

This allows me to adjust the viewing angle for the scene. Suppose the Millennium Falcon is 25 meters wide and starts at a distance of 100 meters from the camera. The angular size at the beginning of the jump is not really known to me. All I have to do is measure the position of the falcon's sides and use them to calculate the angle size in each frame of the video during the jump to hyperspace. However, if the object is far enough away, the difference in arc length and width is tiny and we can ignore the difference. This relationship works only for the arc length of a circle. However, if you know the angular size (θ) in radians and the actual size ( L ), you can obtain the distance ( r ). That's why they look smaller when things are farther away. The angle between these two lines is the angle size. If you draw an imaginary line from your eye to one side of an object and then another line to the other side of the object, you would create a tiny wedge. Instead, they see the angular size of objects.
#Millennium falcon hyperspace movie#
What does the angle size have to do with it? Our eyes (and movie cameras) do not see the size of things.

To estimate the acceleration, we can look at the angular size of the falcon's back as it moves away. For this analysis, I use the setting of the Millennium Falcon, the end of The Empire Strikes Back jumps into hyperspace. It's just a thought.īut what about something we can actually measure? Can we determine the acceleration of a ship when it jumps into hyperspace? Oh yes – we can and will do it. Perhaps traveling through this extra dimension allows a spaceship to take a shortcut through space, making a journey that would take years to take hours. Some other strange things would also happen according to Einstein's Theory of Special Theory of Relativity – but suffice it to say that jumping into hyperspace is not just a matter of speeding at the speed of light.Ī common idea about hyperspace is that it involves extra dimensions. This means that even traveling to the next star (from Earth) would take several years.

Light has a speed of 3 x 10 8 meters per second. It should be clear that the hyperspace drive does not with the speed of light. In short, it is a possibility for spaceships in the Star Wars universe to travel long distances in a very short time. I'm a fan of Star Wars and physics, but I have to admit that I do not know what the jump in hyperspace means.
