These near and far wars

July 18, 2005 8:14 AM

What span of time elapses in episodes 4, 5 and 6 of Star Wars?

I know from fan sites that 3 years is supposed to have elapsed between episodes 4 and 5 for example, but what I'm wondering is how many days, weeks, months pass within each movie. For example, for how long did Luke spend on Dagobah training with Yoda? Since Jedi take a looooong time to train, how long was Luke's crash course? Or, how long did it take for the Millennium Falcon to get from Tatooine to the Death Star in episode 4? Is there a chronology for this anywhere?

posted by Scoo to media & arts (9 comments total)

The official chronology is Star Wars: The Essential Chronology, and I don't have a copy.

TheForce.net has a timeline that seems to put Episode V three years after the end of Episode IV, and Episode VI four years after the end of Episode IV.
posted by profwhat at 8:50 AM on July 18, 2005

For example, for how long did Luke spend on Dagobah training with Yoda? Since Jedi take a looooong time to train, how long was Luke's crash course?

You can assume it took a while, since the Falcon was able to travel between several star systems without a hyperdrive while Luke was training.
posted by COBRA! at 9:04 AM on July 18, 2005

Wikipedia has a pretty extensive Dates in Star Wars section. It breaks things down by year, but has no monthly or weekly info.
posted by Robot Johnny at 10:44 AM on July 18, 2005

COBRA!: Lucas may not be Stephen Hawking, but even he didn't make errors that bad. Weren't they just traveling in-system anyway?
(to Bespin right? Gosh it's been a while...)
posted by hototogisu at 11:53 AM on July 18, 2005

Lucas may not be Stephen Hawking, but even he didn't make errors that bad. Weren't they just traveling in-system anyway?

Nope, he made that error. They start out in the Hoth system. Blast out of there, get chased into an asteroid field, latch onto a Star Destroyer. After unlatching, Solo looks at a chart and says that they're in the Anoat system (so they've switched star systems at least once). Then Solo says that they can make it to Cloud City; he doesn't say whether that's a third star system, but he says it's "pretty far."

I realize that it doesn't say anything good about me that I can rattle this off, but I spent a lot of time in college thinking about it...
posted by COBRA! at 12:23 PM on July 18, 2005

Oh, and while I'm at it, the two possible workarounds:

1. Maybe the Star Destroyer they were latched onto made some hyperspace jumps while they were piggybacking.

or

2. Maybe they did all of their cross-system travel at some crazy-high percentage of the speed of light so that relatavistic effects made their elapsed shipboard time pretty small. This doesn't really hold up if you work with any real interstellar distances, but maybe it's good enough for movie science.
posted by COBRA! at 12:26 PM on July 18, 2005

You expect the dude who thought a parsec was a unit of time* to have an accurate sense of how far stellar systems are from each other?

*I don't care what retconning got done later. It's obvious in Star Wars that a parsec is a unit of time. Lucas probably thought it was better than a second, it was a SECOND!!! IN!! SPAAAAAAAAAACE!!!
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:56 PM on July 18, 2005

COBRA!: The star destroyer wouldn't have jumped with them attached; the whole premise was that the SD dumps its junk prior to making the hyperspace transition... and they bailed out with the trash.

Good spot, though - I'd never even though about it before...
posted by Chunder at 1:55 AM on July 19, 2005

You're just miffed Xeny 'cos he wasn't going through Ultraspace +1 at 1200 kilolights...
posted by longbaugh at 5:54 AM on July 30, 2005