![]() In South West England he came across eight unused cargo planes from the Royal Air Force and scavenged them, taking everything he thought might lend the Falcon a weathered, hand-me-down look. & TM, All Rights Reserved.įantasy or not, the task of building the Falcon was real, and under a limited budget and a tight deadline, Christian scoured junkyards for materials. Grant Mccune, Richard Edlund, and Steve Gawley work on the Falcon model for EP4. It’s one of those things where the visual storytelling was way more important than functionality.” “It’s totally off,” says Jay Machado, senior hard surface modeler at Industrial Light & Magic, the company that supervised effects for the Star Wars films. However, there doesn’t seem to be enough room for two gun pits and a ladder within the freighter, and the guns themselves don’t seem to have a range that matches their field of view. As seen in A New Hope, a ladder in the middle of the Falcon leads to a pair of cannons, one at the top of the ship and one at the bottom. The Falcon’s cannons, too, carried a flaw that future Star Wars craftspeople would have to accept. (“That’s probably the least practical part of the whole ship,” Christian admits of the dish, which was knocked off the Falcon during Return of the Jedi’s climactic battle.) For one thing, the cockpit was on the side of the vessel-how would Han see anything to his left?-and the radar dish on top completely botched the aerodynamics. ![]() ![]() Workaday as it may be, the Millennium Falcon’s non-traditional design posed some logical challenges for the builders. And for some reason, it has a radar dish.ĮP4 Falcon blueprints Lucasfilm Ltd. With its Quadex power core, Isu-Sim SSP05 hyperdrive generator and dual Girodyne SRB42 sublight engines, it can outrun Imperial starships and, according to Han Solo, “make point-five past lightspeed.” About 113 feet long from the tip of its mandibles to its wide-bar engines, the Falcon is souped-up and battle-tested thanks to military-grade deflector shields, twin CEC AG-2G quad laser cannons, a pair of Arakyd ST2 concussion missile tubes, and a BlasTech Ax-108 blaster cannon. According to the authoritative Millennium Falcon “ Owner’s Workshop Manual” published in 2011, a typical YT-1300 reaches a maximum speed of about 500 mph, but the Falcon has been clocked at 650 mph. Maybe not, but to paraphrase its pilot, the Falcon has it where it counts. “That was always George’s description of it: a piece of junk,” says Roger Christian, the Oscar-winning set decorator on the original Star Wars. There are bigger, sleeker, more imposing vehicles in Star Wars, but on the eve of what might be its final flight in The Rise of Skywalker, the Millennium Falcon remains the most iconic ship from George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away. The Millennium Falcon has always been defined by Luke Skywalker’s first impression of the YT-1300 freighter in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope: “What a piece of junk!” But more than 40 years later, Luke’s dismissive words have been adapted by Star Wars fans and filmmakers into a refrain of endearment.
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