Mandibles Part I: Inner Mandibles

One of the features that elevates the Millennium Falcon from the typical flying saucer (in addition to the cockpit of course) are two wedge shaped mandibles that jut out of the front of the ship.

The Haynes Owner's Workshop Manual describes a mechanism on the inner sides of these mandibles that serves as a tractor beam for cargo which is loaded into the ship between the jaws.  

Another theory that has gained some traction recently is that the mandibles could latch on to cargo units that the Falcon pushes along.  This piece of concept art was posted on theforce.net forum by member jasonfry and illustrates this idea:

I really love this idea and hope to see it canonized one day, if not with the Falcon itself perhaps another YT-1300 freighter.  This would explain the Falcon's outboard cockpit, lack of serious cargo space on the inside of the ship and its large engine relative to the ship's size.  

These are a few renders of my model's inner mandibles:

It's plain to see they are essentially symmetrical, with only a couple of differences from left to right.  I was actually amazed to learn that a large kit piece used on this area is actually the frame and floorpan from a 1957 Chevy Bel Air model kit.

It's been cut up quite a bit, but it's there!  My dad owns a 1956 Bel Air so I've been around tri-fives (as the '55, '56, and '57 Bel Airs are called) my whole life.  I even modeled my dad's '56 in school.

Maybe I'm making too big of a deal out of this but I thought it was really cool to discover that this part lived on the Falcon.
Here's a breakdown of the rest of the kit parts on the mandibles:

The large pontoon bridge panels actually have some nice fine-scale detail when you look at the model kit parts.  My plan is to handle that kind of detail with texture maps later on.  Here's our progress so far:

I'm splitting the mandibles up over a few posts just because of the high volume of parts on them. Expect to see more soon, and as always, thanks for reading!

Next Time:  Outer Mandibles!

Falcons of all Sizes

Hey everyone, sorry for the long delay between posts, but I'm ready to get back to the action here! There are many Falcons in my life right now and I wanted to share some of the other things I have going on.

I was able to attend Star Wars Celebration in Orlando this year and met a few random awesome people.  One of the people I spoke at length with was Lee Malone who really faithfully recreated the 5 foot filming miniature of the Millennium Falcon.

This thing really looked incredible, and it was awesome to hear a bit about his process of tracking down the kit parts and decals. I've been lucky to have seen the real miniature and this is as close as anyone's going to get to the real thing.  There are more build photos on his Rogue Studio Productions Facebook page so be sure to check it out!

I've also been hard at work on a couple practical Falcon models of my own.  First this mini Bandai kit.

I had a lot of fun with this thing.  The engineering of how it all fit together without any glue was really incredible and the level of detail was really amazing for how small it is.  It was interesting trying to do weathering on something so tiny but I'm pretty happy with the results.

I also started assembling the DeAgostini Millennium Falcon which, finally after 2 years of monthly shipments I have all the parts to.  For those who don't know this is a pretty good replica of the 3 foot filming miniature that was built for ESB.  It's going to be a lot of work to paint it up nice and I'd like to make some improvements to the interior but it's been really fun assembling the exterior so far!  Here are some photos of my progress.

 

It was really interesting building this thing because I'm definitely more familiar with the 5 foot filming miniature so it was cool to see the details on this thing and how they're similar but very different.  It all felt so alien!  It's still an amazing model.  The size and heft of it is pretty impressive (it has an aluminum frame!)

ANYWAY, I'm rendering some images of the mandibles as I type this so another post should be on the way tonight.  Sorry again for the long wait, and as always, thanks for reading!