I really like Brooklyn 99. It’s really funny and full of fantastic performances. I really recommend it and am sure to catch it every week. That being said, this week’s episode really disappointed me. Not in a real way. The episode was great. It disappointed me in a nerd way, which is worse. Amy Santiago, you’ve broken my heart.

It’s a scene in the episode where she explains that a parsec is actually a measure of distance, ending with the comment “and that is one of the inconsistencies of Star Wars.” It’s actually very consistent, Amy, and even if Neil DeGrass Tyson can stop by and not take the time to tell you all about it, I can.

Here we go, kids!

The reference here is to Han’s saying, “the ship that did the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs” for those who aren’t sure what we’re talking about. Weird that he uses a measure of distance to impress us about time. Right?

First, we have to make sure we understand how hyperspace travel, or any space travel, works in both the star wars universe, and in ours. Later in the movie Han describes “it takes a moment to get the coordinates from the navicomputer. Otherwise we could fly into a moon or too close to a planet, and that would end your trip REAL quick.” The coordinates he was waiting for were likely a series of coordinates; little jumps chained together to create a ‘safe’ path to their destination.

That means even hyperspace travel in Star Wars isn’t a straight line. The path is weaving in and out of obstacles, like a highway curving in between the mountains. What’s more, though, you have to watch out for the gravity of these celestial bodies as well. Every object that has mass pulls every other object toward it. Big ones, like stars and stuff, have giant fields that pull passing objects toward them as they travel past. The need to avoid those hazards makes the path even more winding, an even longer distance to get where you are going.

We only hear about the Kessel system a few times in the movies, and never get to see it. We only need to suppose one thing about it for the movie to hold together just fine. Maybe Kessel is a dense system, with lots of planets and moons. Maybe a binary star? We just need to accept that it has lots of celestial bodies that need to be navigated and that travelling through it is usually a winding mess.

A ship that was fast enough to use it’s momentum to easily escape the gravitational pull of those obstacles would be able to cut travel time and distance out of their journey, like hugging the curves on a racetrack. A ship that was so fast it could cut the curves completely, chopping huge amounts of distance out of the journey because it can use it’s speed and momentum to virtually ignore gravitational pulls… a ship that can shorten the travel distance to less than 12 parsecs… That would be a fast ship, indeed.

Astrophysics is fun!