asterisk8 said:
Yes, sorry, that's what I get for trying to explain FTL travel after a long day of work. The time would be theoretically instantaneous for those inside the ship (ignoring the fact that they would've reached infinite mass), but for everyone else, like those waving goodbye to you or waiting for you on the other side of the galaxy, it would take so long as to be pointless.
You're right that Star Wars cannot be explained with realworld physics, that it proposes a stable space outside spacetime called Hyperspace, and that this space has dimension and objects within it have mass. Hyperspace is about as real as Middle Earth, but I just thought it might help some people here if they visualized just how much distance is being traversed by characters in space sagas like this. I mean, Star Wars starts with "... in a galaxy far, far away." I think Lucas recognized that even highly-advanced civilizations weren't likely to leave their own galaxy.
Actually in the travellers frame of reference they would have normal mass (they might have felt quite heavy during the acceleration stage of the journey though!). It is only the outside observers who would see them as having infinite mass. This is why the only particles known to travel at the speed of light have a rest mass of zero. Even neutrinos are now thought to have a small rest mass and I look forward to the first measurement of the time delay between the light flash and the neutrino signal from a distant supernova.
The fastest particle (with a rest mass) ever observed was a cosmic ray detected by the fly's eye experiment. It had an energy of 3*10^20 eV which is about the same as that of a bowling ball dropped from about a metre (imagine it landing on your foot) all contained in a sub-atomic particle (probably a proton). It was so close to the speed of light that it travelled 160 Million Light Years in about 15 minutes in it's frame of reference. It took rather longer in ours!
But as you say the SW universe is as fantastical as Middle Earth. I like both of them for that reason. I put wands and light sabers in the same category, though I think light sabers are cooler. I just get a bit hacked off with people trying to use science to explain things in these movies. Firstly they are just escapist fantasy and secondly they DON'T NEED FURTHER EXPLANATION. I saw ANH when I was 9 and I pretty much understood it all. Well except why Han and Luke seemed so keen on a girl. I didn't get that until a couple of years later in ESB! Incidentally, does anyone else think Leia looks hottest in ESB? I know in ROTJ that she has the slave girl outfit but there is something about her in ESB...