332
Battle of the Bands (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by [M] to c/tenforward@lemmy.world
130 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Depends. Are you asking about the canon Kessel run, or the objectively superior EU version?

In the EU pre-Disney, Kessel was a black hole and there was a race around it. The more powerful your engines, the closer you could get to the black hole. Which is why Han used a distance measurement instead of time (of course, the most likely in-universe fan theory is that Han was BSing the two farm yokels by throwing out space technobabble, but Star Wars authors never settle for the easy answer when they could write an entire book to fill in the plot-hole).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Never made sense in the EU. You get yanked out of hyperspace way before you need to account for that kind of gravity. My headcanon was always that it's just some spacer jargon we don't have the context to parse. Like how a 12 second car is fast, even though time is not a unit of speed.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago*

    Stronger/faster engines could get closer to the gravity wells but there are also lines about running into stars so at the end of the day it was all fan cope to explain away something that had a simpler answer:

    Han Solo was very obviously lying to the hicks about how fast his ship could go.

    Obiwan knows, Luke is clueless. It's one of the best character defining scenes in the movie and most viewers didn't catch it.

    Head over to YouTube and watch the clip, you'll see Obi-Wan smirk at the lie while Luke buys it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    An even easier explanation is that they're speaking Basic, not English, so any words that have different meanings are just different in that language.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Nope. Han Solo was just lying about how fast his ship can go, but fans came up with some bullshit because, just like Luke, they didn't know enough about space to catch it.

    There were eventually three explanations:

    1: Han Solo is lying to the hicks who don't know how space works. The original one that is actually quite obvious if you watch the scene again and look at Obi-Wan's reaction to the lie.

    2: Lucas's cope, because he didn't want to admit that and pop part of Han Solo's fan bubble: it's actually a brag about his ship's computer being able to navigate an ultra precise course.

    3: EU explanation: it's a brag about how good the engines are, allowing the Falcon to be physically closer to the black holes and take advantage of spacetime distortions.

    What was actually a great detail in the Solo movie is that they canonized all three explanations.

    The Falcon gets a droid brain that is one of the best navigators in the galaxy. It sets the (shortest) distance record when that navigator plots a course out of the black hole trap using the Falcon's souped up engines, and Han tells us what the record they just set is...

    And that number was bigger/worse than what he told Luke and Obi-Wan in the cantina. So he still lied about it.

    Honestly a pretty great cinematic interaction of fandom and writers that the vast majority of viewers, even huge nerds, will never catch.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •