Speed of Hyperspace

We see in the movies that ships move VERY fast in hyperspace. Crossing the galaxy can be done in a matter of hours, if one has a ship capable of long distance jumps. Capital ships are described in near-canon sources as being notable in part because of their range, rather than necessarily their size. Certainly Yoda is able to hop from Coruscant to Geonosis (Half a galaxy away) and back in a matter of hours. The jump from Tatooine to Alderaan in A New Hope takes a very short amount of time, just enough, in fact, to basically be worth slipping your gloves off to grab a seat for a while. Every time there is a depicted travel in Star Wars it is very very short. The EU novels and games have chosen to ignore this and make jump times fairly long (comparatively) and I completely understand why; it creates a story hang. But you don't have to stick with it. You can break the mould.

The first element to this is a question of range. As I see it the galaxy is composed of many systems and vague alliances that are all subsumed into the Republic / Empire. Each have their own varieties of defensive force (Naboo's Royal Navy, the Trade Federation's army) but generally these are very limited in range. A typical defensive force would comprise mainly SPACEShips (Short range small vessels) and would have difficulty crossing the galaxy due to several factors, not limited to fuel supply (in both senses of the word) and parts and components. I think there's sufficient evidence in TPM to suggest that parts proliferation is fairly limited, and that using the wrong bits is such a time consuming and exhausting endeavour that it is usually cheaper and easier to buy a new ship.

The Trade Federation is picked to be the first really effective naval force since the creation of the republic partly because it's giant container ships are already capable of intra-galactic jumps and are so large that they can carry parts spares and enough engineering capability to do their own re-supply 'on the fly'. (It is one of my contentions that large warships devote a surprising amount of internal space to refineries raw material storage and factories).

In addition to these stupendously huge vessels and the limited range defence vessels there do exist courier ships. The R-10 cruiser, C-90 corvette and the Royal Starships are examples, large enough to qualify as space level corvettes but devoting much of that space to the capability of jumping distances sufficient to act as communications links within the Republic. The Separatists are already able to strike anywhere in the galaxy with little or no warning. Their mandate of occupation means their available targets are not all that numerous; the fact that they take many hours to deploy even a expeditionary force onto a planet would allow even modestly military capable worlds of resisting fiercely; engaging poorly defended landing craft in zones of opportunity. In addition the policy of coercion through political measures limits the combat effectiveness of a numerically staggering army.It is in this environment that the Republic Army is raised. The mainstay of the Republic Army is the Blitzkrieg; the entire Army can be lifted and deployed en mass far faster than the Separatists thanks to the capability of the Assault ships to deploy everything from infantry to heavy armour directly into the atmosphere of the planet, avoiding fighter attacks. Once the Grand Army is deployed it's entire force composition is geared to blitzkrieg; rapid advance with overwhelming firepower concentrated on weak points and critical zones. These tactics are exceedingly capable versus the formation attack and siege tactics of the droid heavy enemy.

To be able to provide this kind of assault the ships must be able to get around the galaxy at least as fast as Separatist cargo haulers. To get that kind of performance I allege that size is the very key. These kinds of ships, starting with the Acclamator consist what I class as STARShips.

Now the other element I have assuming has been seen directly in The Empire Strikes Back, and that is to get from A to B when B is over, say, five hundred light years is to 'disc-hop' that is is plot a jump straight 'up' out of the galactic disc then skim along the top at horrific speeds safe in the knowledge there are no stars or planets up there to hit, and then drop back into the galactic disc when you get near your destination. The image below represents such a jump with the actual path exaggerated somewhat for clarity.

One of my contentions is that for any given travel one can go faster in a straight line, or a straight line as determined by local space-time curvature anyway, which is usually a non-euclidian arc. This would mean that any jump that involved a change in direction would slow you down considerably because you'd drop to real space, reorient and re-jump. This is what I suspect Solo is doing whilst Luke is twatting the remote with his lightsabre; the Falcon is executing a series of jumps to shake loose the Star Destroyers which are doggedly following him. In this circumstances the 'speed' of the Falcon is it's ability to calculate a jump and execute it faster than an ISD can determine the target's vector and likely distance of its jump, calculate its own jump to pursue and execute that jump.