Millennium Falcon/Legends

The Millennium Falcon was a starship that achieved fame when she was piloted by Han Solo and Chewbacca. The Falcon began life as a standard Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 stock light freighter, though it is unknown exactly when the ship was made. Solo won her from Lando Calrissian during a Sabacc tournament. Under both Calrissian and Solo the ship endured many adventures and upgrades resulting in her dilapidated exterior appearance.

History
The origins and early years of the ship have been lost to history. She is thought to have been on Coruscant at the end of the Clone Wars, though this is not certain.

Lando Calrissian purchased the Falcon used, circa 5 BBY. After learning how to pilot from his new friend Solo, Calrissian took the ship through many escapades in the Rafa system, the Oseon belt, and the Starcave of ThonBoka, just to name a few. He also made modifications to the ship in order to better protect himself during his smuggling runs. The Falcon gained one of her most significant battle scars, a huge tear near her entry ramp, when a Renatasian Confederation starfighter rammed her.

During a high stakes Sabacc game, the final round of a large tournament on Cloud City, Calrissian threw in a marker for "any ship on his lot" (at the time, he was the owner of a used spaceship lot). Solo, the other contestant remaining in the tournament, accepted the marker, knowing that Calrissian had taken a cruise ship to the tournament, leaving the Falcon behind. When Solo won the game, he claimed the Falcon as his own on the technicality which had been overlooked by Calrissian.

After winning the Millennium Falcon from Calrissian, Solo began to add to Calrissian's modifications. His enhancements included upgrading her armor, weapons, speed, sensors, and sensor jammers. The jammer that Solo installed was so powerful that the first time the jammer was tested, it disrupted the information relays inside the ship.

Solo's first trip in the Falcon was a trip to Kashyyyk for the benefit of his Wookiee co-pilot, Chewbacca. After that, they used her for their various smuggling operations, mostly ones assigned to them by Jabba the Hutt. Just a few months before the Battle of Yavin, Solo was forced to jettison a load of Jabba's spice when he was boarded by Imperials.

A few months later, the ship's destiny was forever changed when she was chartered by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker to deliver R2-D2 and the stolen Death Star plans to Alderaan.

When challenged by Obi-Wan about his ship's speed, Solo famously replied, "Fast enough for you, old man." The ship is capable of attaining "point five past lightspeed."

Han's famous comment, that the vessel "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs," comes off a little incongruous&mdash;a parsec is a measure of distance, not time. It has been conjectured that George Lucas simply did not know that when he wrote the script. In the 4 DVD special edition of the original trilogy, Lucas explains that the remark meant that the Falcon's computer was so advanced that it was able to plot a shorter route through hyperspace than any other ship, and thus travel faster. An alternate explanation is that Solo was most likely trying to impress his travelers with plausible-sounding yet meaningless bragging. Some novelizations have retconned the statement as meaning that Captain Solo was able to hug closer to the black hole cluster known as The Maw, shaving off distance (and thus time).

At sublight velocities, the Millennium Falcon is not a particularly fast vessel; Imperial Star Destroyers have been able to keep up with her. However, the Falcon was considerably more maneuverable than Star Destroyers. An example of this is when Han Solo used the maneuverability to elude three Star Destroyers that were trying to block them in and nearly made them collide with each other. The Falcon's true strength involves the skill of her crew and her high supralight speeds.



The cobbled-together nature of the ship presented many problems throughout the movies and the novels; systems were barely held together and apparently had many incompatibilities. C-3P0 once commented that he wasn't quite sure where the ship learned to communicate. During Imperial pursuit from Hoth the ship's technical difficulties&mdash;namely an inability to enter hyperspace&mdash;resulted in the ship and crew nearly being captured.

Years after the Battle of Endor it appeared that Han Solo and/or Chewbacca were able to resolve these difficulties, much to the relief of one Leia Organa-Solo. The resolution of those problems may have involved a virtual rebuild of her internal operation systems; this has never been discussed in detail.

