Landing Gear

One of the first things I modeled was the Falcon's landing gear, mainly because these great blueprints are available online.

I decided to model my Falcon with 5 sets of landing gear.  In A New Hope the Falcon model and set were built with 3, as you can see in these images, (first a screengrab of the ANH set, second an image from RPF user Jaitea's Millennium Falcon Differences thread)

Two additional landing gear boxes were added for The Empire Strikes Back, presumably to better support the weight of the full Millennium Falcon set.  Some write this change off as some of Han's "special modifications."  I always preferred the look of the landing gear box configuration from ESB because it seemed like a more balanced design.  To me it looked goofy with the big box on the back and nothing up front.  Needless to say I wanted my model to have the two forward landing gear boxes.

Here is a quick animation test of the landing gear deploying and retracting:

The way the doors open was something I had a lot of fun figuring out.  I knew the doors on the set were cut into thirds with notched edges on the panels.  You can see in this screen grab that 2 of the 3 fold up on themselves with the help of some pistons.

I also referred to this image from the Haynes Manual on how to construct the door mechanisms.  (Note the difference in scale between the ships in these two images...  not even close!)

The thing that bothers me about the Falcon's landing gear design is there is an implication that they are like shock absorbers that can collapse into the hull of the ship, but the big blocky elements don't allow for very much compression.  The bays I had to extrude into the landing gear boxes were really cavernous to accommodate the gear. Also, in order to make the landing gear reach both the ground and the ceiling of the landing gear bays I had to make the struts so long that they stuck out of the top of the ship when fully retracted. (One of the landing gear bays totally intersects with the cockpit tube, but we'll get into interior v. exterior discrepancies later!)  You can see my solution to these problems in the animation; landing gear bay ceilings that move down with the landing gear.  This animation is not without it's flaws though.  You can see on the aft landing gear there is a small piston that materializes through the ceiling.  I will work harder to figure all of these things out when I do the animation rig.

The Falcon's landing gear is always depicted in the sets and matte paintings as having hoses hanging down alongside the landing gear.  I haven't included them with my landing gear because I feel like they would get caught and/or damaged by the mechanism.  That being said, I do think they add a certain extra level of detail and scale so they may be something I add later.

As always, thank you for reading!  Next time: The Boarding Ramp!