Syzygy

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Physics do not apply in the Star Wars universe.

I'm not just referencing Solo's "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" claim, which can be explained away as a boast about navigational and piloting ability rather than ship speed. (Though there may be relativistic reasons for why speed would affect the ability to accomplish the Kessel Run in a shorter distance.)

In the latest BrickMaster (LEGO's magazine), there's a fake ad from Koensayr for the Y-Wing that claims "Goes from 0 to 2,700G in less than a parsec!" I was going to try and figure out what that meant, and then realized that 2,700G is acceleration and parsec is distance! When car manufacturers boast that a car goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, what they are bragging about is acceleration, that within 4 seconds, the power is such that the car can be accelerated to 60 mph from rest. What the hell does 2,700G mean? (Besides the fact that G is meaningless in Star Wars unless it references a specific planet.) If we take G to be 10 m/s^2, then 2,700G = 27,000 m/s^2. At that acceleration, it would take about 7 seconds to accelerate to lightspeed. I'm fairly certain that's not possible in the X-Wing flightsim games. Hyperspeed, yes, STL acceleration, no way.

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