The ship sports quad blasters startlingly reminiscent of World War II crew-operated machine guns, with the operator tracking targets optically (due to the high prevalence of electronic warfare in Star Wars) and swiveling along with the gun barrel. In Return of the Jedi, the ship is revealed to possess powerful armor-piercing missile weapons called "Concussion Missiles," which are illegal in the Star Wars universe for civilians to possess. During the events surrounding the reborn Emperor Palpatine, the missile launchers were temporarily replaced by a giant lightning gun. Later refits, during her service as a New Republic diplomatic courier for the Organa-Skywalker-Solo family, who were highly placed in the New Republic in honor of their service to the Rebellion during the Galactic Civil War, included light turbolasers replacing her quad blasters. At least one pop-out repeating blaster is mounted to give some ground cover when the use of the heavier weapons is not warranted.

The ship has been captured by the Death Star's tractor beam and searched by Imperial Stormtroopers, who managed to miss the crew and passengers secreted in the smuggling holds, which are shielded against most scanning equipment. She has also been piloted through asteroid fields, and outran the massive explosion of the second Death Star.

In Expanded Universe material, she is referred to as a highly-modified YT-1300 freighter. After the end of the movies, the ship becomes a New Republic diplomatic courier for the Skywalker-Organa-Solo family, and is comprehensively refit with military-grade power generators, propulsion and weaponry. Towards the beginning of the the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, Han Solo painted the Falcon mylar black.

Layout and Modifications


Under the ownership of both Lando and Han, the Falcon has endured countless modifications and rebuilds. It was Lando's idea to install hidden cargo sections under the Falcon's deck-plates, these would prove to be a crucial addition to the ship. It allowed both Lando and Han easy storage for their smuggled cargoes and provided invaluable, when the ship was captured by the first Death Star. Lando also increased the ship's shields, while also installing a pair of smaller blasters that were located on the bow mandibles.

The Falcon features duralloy plating over most of the vital areas of her hull. In addition to the plating the ship is equipped with a set of advanced Kuat Drive Yards, Novaldex, and Nordoxicon shield generators "liberated" by Solo from the Myomar shipyards. These shield generators provide the Falcon with warship-grade shielding, allowing her survive laser hits that would destroy an ordinary YT-1300. A set of high-grade sensor suites are tied into the Falcon's over-sized rectenna sensor dish. Powerful sensor jammers also protect the the ship in combat.

In an effort to reduce his expenses and maintain his privacy, Solo modified the Falcon so that most of her major systems could be accessed through the cockpit or the engineering station in the main cargo hold. The myriad of ship control functions are funneled through what was once a Hanx-Wargel SuperFlow IV computer. It has since been modified with three droid brains, which cause the Falcon to have schizophrenic arguments with herself.

The Falcon's unkempt interior matches the ships dilapidated exterior. The interior corridors are littered with all sorts of mechanical gear. The main hold contains a lounge area with a holographic game table. In addition to the hidden cargo holds under her deckplates, she also has a  cargo-jettison feature. The Falcon lacks a bacta tank, to make up for it she is equipped with a cryogenic hibernation capsule. This can be used to keep the critically injured stable until the reach acceptable medical facilities or for the transport of live cargo.

Frequently the ship is required to make a quick escape. Interestingly, the Falcon has a remarkably quick start up time of about three minutes, and in times where that is not enough near the loading ramp, is  a ventrally mounted, concealed, anti-personnel repeating laser.

Behind the Scenes
The original model for the Millennium Falcon was changed at the last minute because it too closely resembled ships from the television series Space: 1999. The replacement is said to be based on a half-eaten hamburger held by George Lucas and the disused original design was further developed into the Blockade Runner starship seen at the beginning of the first film. Like many science fiction spacecraft, the Falcon's interior sets can not actually physically fit within the exterior sets. Subsequent Expanded Universe plans are consequently a compromise attempt at squeezing the interiors in (often with detriment to headroom).