Leia suspects there's a tracking device on the Millennium Falcon and yet they fly straight to Yavin 4 anyway... — @msharp

Many things in Star Wars don’t make sense, but this one turns out to be pretty straightforward. Leia is badass.

Senator/Princess Leia Organa doesn’t know she is going to be rescued from captivity on the Death Star moments before she is scheduled to be executed, but when it happens, and when the ship she is rescued in is allowed to get away suspiciously easily, she thinks on her feet.

She knows the moons of Yavin have no sentient inhabitants outside the rebel base, and after seeing Alderaan blown up she wants the Death Star as far away from civilian populations as she can get it.

OK, there were two primitive pre-spaceflight species on Yavin 13, but the Empire was unlikely to pay them any notice.

She knows the clock is ticking on the value of the plans she stashed away in R2D2. The Empire knows exactly what was stolen, and it is only a matter of time before they do exactly the same analysis that the Rebellion wants to do, leaving the Rebellion with the embarrassing prospect of showing up to bomb an exhaust port that was already closed for emergency maintenance.

She has seen that Admiral Moff Tarkin is drunk on the power trip he gets from being in charge of a moon-sized death machine. She knows that given the choice between sending a couple of Star Destroyers to take out the Alliance base, and blowing them up personally with his planet-killer, he’s going to choose the Big Round Fucking Laser.

But she knows she doesn’t want to give them too much time to think and maybe come up with a proportionate, sensible response.

So Leia figures either they’ll find something useful in the Death Star plans or they won’t. If they don’t, they’ve got a pretty hairy evacuation in their future and they’ll need to find a new base, but they’ve at least got advance warning the Empire is on its way. If they find something though, this is their best and possibly only chance to get the Death Star to come to where they are tactically strongest, without the rest of the Imperial fleet getting in the way.

And she thinks this through in the time it takes to tell Han what course to plot. Fuck yeah Leia.