Ship of Riddles
20 May 2013 -
This is a page I've started to make about the Millenium Falcon. It borrows heavily from the old Ship of Riddles made by Robert Brown back in the nineties. His site is still accessible via archive.org, but images are heavily compressed and small in size, so my mission is to resurrect the information from that page, order it nicely and display it a bit better.
Most of the content in this part is written by Robert Brown. I take no credit for it, nor have I asked him (to come in contact with him seems very hard) and if he finds this site offensive, all he need to do is send me an email.
I will obviously add my own commentary to this, and hopefully it will be clear when I do so.
Introducing Everyone's Favourite Tramp freighter
Our first 1977 glimpse. The Special Edition gives us the earlier "Jabba" scene to drool over! Now we can imagine that Solo in THIS shot, is probably checking his ship for damage, or tracking devices after Jabba's visit!
I always loved this shot, it sits so well on the screen. The majestic Millennium Falcon, though far in the background absolutely dominates the frame. It looks fat, dirty and half broken but WE know it moves like a swallow in running shoes!
A Terrible Realisation - the ship that didn't fit
The Millennium Falcon we know was a rush job. George Lucas had vetoed the original design, and the set builders in England had to rush ahead with only sketches and photos. The scale models were still being rushed through.
Perhaps the saddest day of my StarWars fan-life was the realisation that the Millennium Falcon interiors CANNOT be matched to the exterior. The rush job, sadly, meant that glaring inconsistencies arose between the interior and exterior of the vessel. The exterior set was built BEFORE the models were finished, and ended up about 40% too small!
Perhaps the saddest day of my StarWars fan-life was the realisation that the Millennium Falcon interiors CANNOT be matched to the exterior. The rush job, sadly, meant that glaring inconsistencies arose between the interior and exterior of the vessel. The exterior set was built BEFORE the models were finished, and ended up about 40% too small!
I had originally hoped to prove all the current plans wrong and present the true interior, but I have found that they are all compromises, as they MUST be! the attempt to fit the interior scenery into the undersized exterior set will fall down every time! Even in the correctly sized Millennium Falcon, some aspects of the interior set MUST BE CHANGED to work
I will detail the points of contention, list the good and bad points of the current plans. Finally, I must commit the ultimate sin of ALTERING (as little as possible) some details so that the Millennium Falcon can maintain integrity and as much interior similarity as possible to the movie shots.
There is an irreconcilable problem between the interior and exterior sets of the millennium falcon
As a result, the best we can EVER achieve is a COMPROMISE. There several ways to do this:
- just make stuff up, who cares? - WEG did this
- ignore practicality and just try to use EXACTLY what is seen in the internal footage - you will have to MAKE UP a lot of stuff and then also HIDE the problems in the third dimension. - The STARWARS Technical Journal did this
- just go with what LOOKS REALLY COOL, but has little if any research behind it - the SciPubTech poster does this
- try to work geometrically but still come as close as possible to the contradictory film footage - SWICS does this, and *I* do this
The approach used in this project
- Make the ship ''work''
- Make the absolute minimal changes necessary to stay as close as possible to the film footage.