Mrebo said:

Still bothers me that the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan was like 2 minutes. I can't believe it was meant to be that way.

I like to think a lot of it was for the purpose of moving the story. It's fairly contradictory to call Tatooine remote, requiring quite an expense to travel, and then only taking 5 minutes to get to Alderaan. And the galaxy is a nice visual. As for the Imperial Fleet, that it is spread across at least a large portion of the galaxy makes sense, but it also implies significant travel times - otherwise we could probably have the entire fleet here in under half an hour. I like to think it's like parsecs and more about artistic license in telling a story than intentional decisions about physics.

I had a lot of these thoughts a couple of years ago here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Space-War-Hyperspace-Fuel-etc-How-it-all-works-or-doesnt/topic/10621/

No one really wanted to talk to me about them then. Maybe you'd like to talk about them now?

Also- not in that thread, but I do recall thinking that Tatooine->Alderaan was about 5 minutes, but someone suggested that they could be on the Falcon for days. It all seems to make more sense to me that way. Also- I think Zahn writes hyperspace as still taking significant time to travel. Not compared to realspace, but still not instantaneous.