Engines

The Millennium Falcon's engines are part of what makes the ship really unique to me.  We've all seen the typical rocket engines and jet engines before, but the Falcon is really one of the few ships in Star Wars (and really anywhere else) that has something different; a strip that covers a quarter of the rear of the ship and is really more radial than directional.  This design has definitely evolved and become more fleshed out over the years, and of course it wouldn't be the Falcon if any two versions of it were totally alike!

Originally the 5 foot filming model built for A New Hope had engines that were a strip of frosted glass that was back-lit.

While this was super effective in the original trilogy's theatrical release as the ship flew by camera on film, we hadn't really seen what the Falcon's engines looked like powered down.  The special editions in the late 90s expanded on the design with this shot of the Falcon blasting its way out of Mos Eisley Spaceport:

I was 11 years old when I first saw this shot and I remember being absolutely amazed by it.  I had never even considered what might be behind the bright light that was the Falcon's engines.  I definitely think of that moment as a turning point for me because from then on, I was completely fascinated by the inner workings of spaceships.

Eventually more designs started to surface.  The DK cutaway books from the 90s were books I stared at for hours at a time throughout my young adulthood and the Falcon cutaway depicts the engines like this:

Several years later The Haynes Manual offered this diagram:

While I don't wholly agree with what these artists have done with the ship, what I love about these two books is that artistic license was taken to make practical sense of things.  I had never thought of it as a small child but when I read the cutaway book for the first time I remember thinking, "Of course the engines would need thrust vector plates, and of course they would need to be thick for the amount of thrust the Falcon would generate."  These were formative experiences to be sure.  I know now that the flaps on the filming miniatures don't even have any separation between them.
Contrary to what I saw in these books, I always felt that the Falcon's engines needed to occupy more space on the inside of the ship.  On the top of the engine deck are six massive cooling fans, so in my opinion what lies beneath has to warrant a need for them.  I'll talk more about the Falcon interior later, but what I ended up building in terms of the basic shape of the exhaust manifold and the flaps is a combination of what I saw in these two books.  The pistons on top of the flaps were built from reference of the 5 foot filming miniature.  Here's a close up of one engine section:

And here's an animated breakdown of the various engine parts:

One of the joys of being a 3D modeler and building something modular like the Falcon's engines is that you only need to build one piece and then duplicate it around.  Building these sections early on was really satisfying because it covered such a large area of the ship and started to give me an idea of the scale of details to come.

That's all I have to say about the model this week, but I did have fun exploring what the engines would look like powered up.  In Keyshot I was able to get a pretty cool looking result in a pretty short amount of time (I did add a bit of a glow in Photoshop though.)  Without further adieu, let's kick the tires and light the fires!

As always, thanks for reading!  Next time: Quad Cannons!