The Starkiller shoots across the galaxy. 9 Greatest Absurdities of Disney's Star Wars

How is he able to see that?

Star Wars bypassed the problem of long distances in space by resorting to the concept of hyperspace. Ok, spaceships have a hyper drive and they travel faster than light. Lucas decided, we accepted it, it's all good. Beams, lasers, blasters, light from a lamp and objects like that move normally. To destroy a planet, Death Star needed to burn an ocean of gasoline to get near the target. The Starkiller Base didn't care.

In The Force Awakens, we see some sort of a ray fly through space and destroy the New Republic. Of course, we could assume that the flow of energy enters some kind of hyper space – the thing is that some of the characters are able to see it, standing on the surface of a completely different planet. How is all this possible, assuming that the speed of light in the Star Wars world is the same as in ours?

Well alright, we have a superweapon sucking all the power of a star, able to destroy anything. OK, its beam is visible at once, for people who are light days, weeks or months away from it. Sure, the Force isn't particularly well explained in physical terms either. But how do you justify the fact that a single shot destroyed the New Republic so much that it was never mentioned in the movies again? Were those five exploded planets all it took? Remember the Senate scenes in the prequel? The Republic counted thousands of star systems. Was it that weak? Was her entire fleet in hangars? It looks like the creators just said "Yeah, stuff was happening in galaxy after the Return of Jedi, but it no longer is, so let's move on."