On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 01:57:51PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
Han Solo: "Fast? Yeah, she's fast. She made the Kessel run in
under 12 parsecs."
Which makes sense only if the "kessel run" is some kind of benchmark
other than a DISTANCE benchmark, i.e., if they're benchmarking something
whose ultimate goal is to be achieved over some variable distance,
and 12 parsecs is a record-setting distance. But of course, even that
doesn't make much sense, it's just a bit of flotsam/jetsam on the sea
of stupid movie lines.
Oddly enough, and still off topic, there is a reason that Han Solo said that.
Strictly star wars speaking, the kessel run was a smugglers run from the planet Kessel to a point out in space. Now, the problem with this run was that there was a place in the vicinity of the system that Kessel is in called the Maw, which is basically an area that contained numerous black holes that created gravitic anomolies that made it impossible to jump to light speed (as it were in that universe).
Until the point at which Han and Chewie, in the Millineum Falcon broke the record on the Kessel run, ships went a certain path (read arc) around the maw. and the length of that arc varied depending oh how close a ship came to the maw.... so, the closer you flew to the event horizon, the shorter your distance from one point on the arc to another. Hence the parsec quantifier. basically, the trip from Kessel to the safe point normally took something like 15 parsecs worth of distance as the ships had to travel a pretty good arc around the area of black holes. Han did it in under 12 parsecs, meaning that he had cut it that much closer to the maw than anyone else had ever done.
by the way... whats wrong with using parsecs as distance? that is what they are...
1 parsec = 3.09E13 km = 3.26 lightyears.
Of course, picturing a 12pc arc and a 15pc arc with the same start and stop points would make a good example to look at, but in astronomical terms, that would mean that hte typical (and 15 is just a guess) parsec trip would be roughly 9.27e13 km longer than the record setting run that Han did...
or in other words...
the normal trip is about 463,500,000,000,000km and Han's trip was roughly 370,800,000,000,000km long, saving roughly 92,700,000,000,000km
roughly of course... my astronomical math is a little rusty... I havent really used it in ages.. <grin>
cheers
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