Imagine you go on a sleeper ship to colonize a distant world and when you arrive theres already a colony and they say "Yeah we invented FTL 200 years ago, weve been here for 3 generations."

Did you know that some of the most important planets in Star Wars were settled by Sleeper Ships? These worlds included Alderaan, Anaxes, and Kuat.

How FTL travel in movies/games Star Wars = Hyperspace Halo = Slipspace Star Trek = Warp Speed Warhammer 40K = HELL!!!

"Sir we have a ship entering Imperial space. Looks like another sleeper ship." "Someone tell that Weyland guy to get his crap outta here."

Or you could... Intercept an unknown distress signal that lead you to a ship with many strange eggs and comes back with one of your crew mates infected by an alien parasite.

The main thing I got from this video is that Halo’s UNSC still uses the QWERTY keyboard

Sleeper ships: when you want to leave all the bullshit behind you as quickly as possible, and arrive to see the bullshit got there ahead of you.

But you forget one important fact: without sleeper ships we wouldn’t have no Chiss/Thrawn

Honestly I feel like the whole "getting attacked by pirates on a sleeper ship" has an astronomically small chance of happening, think about it. You're 3 years of traditional space travel away from any known hyperspace lane: who are you going to run into out there? Sure there are pirate bases off the beaten path, but space is a *very* big place, and even if every single planet and large asteroid in the galaxy had a pirate base on it you'd be highly unlikely to get even close to sensor range of any of them. I think the biggest risk would honestly be the changing political climate of the galaxy: There's no guarantee the port you're destined for will be friendly when you arrive. Maybe you ship out to do business with the republic and wind up on a CIS world, or one controlled by the empire, or even the first order since that entire landscape shift happened *very* quickly, longer than a sleeper ship's traditional travel time, even.

Still beats travelling through the 'Warp' in Warhammer 40K where you are 'literally' travelling through a hell dimension, just one shield failure away from getting to cos-play as the cast of 'Event Horizon'.

"You want to know why they put me in charge?..."

I know it's not a sleeper ship--or at least, I don't remember it being one--But man, this topic just reminds me of Outbound Flight.

You want sleeper ships when colonizing new worlds at the edge of your very own sphere of influence, mostly to save resources during the trip since you always want a skeleton crew awake, then it wakes its replacements, and they go to sleep. This way you avoid the pandorum effect, or the passengers effect.

Eckhart: Hyperspace is quite a dangerous way of travel Me: *looks at warp from 40K*

i love that doggo at the end...makes my day better every time

""Botany Bay? Botany Bay! Oh no!" - Cmdr. Pavel Chekov, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Last time I was this early, everybody was still worried about Omeega being annoying

Check out The Outer Worlds. Sleeper ships are a major plot point, and they go over a lot of the risks associated with them

Imagine spending centuries to get to a planet, and finding it was colonized, via hyperspace, while you slept.

This is the earliest I've been to a video ever. Looking forward to another interesting video!

To the town of Agua Fria rode a stranger one fine day Hardly spoke to folks around him didn't have too much to say No one dared to ask his business no one dared to make a slip For the stranger there among them had a big iron on his hip Big iron on his hip It was early in the morning when he rode into the town He came riding from the south side slowly lookin' all around He's an outlaw loose and running came the whisper from each lip And he's here to do some business with the big iron on his hip Big iron on his hip In this town there lived an outlaw by the name of Texas Red Many men had tried to take him and that many men were dead He was vicious and a killer though a youth of twenty four And the notches on his pistol numbered one and nineteen more One and nineteen more Now the stranger started talking made it plain to folks around Was an Arizona ranger wouldn't be too long in town He came here to take an outlaw back alive or maybe dead And he said it didn't matter he was after Texas Red After Texas Red Wasn't long before the story was relayed to Texas Red But the outlaw didn't worry men that tried before were dead Twenty men had tried to take him twenty men had made a slip Twenty one would be the ranger with the big iron on his hip Big iron on his hip The morning passed so quickly it was time for them to meet It was twenty past eleven when they walked out in the street Folks were watching from the windows every-body held their breath They knew this handsome ranger was about to meet his death About to meet his death There was forty feet between them when they stopped to make their play And the swiftness of the ranger is still talked about today Texas Red had not cleared leather fore a bullet fairly ripped And the ranger's aim was deadly with the big iron on his hip Big iron on his hip It was over in a moment and the folks had gathered round There before them lay the body of the outlaw on the ground Oh he might have went on living but he made one fatal slip When he tried to match the ranger with the big iron on his hip Big iron on his hip Big iron Big iron When he tried to match the ranger with the big iron on his hip Big iron on his hip

