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Why, oh why, write an entire page covering something as nerdy as the Millennium Falcon’s boarding ramp?
Well, basically because I want to make a half-decent model of it. And I’d like that model to be as screen-accurate as is reasonable.
Like everything to do with the Falcon, nothing about the ramp is consistent, and much is obscure. But here’s what I’ve found, for anyone else who might also be working on such a project.
Two sets.
Technically the Falcon’s boarding ramp was built twice for both Star Wars/A New Hope and the Empire Strikes Back (ESB). This is because the interior and the exterior of the ship were actually different sets.
The exterior half-saucer built for Star Wars/ANH, and the full 360° saucer built for ESB, both contained the section of the boarding ramp seen above, so characters could be seen walking up (or rolling up, pulled by wires, in the case of R2) into the spacecraft. In real life, of course, the cast ran up the ramp into an empty plywood shell.
Meanwhile the full-sized interior sets for each movie, built on a different soundstage, also featured the upper interior section of the ramp, so that people could be shown dashing into the corridors from outside (though only Star Wars/ANH actually did so). This meant that the entire interior set had to be raised several feet off the stage floor – which it had to be anyway in Star Wars/ANH to accommodate the famous hidden compartments. Incidentally the ESB set was only about a foot off the floor, and so couldn't have had a full ramp. The hold pits where Han tries to repair the Falcon in ESB were constructed by positioning that part of the set over a deep tank on the studio floor.
I don’t know if any components, such as parts of the ramp wall, were moved and recycled between each of the two sets in each film, though it seems like a reasonable thing to have done. The end of the curved corridor that's just past the ramp door, for example, is marked on the ESB set blueprint as "floating", which means it could be picked up and moved to the opposite side of the set when required.
The interior set's section of ramp can be seen in the upper right corner of this shot.
No effects miniature of the Falcon was ever shown with an open (lowered) boarding ramp. The ramp was only ever constructed for the full-sized studio sets for the actors to walk on.
The mystery of the boarding ramp mechanism.
One of the many mechanical challenges in modelling the Millennium Falcon, a fantasy ship filled with many famous impossible aspects, is the boarding ramp mechanism used in ESB.
Basically the boarding ramp for Star Wars/ANH was designed to look really cool, but was never fully engineered. It’s a mix of a swing-down ramp combined with three pairs of vertical posts that are supposed to be hydraulic mechanisms.
The problem is that, because of the way the ramp pivots down, you can’t have hydraulic pistons with solely vertical travel. Simple geometry means that the pistons would have to shift horizontally to accommodate the motion of the ramp. Or the ramp would have to lengthen. Oops.
This part is a total guess, but maybe the ramp idea was inspired by aviation airstairs, such as the Boeing 727’s aft airstair that hinged down from the back. (a rear exit famously used by the mysterious parachuting hijacker known as “DB Cooper” in 1971) Such airstairs, which were commonly used in the 1960s and 70s, have a pair of struts which look, when down, a bit like the Falcon’s hydraulics. However, they’re not pistons - the struts actually hinge midway and fold up. But this is something casual passengers may not have seen, if they never saw the airstairs being raised or lowered.
The Boeing 727's aft airstairs.
Joe Johnston’s early production sketch for a Falcon ramp, back when it was a linear “pirate ship”, shows another idea for a ramp, with swivelling telescoping struts and a pivot point at the top.
A later Johnston sketch, when the saucer design of the Falcon was being developed, shows a single pair of telescoping hydraulics. It also shows a fold-down foot; something implemented, albeit a bit differently, in the finished set.
But when the Falcon exterior set was built for the first Star Wars film, the ramp was firmly bolted to the stage floor ("3 1/2" tube through to floor - anchored for support," according to the blueprints). Simulated hydraulic telescoping struts were made, but they were completely static.
Empire's ramp
However, in the Empire Strikes Back the full-sized ramp is clearly seen in motion. It slowly starts to raise as our heroes flee the Hoth ice hangar, it’s seen coming down inside the space slug, and it’s seen descending in closeup for the arrival on Bespin.
But how how did they do it? It seems unlikely that an actual hydraulic mechanism was used. That would have added a lot of expense to the set design unnecessarily, and you don't see any telescoping movement in the films. I would imagine that the pistons were simply painted tubes with external decorations. I don't even see how the telescoping mechanism was supposed to work, since the exposed metal tubes were all the same diameter for each post!
