Mysteries of hyperspace?

[Maximum77]

I was reading the Star Wars YT-1300 Complete Reference Manual and it mentioned that their are some aspects of hyperspace that remain a mystery aside from those well-established facts acknowledged by all competent astrophysicists.

What could be one of the main mysteries? I can’t think of any.

[Yora]

Hyperspace is a completely fictional concept. To my knowledge there is no evidence of any such thing existing as a means to travel faster than light.

It's basically just magic.

[Maximum77]

Wormholes?

[DavidSh]

Wormholes?

Are you proposing them as an existing means to travel faster than light, or as a fictional mystery of hyperspace in the Star Wars universe?

I don't think they have been shown to actually exist, even if the General Relativity equations allow for them.

[Maximum77]

Are you proposing them as an existing means to travel faster than light, or as a fictional mystery of hyperspace in the Star Wars universe?

I don't think they have been shown to actually exist, even if the General Relativity equations allow for them.

Well both. Wormholes exist in Star Wars canon. They appeared in the Han Solo comics.

Wormholes could be a potentially REAL FTL method but I am playing Devils Advocate and asking from an in-universe point of view. In Star Wars, based on what we see and know about hyperspace; what could be one of the mysteries?

[Battleship789]

Well both. Wormholes exist in Star Wars canon. They appeared in the Han Solo comics.

Wormholes could be a potentially REAL FTL method but I am playing Devils Advocate and asking from an in-universe point of view. In Star Wars, based on what we see and know about hyperspace; what could be one of the mysteries?

I can recall 2 mysteries about hyperspace off hand that are specifically in-universe:

What happens to objects stuck in hyperspace (say tossing someone/something out of an airlock with no hyperdrive to bring them back to normal space)? If my memory is correct, one of the scenes in the final novel of the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy involves shoving someone out of an airlock during a hyperspace transit, with the pushers speculating what would happen to them.

A second mystery involves traveling outside of the galaxy via hyperspace: it can't be done. My memory about this is more foggy, but I believe it is mentioned/discussed during the New Jedi Order series, particularly the first novel Vector Prime, and the Outbound Flight novel.

[Saintheart]

What happens to objects stuck in hyperspace (say tossing someone/something out of an airlock with no hyperdrive to bring them back to normal space)? If my memory is correct, one of the scenes in the final novel of the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy involves shoving someone out of an airlock during a hyperspace transit, with the pushers speculating what would happen to them.

The early EU novel Han Solo at Star's End has this actually happening at one point. I won't say who it is, but I found the description chilling: 'Outside the Falcon's protective shell of energy, the patterns of force that had once composed [the person who was shoved out] ceased to have coherent meaning.'

As for descriptions of hyperspace, I actually resort to a very, very old novella originally published with the computer game Elite, written by Steve Eisler under the pen name of Robert Holdstock. It has 'Witchspace', but it might as well be hyperspace:

You're going to cover maybe seven light years in a few minutes, and you might think that's a lot of space to get lost in, but that isn't how it works. Faraway is a tunnel, like any other tunnel. Inside that tunnel is the realm called Witch-Space, a magic place, a place where the normal rules of the universe don't necessarily work. And every few thousand parsecs along the Witch-Space tunnel there are monitoring satellites, and branch lines, and stop points, and rescue stations; and passing by all of these are perhaps a hundred channels, a hundred 'lines' for ships to travel, each one protected against the two big dangers of hyperspace travel: atomic reorganisation, and time displacement.

Jump on your own through hyperspace, across more than half a light year, and you'll be lucky to make the same universe, let alone your destination.

You might emerge from Witch-Space turned inside out (which is not a pretty sight).

You might be stretched in all the wrong angles, and although the ship keeps travelling, that jelly mass of broken bone and flesh inside the cabin is you.

According to legend, you might come through okay and breathe a sigh of relief, only to go into Earth orbit and wonder why that big lizard, with the teeth and the long tail and the green scales is roaring up at you, and warning you off of his nice Jurassic patch of prehistoric desert.

To go Faraway is a killer, unless you obey the rules.

And in terms of actual mysteries of hyperspace as shown on film, one of them might well be why whether entering hyperspace means you're actually entering a parallel dimension or not, or indeed what the nature of hyperspace actually is.

(Or indeed the bigger mystery might be what the nature of travelling in hyperspace actually is. You can't fly through real-universe objects like stars while in hyperspace (hence why it takes a nav computer a few moments to calculate the course), and The Last Cowpat demonstrates it's possible to impact a real-world object while in or transitioning to hyperspace ... but hyperspace flight seems to be frictionless, suggesting there's no interaction with the physical universe (if for no other reason than a ship in hyperspace would have to be generating infinite energy shields, since every particle of dust becomes an atomic bomb consequent on E=mc2). So are you still in four-dimensional space or are you Somewhere Else? Are you existing in several different dimensions at the same time?

