Monthly Archives: December 2012

ship of riddles strikes back

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MF_Cockpit-FullScale_12.126

 

It’s long been known that the Falcon is a ship of mystery – especially if you’re trying to reconcile interior set elements with exterior proportions. I haven’t run into too many head-scratchers yet on my project, but I have now. I’ve started roughing-out the rest of the cockpit and access corridor.

The amount of hallway behind the cockpit, but before the bend, just doesn’t fit. I could just arbitrarily extend the length of the hall way to fit the set proportion, but then it would make the bird look really odd from the exterior.

Not only do the lengths not fit, but the corridor tubes and the cockpit diameters are eccentric. The corridor doesn’t even fit in the exterior tube diameter unless the cockpit is scaled really tiny compared to the exterior. I’ve seen this as a solution in the Full Scale Falcon plans (at least as of the latest 3D walk-through) and the Falcon Haynes Manual.

I’m considering a few things; shortening the first ring of padding between the cockpit and first structural bulkhead ring, and adding a ramp or stairs down to the cockpit floor which are at very different levels when the access corridor is scaled down enough to be concentric with the cockpit…

I could also just ignore the whole issue and close the cockpit door – but I’ve always imagined that my model would allow a peek down the corridor.

MF_Cockpit-FullScale_12.127

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nav seats, done (sort of…)

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Nav Seat

Hey all – so after much fussing here’s where I’m at with the Nav seats. I think I’m pretty much done and the files have been uploaded to grabCad. There is still a bit of work to be done to get them to a printable state, but that will happen in due time. All the major elements are there and the exterior surfaces are represented as accurately as I think I’m going to get – so I’ll call it done for now.

 

I might do some more renderings, but since my goal is to print these, I probably won’t spend the time texturing and weathering them. Never say never though…

even more nav comm

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I still have some more work to do on the parts that aren’t part of the Martin Baker frame (ahem, Tupperware lid), but I think I’m about as close to the MB Mk4 frame as I’m gonna get without one sitting in front of me.

The catapult tube and top cap have been updated. All the fiddly lever and linkage bits on the sides have been updated. The drogue gun has been resized to be more accurate. Most of the underlaying structure has been adjusted. I’ve recanted on my thoughts about the rubber banding on the seat pads – what I show seems to fit better against photo reference – a 1-inch band coupled with a 1/2″ tube binding the seat frame.

Here is a 4k high res image of the chair so far…

Millenium Falcon Nav Comm Seats

… and I’ve had a few people ask for orthographic projections of my seat in progress.

My daughter refers to the edge pattern on the the seat pads as the “Butterfly”; it’s an artifact of the modeling technique I use to create soft pillowed forms, not unlike the natural surfacing techniques I’ve done on watches for Nike.