There are blueprints of the overall set design available to the public, but none go into the nitty gritty of how the set was physically engineered. And you do have to be careful interpreting movie set blueprints, since a lot of things will change during the course of construction, well after the blueprints were drawn.
So how did the boarding ramp move in Empire?
The question is, how did the pistons move? If they were solid posts, and neither hinged nor telescoped, and assuming the ramp didn't retract or get shorter as it went down, then I think there are the following options:
1) the attachment point where the posts join the ramp could be rigid and fixed. In that case, the posts would not travel purely vertically when the ramp went up but would swing in at an angle. But you can see in the film that the posts don’t seem to angle dramatically when they move, so this isn’t what they did. This is the easiest option to build into a scale model, of course, but the least realistic.
2) the attachment point could be a sliding one. In other words the connection would essentially move horizontally along as the ramp went up and down. The outermost pair of posts would have to slide the most, with the innermost pair the least. This is a logical solution, but doesn’t match what you see on screen either. Set photos clearly show that the attachment points were simple pivot points, not sliding lateral connectors. This version is hard to build as a scale model, since the sliding connectors tend to bind when they move.
3) the final alternative, it seems to me, assumes that the connection points between ramp and posts were indeed simple pivots. In this case the posts neither moved strictly vertically nor swung out of the way. Instead the top of each piston arm moved along a curved, or possibly straight but angled, track to simulate vertical movement. This crude diagram will probably help here.
So I think the set builders used option 3, or something very similar. There’s some convincing movie evidence backing up this idea. The space slug scene shows the ramp descending from the side. If you look at the frontmost piston rods you can see they move laterally inwards (ie: toward the centre of the saucer) a short distance as the ramp descends.
If option 1 had been used, then the pistons would be seen tilting noticeably towards vertical as they came down.
If option 2 had been used, and the pistons moved purely up and down, then no horizontal/linear motion should have occurred.
But if they had used option 3 then you’d expect to see exactly what happened - the piston would shift slightly inwards, parallel to the ground.
This behind the scenes shot of the ESB Falcon under construction is interesting, but sadly doesn't really reveal how the mechanism worked. The U-shaped frame around the lowest pair of pistons does suggest that the basic model I suggest here was used, however.
Now there is one potential flaw with this theory. The "hydraulic pistons" appear to be recessed into grooves/openings in the wall, which would not allow any lateral/sideways motion - just vertical motion. So this theory only holds together if the grooves are wide enough to accommodate some horizontal movement of the posts. The frontmost recesses, visible during the Bespin arrival scene, seem to be wider than would be necessary to fit just the posts, but they're shown at an angle, so it's hard to know for sure. It is clear that the physical sets have wider recesses than those shown on the blueprints.
Of course, given the geometry involved, the outermost pair of cylindrical posts will experience the most lateral motion, with the middle and inner pair of posts experiencing less (see diagrams below). The middle pair also seems to tilt a tiny bit back during the space slug sequence.
Finally, the curved track idea may not have been used. If a straight track, angling back, had been used instead, then there would have been a bit less lateral travel for the lower section of the ramp's arc.
Boarding ramp movement model.
To summarize, this movement model assumes that:
The ramp hinges down from a single pivot point located near the inner end of the ramp. This point does not change position on the ramp.
The ramp lowers fully to the ground. It can also raise to close fully, though this isn't shown in the films.
The ramp neither extends nor contracts in length as it moves.
The flip-out foot, described as a "hinged step" in the ESB blueprints, is never shown moving in the films and so isn't part of the main mechanism under consideration here.
The simulated hydraulic pistons are just that – simulated. They’re merely posts decorated to resemble pistons, and neither compress nor extend.
The posts obviously aren't hinged anywhere along their length, but remain rigid.
The posts stay nearly vertical as they move.
The points where the posts join the ramp are simple hinged pivots, and do not shift position along the ramp. The pivot point is exactly halfway through the thickness of the ramp, according to the ESB blueprints.
The recesses inside the ramp walls are wide enough to accommodate some lateral motion of the posts as the ramp descends and raises.
The twin rows of four protruding posts at the upper outer end of the saucer are designed to fit into matching holes on the ramp tip. These are presumed to represent an interlock system, but serve no purpose to the set mechanism itself.
I've discussed this model with the esteemed Stinson Lenz, and he's built some 3D models that are vastly more detailed than my crude approximations. He's kindly let me post some of his graphics here.
The ramp in down position. This is marked as 18° on the ESB blueprints. Note the flip-out foot at the very bottom, in magenta.
