This Is What Happens When A Hyperdrive Malfunctions In ‘Star Wars’
The hyperdrive is one of the most critical pieces of equipment for any ship in the Star Wars universe that wants to fly throughout galaxies far, far away. However, it’s just like any other piece of technology and is subject to failure at some point. We were first introduced to a malfunction in Episode 5 when the Millennium Falcon is trying to escape Cloud City only to find that the hyperdrive motivator had been tampered with.
This just leads to not being able to make the jump, but what happens if some of the safety mechanisms break down?
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Hyperdrives essentially launch the ships into “hyperspace”, a dimension of space-time where objects could move at faster-than-light speeds. They are complicated pieces of technology that use gamma radiation to make ripples in the space-time matrix which the ship is then propelled by. If this sounds like it would be bad for something to go wrong, it is.
There are multiple safety mechanisms to prevent anything catastrophic. There are shields to protect the vessel, inertial dampeners to cope with the momentum changes of going faster than lightspeed, stasis fields to shield whatever is inside the ship from the relativistic passage of time and to keep them in time, as well as several technologies to keep the ship from being ripped apart by the physics of hyperspace travel.
Image Source: Blogspot
All this being said, what could go wrong? Well, here are some examples from the main canon and Legends. First, is that the relativistic shielding fails. This means that, instead of staying roughly in the time you were making the jump, you would come out of hyperspace centuries in the future. If you've seen Interstellar, just think of the scene where they are trapped on the planet near a black hole.
Some more straightforward malfunctions would be the hyperdrive coming loose and destroying the ship and a power drop in the hyperdrive which just leads to a longer time in transit. Damage to the ship can also cause the hyperdrive to make an accidental jump as seen in the Clone Wars animated series whereas a damaged hyperdrive can send a ship through time as well as space. Finally, a malfunction of the Thorsen field generator can cause damage to the ship and the crew while travelling through hyperspace.
Most failures occurring in the hyperdrive are catastrophic at best and fatal at worse. Thankfully, there is a large range of safety features that make these malfunctions fairly rare. It’s still safe to say that it is certainly something you want to avoid next time you’re making your next jump through hyperspace.
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Source(s): Millennium Falcon Owner's Workshop Manual