The Mystery of the Five Foot Falcon's Undersaucer Pits

Maybe not the catchiest title, but there you have it. Here's an article on the last remaining mystery* of the five foot Falcon: details of the lower maintenance pits as they appear from 1979 onwards. I wrote this up while researching the designs for some 3D-printed parts.

Access to maintain

One of the interesting design elements of the original Millennium Falcon is the idea of an exposed maintenance pit, or well. These large openings all over the ship, some round and some polygonal, reveal an intriguing selection of cool-looking internal components.

In some ways the pits make the ship look more real. It’s kind of like the way repair technicians would want to leave off the aerodynamic fairings used by streamlined 1930s steam engines, for ease of maintenance. But in other ways they do seem kind of absurd, as you wouldn’t think that having great big holes in your armour plating would be wise from a defensive point of view!

Modelling the pits

Anyway. There are a bunch of these pits or bays all over the craft. And for decades their exact innards, known as "greeblies," were mostly a mystery for model makers. Various commercial Falcon kits approximated the incredibly complex set of pieces, taken from 1960s and 1970s car and tank model kits, but nobody got the five footer right. In fact, the four (arguably six if you count partial models) miniatures and  two full-size sets built for the production of the Original Trilogy were all totally different themselves, especially in terms of details.

But the design of the five foot Falcon has always been a bit of a model maker’s holy grail. And the rise of high-rez digital cameras and touring Star Wars prop shows mean that we now have a rich source of fan-taken photos of most of the surviving models, including the mighty five foot ship. Enthusiastic enthusiasts have been researching and publishing detailed kit maps, showing the sources of most of the original model kits used to build those incredible fantasy vehicles. Most of the pits have now been pretty well documented.

The release of the super-detailed Bandai “Perfect Grade” Falcon in 2017 meant we also have a commercial model with highly accurate part placement and geometry that’s helped hobbyists make their own versions.

The underside pits

But there are two maintenance pits that remain elusive; hence the point of this article. And those are the two undersaucer pits from the ESB-era five foot Falcon. (not the 32" stunt model, which is pretty thoroughly researched)

As has been documented exhaustively here and elsewhere, the Falcon design gained two extra landing gear legs between Episode IV (Star Wars, 1977) and Episode V (The Empire Strikes Back, 1980). The reason was practical and related to filmmaking - the physical set needed the extra legs to stand up properly - and was never explained narratively in the movie.

The addition of two extra front legs meant two extra boxes were retrofitted to the five foot model to enclose them on the saucer underside. And that meant that the open maintenance pits on the underside of the hull had to be narrowed and moved over towards the edge.

So there are thus two undersaucer maintenance pit designs used on the five foot miniature. There were the original Star Wars: A New Hope / ANH / 1977 / Episode IV pits. And the Empire Strikes Back / ESB / 1980 / Episode V pits, as they appear today following the permanent modification done in 1978 or so.

The ANH pits

To start, let's look at the lower maintenance pits as they were built in 1976 for the original Star Wars. Interestingly enough, there are excellent high-rez photos of the original ANH pits in existence. And, most importantly, many of these photos were taken with the camera facing the model square-on. Such near-orthographic photos are essential for the model maker, since they show the exact size of each detail component and, most importantly, the position and relationship of the parts.

There is one particularly important series of black and white photos taken on 30 October 1978, by ILM’s Dennis Muren, well after filming had concluded on Episode IV. Many of these pictures include rulers in the frame, and an effort was made to keep the model square-on to the camera for many shots, suggesting that the photos may have been taken deliberately to document the design for Lucasfilm licensees making models and toys.

The close-up lower pit shots from this series were first published in a 2016 Japanese-language  book (Star Wars Chronicles Episode IV/V/VI Vehicles), just in time for the researchers designing the Perfect Grade kit. Accordingly Bandai were able to release a highly detailed and accurate model of the ship as it appeared in 1977/1978.

The Payhauler Discrepancy

Oddly, there is one minor inconsistency between some of these photos. Specifically the Ertl 1:25 International Payhauler I-beam part, in the port pit, is standing on its narrow edge in the full shot of the underside that was taken earlier, but it's resting on its wide edge in the closeup shot that was taken later. My theory is that the part broke off at some point, and someone just stuck it back in, not realizing that it had originally been glued in standing up.

The ESB pits

So enough about the original ANH undersaucer pits. What about the ones modified for the Empire Strikes Back? Surely we must have tons of photos of them, since the five foot model has permanently looked that way since 1978 or so.

