"What a piece of junk!" Luke Skywalker couldn't hold in his reaction upon first seeing the Millennium Falcon, the battered freighter that was somehow to transport him, Obi-wan Kenobi, and the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO from Tatooine to the planet Alderaan. Luke doubted that the ship would be able to lift off from Docking Bay 94, much less make it halfway across the galaxy.
Of course, the Falcon's dilipidated appearance was part of spice smuggler Han Solo's game plan. The best way to avoid "Imperial entanglements" was to give nosy Imperial Customs inspectors nothing to suspect in the first place. The Falcon appeared to be no different from the thousands of other Corellian Engineering YT-1300 light freighters plying the star routes of the Empire.
However, Han Solo, Fist Mate Chewbacca, and the Millenium Falcon have always been famous in smuggler circles. Just before hiring on to take Skywalker, Kenobi, and the droids, Solo was smuggling spice for the gangster known as Jabba the Hutt. Unfortunately, Solo's famed "smuggler's luck" failed him, and he was boarded by an Imperial Customs cruiser. Solo's inability to reimburse Jabba for the lost cargo led the Hutt to post a significant bounty on the young Corellian's head.
Beneath the Falcon's battered exterior hides a fast, tough smuggling vessel. It has a Class0.5 hyperdrive, which is nearly twice as fast as the fastest Imperial warships. It is fitted with a top-of-the-line (and highly illegal) sensor system to detect incoming Imperial ships long before those craft notice the "lowly freighter". And Solo has shielded smuggling compartments hidden throughout the ship's interior.
When combat is necessary, the Falcon is ready. It sports a deflector-shield system "liberated" from the Imperial maintainance facilities at Myomar. Two quad laser cannons are enough to stop TIE fighters and pirate ships, while concussion missles provide short-range punch. Solo is an expert at the quick getaway: the ship has a remarkably short start-up sequence of about three minutes and sports a retracable repeating blaster for covering fire.
Solo's modifications push the ship far past the manufacturer's original specifications, but both the sublight drives and the hyperdrives are as finicky as they are fast, and Solo frequently has to crawl around inside the hull making last-minute repairs to get the ship flying. The Falcon's three droid brains often predict that the ship won't fly--but somehow Solo and Chewbacca manage to get the Falcon through countless scrapes, from evading irate Imperial Customs ships to dodging vengeful pirate corvettes.
Han Solo won the Falcon from a young gambler named Lando Calrissian in a high-stakes sabaac game several years before the Battle of Yavin. Lando himself had won the ship just as he was beginning his "career" as a gambler, and even back then the ship had a questionable past. Neither Solo nor Calrissian has ever bothered to trace the ships's history, figuring that some things are better left unknown.
