The Hammerhead

The Eagle Transporter didn't really look that much like the pirate ship, but it was similar enough that Lucas decided at the last minute to change designs completely. He asked art director Joe Johnston (seen airbrushing the model below) to come up with something cool, and Johnston obliged, quickly devising the asymmetrical saucer design that hit movie screens in 1977. To save time and effort, two pieces of the original model – the cockpit and the round radar dish – were transferred from the Pirate Ship to the new saucer-shaped ship, now called the Millennium Falcon.

So they wouldn't completely waste the work they'd done building the Pirate Ship, the effects team thriftily recycled the original model. They designated it Princess Leia’s Rebel Blockade Runner and created a new "hammerhead" shaped front end, using a pair of conical paint buckets as structural supports. Here are some photos of the first attempt to build a revised cockpit.

At this time it appears that the Blockade Runner wasn't intended to be particularly big, and so a large multiple-pane front window was designed. Eventually the decision was made to turn the Rebel Blockade Runner into a big and handsomely crewed ship, compared to Han Solo’s personal Falcon. This meant that the previous full-height cockpit window design made no sense, so the front of the hammerhead was revised to include the narrow window seen today. The very last photo in the series shows the final narrow window.