Sublight speeds as exist in the game and are seen in the movies (or listed in reference books) are slow. It would take a very long time at those speeds to move from a planet’s surface to a safe jump point, or back the other way.
So with the question of MGLT (megalight per hour), we’re left with questions:
They clearly do not move that fast in the movies. 661x the speed of light is far too fast for the human eye to track, much less shoot, and yet that’s slow. An A-Wing can move at 120 MGLT, or 9 LIGHT YEARS PER HOUR. That’s literally astronomical, the speeds we’re talking about there are patently ridiculous.
Okay, that’s just the Canon page on Wookieepedia. Maybe they screwed something up (it’s clearly not “sublight”). But the Legends page gives no specific information.
I’ve got some ideas for how to make any of this make sense, but what are some of your opinions on the matter?
My current basic idea is that sublight drives have two modes: One for fast travel that’s like “hyperspace-lite,” where you plot in the coordinates and move very fast (still sublight) in a very straight line, and one for maneuvering that gives us the normal speeds and such that we see.
Then you have the question of what stops a given ship from using it whenever desired, and that gets into worldbuilding and is something I have to think more about.
Most of the time, I think fast travel would be used for exit-reentry, and hyperspace would be used for moving between planets within systems. But why couldn’t fast travel be used to just zip past blockades?