said speed of plot for movie/tv , he didn't say anything about in a campaign. And in entertainment, that is exactly how fast the ship moves...as fast as the writer needs it to go. If the cast needs to get there "just in time", then they go fast enough to get there just in time. If they need to be too late, then it's too late. They don't waste valuable screen time on being accurate with that kind of stuff, which is why nobody has ever actually stat'd out the speed of hyperspace in the official material of the movies. Because it doesn't matter.

In a game, sure it matters, when the story being told is nebulous and flexible, and can meander all over based on what the players decide to do, because they have agency in the narrative. Movies don't. They follow the script, which means they will always go the same way, at the same rate.

Bottom line though, in a game, it's still irrelevant to the plot. If you need there to be a choice between flying to X location and Y location, and they can only do one or the other, simply space them far enough that this would be the case. Space is huge, to me, trying to say that all travel in a galaxy, from one point to another, regardless of distance, can be done in 24 hours, just seems silly. But I don't see the point in trying to hash it out anyway. The game's already done that for us, so use that. Ballpark guess on distances, and give them in metrics of time for the players to use to decide how they want to proceed.

Who cares if it matches with the movies or not? They've never bothered to make sure their movie speed matches with the published game modules that have been out for decades, so why slave yourself to their system if you don't have to?

Which brings us back to the problem of why the Rim is so much harder to govern than the Core for the Empire. Can't be purely a matter of travel time, a few days of travel, even a week, really aren't enough to interfere with a government's projection of force.

Someone should have told that to the British before 1776....at the time of the American Revolution, the average travel time from England to the North America was about 2 weeks,

Which brings us back to the problem of why the Rim is so much harder to govern than the Core for the Empire. Can't be purely a matter of travel time, a few days of travel, even a week, really aren't enough to interfere with a government's projection of force.

Someone should have told that to the British before 1776....at the time of the American Revolution, the average travel time from England to the North America was about 2 weeks,

I think America is more the exception that proves the rule. England went from losing America to running the first truly global empire. Distance is not a factor if you have capable and loyal executors of the Imperial will.

There seems to be a !arge gap in the abilities of craft between RPG and the game. From what Ive seen in the films star destroyers have pretty good straight line speed. The Falcon for example cannot outrun them in Empire., yet it's upgraded speed would be about the same as an x wing in game so speed 2 (stasr destroyer) and speed 4 or 5 (falcon).

The Falcon likely has greater initial acceleration and maneuverability. A Star Destroyer would have greater top speed when traveling in a straight-line, but take longer to get there. The Falcon's primary tactic will be to use their initial acceleration to buy enough space to go to hyperspace. If they can't calculate that by the time the SD is offsetting is mass disadvantage then their only option is to out-maneuver the SD. If the Falcon could pull and 180 and shoot back past the SD thy would almost invariably escape. Except... doing that means running the gauntlet of the SDs guns and Tie fighter swarms. Hence, an asteroid field being considered a "viable option."

Which brings us back to the problem of why the Rim is so much harder to govern than the Core for the Empire. Can't be purely a matter of travel time, a few days of travel, even a week, really aren't enough to interfere with a government's projection of force.

Someone should have told that to the British before 1776....at the time of the American Revolution, the average travel time from England to the North America was about 2 weeks,

It wasn't the travel gap that cost them the 13 Colonies. It was the competition from the French and Spanish. We were never a military threat to King George, and if they had the luxury of concentrating the might of England on the emerging US they would likely have won handily. Our military revolution was a delaying action. The Founders were relying on the quixotic and shifting diplomatic landscape of Europe to make letting the colonies go the most expedient choice the British could face.

Hence the frequent presence of Franklin, Jefferson, and others on the Continent. The diplomatic goal was support from France and Spain combined with the dissolution of those nation's detante with England. We lost almost every battle. The Founders won our independence by shrewdly reading the geopolitical landscape, not beating the redcoats in the field. Prior to 1945 Europe couldn't forge a lasting truce to save itself - and didn't want to.

This and underscores why Palpatine walked a careful path and waited for the Death Star to dissolve the Senate. His Imperium was not secure. Doing it before the DS coming online could have led to key core worlds, critical to the Imperial machine and not easily brought to heel making a stand. Some of those words have not-insubstantial sector military and production capacity. What would happen in Corelia, Alderan, Chandrila, Kuat, and other leading worlds all ceded and told the Empire "out!" All while taking their allied worlds with them?

