also, if you were traveling at one million MPH, it would take almost 6,000 years to travel one parsec

lol, it sort of gives your people a sense of relief knowing that if an invading Drengin fleet is currently right next to Earth, its still several trillion miles away

distance between your first and third forfinger on the screen map. an example... Use your first forefinger as a starting point on the monitor screen. As you are doing this use your third forfinger on the same hand and place it on your destination point on the screen. This will give you the formula to ascertain the correct parsecs you wish to travel. Add the number of squares you see on the screen between the two forefingers. Divide this number by 4 and then add 6. You should have it. HOWEVER, If the first forefinger is longer than your third forefinger then please reverse this procedure. If you by chance have a fourth forefinger on the same hand then I would use the second and fourth if the first is too long and the third too short. If all else fails, just use your middle finger and point upward.
Hope that helped

Well, I guess parsec it one of those words that are used under the "no idea what it means, but it sounds cool" premise. It's been incorrectly used for a time unit before (Han Solo, Star Wars), so I guess applying a wrong scale it not the largest inaccuracy ever done to it.
That's why most space shooters use "Klicks" as unit for distance...

Quote: "A true parsec is 3.26 light years"

So, if I'm right, when you travel one parsec in one week (hmmm, just say that one year have 52 weeks, then: 3.36 light years * 52 = 160.52 light weeks), you travel around 170 times faster than light! Well, that's fast... so, when your transport movet 34 parsecs per turn (turn is one week?), it moved (170 * 34) = 5780 times faster than light!

satisfied?

But you're not going really fast until you've done the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs.

- Ash

"...It's been incorrectly used for a time unit before (Han Solo, Star Wars)..." Actually in Star wars it meant that all the black holes near kessel warped space so he actually went less distance than anyone else. Skirts the blackholes, VERY closely. Anyone read the manual (obviously yes) The gigantic galaxy is truly massive. I can't wait...

Exactly, the kessel mines are in a region of space with MANY black holes. Solo was bragging about using the SHORTEST distance to get there and therefore went much closer to any particular black hole than anyone else. (Personally, while I would be impressed that he had a ship that stayed together under the stress, I would be very leary of a pilot crazy enough to break this record.) God I am a geek.

Chris.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec

For the derivation of the Parsec. My only quibble with the article is that it may not be obvious that they are using the small angle approximation in the intro, i.e. sin X ~ tan X ~ X for small X, yet later on there is this mention of using the tangent function, which will confuse people without a good understanding of trig into thinking there are 2 different derivations in the article--there aren't. So you can just figure out the reciprocal of one arcsecond in radians (360 * 60 * 60 / 2pi) and that's how many AUs there are in a parsec (about 206265). Also after reading this article you'll see why AUs (1 Astronomical Unit = distance from earth to the sun) are the building block of the parsec, not light years.

hahaha, theres som friggin hilarious posts here i almost pissed myself, and some very intelligent posts. cheers to GC fans