Part 2: Escape from Echo Base
After his AT-AT hat-trick, Dash returns to Echo Base to find it overrun with Stormtroopers. Leebo directs Dash via comlink to free the Outrider from Imperial clutches and escape Hoth.
Courtesy of nine-gear crow.
The Millennium Falcon
The Millennium Falcon is an over-rated, sub-par, barely functional eyesore piloted by a two-bit hasbeen smuggler and his non-droid partner and is clearly inferior to and less famous than the Outrider in every way imaginable. Isn’t that right, LEEBO?
Dammit, Dash! Who let you near a keyboard?!
As briefly glimpsed in Escape from Echo Base, the Millennium Falcon is the personal craft of Captain Han Solo, and his partner/co-pilot Chewbaca. The Falcon, as it’s known for short, is a heavily modified Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 long range cargo transport craft. According to CEC’s manufacturing records, the ship itself is over 60 years old and has had multiple corporate and civilian owners, as well as multiple callsigns over the decades, and was re-named Millennium Falcon by its previous owner, Lando Calrissian, the chief administrator of Cloud City on the gas giant world of Bespin.
The Falcon has been retrofitted numerous times by its previous owners, to the point where even Solo has difficulty maintaining the ship’s patchwork array of parts and systems. The Falcon sports military grade shielding (use of which on civilian craft is illegal under Imperial law), heavy armor modifications, a Class 0.5 hyperdrive, and a pair of quad-linked laser turrets on its dorsal and ventral sides, in addition to other hidden weapons and systems.
The Falcon also sports a long-range sensor dish on its port side which is linked into a system of sensors so advanced that they are also illegal under Imperial law. The dish gives the Falcon a distinctive profile unique even among other craft in the already incredibly modular YT-1300 line. It’d be a shame of anything should happen to it…
The Outrider
The star attraction for vehicle nerds like myself. The Outrider is a heavily modified Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-2400 light cargo transport. CEC boasts that the YT-2400 has double the armor load of their more popular YT-1300 (the model of craft such as the Millennium Falcon, and Twin Suns Transport Corporation’s Selu and Sabra), as it was designed specifically to operate in the dangerous Outer Rim Territories. Hence why Rendar creatively chose to name his ship the Outrider. He also claims it’s as well known across the galaxy as the Millennium Falcon. Yeah, prove it you fucking liar.
The Outrider is capable of operating at a top speed of between 800 and 1,500 km/h and is equipped with a pair of dual laser turrets on the dorsal and ventral sides of the ship, as well as a compact concussion missile launcher located directly beneath the cockpit on the starboard side of the ship. At nearly half the size of the YT-1300, the YT-2400 can be crewed by one person on their own, if necessary, as it lacks the more spacious bunk compartments of the YT-1300, and is also less modular than the 1300s (which could be specially designed to fill a specific role, ie: transport, freighter, personal leisure craft, gunboat, some mix of the above). It can carry up to 75 tons of cargo and is equipped with enough provisions to operate out in deep space for up to two months—mostly booze, cigarettes and meat, if you’ve been paying attention to the LP storyline.
On a personal note, I like the design of the Outrider much more than I do the Falcon. There’s just something so intriguing about its asymmetrical design and how it seems to look beautiful no matter what angle you look at it from. I’m almost kind of disappointed I had to slap that big red FRAUD stamp over top of it for the header to our Table of Contents, but then again that’s more Dash’s fault for being an unscrupulous huckster rather than the Outrider’s itself.
As mentioned in the OP, the Outrider was one of the few Expanded Universe elements to be lifted up into the “G-Canon” (or movie canon) thanks to the popularity of the Shadows of the Empire multimedia project, specifically the video game we’re LPing. The Outrider can be spotted taking off from Mos Eisley spaceport in the post-Special Edition releases of A New Hope as Luke is driving into the city with Obi-Wan and the droids. What’s being seen on screen is actual the denouement of the novel Shadow Game, with Dash having reclaimed the Outrider from the repair shop on Tatooine after an adventure involving a galactic popstar/spy/relative of Princess Leia’s and her deadly game (a shadow game, if you will
… I’ll show myself out) of espionage and murder involving Prince Xizor of Black Sun, because fuck, who’s someone we can send Dash up against that people are familiar with.REPEAT OFFENDERS
● AT-ST
● Snowspeeder
Blind Sally posted:
After single-handedly defeating the Empire at Hoth, Dash returns to Echo Base to a hero's welcome. He is given a trophy.
But seriously, he wipes out a legion of Stormtroopers, culls the local wampa population, and knocks out an AT-ST while on foot? Yeah, Dash, I'm pretty sure that didn't happen. Also, we saw Vader in the film, but we don't see him in the game. I don't think Dash was there. While I feel Han deserves a knock against him for keeping the Falcon in such disrepair, Dash's tall tail clearly doesn't warrant a point.
Vote for Han.
nine-gear crow posted:
This one goes to Han. I should have put a [CITATION NEEDED] tag in the corner of this video because nothing that actually happens in it can be verified by another canonical source. In fact, it seems to be actively contradicted by both the movie AND the opening of the game itself. The intro shows the Outrider in the same hangar as the Millennium Falcon, yet when it’s just Dash on his own, suddenly the Outrider has magically moved to the opposite end of Echo Base. Not buying it. Then there’s the lack of Vader, the presence of Wampas in Echo Base, the AT-ST in the hangar despite there being no way it could have gotten in there, the sudden and localized chasm-causing earth quake. It’s all too much.
In reality, Dash probably booked it to the hangar the second after the shield generator went down, grabbed the Outrider and was gone while Han was escorting Leia back the Falcon. That’s why it’s not there in the hangar when the Falcon makes its escape.
Dash Rendar: 1
Han Solo: 3
There's not a tonne to talk about with regards to the multimedia project at this point in time. So I just want to leave you with a wonderful piece of artwork I cajoled Crow into making for me:
EDIT: I wasn't aware of this fact, but I thought it was relevant enough to warrant being added to this miscellaneous section. Thanks to MassRafTer to pointing it out.
MassRafTer posted:
The Wampas are there as a reference to some cut scenes from Empire. I don't remember if this game made me aware of it or watching a documentary on a random VHS release of the movie, but there was a Wampa subplot that got cut from the movie. Probably because it sounds really dumb.
Huh, whaddaya know. I love me some obscure Star Wars references.
I dug around Wookiepedia and found information related to this. You're right, it does sound silly:
Wookiepedia posted:
Wampas originally played a much more prominent role in early versions of The Empire Strikes Back. In the treatment and the first draft, wampas storm Echo Base shortly before the arrival of the Empire. In the original shooting script, a tauntaun was killed when a wampa stormed into Echo Base. Shots of a wampa breaking through one of the walls of the complex and attacking Rebel soldiers were filmed but ultimately dropped from the final version of the movie. In addition, the wall did not crumble properly and the shot was never successfully achieved. Final versions of the script depicted a mass-coordinated wampa attack on Echo Base. There were several scenes shot for the film that showed this incident, as well as a sequence involving C-3PO tearing a warning sign off the door of a wampa pen, followed by a group of snowtroopers entering the pen only to be attacked by the wampas inside. However, these scenes were later deleted and did not make the final version of the film.
Apparently the information came from an interactive CD-ROM released in 1998. It was intended to hype up Episode I:
