This upcoming gold mine of unreleased blueprints is something we’ve been anticipating for a long time. A long time.
The unsigned version is going to be $500. Help us get a copy by buying a t-shirt! If we can sell 20 more t-shirts, we can get the book and have even better reference for things like landing gear positioning, greeblies, detailing, and more!
Stinson is working through the exercise of getting the scaling of the overall exterior as refined as possible so we can move ahead with footings. The key is to get the landing gear positioned and scaled so that it fits with the look of the rest of the ship. Since this Falcon will be so much larger than any of the exterior sets from the films, coupled with the fact that the landing gear must support almost all of the weight of the structure above, getting those proportions correct is pretty important both visually and structurally.
We will also incorporate some additional vertical supports, disguised as fuel hoses, under the mandibles. These images show the supports farther aft than they will ultimately be placed.
Stinson Lenz has joined the Full Scale Falcon team. We met Stinson on the Replica Prop Forum where he was displaying his incredible 3D models and renderings of the interior spaces of the Millennium Falcon. We were impressed to the point that we had to invite him to join our project. His visualization skills and modeling expertise will be instrumental in getting the proper fit and scaling between interior and exterior dimensions.
Some examples are shown below. You can see more of Stinson’s awesome 3D Falcon interior work on Flickr.
We’ve added several more exterior reference screen captures: http://fullscalefalcon.com/reference/
We now have a Twitter account. Follow us at http://twitter.com/fullscalefalcon.
Saw this on Boing Boing and on several other blogs earlier this week:
I’ve emailed the guy behind the project just to introduce us and the Full Scale Falcon project and see what we might be able to do to work together. No response yet, but I’m sure he’s inundated with email at this point.
After talking to Steve Sansweet on several occasions about our Falcon project, I’m not sure how Lucasfilm licensing will feel about the AT-AT project going through Kickstarter, but hey, more power to the guy if he can get it going. We’d love to do a cross-promotional thing, or maybe even a contest to see who can finish first…
UGO.COM chose the Millennium Falcon as #1 of the 100 best movie spaceships.
Just looked back at an insightful reader comment from Darth Humorous from April 2010 about the difference in scale from the 80 foot set blueprints vs. the current 114 foot full size dimension:
“The plans for the landing gear are based on the 80 foot set. Since you are scaling the ship up to 114 feet per Brown, the feet should be scaled up accordingly. Now, you may have already done so, but you were talking about a 12 inch tube, which is very close to the original landing gear plans. You did mention going to 18 inches for structural concerns. Perhaps you should scale the gear up accordingly to see what the tube diameter would actually be. You might be surprised.”
Math is a wonderful thing.
Get this: Scaling up the 12 inch diameter landing gear/foundation pier by the 80/114 factor gives roughly an 18 inch diameter. So it looks like we will be going with an 18 inch diameter steel-reinforced concrete pier for each of the seven landing gear tubes.
The current plan is to use Tube Base Plastic Footing Forms with 18 inch Sonotube forms for the footings and piers. The landing gear will be built around (and will anchor to) the concrete piers.
Wired.com has an article on the plans from the West End Games’ plans for the Falcon. While we are not using these plans as reference, they are interesting in the way they laid out the interior.
West End Games' Falcon Plans
Mike Demaine’s Docking Bay 94 is an incredible collection of all things Millennium Falcon!
