How much time passed from Luke's adoptive parents death to the encounter with the Death Star?

[Gaith]

Just after that, Han comes back and reports that he's successfully outrun the Imperials, which would seem to place the scene immediately after the jump to hyperspace. He then says "We should be at Alderaan about 0200 hours," i.e. the following morning.

So unless they were traveling for a week and had an unchronicled encounter with Imperial pursuers on day 6, the travel time from Tatooine to Alderaan must be less than one day.

Is it wrong that I kinda like that explanation?

 

[Christopher]

Incidentally, I'm reading Isaac Asimov's 1982 novel Foundation's Edge, and I just read a scene where the characters discuss the difficulties of tracking a ship through multiple hyperspace jumps, and it reminded me uncannily of the discussion in this thread. Of course, Asimov established the hyperspace jump technology in his main universe back in the 1940s, but it wasn't discussed in as much detail, certainly not where tracking is concerned. Edge establishes (on p. 53 of the Del Rey paperback edition) "that if a ship is observed immediately prior to a Jump, its direction, speed, and acceleration make it possible to guess what the Jump might be—in a general way. Given a good computer and an excellent sense of judgment, a follower might duplicate the Jump closely enough to pick up the trail at the other end—especially if the follower has a good mass-detector.” It sounds as if hyperspace tracking in SW might work pretty much exactly the same way.

Of course, there are a number of things in Star Wars that were probably inspired by Asimov -- most obviously Coruscant, which is a direct knockoff of Trantor from the Empire/Foundation series, an imperial capital planet that's located near the center of the galaxy and is entirely covered by a planetwide city except for one small area (although in Trantor's case it's the expansive grounds of the Imperial Palace rather than a single mountain peak). Not to mention both having a Galactic Empire, although in Asimov's series the Empire was more like the Old Republic, a nominally benevolent (though non-democratic) authority that preserved galactic peace and whose fall brought an age of chaos.