Dish Network!

According to the Haynes Owner's Workshop Manual for the Millennium Falcon, the ship is equipped with a military grade rectenna dish.  In fact, the first time we see the Falcon in Docking bay 94...  wait...  there is no dish!

Since only about half of this set was constructed, the dish was never built for A New Hope. Presumably the intention was to extend the set with a matte painting in post production, and maybe they never got around to it.  I remember thinking as a child that the dish was probably somehow able to fold down into the hull, but that seems kind of silly now.  Anyway, for the rest of the film, the ship has a rectenna dish which you can see here:

The dish on the 5 foot filming miniature is posable, and one of the interesting things I noticed in my research is that at some point between the filming of A New Hope and now, the dish was flipped around completely.  Take a look at this screen grab from ANH and this photograph from around the same time.

It's a little difficult to tell from these images but if you look closely you can see that the dish has 2 patches of grey paint on either side of the dish; small on the left and large on the right.  This modern photo shows that the large grey patch is on the left and the small is on the right, meaning that the dish was flipped over to face the back and around to face the front again.

My suspicion is that it happened after this photoshoot which has the dish looking super goofy pointed straight up.

The dish is famously knocked off in Return of the Jedi when Lando is flying through the superstructure of the second Death Star.  Not a scratch, my ass!

The damaged round dish gets replaced sometime before The Force Awakens with a new rectangular dish.  I affectionately refer to this dish as the "snow shovel."  The Haynes manual has a diagram of a similar looking dish and calls it a standard CEC (Corellian Engineering Corp for you non-nerds out there) civilian model sensor dish.  

Another bit of trivia is that this dish is based on the dish from the Tantive IV Blockade runner.  This ship was originally intended to be the Millennium Falcon but similarities to Space 1999's Eagle Transporter prompted a design change.  

Incidentally, ILM legend Bill George recently posted on his Sci-Fi Airshow website a model he created that is essentially the lovechild of the original Falcon design and the Eagle Transporter, The Millennium Eagle.  His page includes more history on the initial Falcon design that would become the Blockade Runner and a link to even more Falcon history!

ANYWAY, the dish was one of the first detailed parts I worked on for my build, and was based on this diagram from the Star Wars Blueprints book:

Here is a behind the scenes image from the Empire Strikes Back of Lando rescuing Luke that features this setpiece:

I built the radial details on the front of the dish based on the diagram above, but on the filming miniature many of them come from the Aurora Sealab model kit (see below).  I had also initially modeled the concentric rings seen in the image above, but left them out feeling the model looked too busy with them.  Here are some beauty shots of my dish (note that it's been rotated to it's original ANH position).

I also put together a diagram of the greebles on the dish that have been identified. This information is available on Gort's Kit ID thread but since I've kept track of this stuff I figured I would share here.  Addtional parts were identified by Lee Malone of Rogue Studio Productions.

Thanks again for reading!  I'll leave you with a render of our progress so far.

p.s.  I want to thank RPF user Jaitea for color correcting these classic shots of the Falcon recently.  I really enjoyed them!

Next time: Docking Rings

Greebles!

For those who don't know, a greeble (sometimes called a nurnie) is a detail added to the surface of an object that makes it appear more complex, and therefore more visually interesting. In the 70s, model builders at ILM re-purposed parts from plastic model kits to decorate the surfaces of the spaceships for Star Wars. Most of the kits used were World War II tanks, battleships, and planes, but race-cars were also frequently used. Here's an image of the 5 foot Millennium Falcon miniature being "kitbashed."

Since Star Wars is so beloved by fans, many of the model kits and individual parts used to build the ships have been identified and catalogued. RPF member Gort has a thread identifying many of these parts on the 5 foot Falcon. Discovering this research by members of the RPF is part of what inspired me to begin this model over a year and a half ago. This thread on Studio Scale Modelers offers a list of the kits with links to flatbed-scanned images of some of them. These scans were essential to my build, here's an example: this is a sprue from the Tamiya 1/12 scale Ferarri 312B kit and the corresponding parts I modeled for the Falcon.

One of the more recognizable model kit parts on the Falcon are these two halves of the Entex 1/5 scale Wankel Rotary Engine kit which appear on both sides of the Falcon where the mandibles meet the saucer.

The kit that was most widely used on the Falcon was the Tamiya 1/12 scale McLaren M23 kit. 178 parts from this kit were used on the Falcon. Here are the individual parts (note: for my library I have not included mirror images of parts, but some of the suspension parts do have corresponding mirror images.)

When scans weren't available I used these sets of photos taken by Andre Bustanoby and David Emmerichs to model my parts. Also, since the 5 foot Falcon is over 40 years old, a few pieces have been damaged or have come off completely. This thread of vintage Falcon pics started by Whiskey helped me track some of those missing parts down.

I put this video together to showcase all the parts I've built for my library, just for a bit of fun. It doesn't include duplicates or mirrored parts, but it does give an idea of how many greebles cover the surface of the Falcon.

I hope that was enjoyable; I certainly had a good time making it! It's been such a long time since my last post because there were so many greebles to sift through! The final count of my greeble library for the Falcon was 1,125 individual parts, if you count all the duplicates and mirrored parts that appear on the Falcon the number jumps to 2,548! That's a lot of glue! As I go through each section of the Millennium Falcon from here on it's going to be all about greebles so prepare yourselves!

Thanks for reading!  Next time: Dish Network!