The Emperor would be forced to recall sufficient forces to the core to pacify them, or even defend Coruscant, which would open the door for former CIS regions to in turn declare independence. At that point, the Empire is suddenly in precarious, contested waters. The Rebel Alliance doesn't openly face the Empire in the field until an existential threat is forced upon them. The reason is simple: There aren't enough galactopolitical levers forcing the Empire to meet any of their demands the way their were levers forcing the Brits to meet ours. It wasn't the rockets red glare of bombs bursting in heir that drove our rebellion to victory. it was timing.

In the movies and TV shows, it's all very much speed of plot. Does anyone ever start a trip and end it in different clothes, even?

For my games, I've kept it vague; basically, it's handwaved, but travel takes time, because that's the feel I want (originally, we were talking about a Traveller game, but one player looked at the Trav rules and said nuh-uh). "A day or two later, you make it to the Wheel" is about as detailed as we've been so far, other than in Beyond the Rim.

I feel like the new movies don't care at all for keeping any kinds of reasonable restrictions on Hyperspace travel. We see ships jumping in and out of planet's atmospheres, and all jumps seem to only take a few minutes at most.

I find this kind of annoying, because the Rebellion wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually opposing the Empire if hyperspace works the way it works in the movies. In the SWRP system it makes sense that the Empire is under a lot of pressure, because there are millions of planets and only 25000 Star Destroyers, which may seem like an insanely huge force, but the raw amount of space they are trying to police is so insanely vast that it's virtually impossible to control it all.

If you throw in hyperspace the way it works in the movies though all the Star Destroyers would simply sit at a fleetyard somewhere to be dispatched at a moments notice the way a planet signals a rebel attack. Suddenly it would be perfectly possible to bring down the entire might of the imperial war machine one very single rebel who pokes their head out. That honestly kind of ruins the whole strategic element of the galactic civil war. The whole reason why the rebellion stood any chance at all is because space is so vast that even the most powerful fleet there ever was couldn't begin to hope to actually control it all.

The whole reason why the empire needed a death star in the first place was because in a galactic game of whack a mole the only way to win is to plug the holes for good.

Ok, so back in topic

- there is no official time travel, only some roughly estimates

- time travel on movies/series are plot time: good and evil characthers arrives whenver they need to arrive

- rpg need to build a coherent way to solve distance

- travel across the galaxy should be in days range, not months

- using routes is the way to cut off travel time

- rogue one examples are WRONG. that is. we can argue on different, free-to-spoiler, topic

- x0.5 travel speed (ie Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive) should be better enough than x1 speed to make difference, at least on Outer Rim

so, i'm creating a new "hyperspace travel time" table; something like this

same system       | 10 - 30 minuts
same sector       |  1 - 4 hours
adjacent sectors  |  3 - 8 hours
same region/quad  |  6 - 24 hours
adjacent regions  | 12 - 48 hours
across the galaxy |  5 - 10 days

Those times are way too fast for my liking.

I've just realised as well in, the LoTR trilogy.. Frodo turns up in Rivendell and suddenly so do all the representatives of the Free People. Didn't it take elven outriders three months to get to the dwarfes of the Grey Mountains or something,,,, Just a scene or two showing outriders getting ready, the slow recovery of Frodo from the wound of the Morgul Blade, Gandalf discussing the time/distance between the different races with Elrond etc

It's an issue of style, really. Showing the messengers leaving would just bog the movie down - it's not relevant to the plot. In the extended version you see Boromir leaving and it's clear he's in for a long, arduous journey.

I've just realised as well in, the LoTR trilogy.. Frodo turns up in Rivendell and suddenly so do all the representatives of the Free People. Didn't it take elven outriders three months to get to the dwarfes of the Grey Mountains or something,,,, Just a scene or two showing outriders getting ready, the slow recovery of Frodo from the wound of the Morgul Blade, Gandalf discussing the time/distance between the different races with Elrond etc

It's an issue of style, really. Showing the messengers leaving would just bog the movie down - it's not relevant to the plot. In the extended version you see Boromir leaving and it's clear he's in for a long, arduous journey.

A movie all about a bunch of guys slogging across the countryside would be bogged down by showing a scene of few more guys doing the same? OK...

