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How fast can the Enterprise make the Kessel run?
This fast:
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can even see Obi-Wan make a face when Han says the parsec bit.
You think some guy in a bar would just make shit up to sound cool?
Not very. The Millennium Falcon is about the size of a Runabout. You're not making those turns in a battlecruiser.
The Defiant could handle it just fine, and obliterate the Millennium Falcon on its way through.
Possibly. But not with the "stock" sluggish engines.
The Millennium Falcon is way more maneuverable. They are not the same class of ship. I looked up their sizes. The Defiant is supposed to be as thick (the shortest way) as the Millennium Falcon is long. You are comparing a military destroyer to a relatively large speed boat.
Isn't the Millennium Falcon a suped up small freighter? There are no other ships like it AFAIK, it's a custom job. A galaxy class starship (The Enterprise) would be more comparable to a star destroyer. The Defiant is also a one of a kind ship, created to fight the Borg. I'm confident it would completely obliterate the Millennium Falcon, since the Falcon barely has an armament, doesn't have shields TMK, no cloak, no torpedos, no transporter, and no cloaking device. Its only advantage is maneuverability, which is negated by tracking computers.
Just teleport an armed torpedo on board the Falcon and detonate it.
Ok holup why don't they do this more often?
In the Star Trek world, teleporters cannot go through shields. In a few episodes when they lose shields they have boarding parties attack.
Star Wars ships don’t have shields, they have area deflectors. A ship like the Enterprise could simply teleport active torpedoes into whatever Star War ships they encounter at a critical location and take out every ship with ease.
The Falcon has shields and missiles. Pretty much every ship in Star Wars except for TIE Fighters use shields. TIEs specifically don't because the Empire is wasteful, stupid, and arrogant.
Everything else comes down to the exact amount and kinds of energy the ships can generate and protect themselves from, and what speeds they can move. Those answers probably exist, but who knows what they are.
TIEs specifically don’t because the Empire is wasteful, stupid, and arrogant.
Well, also because the TIE is a light fighter built for both speed and mass production, which meant stripping out everything other than engines, guns, and controls. Similarly fast fighters with more features seem to have been made in comparatively small numbers and were issued specifically to either elite Imperial pilots or Jedi depending on the era.
Yeah, thats what the Empire said but when you're losing dogfights with 2:1 odds or better because all your pilots get clapped in one shot and never have a chance to gain experience against an outgunned and outmanned insurgency your strategy is just bad.
We know that was the rationale but we also know they were hilariously wrong.
What I really want to know is why the Defiant is vaporizing the Falcon in the first place. It isn't like Starfleet to shoot first and open hailing frequencies later.
I'd expect it to go more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKJa8lIiWHg
Then either followed by this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7jWqD3Zs9Q
Or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23vTQDS36dM
...depending on the writers.
The Falcon is much bigger than a runabout. 23.1 meters by 13.7 meters for the runabout, 34.7 by 23.8 for the Falcon. It's 1.5 times longer and 1.7 times wider.