For a lighthearted scene, I have two characters debating who is the better pilot: Poe vs Han Solo from Star Wars. (I realize Poe has a more maneuverable fighter, bit taking into account both fighter capacity and sheer skill). I know nothing about Star Wars and Google isn't helping. What do you think? Any major battles I can refer to for research?
Okay strap-in because you asked me a Star Wars question so…rambling ahoy!
I’m probably (okay definitely) biased, because I’ve spent several decades reading about Han Solo and his piloting and my exposure to Poe’s consists of all of one movie plus a few comics – but I would say Han, personally, just because he flies so much outside the box. And I don’t just mean he’s an idiosyncratic pilot who comes up with unorthodox techniques; I mean he literally flies ships in ways they are not meant to be flown. Regularly.
There’s a quote that comes to mind (and I may be paraphrasing slightly because I’m pulling it from memory, but): “That has to be Solo. No one else thinks a stock-freighter is a snubfighter.” And that’s why I’m putting him over Poe.
Because as good as Poe is as a pilot, Han regularly takes ships miles beyond their specs – and does it well. He’s not just good, he’s insane. Stock light freighters are not snubfighters; they don’t have the maneuverability or the weapons for close-combat engagements. Even when they’re tricked-out with extra armaments, it’s so they can defend themselves from pirates and flee – not so they can cruise into snubfighter engagements and shoot TIEs out of the sky. But Han does this so regularly that people start to expect it. Like “oh that’s the Millennium Falcon, they’ll come help us out in this fight!” or even “oh that’s the Millennium Falcon, we’ll take that with us when we go up against the Second Death Star in a massive space battle!” That’s not the type of ship that should be going into combat…but Han does it so often that people just nod and accept it as an okay thing to do. By the way it is not an okay thing that people should do.
(And yeah, he caught Vader by surprise…but there still aren’t a lot of people who can say they’ve shot down Darth Vader. Heck, there aren’t a lot of people who can say they’ve caught Vader by surprise, but Han and Chewie did it!)
As for direct battles to refer to, I’m not going to be much help because all of the battles that I know about exist in a canon where Poe doesn’t exist. Because they’re from the old Legends EU, which is defunct now. (Sadness.) However, you can always bring up the shooting-down-Darth-Vader-thing as that’s from the movies so it counts…and of course, the Kessel Run thing is a big deal, much as it gets played for jokes: he managed to fly so close to the event horizon of a bunch of black holes that he actually shaved distance off his flight path (without getting consumed by said black holes) which is…pretty impressive. And crazy. (And also perhaps no longer canon ummm maybe check on that.) But hey, you can definitely bring up the 3720-to-one odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field, because not a lot of people could survive flying that and that was in the movies as well, so it’s definitely canon!
(He did once outfly Boba Fett in the Dark Empire comic too…which again my bias is showing, but that’s pretty damn impressive in my book!)
So I would focus the conversation on the madness that is Han Solo’s piloting, for sure; because while flying a snubfighter well is impressive, flying a ship in ways that the ship wasn’t even designed to do is just nuts, especially when you do it over and over again instead of just when under duress and don’t have a choice. Because it’s one thing to shoot down TIEs when they’re swarming at you, and something else altogether to go chase those TIEs down willingly when you’re in a ship that has no business going up against fighters like that.
Especially because his ship is usually falling apart at the time, too. People tend to be pretty impressed that he can even manage to keep the Falcon in the air, honestly…let alone fly it well enough to shoot down crack Imperial snubfighters.
The fact that Han (again, in Legends chronology) also figures out how to fly and manage capital ships is a big mark in his favor too, because they operate very differently from snubs (or light freighters pretending to be snubs lol) and as far as I know, Poe has only ever done snubfighters. As far as I know, mind you!
Vaguely Relevant Story Time: at one point (in defunct Legends chronology) a Rebel base was evacuating too slowly and a star destroyer was going to pound them, so a few X-Wing and A-Wing pilots fake-up a weird shield/energy signature and broadcast some staticky communications to make it sound like they’re an escort of fighters trying to sneak a breaking-down Millennium Falcon with Princess Leia onboard out of the area before the Imps can detect them, and the Imperial captain’s reaction is basically “this makes no sense – but that sounds legit because nothing Solo does makes sense, quick break off the attack on the base and go after that ship!” At one point he asks his sensor-techs if the specs they’re reading match the Falcon’s sensor profile and the response is basically “umm…we have at least four different sensor profiles on record for this ship over the last three years alone, sooo…no?”
At another point, in order to infuriating an egotistical post-Imperial Warlord, some of those same pilots – with Han’s blessing and Chewie’s help – mock-up a different YT-1300 freighter to look like the Falcon and fly it around to annoy this dude (they call it the Millennium Falsehood) and just the nonsense that goes on with this escapade is…pretty damn epic. And at one point involves a protocol droid wearing a Han Solo-facemask and impersonating his voice. This has actually very little relevance to Han’s piloting abilities…but is one of my favorite tricks ever pulled by any of the Rebel pilots, so I’m sharing it anyway because it’s a good story and does at least support the idea that people think of Han as a good and utterly unpredictable pilot, because the Imps at no point suspected that it wasn’t actually Han flying around on these ridiculous missions despite the fact that he was supposed to be managing an entire fnarling taskforce at the time and had no business taking his ship out on risky solo (ha) jaunts like these wtf dude.
Also Han (in Legends; I have no idea if this part of his backstory remains canon now) attended the Imperial Academy, which means he once flew TIE fighters when he was younger, and anyone who can survive flying those tincans…well! Let’s just say that attrition among TIE pilots is hella high and leave it at that. (They have no shields; that’s why they’re faster than X-Wings. No hyperdrives or ejection life support either, so not only will you go up in a ball of flaming gas if you get shot, you can’t eject and you can’t escape. Talk about a deathtrap…)
At any rate, the fact that people like Wedge Antilles (arguably the greatest snubfighter pilot in the Rebellion, at least in my opinion!) respected Han’s piloting to the degree that he did means that his reputation was not unearned.
tl;dr in technical terms, Poe is probably the “better” pilot. In terms of what the fuck just happened was that even a ship??? however Han Solo wins hands-down because while Poe might be able to outfly him in a straightforward one-on-one simulator match…Han Solo doesn’t fly straightforward ever. He’s a maverick pilot who makes his ships do things that they should not be able to do. So no matter how good of a stick-jockey Poe is (and I do believe he’s a good one), Han ranks as a better pilot in my book due to his audacity and unorthodox tactics because he flies ships in ways that other people cannot. In ways that, in fact, those ships cannot. But in Han’s hands, they do. Somehow.
…erm so I hope that lengthy ramble helped? I will be glad to answer follow-ups or tangents if you have more questions! And I apologize for the verbosity lol.
