- "Travelin' through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
- ―Han Solo, to Luke Skywalker
A navigation computer, also known as an astrogation computer, navicomputer, navicomp,[3] or nav computer,[4] was a device that made the careful calculations necessary to navigate through hyperspace. Navicomputers would calculate data like the exact destination, the quickest and safest route to it, and the number of hyperspace jumps necessary. Most starships carried a nav computer of some sort, though some starfighters made do with only the astrogation buffer of an astromech droid. Smaller ships often possessed limited nav computers, capable of containing data for only a small number of jumps; larger ships had large dedicated nav computers capable of storing coordinates for nearly any foreseeable destination. Some nav computers were handheld. Smugglers tended to voice-print their navicomputers to hide where their ship had been.
All navicomputers contained the Galactic coordinates for all star systems in the known galaxy.[5]