#KESSEL RUN PARSEC DISTANCE OFFLINE#

There is some debate among Star Wars fans as to whether or not George Lucas just used the term parsec because it sounded cool and not because he knew anything about it. In the commentary for the DVD of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, George Lucas talks about his thoughts and reasonings behind the comment. In Alan Dean Foster's novelization, Han Solo doesn’t say parsecs in his comment he says 'standard time unites,' which is also interesting. Indeed, in the final version of the script next to Han’s famous line, it says in parenthesis: “(obviously lying)” However, this now seems to imply that Han Solo is merely bragging about making the Kessel Run in that distance and it is not the truth. “It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs!”īen reacts to Solo’s stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation. In the revised fourth draft of the original Star Wars, the description for the famous “Kessel Run” comment by Han Solo reads as follows: A few months later, however, Han Solo beats both records when he makes the run with Luke Skywalker.

The smuggler BoShek actually beats Han's record record, but without any cargo. In Legends, by dangerously moving closer to the black hole, he is able to cut the distance to 11.5 parsecs. So, when Han claims that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, he doesn't mean his ship sped through the asteroid field, but rather that he was able to find a shorter route through by skirting The Maw black hole, which makes the run under the standard distance.

#KESSEL RUN PARSEC DISTANCE OFFLINE#

This phenomenon makes sensors go offline so that pilots cannot navigate their ships except through sheer luck of doing it without computers and not hitting an asteroid. It takes ships in realspace around the Maw, leading them to an area of space called the Pit, which is an asteroid cluster encased in a nebula arm. Smugglers use it to smuggle things, particularly glitterstim spice, so that they wouldn’t get caught by Imperial ships guarding the Kessel’s mines. The Kessel Run was a 20-parsec route and is one of the most used smuggling routes within the galaxy because not many pilots dare to go in there. Parsecs is one of the oldest methods used by astronomers to calculate the distance to a star and its angle in the sky. Parsecs are generally used to measure shorter distances within the Milky Way (imagine the Kessel Run again), while multiples of parsecs are used for measuring larger scales of distance within the universe and, of course, change the term to kiloparsecs, megaparsecs, and gigaparsecs depending on if you are measuring within the Milky Way and beyond our galaxy. It is a unit that is preferred in astronomy and astrophysics, although the popular term light-year (Buzz Lightyear, anyone?) is prominent as well in many popular science texts and is used commonly. It comes from the parallax of one arc second: parsec, and was used to make the calculations of astronomical distances from raw observational data easier for scientists. The term parsec was coined by British astronomer Herbert Hall Turner in 1913. (Other than it sounds different and cooler than say, miles or kilometers.) So it makes sense that in the Star Wars universe, they would measure in parsecs.

Basically used for objects in space particularly. In particular, a unit of length used to measure large distances of astronomical objects outside of the Solar System. Parsecs are actually a unit of distance rather than time. Well, if you are like me and aren’t much of a scientist, you may be surprised to know that a parsec is a real actual measurement and is not just a made up term in Star Wars.

Kessel run parsec distance