The ramp in its up position. Note that the foot would have to flip back inwards. Note also that, unlike my simplified diagrams, his correctly shows how the ramp isn't horizontal when fully closed, owing to the curvature of the saucer.
Powering the original ramp.
Okay. So that’s a reasonably convincing theory as to the basic design of the ramp mechanism. Now, how did they make it move? Here we move into speculation territory.
The ramp moves pretty smoothly and was obviously quite sturdy, despite having to hold the weight of up to 4 actors at a time. The ESB blueprints indicate the length of an internal "steel frame." So it seems unlikely that the cockpit door technology - an off-camera stagehand - was employed.
So perhaps the ramp was actually raised and lowered by a pair of steel cables or chains fastened to the end of the ramp, and winched on a motorized drum, like a garage door opener. Chain hoists like this (block and tackles basically) are commonly used on film and live concert sets to move things. The “piston” rods in this scenario were effectively hollow, decorative, and not at all load bearing. This theory could explain why there's some side-to-side sway of the ramp as it comes down during the Bespin arrival scene. Fortunately Ben Burtt's awesome metallic clunking sound effects make the ramp feel more solid than it probably was.
However, there’s no evidence one way or the other about how the ramp was actually powered, so this is all pure conjecture. Unless one of the set designers or builders comes forward, and tells us how they did their magic 40 years ago, we may never know for sure!
The Solo set
After I wrote this material, this interesting shot came up. It's from an interview with Donald Glover on the set of the "Solo" film. And behind him? An unfinished Millennium Falcon ramp set!
You'll notice that one pair of the three pairs of "hydraulic" rams are visible. And they're as I theorized - solid metal posts on simple pivot points. Two chains are also obvious at each point - one holding up each purple-painted post, and another beside it, presumably load-bearing.
Now, it's possible that these are temporary supports for construction. They do seem to be spaced slightly wider than I would expect. And the fact that this is what they did for Solo doesn’t mean they did the same thing in ESB. But it does lend credence to the theory that this is how the ramp could have been made to move.
The plywood reality behind our spaceship fantasies.
It don’t fit.
Now to change topics. This has been covered in depth elsewhere, but basically it’s well established at this point that the interior Falcon sets could not have fit inside the exterior sets. They’re simply totally different sizes and there’s no way around that.
Since the interior ramp set is too big to make any sense relative to the saucer, you have to make a lot of compromises when making models of the ship. Having the ramp corridor size not match the cockpit interior size is one such typical compromise.
The hinge point is not at the top of the ramp, where the ramp floor putatively meets the ring corridor. Instead it’s just before that, meaning there’s a stub length of fixed ramp. This is clearly seen on the blueprints and also the scene below.
Symmetry.
The two triangular interior walls of the boarding ramp are often depicted as mirror images of each other.
This is the left-hand wall, which was basically the same in both Star Wars/ANH and ESB. Note the recessed panel with the angled section at the very top. This particular blueprint was drawn for ESB.
However in Star Wars/ANH, at least, they weren’t actually the same. The panels, recesses, lights, etc, were arranged differently on each side.
Notice how the right wall was different in Star Wars.
And here's something it took ages to find - a blueprint of the right hand wall from ANH! Nerd gold! The attention to detail is quite interesting. The larger raised panels, for example, are labelled 1/2" thick, and the smaller ones are mostly 3/8" thick.
ESB seems to have been built differently, however. The right-hand wall is never visible in the film, and I haven’t seen any blueprints for the right hand side. So I've had to rely on the two behind the scenes photos that show part of the area.
I'd guess that the walls were either mostly or entirely mirrored in terms of their recesses and protruding panels, but different in terms of the recess greeblies and the rectangular lines drawn in pinstriping tape. However since no scene shows the right hand wall in any detail, I guess it’s one of those areas where everyone can do what they want and be screen accurate. :)
In The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi the set builders seem to have gone for fully mirrored walls, based on the left hand wall from Star Wars/ANH and ESB, in terms of the openings and panels. However, the greeblies in the openings weren't mirrored. I believe the shot below was taken by some trespassing kids, of the TLJ exterior Falcon set.
Ceiling lights.
The number of interior ceiling lights within the boarding ramp differ from film to film as well.
Star Wars/ANH (1977). This ramp appears to have had a plain ceiling with no overhead lighting. The only lights that are part of the set itself are the small indicator lamps built into the ramp walls.
