Traveling At the Speed of Plot: Difference between revisions
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* ''[[Pirates of the Caribbean]]:[[The Curse of the Black Pearl]]'': The Black Pearl is the fastest ship in the Caribbean, and the ghost pirates are suffering from a horrible curse. So after they abduct Elizabeth Swan, mistaking her for the one they need to break the curse, they would presumably head straight back to Isla de Muerta to do just that. Meanwhile, Will Turner wakes up the next day and, after an unsuccessful conversation with Norrington, breaks Jack Sparrow out of prison. The two steal a ship and sail for Tortuga where they recruit a crew. Then they proceed to Isla de Muerta. Will and Jacks' path is much longer than the ghost pirates, yet they arrive before the ceremony to lift the curse begins. Perhaps the ghost pirates aren't in quite the hurry we would expect.
** Happens again after Jack and Elizabeth are marooned. With Will in custody, the pirates now have the real person they need. Yet Jack and Elizabeth spend the night on the island before being rescued by the Royal Navy. With Jack's navigation they reach Isla de Muerta, and again it's before the ceremony has started.
** Some of this could be explained by the fact that wind and tides can be notoriously fickle even in the real world, making a difference of a few days in travel time between two points for two different ships ultimately trivial, and the rest could possibly be explained by Jack's magic compass that gives him the best and most direct route to where he wants to go, whereas the Black Pearl might have had to stop at various points to check their own charts or correct themselves since they're navigating to the Isla de Muerta by memory.
* In ''[[The Empire Strikes Back]]'' Luke and the crew of the Millennium Falcon leave Hoth at about the same time. Luke does a hyperspace jump to Dagobah to go meet Yoda. The Falcon, whose hyperdrive malfunctions, tries to evade Imperial forces in a nearby asteroid field. By the time they leave the field (the hyperdrive's still not working), Luke has crashed on Dagobah, met Yoda, and even ''began training as a Jedi''. The crew of the Falcon then decide to go to Bespin. Bear in mind that they still have ''no'' hyperdrive or FTL and Bespin is in another solar system than Hoth. You'd expect the journey to take at the very least several days, even if [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]], yet they appear to make the trip is at most a few hours (they are wearing the same outfits when they land, no one looks particularly more scruffy or even remarks about the trip's length). Meanwhile, Luke leaves Dagobah, does a hyperspace trip to Bespin and arrives just after the empire's captured everyone. Either the Falcon's trip to Bespin took several weeks during which Luke trained on Dagobah, meaning the Falcon has facilities including a laundrymat, or they did the trip in a few hours and some how becoming a Jedi is something one needs only an afternoon to learn.
** The Extended Universe explains that all ships have an "emergency backup" hyperdrive for when their main hyperdrive fails, which is never mentioned on film. This emergency hyperdrive allows for slow FTL travel, fast enough to limp to the nearest star system with a repair station, but not enough for the usual cross-the-galaxy-in-a-week hyperspace travel.
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