Well the funny thing is – it seems there are no near-orthographic (straight-on) publicly-available photos of what these two pits look like today! All known five foot ESB underside pit photos were taken at really oblique angles, because of the way the five foot model is now permanently attached to a low pole. It’s mounted that way at public exhibitions, and apparently it’s kept that way even when in storage in the Lucasfilm Archives. It’s the pits, man.

We know that Bandai took detailed photos of the existing Falcon, presumably including the pits, as part of their research for the PG Falcon kit. We were all hopeful that one day they would release an ESB-era version of the PG Falcon kit, but that seems completely unlikely now.

So even though the studio model has been around for decades, this is the final bit of unexplored territory in terms of the five footer. And there has never been a commercial kit of the ESB-era five foot Falcon. Just the ANH-era five footer and the ESB-era 32 incher. (Bandai billed one of the 1:350 “Vehicle” model kits as being an ESB ship, but it's actually a mishmash of ANH, ESB and TFA details on the five foot body)

All it’d take to document this last mystery area of the ship would be access to the original model, a mirror angled on the underside of the hull, and tripod-mounted camera! Unfortunately it’s the getting into the Lucasfilm archives part that's a bit tricky...

Figuring out the greeblies

What this all means is we know the shapes and basic positions for most of the greeblies in the two five-footer ESB pits. Many specific kit parts have been identified, in fact – mostly Tamiya 1:12 McLaren M23, Tamiya 1:12 Lotus 49B, and Tamiya 1:25 Centurion components.

But we don’t know the precise positioning of the greeblies, or even the exact locations and shapes of the two holes in the outer skin. We can extrapolate a lot of these facts from the sharply-angled photos we have, but without near-ortho images they remain approximations and likelihoods. Gort and the RPF team have published some great part maps. Jay Machado also has done a bunch of research in this area, and his in-progress images are available on his website.

Anyway. This is my go at recreating the parts that make up the ESB-era pits. These 3D models contain only those elements visible in the roughly 50 photos that I've examined. As described above, there is no guarantee that all the parts are fully accurate in detail, placement, or exact sizes, though the general shapes should be close.

Note that some components above have details which are deliberately simplified or thickened compared to the original kit parts. This is because my model was designed to be 3D-printed at 1:72 scale, and that puts certain size limits into place. Some maps I've seen list a couple of parts as being from the Tamiya 1:12 Lotus JPS kit, but I believe that is incorrect – they are similarly shaped but larger pieces from the Tamiya McLaren. Finally, the unidentified parts in white have had to be constructed solely from photos of the Falcon, and so may be inaccurate. Especially the sides which aren't visible in any shots!

Interestingly, some greeblies from the ANH pits were reused in the ESB pits. In fact, one entire assembly from the port-side ANH pit was sawn out, cut down, and moved over. This piece, the large L-shaped blue piece above, was a top body component from the Tamiya 1:12 McLaren M3 kit. It was transferred to the new pit with its original glued-on ANH-era greeblies intact. The Payhauler I-beams and a number of the McLaren parts were also pried off and reused.

No effort was made by whoever did the conversion to make it look like the internal components were fixed in place in the ship and the hole in the hull moved over, however. That would have been an interesting approach.

Another fun fact – note how the port side pit actually contains a NASA Apollo lunar lander! Or, to be more accurate, the front half of the Airfix 1/144 Saturn V LEM model.

There are also certain areas of the pits that aren’t visible in any of the hobbyist photos. These are blank spots on the map - here be dragons!

3D prints

Finally, I've designed two 3D printed versions of these pits, for adapting a Bandai "Perfect Grade" 1:72 Millennium Falcon kit to the ESB look.

Of course you'd also need replacement landing gear boxes and, optionally, landing gear legs. Those have been designed and published by fellow 3D designer Antonio Regidor of 308bits.

“Purist” version of the pits, containing only renditions of known details.

“Busy” version of the pits, containing conjectured detail.

308bits landing gear boxes.

308bits landing gear legs.

Links

The RPF kit part thread.

Jay Machado's Falcon A!

Joshua Maruska's The Falconer.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Jay Machado, Gort and the RPF kit part team, t2sides and eagle1 of the RPF, Lee Malone, and John Stuart for sharing the research they’ve done in this area. Also thanks to Fantastic Plastic, Vfxguy, and others who have made their photos of the original model online as a valuable community resource. Your generosity is much appreciated!

And if anyone out there has straight-on photos of the ESB-era five footer underside, please let me know. Not the black and white photos of the ANH-era five footer, or any photos of the 32 incher, since those are well documented and both different from this ship!

contact@3dsf.info

* Okay... so not really that mysterious.