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The Wookieepedia article on hyperspace states (emphasis mine):

By entering hyperspace, a starship could take advantage of the wrinkles in the fabric of realspace to reduce journey time significantly, "jumping" from a specific point to another point without having to travel directly between them.

How exactly do these "jumps" work? Is it like an instant teleportation from one point to another in hyperspace? I'm asking because of a conversation on this question.

After a jump, do you just suddenly appear in a point in realspace?

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    Well, you could only use hyperspace to jump directly between points in space. If you want to "jump directly between points in hyperspace", you have to use hyper-hyperspace.
    – Doug Warren
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 17:42
  • @DougWarren So, after a jump, do you just suddenly appear in a point in realspace?
    – Fiksdal
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 17:55
  • I think we're talking about also using a wormhole to make that direct jump.
    – PoloHoleSet
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 19:01
  • you still travel between from A to B. it takes much, much less time. take a look at starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kessel_Run "Behind the Scenes" part to try understanding what George thinks about hyperspace jumps.
    – Cherubel
    Commented Aug 19, 2016 at 8:48
  • A read on Eistein Rosen gate would be helpful.
    – ABcDexter
    Commented Aug 19, 2016 at 14:50

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NO

Take a look at the Episode 4. They Plot a course from Tatooine to Alderaan. Then there are a few scenes inside the Falcon. After some time they appear In the Alderaan system.

Or take a look at Phantom Menace (Episode 1) They take of from Naboo and want to go to Coruscant. On their way they have to drop out of Hyperspace at the closest planet.

So to conclude it isn't instantaneous. Some time does pass while they are traveling from A to B.

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  • So does hyperspace travel always take advantage of these "wrinkles"?
    – Fiksdal
    Commented Aug 19, 2016 at 8:54
  • That would depend on how stable is the route, does it come close to some space phenomena that can cause it to be faster ot slower. Black holes are bad, other planets, asteroid field that shift positions etc etc. Some routes are pretty fast, others less so coz it isnt a straight line in some cases. Finding new and stable routes would make you a very rich person.
    – Cherubel
    Commented Aug 19, 2016 at 8:59
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    You mean episode 4 (can't correct it because its less than 10 characters. Stupid limitation if you ask me because wrong numbers often are less than 10 characters)
    – Hothie
    Commented Aug 19, 2016 at 10:03
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I don't like Wookieepedia's use of the term "wrinkle" (which I don't believe is based on any canon source, though I could be wrong) because it has different implications than the way hyperspace travel is conveyed in all official Star Wars media I've ever seen/read/played/etc. I would suggest not trying to think of hyperspace in terms of wrinkles, because I don't think George Lucas ever intended us to think of it in wrinkles and the term "wrinkle" certainly isn't used in A New Hope, which is Wookieepedia's "source" for that claim.

Hyperspace travel is analogous to real-space travel, but at different scales. You still have to travel through hyperspace - if the distance is further in real-space, it is also further in hyperspace. The films show that hyperspace travel is not instantaneous.

We also know from the films that it is possible to collide with real-space objects while traveling in hyperspace. In A New Hope, Han specifically comments on the importance of calculating the correct course before beginning a hyperspace jump, so that the ship doesn't hit an obstacle such as a supernova or meteor shower. Extended Universe sources further explain that each object in real space has a "mass shadow" in hyperspace that objects in hyperspace can collide with.

You can see what happens at the end of a jump in the films. The ship starts to appear in real space, but appears to be elongated and traveling at massive speed. In only an instant, the ship has returned to sublight speed and no longer appears elongated. I'm not sure whether this elongated effect is actual spaghettification or just a visual artifact of how fast the object is moving.

The following addendum is my interpretation and may not accurately reflect the universe: I tend to imagine hyperspace as a parallel dimension of realspace, where every object exists in the same position relative to each other, but something about the scale is different. Imagine if you shrank our universe to 1/1000th of its normal size. Then it would only take 1 year to journey between two planets that were 1000 years apart when the galaxy was its normal size. I don't mean that hyperspace is simply a smaller version of normal space, but that perhaps the concept of distance works in a fundamentally different way in hyperspace so that the limitations of the speed of light no longer apply.

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