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In Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, it is obvious that Poe Dameron is the coolest X-Wing pilot to have ever existed. He an extremely skilled pilot, but I have a head canon that he has made custom modifications and tweaks that even the Resistance doesn't know about, such as removing inertial dampeners or other modifications, which help his fighter out-perform other X-Wings.

So even if Poe were to fly another X-Wing, he would not be able to fly as well.

Except for the super booster at the beginning of The Last Jedi, is there any canon evidence to support the theory that Poe Dameron's black X-Wing has special modifications which allow it to out-perform the other X-Wings in the fleet?

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  • Out-perform, not that I can see. It has a custom black paintjob that allows it to evade enemy sensors.
    – Valorum
    Commented Dec 13, 2018 at 17:34
  • In the novels, at least, the inertial damper was user-configurable, so it wouldn't have to be modified as such.
    – Cadence
    Commented Dec 13, 2018 at 18:17
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    "It is obvious Poe Dameron is the coolest X-Wing pilot to have ever existed." ...Not obvious to me at all.
    – jpmc26
    Commented Dec 13, 2018 at 22:57
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    Not able to fly others as well because he'd be too busy mansplaining about how cool his black one was. "extremely skilled pilot" ? Does anyone ever say that in the movie? IMO there's no on-screen evidence of that. Not that it really matters; this question needs nothing but its title so +1.
    – Mazura
    Commented Dec 14, 2018 at 0:32
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    "it is obvious that Poe Dameron is the coolest X-Wing pilot to have ever existed" Amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong.
    – Ege Bayrak
    Commented Dec 14, 2018 at 6:30

2 Answers 2

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You're damn right he does. Poe is extremely proud of his customised X-Wing and likes to keep the flight systems just the way he likes them as this maintenance report (from Poe Dameron: Flight Log) shows.

In brief, he likes the thrusters and electromagnetic gyroscopes to be calibrated to his own personal specifications and he likes the flight controls "oiled" and "loose".

enter image description here

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    @Newbie12345 - Gotta catch 'em all ;-)
    – Valorum
    Commented Dec 13, 2018 at 18:52
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    ...He actually wrote "bigger, badder ships" in an official report...?
    – jpmc26
    Commented Dec 13, 2018 at 23:00
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    @jpmc26 - Like most fighter pilots, Poe is 98% ego, 2% ego.
    – Valorum
    Commented Dec 13, 2018 at 23:06
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    None of that really sounds like any invasive modification, just some preferences regarding maintenance and calibration. Reading this it seems like his X-wing is still a regular stock model.
    – Philipp
    Commented Dec 14, 2018 at 12:46
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    I agree with @Philipp but this definitely answers my question. Thanks!
    – Newbie12345
    Commented Dec 14, 2018 at 17:30
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In the Last Jedi novelization, there's a section from BB-8's point of view describing Poe's ship, Black One, as uniquely difficult to work with:

Behind Poe in the starfighter's droid socket, BB-8 was already dealing with a lengthy list of mostly irrelevant alerts from the X-wing's central computer. That was nothing new: Every astromech in the Resistance droid pool could tell you that Black One was a prickly, vainglorious machine.

[...]

The Resistance astromechs classified Black One as a high-communications-volume interface. BB-8 searched his memory for an organic equivalent of that classification, and found a high-confidence answer almost immediately.

Black One was a pain in the ass.

(Chapter 4, page 40 of Kindle edition)

However, there's no mention of any physical modifications to the ship, besides the rocket booster on the back.

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    ... and just like that, I've realised the ship is "Black 1", not "the black one".
    – Rawling
    Commented Dec 14, 2018 at 13:19

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