Sleeper ships aren't that bad. . 1) Depending on how close they get to light speed, time dilation drastically shortens the amount of time actually spent IN hibernation. 2) It's not necessary to keep all of the crew in hibernation for the entirety of the trip. A small crew can keep an eye on things for a while, bring the next "shift" out of hibernation, and go back in themselves, and so on. That way, everyone gets some time to be active, no one has to spend an absurd length of time awake on the thing, and the ship is never left unattended. So long as you provide sufficient comfort and amenities for those awake at any given time, it would actually be a pretty enjoyable trip, overall. . The reality is, even warp drive won't actually break the light barrier in the end. But it could certainly offer access to full lightspeed travel. And the technology could open the door to wormhole technology, though it would have to be in the form of permanently open gates, which...if shut down, would take years or decades to reestablish a connection.

The potential duality of FTL drives in one interpretation of the Star Wars sleeper ships reminds me of Isaac Asimov's novel "Nemesis" where you had genuine "hyperdrive" and an older FTL method called "hyper-assistance".

How's life going for everyone? I hope you are having a nice day

The only way I’d want to travel if I lived in the Star Wars galaxy would be in a X-70B Phantom, that ship is the definition of class.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Palpatine planned on making the Eclipse into a hybrid of hyperspace and sleeper tech, considering his plans to make his Empire extragalactic. Even a ship with the fastest hyperdrive would take decades, if not centuries to reach one of the neighboring galaxies.

Sleeper ships only work like in Dragonsdawn of The Dragon Riders of Pern novel. Where there is always an active skeleton crew.

"well they just teleported their ships" best way to travel is to break the rules of time and space, got it

If you are setting out on an one way journey to colonise a distant planet -time is irrelevant; how would you being awake when your relatives die of old age, be practically different if you were asleep when they died of old age. Sleeper colony ships should be safer from targeted (non 'inside job') attacks -they would be travelling on routes and to planets not determined by Hyperspace factors (unlike everyone else), which means they should avoid high traffic areas/routes. You are obviously more likely to get mugged in NYC than an uninhabited island in Antarctica.

Honestly, I want to travel on a sleeper ship. More or less so when I wake up, I’m not gonna be among the first to arrive at a new world, and so I can wake up to new and spectacular technology

Hello there

Supposedly prior to hyperdrives being reverse-engineered from the Rakata some factions developed a "dimensional drive" which worked the same way as warp drives in the Star Trek franchise.

I’m surprised Eck only has 800k subs. He deserves more.

I though that was what lead to the development of Carbonite as a process. They weren't cryonically frozen.

It can’t possibly be that bad... Nevermind, it can possibly be that bad.

Imagine if someone was on their way to Alderaan, 'man I cant believe I have to use a sleeper ship oh well I'm just happy I'll get to see home again someday' - 500 years later - 'WTF!!!!!!!! omg somebody has to tell the Jedi council'

That being said, it may have been a good idea to avoid authorities should you be wanted for some reason. Sneak aboard a sleeper ship by means of fake identity and sit there for thousands of years as the galaxy forgets your crimes, only to wake up 1. In the future 2. VERY far away and 3. Free

Wish me luck, I'm archiving all of legends starting tomorrow. Detailed summary 5-10 minutes at a time

3:50 I would compare this to bo man's sky where your able to seemingly travel very fast from planet to planet while still seeing some of your surroundings

Another interesting method of interstellar travel explored in science fiction is generation ships. They're like sleeper ships except the crew is awake. On a generation ship the crew live die and reproduce removing the need for cryogenic sleep. The down side is that the ship needs to house a full ecosystem to sustain the crew. They're called generation ships because on longer voyages the original crew would be dead by the time the ship reaches its destination.

I've been waiting for another one of these videos they go great when having dinner these always come in clutch

In SWLegends there was a Dimensional Drive...from its description it was very much like a warp drive. It wasnt very common as Hyperdrives were far superior.

I want to say that there were hyperdrive capable sleeperships as well. Many sources show that ships would have backup hyperdrives that were 40 - 50 times slower than their main hyperdrive. A cargo transport carrying non-essential cargo did not need to move at SD cruising speeds. A load of matresses could be sent on a cheaper ship that took several weeks with a smaller crew in cryo sleep while the ship slowly traveled on auto pilot.

love your videos been watching for 5 years

Have been "early" to 2 videos in just 2 days! Lol, feels so cool. Love your videosss EckhartsLadder!

