TESB Article: 10 things you didn't know about...

[Praeothmin]

Very interesting article...

This gem though is what got me interested:

And they built a full-size Millennium Falcon, which was 65 wide and 80 feet long.

This was most likely the one seen when Han is repairing it with Chewie, in the hangar on Hoth.
This, once converted to metric, means the official size of the MF was 19.6 meters wide by 24.24 meters long...

[Nowhereman10]

Very interesting article...

This gem though is what got me interested:

And they built a full-size Millennium Falcon, which was 65 wide and 80 feet long.

This was most likely the one seen when Han is repairing it with Chewie, in the hangar on Hoth.
This, once converted to metric, means the official size of the MF was 19.6 meters wide by 24.24 meters long...

The drawings for the Echo Base hanger set in "The Art of the Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" book show the "full scale" Falcon was 90 feet long from tip of the mandibles to the aft "turkey feather" flaps just behind the engines and maybe a little over 75 feet wide when the outrigger cockpit is included. The height is just over 22 feet including the landing gear.

There are a whole bunch of scenes, mostly in Echo Base's hanger where the whole set is made use of, including when the disembark onto the Cloud City landing platform (close up scenes only). The set (only half assembled) was used in a deleted scene on Tatooine in "The Return of the Jedi".

Sadly the whole thing was deliberately scrapped despite it being built around a heavy steel framework and being stored in hermetically sealed containers. Imagine the fans that would flock to see that in some museum or if Lucas put it in as part of a traveling Star Wars themed show! >.<

As for the "offical" size, the interior sets contradict the exterior set's size, so you have to find a good compromise between the two.

[Praeothmin]

You do know that 90 feet is only three meters longer, so 27.24 meters long, and 75 feet would then be 22.6 meters wide...

Still nowhere near the 35-40 meters long certain people claimed... :)

[Trinoya]

Bah, this just means the falcon is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside! Star Wars = TARDIS LEVEL TECH!

/Wars wank.

[Praeothmin]

Honestly, we are dealing with future advanced space tech with ships that only have inch thick outer shells, so why would the interior shots actually not fit with a 22 meter wide by 27 meter long MF?

[Khas]

Well, the size of the Falcon given in the New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels says is 27 meters long...

[Praeothmin]

You know, if the MF is 27 meters long, and it was shown as being longer than the Sensor Globes/Shield Domes on an ISD, and since the only ISD size reference is in C-Canon, than shouldn't the ISD size be recalculated to fit this?

Or do we treat this one as a SW style "Defiant scaling issue"?

I prefer the latter, as a big 1.6km ship seems really cool to me...

[Mike DiCenso]

Bah, this just means the falcon is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside! Star Wars = TARDIS LEVEL TECH!

/Wars wank.

If that's the case, then you have to do the same for Trek and some of the other live-action SF franchise spaceships since the majority of such separate interior sets are far larger than their exterior ones. Only in more recent times with the advent of CGI sets and models has this improved a little bit.

An example for Trek is the Galileo shuttlecraft exterior and interior sets, both separate. The exterior is built to be 23 or so feet (7 meters) long. The interior sets, including the back engine and storage compartment Scotty goes into to electrify the hull in "The Galileo Seven" and various characters go in and out of to find equipment that can be jettisoned overboard to shave weight off would make the craft well over 30 feet (9.14 meters) long.

Why is this done? Well, most of it is practical artistic license with having to move the bulky cameras and lights available in those days around inside the set and other filming necessities. Something that would not be easily done if everything was built into the shell of the exterior set.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

Honestly, we are dealing with future advanced space tech with ships that only have inch thick outer shells, so why would the interior shots actually not fit with a 22 meter wide by 27 meter long MF?

Because they don't just barely fit or might barely fit with some work, they don't fit at all. An example is that the TESB exterior "full-scale" cockpit is something like 8-9 feet wide while the interior one is around 12 feet. So the exterior could be reasonably said to be only a 75-80 percent scale model.

Bob Brown on his now sadly defunct website went into a lot of the issues involving this. The interior set plan so poorly fits inside the official 27 meter Falcon that in order to get anything to fit at all you have to massively shorten one side of the ring corridor and rotate the hold and passenger compartment 30 degrees off axis. It only gets worse from there when you apply three dimensions to the picture and you try to work the hold and corridor heights into the hull.

Anyway, here's the link to Bob Brown's "Ship of Riddles" page as archived on the Wayback Machine.
-Mike

[2046]

I was actually working on a "Great Star Wars Rescaling" project a couple of years ago using various yardsticks, including the smaller Falcon seen in the films compared to what some have claimed.

[Mike DiCenso]

Funny you should bring that up, Robert. Do you remember the Strek-v-Swars.net forum and the second ST-v-SW.Net forum? There were several major discussions on scaling the SW ships based on the actual movie sizes, and I also recall Weyon the Dancing Borg did one where he scaled the Falcon based off the hanger scene with Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewie looking down on the freighter from the upper deck observation window. Weyon's scaling pegged the Falcon at a size smaller than even official ones. He also did a scaling of the Super Star Destroyer based on a scene in ROTJ where the ship is flanked in formation by two Imperial Star Destroyers which as I remember work out smaller than the current official and fan numbers at 8-10 km.

So you might want to see if you can check Wayback to see if they're archived. The images may not have survived, but the discussion will be there for sure, and it is superb. Well worth the effort.
-Mike

[2046]

As I recall I was aiming to take the Strek-v-Swars stuff further. And no, I don't think any of that is Wayback-able.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Funny you should bring that up, Robert. Do you remember the Strek-v-Swars.net forum and the second ST-v-SW.Net forum? There were several major discussions on scaling the SW ships based on the actual movie sizes, and I also recall Weyon the Dancing Borg did one where he scaled the Falcon based off the hanger scene with Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewie looking down on the freighter from the upper deck observation window. Weyon's scaling pegged the Falcon at a size smaller than even official ones. He also did a scaling of the Super Star Destroyer based on a scene in ROTJ where the ship is flanked in formation by two Imperial Star Destroyers which as I remember work out smaller than the current official and fan numbers at 8-10 km.

So you might want to see if you can check Wayback to see if they're archived. The images may not have survived, but the discussion will be there for sure, and it is superb. Well worth the effort.
-Mike

Ooo, shots with lots of perspective.
Besides, I don't think there are that many opportunities in tesb for a good measurement of the Executor.

[Picard]

I did scaling of Executor based on few scenes... even with 1600 meters long ISD, it was always between 8 000 and 12 000 meters.

[Mike DiCenso]

I don't see how you got that exactly as the the debut scene of the SSD Executor shows a ship at least 11 times longer than one of the ISDs flanking it:



In fact, the ISD in front may not be so close. Only the one at the top left of the image brackets the size to just under 19 km. This view, and not really any other, is what Saxton largely based his 17.5 km estimate on. There is little else that shows this kind of scaling again.
-Mike