Something that has always bothered me...

[kieferskunk]

Warning, my geek is showing.

XKCD 890 (4/25/11) touches on the one scene in Star Wars that has always bugged me. When Luke and Obi-Wan ask Han about the Millennium Falcon, he says "It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs

Comments

[_dogan]

Naturally, the internet has the answer to this.

How could Han make the Kessel run in “under 12 parsecs”? A parsec is a unit of distance, not time.

Kessel is situated extremely close to the Maw, an extremely dangerous cluster of black holes. The Kessel run is usually an 18 parsec trip, with extra distance taken to avoid the black holes. Han’s boast of making the run in 12 parsecs referred to the Falcon’s ability to fly closer to the cluster without being destroyed, thus taking a more direct route. It is assumed that Han attributed this feat to his ship’s speed, or at least the power of his engines.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3338643

[kieferskunk]

Interesting, I hadn't heard that particular theory. Is this an example of Lucas backfilling the universe to make up for a bad line in the script? :)

[cateagle]

If you look at Obi-Wan's face when Han delivers that line, you can tell he knows it's nonsense.

[kieferskunk]

Ah, yes, but how much of that was written into his character and how much was Alec Guinness trying to keep a straight face on a bad line? :)

[cateagle]

I think you could argue either way on that. Myself, I'd prefer to give the young George Lucas the benefit of the doubt; after all, when the first movie was announced, it was clearly delineated as "Space Opera" and this works with that meme (hey, I grew up reading both space opera ("Doc" Smith, the early John W. Campbell, and early Jack Williamson among others) and more recent sf (dad gladly shared his issues of Analog with me).

[mhari_lindhaven]

If I'm remembering correctly, I think it was acknowledged around Lucasfilm that it was an incorrect choice of words and nobody caught it, but it did make for a lot of snickering and joking.

[kieferskunk]

As _dogan mentioned above, apparently there IS a distance-based explanation for this line, but I couldn't tell if it's official or just fancruft. And if it DOES have some form of officiality, I'm highly suspicious that it's just backfilling the story to cover up a poorly-written line. :)

[nykkel]

I'd figured it was a hyperdrive thing, and that he was able to take a shorter hyperdrive route than most other ships.