In A New Hope, Han Solo explains that navigating the Star Wars galaxy can be a tricky and dangerous task. Without the proper calculations, one could accidentally fly straight through a planet or a star at lightspeed. And even though Star Wars can’t decide how hyperspace really works, it has a more difficult time explaining how pilots are always able to find what they’re looking for on the planet. Oftentimes, the population of a planet is in the millions, billions, or even trillions. And while it makes sense for pilots to know where to land on well-mapped planets, it’s hard to explain how they know where to land on rural ones.
Of course, the first answer that comes to mind is to simply use a lifeform scanner. Many ships in Star Wars—such as Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing—had the ability to detect signs of life on any given planet. One merely needed to find an area that was densely populated and then land there. But things get a little more complicated when so many planets have hundreds or thousands of settlements and cities, or none at all. Nevertheless, the characters in Star Wars tend to always know where to land, and almost never have to travel long distances to the destination they’re looking for.
Star Wars: Why Some Ships Need Hyperspace Rings to Go to Lightspeed
In Star Wars, Jedi starfighters and some other small ships lacked a hyperdrive and needed to use a hyperspace ring to reach lightspeed.
The Mandalorian Season 2 Finally Explained How Pilots Always Find The Right Place To Land
One throwaway line in The Mandalorian season 2, episode 5 helps partially explain how pilots find the right place to land. When Din Djarin and Grogu arrive above the planet Corvus, Din tells Grogu that he detects a “beacon” on the surface. This beacon leads him straight to Calodan, where Morgan Elsbeth resides. In other words, it seems like many towns and villages across the galaxy employ beacons to signal their location on the surface, making it easy for pilots to know where to land.
This Explanation Doesn’t Fit Everything… But It Helps
Even though the beacon idea in The Mandalorian seems to solve the franchise’s problem, there are times when this explanation doesn’t make sense. For example, in the very next episode of The Mandalorian season 2, Din Djarin flies to Tython and lands directly next to an old Jedi Temple. There are certainly no lifeforms or beacons to guide him to the site he’s looking for, but he still manages to find it without any difficulty. Too often in Star Wars do characters find what they’re looking for without searching.
In any case, The Mandalorian season 2 gave one of the best explanations in the franchise for why pilots know where to land. Pilots use a combination of lifeform scanners and beacons to navigate their landing on foreign planets. But the franchise has yet to explain how pilots find planetary locations where no lifeforms or beacons are present. At some point, Star Wars needs to explain why most ships conveniently land exactly where they want to be.
