Star Wars: The Magic of Myth at the Smithsonian

Star Destroyer

The Star Destroyer was based closely on an early concept model by Colin Cantwell , which was given a larger scale and modified by Joe Johnston to feature a more "Star Wars" style texture and structure. Johnston's final sketch of the Star Destroyer was followed closely by Grant McCune's model department, which created the original finely detailed model of Darth Vader's Devastator, which was three feet long.

For The Empire Strikes Back, the model shop created an 8-foot version of the Star Destroyer with fiber-optic lighting. This Empire model of an "Imperial II" class Star Destroyer is now on display at the Smithsonian, having been added specially after the exhibit's opening.

The Star Destroyer functions in ways analogous to both a battleship and an aircraft carrier.

Large battleship-style turret guns line its upper flanks, and the ship is well-equipped for heavy ship-to-ship combat with dozens of turbolaser stations. However, hangars on the ship's underside open to space below and release fighters, shuttles, and assault craft like an aircraft carrier. The superstructure above juts from the flat upper surfaces of the ship like an aircraft carrier's "island" command tower, complete with equipment finishing off its upper reaches like the communications and scanning gear of a carrier. Both functionally and in aspects of its design, the Star Destroyer recalls real-world precedents that give it a convincingly real role and performance in Star Wars.

Millennium Falcon

In the first Star Wars film, Han Solo's hot rod freighter the Millennium Falcon is the aerodynamic analogue of a US heavy bomber from World War II. Capable of carrying a group of passengers in addition to a small crew, the Falcon offers interior spaces unlike single-pilot fighters. Faced with an assault of nimble TIE fighters, the Falcon flies a steady escape course just like American B-17's did over the Third Reich, under attack by darting single-pilot Luftwaffe fighters. Luke and Han blaze away at the TIEs with heavy automatic quadlasers, for all the world like B-17 waist gunners trying to track and lead Messerschmitts.

While the Falcon's overall design was spectacularly original, the cockpit and gun wells presented points of familiarity with real-world precedents to give the ship an understandable aspect for viewers.

X-Wing Fighter

The Star Wars X-wing fighter presents a shape that is at once sharply original and immediately comprehensible, a very successful design in every respect. The wings and long fuselage give the ship the very familiar feel of a World War II era single-fighter airplane. The wing-mounted engines look much like real-world jet engines, complete with "jet intakes" on their forward faces (turned into 'retro-thrust nozzles' in the space vacuum environment of Star Wars). Such features recall direct real-world precedents to visually communicate the X-wing's analogue role as a fast aircraft.

At the same time, the X-wing configuration and the huge wingtip laser cannons give the ship a dramatically original look. The long fuselage and nose, with rear-mounted cockpit, comes directly from the design of a racing dragster. (A toy car in 1975 featured this dragster nose, and Colin Cantwell used this actual piece in his first concept model of the X-wing fighter.)

Rebel Pilots

While the Imperial pilots in Star Wars wear black jumpsuits, self-contained breathing apparatus and face-hiding dark masked helmets to give them an impersonal and evil aspect, the Rebel pilots wear jumpsuits inspired directly from American military precedents to give them a familiar military "good guy" look. Dressed with technological details and a kind of flak vest, the suit becomes a convincing Star Wars uniform in spite of its clear origins in the real world, and it succeeds in communicating both the familiar and the exotic. The Rebel pilots' helmet is very close in design to the helmet worn by US fighter pilots in the 1970's when Star Wars was created. The helmet shows the pilot's face clearly, making them human heroes against the inhuman masked Imperial pilots in the film.In fact the Rebel pilots' faces showed a little too clearly during the filming of the original Death Star assault cockpit scenes: in the hot soundstages under the baking heat of the floodlights, the pilot actors could not help sweating profusely, ruining their makeup for the camera. Orange-tinted goggle lenses helped hide this problem while coordinating with the orange jumpsuits, and so the problems was solved.