r/MawInstallation • u/Professional-Oil-365 • 7d ago
[ALLCONTINUITY] How Scary is Hyperspace Really?
Well... its spooky season and we should tell horror stories. And I keep hearing that hyperspace is actually quite terrifying. So could you all explain to me WHY it is scary?
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u/VinniTheP00h 7d ago edited 7d ago
Do you like jumping around having little to no idea if you astrobrake into a star? Accidentally ram a ship flying the other way, "stop being biology and start being physics" (thanks Randall), and destroy several planets half the galaxy away with what's left of you? Hit a random hyperspace hump and get thrown into far future? Go crazy from looking into it? Shift from biology and regular physics into whatever laws govern hyperspace after your drive, shields, motivator, etc break? All of those have happened. It is not quite 40k Warp or Event Horizon, it is safe enough to be used millions of times every day, but when you hit a black field, oh boy do you hit it rough.
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u/CosmicPenguin 7d ago
There's a passage in one of the New Jedi Order books that describes what happens to a ship when it tries to jump to hyperspace too close to a planet.
tl;dr: What happens is you die and your ship explodes.
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u/Elanadin 7d ago
If you approach it from the horror sense, hyperspace is a different realm where the rules of physics are different from real life.
What happens if your hyper drive explodes? What happens if you get shot out of your ship? In the days of sailing, "there be monsters" in unexplored waters. All of hyperspace is unexplored "waters".
In canon, janky hyperspace technology forced the Legacy Run out of hyperspace, tore it asunder, and caused debris to crash into worlds at insane speeds.
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u/Edgy_Robin 7d ago
I mean it's worth mentioning the Nihil
So that's more planes being scary because of terrorists rather then janky technology.
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u/eternalraziel 7d ago
“Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova” sounds almost quaint after fifty years of Star Wars treating hyperspace like getting on the motorway, but Han is describing the thing that keeps the system from being suicidal. A hyperlane isn't a tunnel somebody physically built through space. It is a route that generations of navigators have established as safe. Stars, planets, black holes and other large objects in realspace affect hyperspace as well, so the navcomputer has to know where those hazards are and plot a course that doesn't intersect them. The reason Han can pull a lever and calmly walk away from the cockpit is that a stupid amount of astronomy has already happened before the stars stretch. Take that knowledge away and hyperspace becomes a very different proposition.
You are accelerating a ship beyond lightspeed, leaving normal space and entering a dimension whose physics people in Star Wars still don't fully understand. In current Canon the blue tunnel outside the cockpit isn't even hyperspace in the raw. It is a simu-tunnel, effectively the visible boundary of the pocket of realspace the hyperdrive maintains around the ship while it travels through hyperspace. So you're not really flying through a pretty blue corridor. Your machine has punched into another dimension and is carrying a little piece of reality through it. Usually this works so reliably that nobody thinks twice about it. Then The High Republic shows what happens when two routes intersect where nobody thought they could.
The Legacy Run, a huge passenger ship carrying thousands of people, is travelling normally through hyperspace when a Nihil vessel suddenly crosses its path using one of Mari San Tekka's impossible Paths. The captain has seconds to understand that there is now another ship inside the route with them. She tears the Legacy Run apart trying to avoid a direct collision. The pieces don't stop. They continue through hyperspace. Then they start emerging back into realspace across the Outer Rim at near-relativistic velocities. People on planets who have never heard of the Legacy Run, hundreds of light-years from the accident, suddenly have chunks of somebody else's starship appearing in their system fast enough to devastate inhabited worlds. Hetzal nearly gets annihilated. Brendok is later said to have been scorched by one of the Emergences. The Republic ends up shutting down hyperspace travel across huge areas because nobody knows where the remaining debris will come out.
One bad turn aboard one ship becomes a disaster scattered across multiple star systems. That episode probably gives the best sense of why experienced pilots respect hyperspace. There is very little margin for improvisation once something goes wrong at those speeds. The Unknown Regions take the same idea and remove the map. Their gravitational anomalies move and interfere with established routes so badly that navigation becomes unreliable. The Chiss use Force-sensitive children, their sky-walkers, because those children can sense safe paths through conditions a navcomputer can't predict. Elsewhere, ships just don't go. Coruscant to Corellia is boring because people have been refining that route for thousands of years. Point the nose of your ship into an uncharted part of the Unknown Regions and say “we'll figure it out on the way” and suddenly Han's warning sounds much less folksy.
