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!