system
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human
[StarWars] Lightspeed and HyperDrives

In regards to the hyperdrives in Star Wars, what method of travel are we supposed to assume? Miguel Alcubierre's proposed theory of faster-than-light travel is all that I can come up with. He suggests FTL travel by encapsulating the vessel in a "time bubble," compressing the space in front of it, expanding the space behind it, and jumping the gap. Where I'm lost is when we see stars fly past the craft, we are led to believe that they are simply moving through space faster than light. This is difficult for to rationalize. My only reference is the Supercruise theory from the game *Elite: Dangerous*.

Question: How does SW FTL travel work and how are HyperDrives powered?
gpt
When a ship goes to lightspeed, they are doing exactly that: the ship is accelerated near instantly to the speed of light by its Hyperdrive. For this moment the ship is still in real space, which is why they sort of 'zoom' off when you look at them. This would obviously cause a ton of G-Forces, which is why intertial dampers were absolutely necessary.

The Hyperdrive then shunts the ship into Hyperspace, which is sort of a paralel dimension to realspace, where position is contiguous (that is, where you are in space is related to where you are in Hyperspace, and vice versa) but everything moves at superluminal velocities. This allows ships to traverse the galaxy in days, depending on how fast the hyperdrive can go.

When exiting Hyperspace, the ship would simply slow down back to lightspeed again and the Hyperdrive would allow them to transit back into realspace, and would then quickly deccelerate the ship to cruising speed. However sufficiently strong gravity wells (like planets, stars, and Interdictors) could force the ship back into realspace uncontrollably, which is why the hyperspace lanes needed to be carefully mapped.

As for the hyperdrives themselves, they're typically powered by either antimatter reactions, fusion generators, or hypermatter reactors (hypermatter being a form of matter harvested from hyperspace and very, very energetic).