In the beginning of The Rise of Skywalker we can see the Millennium Falcon do something that they call lightspeed skipping.
How does that work and what makes it different from regular lightspeed travel?
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Sign up to join this communityIn the beginning of The Rise of Skywalker we can see the Millennium Falcon do something that they call lightspeed skipping.
How does that work and what makes it different from regular lightspeed travel?
We have very little information on lightspeed skipping or hyperspace-skipping. It appears to have been invented for The Rise of Skywalker. Obviously in the film we only get to know that it's possible but dangerous and see it happen. The Visual Dictionary goes into a little bit more detail spread over several sections though:
A daring run of "hyperspace skipping" - a new variant of old smuggle tactics designed to evade Imperial pursuit - has exhausted its compressor systems and both sub-alternators.
Poe beats a hasty retreat from Sinta Glacier by hyperspace-skipping the Falcon through a quick succession of deep space obstacles, including the Megafauna Chasm of the Typhonic Nebula, the Mirror-Spires of Ivexia, and the Crystal Chaos of Cardovyte.
Poe has perfected hyperspace-skipping, a dangerous series of precalculated lightspeed hops meant to throw off First Order attempts at tracking.
From the above we can see that it is essentially a series of short, normal lightspeed jumps combined together down a precalculated route.
It is employing light speed without a hyperspace lane. In Star Wars, there are hyperspace lanes that ships can jump into and ride to a destination.
In Star Trek, there are no "hyperspace" lanes but warping in a straight line with minimum probability to run smack into a planet or star. Thanks to the writing.
The Rise of Skywalker showed us light speed really works, without a space highway (hyperspace lane). Han Solo kind of alluded to this in the first trilogy where he had to plot coordinates, because he could not just "jump" in to lightspeed.
In the The Rise of Skywalker, it was finally written as to how dangerous this would be, in "real life", if we did it like Star Trek.