The StarWars plot hole that nobody ever notices

I like Star Wars. Even the prequels. However, for me, the best Star Wars movie is, without a shadow of doubt, The Empire Strikes Back. It stands head and shoulders above all others for a number of reasons, only some of them subjective. I shall briefly outline these before I move on to the nub of my gist:

It is directed by a 'real' film director who took time and effort to bring personality, realism and motivation to the characters and situations.

It is the middle episode of a trilogy and, as such, is unburdened by tedious set-ups (Obi-Wan waxes cryptical) or disappointing climaxes (3-foot teddy bears whip Imperial troops). It can tell its story freely.

It is dark. The rebels are depicted as they truly would be; a small band of freedom fighters continually retreating and being beaten back by the might of a vast galactic war machine, beset by betrayal and strife at every turn.

It has the best lightsaber fight of either trilogy. Vader starts out by goading Luke, lulling him into a false sense of security and making him angry. Eventually he tires of the game, upping the ante and finally all but destroys Luke with relative ease. In addition, lots of scenery gets chopped up very believably.

However, it does have a rather large and obvious plot hole. I am repeatedly amazed at how few people notice it, or even understand it when I attempt to explain it.

Here goes.

If the hyperdrive on the Millenium Falcon is broken when it leaves the beleagered rebel base on Hoth, how is it possible for the crew to travel to two separate star systems before it is eventually reactivated by R2-D2 at the end of the movie?

This is a biggie. The broken hyperdrive is not just a detail, it is the main motivation for everything that occurs on the Falcon during the movie, as well as being a bit of an in-joke ("no hyperdrive?" asks Leia wearily). It is also the indirect cause of Han and Leia getting it on.

[Note for SF newbies and non-physicists:
Hyperdrive, in StarWars and indeed many SF worlds, permits almost instantaneous travel between stars. Without hyperdrive, or something similar (wormholes, warp drives, collapsar insertions, interspace drives, slipspace jumps, whatever you want to call them, they're all basically the same thing), spacecraft must travel the old-fashioned way. In other words, they must actually cover the distance according to the laws of physics as we currently know them. This means they can travel no faster than light, which takes at least 3 or 4 years to get between even quite closely neighbouring stars. Dramatic tension (not to mention burgeoning romance) will ebb considerably during this time.]

At the start of the movie, on Hoth, Han and Chewie are trying to perform extensive repairs on the Falcon, and eventually the Imperial invasion rushes them into throwing it back together and taking off without so much as an MOT test. It is thus not surprising that the hyperdrive is not functioning properly; they probably left an important component on the floor of the ice hangar. They get shot at, they run, they hide in a large asteroid, they escape from a giant space slug, they get shot at again and they hide on one of the Star Destroyers. So far, so good.

Whilst browsing Han's database for a possible place to hole up, Leia says: "Where are we?". Han replies: "Anoat system." Leia says: "Anoat system... there's not much there." Now, the Empire has already referred to the Hoth system by name, so now they're somewhere else. Without hyperdrive.

To continue.

Snipping a few lines, Han concludes: "Bespin... it's pretty far, but I think we can make it." They go to Bespin, again, without hyperdrive. Lando does the dirty on them, Han gets petrified, Luke learns a few family secrets and gets his hand chopped off, yadah yadah.

Now, it could be argued that all these worlds are in the same star system, and maybe what the Empire calls Hoth the rebels call Anoat, et cetera but I don't think that's what the writers intended. Leia asks where they are, strongly implying that it's a different star system from Hoth's. Furthermore, if this was also Bespin's system she'd hardly then say there wasn't much there. In any case, in the expanded universe (authorised novels, sequels, computer game backstory etc) it is made clear that all three planets are in totally separate star systems.

I think that George just lazily assumed that the Falcon could limp between stars without ever going to lightspeed as long as they were close enough.

Well, not good enough buddy, stars just don't get that close together.

Nerdy addendum:
Interestingly, the subjective time experienced by the Falcon's crew for journeys between stars whilst travelling at close to lightspeed would probably be quite small, assuming that acceleration/deceleration wasn't too time-consuming (given the apparent mundanity of artificial gravity, robotic AIs clever enough to get scared and planet-destroying lasers, probably not an unreasonable assumption). This is because of relativistic time dilation. Their transit time as far as everybody else was concerned would still be several years, and it's likely that they'd be written off as dead by the Rebellion in the meantime, but it would still appear roughly as it does in the movie.

Meanwhile, this delay would rather usefully give Luke a couple of years to learn his Jedi skills. This, assuming a full-time course, would probably take a while even if he didn't need to do a foundation year, and if he ever wanted to be a serious Jedi (quite likely given the number of nefarious Dark Lords that needed dispatching by this time), he'd probably have to do some postgraduate work as well.

However, I seriously doubt that any of this occurred to George Lucas.