Diplomatic, Military and Jedi had access to in system hyperdrives. Civilians and commercial transports were hyperspace lane restricted and had to approach planets at sublight from outer system markers.

Travel by a Dune Spice navigator using the Holrzman engines would be my preferential space travel method. 😬

I had an idea for a story where an imperial group along with a few others who didn't like the Republic's return decided to band recources together and use sleeper ships into the unkown regions. Map the area with the use of droids and then once in a good strategic point set up a new structure of planets until they felt they were ready to invade the Republic again. #askeck How did the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances work differently from the New Republic? #shipversus Resurgent-class Star Destroyer vs MC85 Star Cruiser #shipversus Resurgent-class Star Destroyer vs Starhawk-class Battleship #battlebreakdown Battle of Astarte #battlebreakdown Battle of Amritsar

I think it should be more elaborated how dangerous hyperspace is. Later stories; especially the ones made by Disney make space travel look like driving down the street.

Fun topic, gets into all the different types of FTL travel... just brute forcing past the speed of light, warp drive, slipstream, hyperspace, Lagrange Points... For example Star Wars says that hyperspace can take you from one side of the galaxy, true it may be a tiny compact galaxy compared to the Milky Way in essentially a few weeks, Stargate Ancient hyperdrive can cross the void BETWEEN galaxies in just a few years which is a massive distance, but Star Trek says you can't go halfway across the galaxy at Warp 9.x in less than 75 years while early Earth cargo ships at warp 1.x could take years to do a round trip between early close to Earth human colonies... All faster than light, FTL, and all demonstrating just how big space is and how ridiculously fast some forms of travel are

#AskEck Commando Droids vs ODSTs(Star Wars vs Halo)

Hi

i remeber reading a qote and i dont remember who said it but it was that "the only way to get far in life is to take risks" i believe early space travel would b one those things where u r just gonna have to gun it and hope 4 the best.

I believe was stated in the Essential Atlas that the sleeper ships did in fact use an FTL "Dimensional Drive" - it was just much much slower than Hyperdrive, so you still needed to freeze the passengers.

Nice outro

It would be interesting to see you talk about 40k warp space

The same thing is likely to happen in our universe. Sleeper colonization ships are going to go out first, only to be beaten to their destination by FTL equipped ships.

Ah, wow, I know very little about Star Wars lore and I honestly assumed that lightspeed and hyperspace were different things. Like how in Elite Dangerous, there's Hyperspace for jumping between systems at thousands of times the speed of light, and Supercruise for faster-than-light travel within systems.

I imagine sleeper ships were used by the Empire as a convenient way to both get rid of troublemakers without having to worry about them escaping or causing prison riots (after all, they'll be asleep for decades or even centuries), while also expanding its reach. It could be a cool plotline for the New Republic to discover groups of early rebels in the unknown regions who got sent there against their will on imperial sleeper ship prisons. Probably before the invention of hyperspace drives, spacefaring civilizations got good at accelerating spacecraft to near the speed of light, so the last sleeper ships before the type was (mostly) displaced by hyperspace ships likely did travel very fast... but still required centuries to cross the gulf of space. Not all distances are that insurmountable if you're going near light speed. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our sun at about 4.25 light years away. Going 80% of light speed, that distance would take ~5.3 years to cross. Enough that you might want a sleeper ship, but not centuries. However, obviously crossing the distance at hyperspace would be faster. The final iterations of sleeper ships might even be some of the fastest sublight vessels.

Sleeper ships with the right resources and design can be superior to all other forms of exploration. The key is having a powerful AI, extensive sensors, and maintenance/resource collection. It would have to be a form of carrier able to manufacture small dual purpose sensor/combat ships (with a little stealth). The mother ship would record data in a few light year radius before moving there, with a drone(s) always going there first to scout. The speed would be based on the range of sensor data and speed the AI can process, record, and manage it's drones. Making 10-20 light year jumps every few minutes would be way faster than non-hyperspace travel, but much safer than plowing through unknown areas in hyperspace.