It's presumably travelling at faster than the speed of light, but even that's problematic since the time dilation inherent in supraluminal travel doesn't work the way the theory of relativity says it should (time remains constant in the universe across the entire journey, travel 5 hours at supraluminal speeds and only 5 hours has passed in the wider universe when you come back out.) I guess hyperspace could just be a fancy way of saying you're warping space around an object, but if so, why can't you warp matter around it as well, thus getting rid of the hyperspace impact problem?

[Cikomyr2]

If I remember the old canon, Hyperspace technology was actually disseminated by the Rataka and their Eternal Empire. So it's possible that the theoretical scientists who understood the theory never got to spread that knowledge. Everyone just repeats what worked, fiddle and improve on it, but never truly understood the nature of Hyperspace and hyperdrive.

[Mechalich]

It's important to recognize that Star Wars hyperspace functions differently in the Legends continuity versus the Disney continuity, with the former being far more coherent than the latter (things like the Holdo Maneuver or Lightspeed Skipping are explicitly impossible in Legends).

And in terms of actual mysteries of hyperspace as shown on film, one of them might well be why whether entering hyperspace means you're actually entering a parallel dimension or not, or indeed what the nature of hyperspace actually is.

In Legends hyperspace is explicitly a parallel dimension, one that is coterminous with realspace (physical reality as understood in Star Wars). It was not even the only such alternative dimension, as subspace and otherspace also existed. Hyperspace appeared to relate to realspace primarily through gravity, as high gravity objects (basically starting at the size of substantial asteroids and working their way up from there) projected 'mass shadows' into hyperspace representing navigational hazards. Manipulation of gravity - such as by the gravity well generators of an Interdictor Cruiser - could be used to artificially create these shadows and force ships to conduct emergency exits from hyperspace.

The early EU novel Han Solo at Star's End has this actually happening at one point. I won't say who it is, but I found the description chilling: 'Outside the Falcon's protective shell of energy, the patterns of force that had once composed [the person who was shoved out] ceased to have coherent meaning.'

Ships in hyperspace apparently have to be isolated from contact with the actual medium of hyperspace, by deflector shields or some other form of protection (the Force, notably). Direct contact with the hyperspace medium seems to result in dissolution of physical matter.

It's presumably travelling at faster than the speed of light, but even that's problematic since the time dilation inherent in supraluminal travel doesn't work the way the theory of relativity says it should (time remains constant in the universe across the entire journey, travel 5 hours at supraluminal speeds and only 5 hours has passed in the wider universe when you come back out.) I guess hyperspace could just be a fancy way of saying you're warping space around an object, but if so, why can't you warp matter around it as well, thus getting rid of the hyperspace impact problem?

Because hyperspace is an alternative dimension there's no indication that a ship in hyperspace is engaging in superluminal travel. Instead, they are simply traveling at an equivalent to their sublight realspace velocity in the alternative dimension. The assumption is that speeds are either faster in hyperspace - because the equivalent of c in hyperspace is many orders of magnitude higher - or that distances are shorter despite the two dimensions being coterminous. Functionally whichever it is the effect is the same. In terms of relatively, hyperspace qualifies as a 'special frame' by virtue of being a frame outside the known universe.

If I remember the old canon, Hyperspace technology was actually disseminated by the Rataka and their Eternal Empire. So it's possible that the theoretical scientists who understood the theory never got to spread that knowledge. Everyone just repeats what worked, fiddle and improve on it, but never truly understood the nature of Hyperspace and hyperdrive.

In Legends, the Rakata did indeed developed hyperdrive. Critically, like all Rakata technologies this was intrinsically tied to use of the Force. In fact the Rakata didn't navigate using computers at all, but instead used the Force to guide their ships through hyperspace, to the point of developing specially trained agents called Force Hounds to find high population worlds. Hyperdrives were reverse engineered following the downfall of the Rakata Infinite Empire, but even so hyperdrive technology largely remained a black box and was only poorly understood. For example, the Republic and other human-dominated civilizations were unable to duplicate alternative hyperspace travel technologies such as the Infinity Gates (built by the Kwa) or the Hypergates (built by the Gree).

It's noteworthy that instant transportation between two points was possible through the Force alone, using the Fold space or Teleport powers (these may be the same abilities, simply under different names), commonly found among the Aing-Tii monks, but accessible to others and apparently possible using technology as well, as Rakata transmission devices were found in use on Belsavis. This does not seem to have involved use of hyperspace at all.