The Pirate Ship

So here it is. The final model of the Pirate Ship design was long and fairly thin. It had a conical (technically a truncated cone, or conical frustum) cockpit in the front, and an improbably bulky cluster of engines in the back – a glorified space hotrod, basically.

A large and superdetailed model, several feet long, was constructed by George Lucas' special effects company, then located in Van Nuys, California. The images below are the existing photos that I’ve been able to find of the Pirate Ship model during its brief existence.

However, in late 1976, shortly before construction of the live-action set was scheduled to begin in England, the Star Wars production team discovered the Eagle Transporter – a spaceship from the British space fantasy TV show Space: 1999. And this vehicle was long and linear, with a cockpit at one end and a mass of engines at the other! There's a shot at the very bottom of this collection which shows a small Eagle Transporter model sitting on a table below the Pirate Ship.

The discovery of the Eagle spelled the end of the Pirate Ship design as Han Solo’s craft.