The ceiling was pretty blank in Star Wars/ANH. Note the square wall sconce lights.
The set blueprints indicate nothing on the ceiling other than the note “clad with selected purchased rubber flooring as on ramp”. The top bit of ceiling is briefly visible during the “Chewie get us outta here!” and “it’s lucky you had these compartments” scenes, and it’s just a dark grey surface unadorned by either lights or greeblies.
In both scenes where the ramp interior sides are visible (the external Falcon set for the hangar scene and the internal corridor/hold Falcon set for the hidden compartment scene), the ramp is side-lit and not top-lit. The angle of the shadows clearly shows that studio lamps on stands were used, not ceiling lights built into the set.
Though having said that, we never see the whole of the ramp ceiling - just the top. So who knows what could be conjectured as being there? At least one behind the scenes shot does show what seems to be a ceiling-positioned light source over the ramp, somewhat off-centre.
ESB (1980). Both movie footage (the space slug gut and Bespin arrival sequences) and behind the scenes photos clearly show three separate pools of light illuminating the ramp. Other behind the scenes photos show pairs of overhead lights, though none show the whole ceiling.
Anyone know who these nervous but ecstatic young lads were? Were they the children of someone who worked on the production? Contest winners? Anyway - this is the only shot I've found which clearly shows the three patches of light from the six interior lamps.
From this information it’s reasonable to infer that the ESB set had six working ceiling lights, arranged in three pairs. There are also two clusters of hoses or cables running from ceiling to wall at the top of the ramp. These details apparently weren't present on the Star Wars/ANH set.
Note the light shining down from the holes where the simulated hydraulic pistons run. Note also the pivot points where the posts join the ramp. This is the clearest view I've seen showing the actual construction of this important mechanical detail.
TFA (2015)/TLJ (2017). These film sets were similar to the ESB set, but behind the scenes shots clearly show four pairs of ceiling lights.
So whether the ESB set had eight lamps but only six worked, or whether the TFA set added an extra pair of lights, who knows?
Some years ago Stinson produced a popular video walkthrough of a computer model Falcon, featuring an internal ramp with eight lights, based on earlier research. So it’s interesting to speculate that the TFA ramp may have gained its extra lamps because of the influence of this walkthrough!
Ramp top – interior corridor.
The exterior set's ramp was always photographed at an angle in the first movie, so the top of the ramp is never seen in the film. There was a 1976 interview with Alec Guinness on the Death Star Docking Bay set which shows the top of the ramp, but only the edge. It appears to be unfinished, but it's hard to tell.
The ANH interior set, however, corresponds to a curved section of corridor. The hall at this point should, therefore, be a toroid (a doughnut) and not a cylinder.
For ESB, a small chunk of finished corridor was built at the top of the exterior set's boarding ramp. It's mostly not visible in the finished movie, though this screenshot, from a BBC documentary on the finances behind ESB's filming, clearly shows the curved arcs of wall cushions, revealing the corridor's toroid shape.
It's a weird clip, incidentally, since rebel pilots are never seen boarding the Falcon in the Hoth hangar in the actual movie!
The Bespin arrival scene is the only time in the film that this piece of corridor is visible. And even then it's mostly obscured by humans, a Wookiee, and a droid. Here's the split second view you get of it! Note the circular wall sconce light, of the type which first appeared in ESB. (in ANH the wall sconces were square, as seen in an earlier photo in this piece) Note also that the wall cushions look less detailed than those in the interior sets. They look flatter.
The ramp door.
A lot of model makers have made very weird and imaginative doors for the end of the boarding ramp, which strikes me as odd since the door is clearly shown in the very first movie! Admittedly for just a fraction of a second – one of the great things about Star Wars is that Lucas never let the camera linger pointlessly on the sets. He just shot the whole thing like a documentary, as if spaceship bulkhead doors slamming down were just regular things that everybody's seen before.
Anyway. The end of the ramp has a heavy curved door that comes down to cut off the corridor from the outside, which makes a certain degree of sense since it would function as an airlock. The curvature of the door matches the curvature of the corridor itself. Han is shown pressing a button to release the door, but it looks like the actual set may simply have had a gravity-operated door that was winched up by hand, and then just allowed to slide rapidly down. In 2015 Harrison Ford grumpily remarked on this door, saying that it was operated by pulleys, though how authoritative this chat show comment is, who knows? (he didn't seem to be certain if there had been a door or not 40 years earlier)
The door gains rather different surface details, including wire mesh and new greeblies, in ESB and ROTJ. However, you don't really get to see a good view of it in Empire. The following two screenshots are the sum total of the door's appearance in the first sequel.
