Millennium Falcon - Depiction

Depiction

Han Solo won the Falcon from fellow rogue Lando Calrissian in a hand of the card game sabacc. In A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) and Luke Skywalker charter the ship to deliver them, C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), R2-D2 (Kenny Baker), and the stolen Death Star plans to Alderaan. Skywalker calls the ship "a piece of junk", but Solo counters by noting that the ship "may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts." When the Falcon is captured by the Death Star, the group conceal themselves in smuggling compartments built into the floor to avoid discovery during a search of the ship. Solo later collects his fee for delivering them to the hidden Rebel base and departs, but returns just in time to assist Luke in his attempt to destroy the Death Star.

Solo flies the Falcon, with Chewbacca, Leia, and C-3PO aboard, to elude the Imperial Starfleet in The Empire Strikes Back. They take refuge at Cloud City, where Darth Vader (David Prowse/James Earl Jones) captures Solo and freezes him in carbonite. Lando Calrissian helps the others escape and, at the film's end, he departs in the Falcon to track down Solo and his captor, Jabba the Hutt. Calrissian again flies the Falcon during the climax of Return of the Jedi, with friend and former smuggler Nien Nunb as co-pilot, leading the Rebels' successful attack on the second Death Star.

The Falcon is often connected to the Kessel Run; Solo, in A New Hope, brags that the Falcon made the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs". As this is a unit of distance, not time, different explanations have been provided. In the fourth draft of the script, Kenobi "reacts to Solo’s stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation." In the Expanded Universe, the Kessel Run is a pathway from Kessel past the Maw Black Hole Cluster used by smugglers to transport precious Glitterstim spice, and Solo's bragging refers to his ability to move the ship closer to the Maw's black holes and therefore cut the distance traveled. On the A New Hope DVD audio commentary, Lucas comments that, in the Star Wars universe, traveling through hyperspace requires careful navigation to avoid stars, planets, asteroids, and other obstacles, and that since no long-distance journey can be made in a straight line, the "fastest" ship is the one that can plot the "most direct course", thereby traveling the least distance. The novelization backs away and changes the line to "twelve Standard Time Units."

Solo's twelve-parsec Kessel Run, although seeming to contradict the previous paragraph's statement about a card game victory, was the bet that won him the ship from Calrissian; this bet and how he modified it over time, are all depicted in the novel Rebel Dawn by A. C. Crispin. (However, the Falcon makes its debut in the previous book in the trilogy, The Hutt Gambit, as Calrissian's personal ship.) In Dark Horse Comics' "The Kessel Run", Solo mentions a scam that Calrissian uses to win money back from Solo after losing the Falcon to him.