It is a well-known axiom among writers that, when writing speculative fiction, you have to stay consistent with how your world works. You can have impossible technology, but you have to stay consistent with how it influences your world. Audiences will buy magic, faster-than-life travel, artificial gravity, and tasty health food in your work of fiction, just so long as you explain how it functions and stick to that functionality. If you change up how these fantastic applications work mid-story, then you’ll break the audience’s suspension of disbelief. For example, if you say that magic requires the mage to physically touch what she’s enchanting, and then later a wizard zaps a person across the room, you’ve just broken your own rules, and audiences will hate you for it.
With that said, Hyperspace in the new Star Wars movies is inconsistent magic.
Let’s start with the Holdo Maneuver. At the end of The Last Jedi, Vice Admiral Holdo destroys Snoke’s oversized B2 bomber by aiming her ship at it and then jumping to hyperspace. In the words of a Pokémon trainer, “It’s super effective!” However, if this hyperspace kamikaze attack is so effective, one has to ask: Why hasn’t this been done before?
You could destroy entire fleets of star destroyers by sacrificing a few fighters. Oversized dreadnaughts would be less than worthless, because they’d become bigger targets. Heck, why even make a Death Star when you could just ram a big empty ship into a planet at lightspeed for a fraction of the cost? Heck, earlier in the movie, several hyperdrive-equipped starships ran out of fuel and drifted back to be destroyed by the First Order. Why didn’t they turn around and hyperspace-ram the star destroyers? We saw that each ship needed one person to remain behind, and if they’re sacrificed already, why not use them to destroy the First Order fleet?
Most detractors have said, “You don’t want to use a maneuver that destroys your own ships!” And that’s true. Kamikaze tactics are the last-ditch resort of the desperate. But if it is possible to hit ships with hyperspace projectiles, then why hasn’t anybody developed hyperspace missiles? There is nothing stopping a person from attaching an ion engine, droid brain, targeting computer, and hyperspace engine to a tungsten rod and making the ultimate kinetic kill weapon. We know hyperspace engines can be small and cheap, since several fighters have them, so for somewhat less than the cost of a mid-level fighter, you could have a one-hit torpedo that could kill any capital ship in the galaxy.
But they don’t, for some reason.
However, this “science” fails to hold up even when compared with the movie before! In Rogue One, Jinn Urso and Love Interest Spy (he has a name, but his entire character is “I’m a spy,” and “I love Jinn Urso,” so fuck his name) go to hyperspace in a U-wing from the surface of Jakku to escape the Death Star blast.
This doesn’t make sense for a lot of reasons. In the first place, if you can go to hyperspace from a planet’s surface, why would you ever fly into space? In A New Hope, Han Solo could have just gone to hyperspace from Tatooine’s surface and never gotten close to the Star Destroyers! Once again, supporters of the new Star Wars movies state that there were no theoretical issues preventing hyperspace jumps straight from the ground, but safety regulations prevented them from doing so. Disable the safety features, and you could go to hyperspace in a planetary atmosphere. Theoretically, there’s nothing stopping you.
Only there is.
If a small Resistance cruiser can bisect Supreme Leader Snoke’s overcompensating flying wing, then why can’t a small piece of debris (like all the rocks flung about by the Death Star test blast on Jakku, for example) smash up a small Rebel transport? Hitting a bird, an insect, or a speck of dust would shred a vessel accelerating to relativistic speeds. And before you tell me that shields would protect a ship from such strikes, then I point back to the Holdo maneuver! If the cruiser makes it through the shields of a much larger vessel, then a couple of rocks could smash through a ship going to hyperspace.
There’s a more insidious threat, though, to ships going to hyperspace in atmosphere. It’s the atmosphere itself. Air is made up of molecules, and they are not accelerating into hyperspace with a ship. At relativistic speeds, colliding with air molecules would function like hitting a cheese grater made of fire at the speed of light. The U-Wing would have been sandblasted into molecular mist, and we all would have been spared the majority of that shitty film.
This logic also applies to The Force Awakens. Despite the fact that it’s incredibly stupid that shields would have an easily-penetrated weakness and the ludicrous useless nature of that scene (Seriously, they bring up the fact that there’s a shield, then immediately fly through it, and everything’s fine. Cut the damned scene), Han, Chewy, and Finn should have turned into a brilliant streak of radioactive plasma upon entering the atmosphere at lightspeed.
Now, in the now-defunct Legends universe, hyperspace travel had many more restrictions. For one, you could not travel within a large gravitational field. That explains why ships had to fly away from a planet to jump to hyperspace; it was literally impossible to travel faster than lightspeed too close to a planet. If you flew into a gravitational field, your ship would be pulled from hyperspace back into realspace. This is how Interdictor Cruisers worked, by creating artificial gravity fields to keep enemy vessels stuck in realspace where they could be captured or destroyed. Secondly, hyperspace was a different dimension, so when you flew to hyperspace, you would not ram into other ships, because you were no longer in the same space. That’s not to say that coming out of hyperspace was completely safe. There was still the chance of accidental collisions, but they were at non-relativistic sublight speeds after a ship has transitioned into realspace. The tactic of the Holdo Maneuver was truly impossible. Holdo would have simply shifted into Hyperspace and vanished.
But in the new Star Wars, those rules were abandoned in favor of narrative expediency. Ironically, the abandonment of these rules has actually weakened the narratives in these films, as the world is no longer homogenous and cohesive. The audience cannot tell from movie to movie how the technology works. When someone is trapped on a planet’s surface, the audience will now ask why they don’t just jump to hyperspace to escape. If a new superweapon shows up in The Rise of Skywalker, the audience will ask why the Resistance doesn’t perform another Holdo maneuver to save the Galaxy when they did it last movie to save a few dozen transports. If the audience’s suspension of disbelief is completely broken, they may not have a firm grasp of how the technology works anymore (such as why the FUCK lasers now follow curving ballistic trajectories in the blackness of deep space).
So for all of you aspiring sci fi and fantasy writers out there, be better than Star Wars and use some narrative consistency when it comes to your fiction. Otherwise, you might engender some hyperspace hysteria.