Hey! I have a collection of slide rules. I still like to use them sometimes. But I agree - keep those Texas Instruments voodoo machines away from me! (I'm a bred-in-the-bone Hewlett-Packard guy. My dad worked for them when they put out their first calculators and I got RPN brainwashed, and I'm still proud of that!)
Never heard of MT or FT. In Star Wars they muddle units of measurement with units of time: "It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs" (rather than the usual 18 parsecs). Not all that impressive since if I were to say that I completed a 100 metre race in 60 metres, I think most people might point out that I didn't reach the finish line. How they manage FTL travel is beyond me. Anyway, Star Wars is fantasy. All the science is hand-waved, every bit of it.
Chinspinner - The retconning was even worse because 114 trillion miles were "shaved" off and a map produced shows absolutely no such possibility given normal routes. Han was BSing - this was a way to show him not as awesome, but as a shameless boaster. The script even makes clear that Han is obviously lying, but that's a hard pill for some people to swallow and so modifications were made to alleviate fans. It has been twisted nearly beyond recognition - but yeah... not a fan of how terrible it is on many levels. It is the "dream" that people buy into, not the science.
You have to remember that the Empire had most of a galaxy at its disposal, and was strip mining entire worlds in the Outer Rim. And it didn't care about economic viability. The Death Star was intended to make even the thought of resistance impractical. It was the centerpiece of the Tarkin Doctrine: rule through the fear of force rather than force itself.
The Kessel Run is the densest cluster of black holes found in the Star Wars galaxy. Han Solo was bragging about being able to navigate the most dangerous short-cuts that every other pilot was afraid of
I don't know how you know that bit of information but it does make sense to use a distance measurement rather than speed for the described situation.
I read the first two books of the Star Wars Expanded Universe's "Han Solo Trilogy" a few years ago. Did you know he originally joined the Imperial Navy to escape from a life of crime? And then turned back to crime after being dishonorably discharged by the Empire for not killing a defenseless Wookie slave in cold blood