Something that I feel is overlooked here is the impact of being slower than the rest of the galaxy, when using sleeper ships after hyperdrives have gotten widely used. You could leave to a planet that's uninhabited before the clone wars, but by the time you arrive it's been colonised by the republic that's now been reformed to the empire with their own currency, and for which you need a chain code for every passenger to legally set foot on the planet. Or taking years to travel to Alderaan or another of many planets that got destroyed by orbital bombardements, nuked or shot by a death star/starkiller base

7:15 - yep, jump drives are the best in pretty much any universe they come up at :D

There is in some science fiction lores reasons for sleeper ships to exist along side "hyperspace" equivalents. The most basic form of this is "time dilated space" where you and your ship can go faster, relatively, to the outside world. Basically a normal journey with this method, to say mars, which could take months will (with some different flight paths due to orbits going slower) from the outside looking in look like you're warping over there in a matter of minutes, but from the inside looking out you're still taking a several month long trip. So while people _see_ you warp, the reality is you would see them turn into statues as your bubble of dilated time allows you to move faster relative to the rest of the universe. While this method of traveling to mars is pretty frivolous, using this method to travel to alpha centari DOES make it a valuable form of travel. Another form of sleepers is resource preservation, depending on the sleeping pods, a trip with a lot of passengers even with hyper fast travelling would need a lot of oxygen, food, and waste removal, by putting them to sleep for the trip you can make the journey with fewer meals and less need for service crews to keep the capacity happy. "Mental Stability" is the other reason, essentially going through hyperspace may play with your perception of reality (think of how in star wars going through a warp stretches out the ship) even if these are just visual 'illusions' being awake for such events could lead to some experiencing decline of mental health. While the explanation in lore might be slightly different, these mechanical reasons are the main thoughts of keeping sleeper ships a part of a "fast" traveling sci-fi lore. That, or of course the reasons in the video where economic disparity and jump safety are factors, though unfortunately it's unlikely that an explorer would use a sleeper ship to get to a new location in space to explore, simply because competition to be the first will force only those willing to blind jump to remain in the game.

What about the droid attack on the wookies?

Dang sleeper ships that’s a lot of stranger danger right there, Great content Great channel keep it up!

1:54 When you're petending to work by hitting your keyboard.

Sleeper Ships are the Catch-22 of space travel: in the pre-Hyperspace era, you need Sleeper Ships to reach/colonize distant planets, but by the time they reach their destination, we could have researched new technologies, produced exponentially faster engines or FTL drives, and sent out ships that will reach the Sleeper Ships' destinations before they actually arrive, therefore making the Sleeper Ships obsolete before they even serve their sole purpose. It becomes a gamble for the rocket scientists building and launching the rockets: do you send out a ship now that will require X years to reach its destination, or do you hold off for Y years until you can develop an engine that travels Z times faster, letting it reach the same destination in (X/Z)+Y years? Either choice could get you the all-important first claim rights, or could get you a total waste of time and money when someone else wins with the opposite bet.

Something I see rarely in Sci-Fi is the use of near-light-speed relativity time dilation as a substitute for being suspended/frozen. Yes, the crew would still be several decades or centuries out of time with their home world, but they'd experience only a fraction of that and consume that much less resources without the risks of being on ice during the trip. With this factored in sleeper ships are only practical when considerably slow travel means is being used.

Would love to see some star wars horror story about a sleeper ship that was lost in space

Not a star wars reference but Alien: Resurrection where your rude awakening from a sleep pod is staring at a xenomorph egg right in front of your face.

The one thing good about sleeper-shops is that you can prepare for their arrival. For example: a planet gets hit by an asteroid, so the population gets loaded into sleeper-ships and sent toward a vacant planet, problem is that the planet doesn't have any infrastructure to support the new people, but the sleeper-ships give you the time you need.

We gotta get Eck to a million subs

It seems the star wars galaxy is smaller/more compact then out galaxy which is probably why things dont take as long for them

A Mobile hyperspace canon, like the size of an SD or a bit bigger would be a great addition to Star Wars. An SD capable of launching ties via canon or just large metal slugs would give it a huge edge. It expands the effective range of the tie squadron and give the SD a canon that can deliver an FTL payload.

#askeck how do sleeper ships defend themselves?

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said the SW galaxy is compact. For example, in real life, asteroids are never as close together as we see in Star Wars.

So... what would be the best method of interstellar travel? Why, that would be the teledrive (which is short for "teleportation drive")! We saw one example of this in "The Dig", when, after Boston Low arranged some metal plates onto a pedestal inside the "asteroid" Attila in the correct way, triggered Attila (which, at first glance, looked like an ordinary asteroid but was, in fact, a crystal starship) into starting to move, morphing into its actual crystalline form, and then instantly teleporting itself to a spot somewhere within Low-Planet-Orbit range above the planet Cocytus, which was LIGHT-YEARS away from the Sol System. Attila then landed in a matching socket on the ground of the mostly ocean-covered world and then vanished, its job having been done.

