Is the Millennium Falcon the Fastest Starship?

Welcome Star Wars geeks! 👋 We at GoodData were very curious about whether the Millennium Falcon is, in fact, the fastest starship (as Han Solo was very sure that it is). We love analytics, and we asked ourselves — why not build a dashboard that will focus on this important issue? It was a rather hypothetical question, of course we built it! Let’s dive in! 🚀

The number one problem is that it's hard to tell if the Millennium Falcon is the fastest starship. In the movies it is only referred to as “the fastest ship in the fleet” so maybe it's safe to assume that it is the fastest starship available to the Rebels, but is it really the fastest starship ever? Well, that’s a good question, but what to do in situations like this (if you do not know)? Of course, a little chat with ChatGPT will always be helpful!

So naturally, we chatted with ChatGPT, found this Star Wars dataset and loaded everything to the PostgreSQL database:

We had to clean the data a bit, and add some information based on our conversation with ChatGPT — specifically about firepower. But, let’s not discuss the boring technical stuff, and let’s discuss the elephant in the room: is the Millennium Falcon, indeed, the fastest starship? For now, let’s be optimistic, and hope that it is! As mentioned, we have built a dashboard to analyze this issue. We can demonstrate it on a less important question about the biggest starship:

As you can see, the Millennium Falcon is not even in the top 7 (great, kid, don’t get cocky). Honestly, it isn’t that surprising. So let’s move on and check the speed (which is obviously the most important thing for us). Here we go:

Unfortunately, it seems that the Millennium Falcon is not the fastest starship but it is fair to say that the A-Wing is very small compared to the Millennium Falcon. To be honest, comparing the A-Wing with the Millennium Falcon is like comparing a race car to a pickup, and for “a pickup” it is a very impressive speed — it looks like all the upgrades paid off, Han. Good job. Also, as we know, it made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs anyway, and I think that’s what counts.

Starship Analysis

We built the whole analytics in GoodData because we wanted a single source of truth for our starship analysis. We could easily calculate in GoodData metrics like “Count of Starships”, “Actual Shield Eating”, and similar metrics that we would need to otherwise calculate somewhere else (in the database, or in the client code) and that is not a good practice because maintenance of metrics can become very complex over time. Every change of metric can break something, or lead to incorrect numbers and that’s definitely not what you want! That’s the reason we chose GoodData; because it helps us maintain the complexity of metrics. Also, on top of these metrics and thanks to GoodData UI SDK, we were able to build our non-standard dashboard very quickly. Do you want to try it on your own? You can always register for a 30-day GoodData trial, and play around with your data!

Now, if you are interested in other questions like how many people can fit in single starships, or what is the deadliest ship in the galaxy — we have put all the data into a nice shiny coat and made it public for you!

The data we used is only from the first six movies. Would you also like to cover the newest movies? Let us know!

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