BmB said:

Burdokva said:

I've always though that the Falcon's flight trajectory was preset. After all, the technicians messed up its hyper-drive, maybe it was programmed to fly towards the Executor? Yes, it does have the plot-hole that they went to get Luke first, but still..

Also, I'm not sure how it is explained in the EU, but can a ship's tractor beam hold on to another ship, if the latter engages its hyper-drive engine? Maybe Lando and Chewie didn't care about the tractor beams (and thus flying towards the Executor), as long as they got the hyper-drive working.

Star Wars space physics is a strange thing, and a Star Destroyer is apparantly a very fast thing, able to keep up with the Falcon during the chase through open space. I figure they spotted the SSD, tried to fly away, but due to this unseen speed that is made to seem slow because of how massive the ships are, the Executor can still intercept the Falcon without it's modified hyperdrive. In ANH Han also boasts that he can outrun the "big corellian ships", which is apparantly a speed benchmark. Would make sense again that he empire posesses the best equipment.

And also in ANH the incoming star destroyer quickly catches up with the falcon, revelaing that the only arena in which the falcon can actually outrun them is hyperspace. "I thought you said his thing was fast?!"

I think one common misconception with the ships in Star Wars is that people think bigger = slower. Certainly if you compare a jet fighter to a cargo plane in our universe, the jet fighter will always be faster. However, if you compare a small freighter on Earth with say, a destroyer, the destroyer is usually quicker as it is engineered that way. Even with all of Han's special modifications to the Falcon, it was still conceived as a freighter and as such the precision engineered Imperial warships are able to keep up most of the time. That's what I always thought, anyway.