So I always wondered this about Halo. How could the UNSC ever really get recruits if signing up meant going into cryo sleep for decades? Did just no one have families, interests, or a life? I understand the war was a thing, but still seems kinda insane. Do they give an explanation for this? Or am I missing something

I think the Star Wars galaxy is "smaller"/more compact than our galaxy. This is really the only way to make sense of Han flying from Hoth to Anoat to Bespin, without the kind of clumsy retconn of "backup hyperdrives," among other things.

I wonder if there are any still on route? Can you imagine if there was for instance a ship fill of High Republic Jedi still snoozing out there somewhere?

1:53 Man! Smart of them to zero in on him tapping the keyboard for no reason whatsoever. He's not even hitting the buttons most of the time. That's hilarious.

In marvel star wars #1 2015, han flies a lamba shuttle a distance of "a couple lightyears" in just a few minutes without a hyperdrive

First like 👍. Eckhart, you've always been my favourite SW channel.

I think even the Empire at its height used sleeper ships a little more responsibly than all that - sending them as close to their destination by hyperspace route as possible before creeping the remaining way. So rather than 8000 years in a tube you might spend less than a decade. It's still kind of wasteful when you could just spam the system with probes looking for a viable hyperlane into the system from a nearby known hyperlane or world but not as bad as the original pre-hyperspace sleepers.

It’s worth considering entropy here. A starship is an immensely complex thing, as is a suspended animation device. These will be subject to failure over time. The result is that the sleeper ship could suffer some sort of failure that caused the journey to abort. Not only that, none, one, some or all of the suspension units could fail. No, all things considered, supraluminal transport is the way forward.

Imagine being a Rock on a Sleeper ship in Star Wars. Wonderfully exciting.

From what I've read and understand hyperspace is not FTL, the rekatans first used force-based proto-hyperdrives that essentially sought out planets strong in the force. But the actual way it works has always been described as entering a dimension where everything is scaled down and the only force is gravity. Every body in star wars creates a "mass shadow" in the other dimension, this dimension is scaled down but still proportional to the original (think nether portal in minecraft, you move one block in the nether you move 4 in the overworld) so avoiding the mass shadows is also harder as there is less "space" which is why blind jumps are dangerous. That's what a route is, I wish youd covered this but a hyper space route is just a bunch of jumps that were successful and the people who were plotting the course managed to come back and sold them to be put into hyperspace computers.

4:50 Wait what!? There is a star system named N'zoth in Star Wars!?

Stealth... you're moving through free space. Perhaps not for thousands of years... but if you can exit hyperspace and take another route to a destination through normal space, it would be possible to avoid some sort of detection. So a journey of a few months or a couple of years to evade detection might be something that's common when smuggling, blockade running, or attempting surprise attacks.

Another potential issue with sleeper ships: sometime after launch a method of FTL travel is developed and you find the planet u are sent to is already occupied.

At least it’s not ludicrous speed.

Interesting prospect. So then how many potential Jedi may have survived order 66 because they were on some sort of reconnaissance mission aboard a sleeper ship. Probably no one famous, but it does open the door for some possibilities.

This is a very important message: *REMEMBER THAT ECKARTSLADDER ONLY TALKS ABOUT THE LEGENDS SIDE OF THE STORY IN HIS VIDEOS*

What video is the space battle from at 6:52? The Star Destroyer vs the Lucrehulk battleship? That looks really cool!

Proof of FTL travel without hyper space at warp equivalent speeds can be found very easy in the Star Wars saga… Episode five Empire strikes back: The millennium falcon travels from hoth system to the anoat system to the Bespin System within the span of several weeks… ~Estimated on gauging Luke’s progress in training aunt for the six weeks on Dagabagh and considering and solos concerns about being able to make it that far without hyperspace engines.

Due to time dilation you could actually reach your destination in a shorter time. If you are travelling with 60% lightspeed you need 20% less time than you would normally expect.

At least if something happens you will be sleeping... Much better than the majority of star wars deaths kkkk

Hay why haven't we seen a story of clone troopers on a ship that got stuck in hyperspace that come out after the clone wars is over with that'd be a great story.

FTL travel is a nice idea for making the universe accessible to a planetary culture, but realistically we have seen no indications that it is possible. I think scenarios that are lightspeed limited are much more compelling. My bet is on Von Neumann machines that seek out asteroid belts for resources, build and launch interstellar lightsail probes to do the same.

It was weird in the parts of the Mandalorian when he was flying at sunlight speeds in seemingly the middle of nowhere