I posted a bit about this yesterday.

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/239428-explaining-hyperspace/

Might be of interest to you too

I've just realised as well in, the LoTR trilogy.. Frodo turns up in Rivendell and suddenly so do all the representatives of the Free People. Didn't it take elven outriders three months to get to the dwarfes of the Grey Mountains or something,,,, Just a scene or two showing outriders getting ready, the slow recovery of Frodo from the wound of the Morgul Blade, Gandalf discussing the time/distance between the different races with Elrond etc

It's an issue of style, really. Showing the messengers leaving would just bog the movie down - it's not relevant to the plot. In the extended version you see Boromir leaving and it's clear he's in for a long, arduous journey.

A movie all about a bunch of guys slogging across the countryside would be bogged down by showing a scene of few more guys doing the same? OK...

One bunch of guys is embarked on an epic quest to save the world. The other group of guys are carrying mail. So, yeah.

I've just realised as well in, the LoTR trilogy.. Frodo turns up in Rivendell and suddenly so do all the representatives of the Free People. Didn't it take elven outriders three months to get to the dwarfes of the Grey Mountains or something,,,, Just a scene or two showing outriders getting ready, the slow recovery of Frodo from the wound of the Morgul Blade, Gandalf discussing the time/distance between the different races with Elrond etc

It's an issue of style, really. Showing the messengers leaving would just bog the movie down - it's not relevant to the plot. In the extended version you see Boromir leaving and it's clear he's in for a long, arduous journey.

A movie all about a bunch of guys slogging across the countryside would be bogged down by showing a scene of few more guys doing the same? OK...

One bunch of guys is embarked on an epic quest to save the world. The other group of guys are carrying mail. So, yeah.

The other group of guys are essential to getting the first group of guys together. So, no.

My wife is a huge LotR fan. So like Star Wars, we end up watching the LotR trilogy at least once a month. Not once did I feel anything was missing between the Frodo being rushed to Rivendale and the counsel of Elrond.

I feel like the new movies don't care at all for keeping any kinds of reasonable restrictions on Hyperspace travel. We see ships jumping in and out of planet's atmospheres, and all jumps seem to only take a few minutes at most.

I find this kind of annoying, because the Rebellion wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of actually opposing the Empire if hyperspace works the way it works in the movies. In the SWRP system it makes sense that the Empire is under a lot of pressure, because there are millions of planets and only 25000 Star Destroyers, which may seem like an insanely huge force, but the raw amount of space they are trying to police is so insanely vast that it's virtually impossible to control it all.

If you throw in hyperspace the way it works in the movies though all the Star Destroyers would simply sit at a fleetyard somewhere to be dispatched at a moments notice the way a planet signals a rebel attack. Suddenly it would be perfectly possible to bring down the entire might of the imperial war machine one very single rebel who pokes their head out. That honestly kind of ruins the whole strategic element of the galactic civil war. The whole reason why the rebellion stood any chance at all is because space is so vast that even the most powerful fleet there ever was couldn't begin to hope to actually control it all.

The whole reason why the empire needed a death star in the first place was because in a galactic game of whack a mole the only way to win is to plug the holes for good.

I now have to do something which I really, really don't like. I have to defend rogue one. (I even resists the make up joke)

Vader seem have traveling for ages to Scarif. Some people claim that the rebels traveled just minutes to Scarif and in which case Vader would have done the same, but that imho a completely wrong estimate of how long the battle of Scarif did take. It more likely that it took several hours and Vader was on his way before the battle even started iirc. On top of that is Mustafar not that far away from Scarif.

And were the rebels in the u-wing not complaining about being stiff from all the sitting in the transport? Yavin - Scarif is quite the distance even when you can take the Hydian Way and Corrilian Run for the most part.

that's just my ideas; what do you think about?

What your issue with the travel times from Fly Casual? They are close enough differentiate by hyperspace routes, include real space travel when switching from one hyperlane to another or on slower lanes with interruptions in them, they even give you a reasonable concept for masss shadows and engine speed and astrogation checks which can cut travel time dramatically by using optimized routes and getting closer to mass shadows. So why replace the table from fly casual with another, very similar one? If you want a more detailed system, we have a calculator back from the WEG times too … which is pretty close to fly casual.