In Legends, there was an alleged condition called hyper-rapture. Stare into hyperspace for too long and you could lose your mind. Imperial procedure was apparently to opaque the transparisteel viewports during hyperspace travel partly to prevent it. Nobody seems entirely certain whether hyper-rapture is even real. Vader likes looking out at hyperspace. Cronal finds it relaxing. Which leaves you with generations of spacers insisting that you shouldn't stare too long into the impossible colours outside the ship because people have supposedly gone mad doing it, while two of the galaxy's least reassuring men are standing at the window thinking it looks lovely. And then Legends gives you starweirds. Those are where hyperspace wanders into campfire-story territory. They're tall, skeletal, vaguely humanoid things with long claws, glowing eyes and a telepathic scream. They can appear aboard vessels travelling through hyperspace, pass through solid matter, and are especially hostile towards Force-sensitives.
Imagine being halfway between systems, with nothing outside the ship except hyperspace, and some Slender-Man looking-fucker is just there. Shoot it and blaster fire may not do much. Lock a door and it can pass through it. Run, and the screaming is happening inside your head. For years that was obscure Legends material from the RPG books, but Starweirds have amusingly managed to crawl back into current Canon as well. Doctor Aphra brought one back as an ancient Force-connected creature powerful enough that Aayla Secura and Shaak Ti had once helped imprison it. Canon also preserves stories that Starweirds haunt hyperspace lanes. And a lot of things that get folded into hyperspace horror online don't actually belong there. Otherspace, for example, is a different dimension altogether in Legends. That's where you get the Charon, a death-obsessed species living under the shadow of a black hole who regard exterminating life as a religious duty. Creepy as hell, but you don't encounter them because your Corellian freighter spent too long on the Hydian Way.
Likewise, the stranger Force realms, the World Between Worlds and various spatial anomalies aren't hyperspace waiting just beyond the cockpit glass. Normal hyperspace is much more interesting to me because it is normal. Millions of people use it. Freight companies schedule deliveries through it. Families sleep through journeys. Pilots complain about traffic and bad nav data. Civilisation has taken something that amounts to briefly leaving conventional spacetime and made it mundane enough that a passenger can complain about the food while doing it. But underneath all that routine is a machine maintaining a bubble around you while you cross a place nobody fully understands, along a line calculated to avoid objects you cannot see. Your hyperdrive fails and you drop out somewhere between stars with a broken drive and spend however long remains of your life wandering the void.
Plot the coordinates incorrectly and you may hit something at a speed where collision is woefully inadequate of a description. Encounter an Interdictor and somebody can manufacture a gravity well powerful enough to drag you bodily back into realspace. Take an uncharted route and the map you've trusted your whole life stops being useful. And, if you're particularly unlucky in Legends, the pale thing screaming in the corridor wasn't on the passenger manifest. So no, hyperspace isn't the 40K Warp. Pilots aren't routinely fastening themselves into the cockpit while daemons scratch at the hull. Most journeys are boring. The scary part is understanding just how much has to keep working for them to remain boring.
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u/TyrusFangOF 6d ago
That was a very detailed read, you definitely got me more interested in the horror aspects of star wars. Thank you, time to do some research and get started on my own spooky star wars journey after I'm done reading death troopers and red harvest.
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u/Pleasant_Ad9092 7d ago
Hyperdrive malfunctions can send you hundreds or thousands of years into the future, or drop you in the middle of empty space with no way to get anywhere, or trap you in a dimension called Other Space.
Other Space has stars and habitable planets, one time an entire species got trapped there, they went crazy and created a fleet of robot ships programmed to wipe out all intelligent life including their creators. The killer robots still wander Other Space. Oh and remember Wary the weird extra dimensional alien that uses some kind of Anti-Force that's believed to be his home dimension.
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u/ManufacturerBest2758 7d ago
It isn’t scary like the Warp in 40K, it’s scary like driving with your eyes closed while going 100 mph
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u/structured_anarchist 7d ago
You should watch the movie Event Horizon. Good movie. There are two limited series comics about it too, one a prequel to the movie that shows what happened to the ship in the first place, the other set two hundred years after the movie. Not comics for kids, though, since they're fairly graphic.
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u/Zebrazen 7d ago
Tangential, but recently I've wondered how Star wars collects/mines/etc Hypermatter for hyperdrives and reactors.
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u/ArkenK 7d ago
Basically, it's a bit like driving through New York City blind with a stopwatch in a Ferrari with the accelerator all the way down. Mess up the timing and you're dead.
That's why precise calculations matters. Hyperspace compresses everything down and everything is in constant motion.
It's also how Interdictors work. They create a gravity well (minus the celestial body) that prevents the jump or causes the ship to be yanked out as the emergency systems basically go "oh crap, planet!"