"We are also proud to say we mapped out all the underside lights seen in The Empire Strikes Back," says Trevas. "And for the first time the retractable blaster cannon on the underside is in the correct place."
While were researching all the light locations by examing the film frame-by-frame and consulting John Knoll's book, Creating the Worlds of Star Wars: 365 Days, the artists found there were two pairs of smaller lights under the front starboard side of the ship. Previous Falcon diagrams have placed the gun under the ship's cockpit because in the movie close-up, it's seen next to a pair of small lights and assumed those were the two lights under the cockpit. "We realized the gun was actually located further forward by the second pair of lights," says Trevas.
Lengthy email and phone conversations discussed all sorts of details of the ship, including just how the ship's landing claw might function. "We decided the 'claw' wasn't another mechanical device but rather a function of the landing gear," says Reiff. Photos of the landing gear on the 32-inch Falcon models revealed several little details on the bottom. The full size landing gear blueprints from Lucasfilm showed several other details as well. "The bottom of the landing gear depicted in the blueprints are a hybrid of both the full size set blueprints and of the miniature model gear," explains Reiff. "We decided all these details were a series of magnetic and mechanical grippers used to create a vacuum seal with a variety of surfaces a ship might encounter -- even the hull of a Star Destroyer."
Author Ryder Windham came up with the idea that the manual release for the landing claw system was located at the aft engineering station, but due to limited space this was never included on the final poster. So now you know where Chewbacca went when he left the cockpit to "go back and stand by the manual release for the landing claw."