Not much to go on, other than to say, man – I love Peter Suschitzky's masterful lighting and cinematography for ESB! Compared to the old-fashioned lighting of ANH and the blandly serviceable lighting of ROTJ, ESB looked amazing.
Fortunately, one of the unused outtakes from ROTJ has a much clearer view, showing the new details. Perhaps more weirdly, this shot also shows the curved panel of greeblies and switches that ran to the right of the door is replaced in this scene with three wall cushions! And, no, this isn't the doorway that leads to the cockpit, which has those three wall cushions as well - it's exactly the doorway where the ramp should be. It even has boring, flat, lighting. Oh well.
Another view of the ROTJ door can be seen in this pair of continuity Polaroids. It reveals that the door was operable, and that the cockpit-side ramp wall was either missing or movable. These photos are also interesting in that they're the only views of the Falcon corridor looking towards the cockpit that I've ever seen.
The awakened door.
Years later the door made a repeat appearance in The Force Awakens – to boost the dramatic tension of Han and Chewie's arrival. The replica was modelled after the original ANH door, with some additional hoses and cables for decoration. But none of the extra stuff that adorned the ESB and ROTJ doors made it to TFA. At least the door operating controls are back!
This infamous door also had enormous ramifications on the production of TFA itself. It was a heavy mechanism, apparently hydraulic, capable of going upwards as well as down. And it was controlled by an off-set operator. Unfortunately, it was closed inadvertently while Harrison Ford was walking the set at Pinewood Studios prior to filming, and the massive door ended up crushing him and breaking his leg.
Disney production subsidiary Foodles was eventually fined £1.6 million for violating British safety regulations related to the incident. Ironically, although it must have been pretty lousy for Ford himself to have been injured, the subsequent delays gave the production team more time to get sets, models, effects, and so on together.
The outer surface of the door is never shown in the films. This is the TFA door during construction – which is why it's not painted yet. Note how the exposed "metal" piston rods have recently been sprayed silver, with overspray covering the edges of the piston housings.
Flip-down foot.
Finally, we get to the very end of the ramp – the foot that flips down at the tip of the ramp. In ANH there's clearly a fake hinge joining the foot. Though it doesn't actually make any sense since the foot appears to be too wide to flip back. It also just looks like a block of wood covered with dark grey rubber.
In ESB the foot seems to be more narrow, and thus more flip-backable. However, it doesn't appear it was motorized. In fact, I'm not sure how you really could. So it's never shown moving in the films. When the ramp is on the ground, it's already down (Hoth), when it's shown descending it's either already out (space slug) or flipped up (Bespin). The ESB foot also looks a bit more metallic, and has an open arch to its underside.
Since there's a metallic clunk on Bespin, I guess we're meant to presume that the foot can flip down mechanically.
Ramp notches.
Finally, one minor detail involves the large rectangular blocks on either side of the base of the ramp. These contain a number of holes and protruding posts which represent an interlock mechanism that keeps the raised ramp firmly closed.
This pair of blocks has some differences between the ANH version and the ESB and later versions. The frontmost pair of hydraulic posts went into a kind of narrow oblong hole in ANH (see the shot of Luke disguised as a stormtrooper on the Death Star above). But the next two films featured a larger cut-out notch. The notch looks a bit like it could permit horizontal motion of the post relative to the block, but as mentioned above, such motion is not seen to occur in the only sequence that might have revealed it - the ramp descending in the space slug scene. And the posts end up at the back of the notch when the ramp is down, whereas if the notch were used for lateral movement it'd be at the front of the notch.
This notch is hard to see in ESB, owing to shadows and smoke effects, etc, but does appear to be there. The best shot I’ve seen of it is this behind the scenes photo of the deleted sandstorm scene from ROTJ.
One other extremely obscure point involves the two rows of four metal posts projecting down from the top of the interlock section. (from the saucer) These have additional rectangular tab-like protrusions in ESB that were missing in ANH. You can see them in the ROTJ shot above as well.
THE NOTES
Part IIc: the Docking Bay Sets (the next bit)
CONTACT
If you have any corrections or comments feel free to drop a line:
millennium-falcon-notes@gmail.com
Copyright notice: This text is freely available to anybody who wants to geek out on their model plastic spaceship. Please link back to it, though.
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