@@Briskeeenit's sugar free cereal. That's the chance you take. Some people love it while others hate it. Being diabetic, I've been considering trying it.
When I was a little kid in the early 1980s, I asked my Mom what "Millennium Falcon" meant. She said it meant it broke down so much it only flew once every thousand years.
The good thing about being kidnapped to test cereals is that you can stay as long as you need to, cause what are they gonna do? Compress their own ship into a cube?
Be careful not to annoy the Dock Master. He might decide to interpret you fleshy being a form of transport and compress it into a cube to remove an annoyance.😅
I always figured that the “freighter” aspect of the Falcon had to do with the legal technicalities and transponder (ship ID) that allowed it to take shipping routs and not be subject to typical passenger screening the Empire would demand.
The class of ship that the Falcon is, is more of a tug then a freighter.... It was made to pick up a group of cargo container and lock the spine holding the cargo in the containers to the left and right of the spine... Rather then be loaded to hold the cargo inside the ship it self.
The funny thing about the Millenium Falcon, to me, was that it positively reeked of late 1970's custom van energy. I actually saw it as a serious plus to the designers that it didn't have any shag carpet on the inside. Otherwise, it was a heavily modified cargo van whose owner was also its mechanic, and he wasn't very good at either.
I was thinking "Space U-Haul" but now that I have read this... Yeah... 'Space Panel Van' sounds about right. It can be a *lot* of different things but it's not going to be the best at anything.
I always thought it should have been classed as a courier ship instead of a freighter; specializing in hauling small, high value cargo that needed to get places fast... It DID have that sick holo-chess table though ;)
@@vonfaustien3957 nah... For me light freight in the sense I work with it is the sort of size vehicle you can drive often on a car license... Small and relatively rapid... Final mile and local but can do long distance... There is a class in the middle in the old expanded universe that meets the space semi class but then there is a group actually bigger than the lucrehulk for just absolutely insane volume across long distance
@@Simon-ho6ly the Lukerhulk is almost 3 km across it dwarfs most star destroyers. Your telling me they've got a frighter in the same size class as the mandator or executor star dreadnoughts?
As far as overgunning goes, I kinda view the single laser as something like a 37 mm autocannon bolted to a PT boat (or crammed into a P-39), whereas Han had to split the power, coolant, and energizing gas feeds so instead of one moderately honking gun that will toast a fighter or even rattle a corvette IF you hit it once, he slapped in a quad .50 cal mount top and bottom to vomit smaller dakkas.
Only that he didn't. That would be true, if he had replaced the single laser cannon with a quad blaster cannon, but he installed an AG-2G quad laser cannon which has four guns of the same size as the original cannon.
Star Wars weapons seem complicated. Lasers, quad lasers, turbo laser, etc. Not like, "this is a Type X phaser, upgrade over the Type IX" or "quantum torpedo > photon torpedo". What's the heirarchy? They all seem like point defense guns, with no main weapons for actual ship to ship.
@@logicplague turbolaser>laser>blastercannon>blaster, I believe is the hierarchy. There is also ion cannons and blasters, but those can come in various sizes.
@@logicplague The problem is that the nomenclature is all messed up. There's personal scale weapons, fighter scale, ship scale, and capital scale weapons. So a laser cannon from a capital ship can be orders of magnitude more destructive than one from a fighter despite having the same name. Lasers and blasters are side grades in Star Wars and are constantly being improved on so one time one is somewhat more powerful sometimes the other. Blasters are a plasma weapon using ionized Tibana gas, lasers are sometimes solid state, sometimes they use excited Tibana gas. You really need to find a Janes type manual fore each weapon and ship. The real answer of course is whatever the writer needs to tell the story and the rule of cool.
@@snipersl270 Gotcha. To be fair Trek wasn't the greatest, phasers just went up by numbers for each new design, but quantum torpedoes were never really explained other than a blue upgraded photon. To say nothing of those transphasics lol. Disruptors never even had a scale to my knowledge, although they were aomewhat explained as to how they differed from phasers. Phasers were more versatile, and more complicated, where a disruptor is a straight up weapon.
I think the YT-1300 suffers from being mislabeled. If they called the model a "courier ship" and basically treated it as space UPS/FedEx et al, some of these hangups would actually make sense. A freelance courier would only take high-priority, commissioned deliveries which in turn would likely be fairly small to minimize what is doubtless exorbitant shipment cost. This in turn would explain why it would make for a popular pirate ship, since space pirates would most likely be dealing in human trafficking (which is technically what Han did with Luke, Leia and Obi-Wan) or drugs, or other illicit materials such as weapons or contraband. Regarding the engine(s)... yeah, I can't explain that. It fairly obviously falls into the category of "stage magic" scifi tech.
In the Expanse TV show, we encounter a number of actual freighters. For example, the Weeping Somnambulist and the Guy Molinari. But we do not get to see too much of how they actually work as freighters.
Firefly has the same problem of being relatively large compared to ours cargo capacity, making it inefficient for serious transport. The flexibility makes it similar to the yet-1300 however in that it can take a variety of small to medium size jobs and also land in atmosphere directly, allowing it to deliver outside of established infrastructure. So they aren’t exactly tug boats, instead they are more like crew cab pickups or sprinter vans
These freighters are designed to ship Star Wars toys. That's why you have to take the cargo 3 times further to put it into the cargo bays, it gives you longer to play with the toys before you have to put them down for shipping.
I have always wondered about the whole freighter without a cargo bay thing. Back in the eighties when I was a kid, the talk in the playground was that the Millenium Falcon was actually built as a very fast 'one off' luxury yacht. It was old and due to its bespoke nature, spares where a nightmare to get hold of, hence its jury rigged wiring and bodged maintenence. When we first see the ship, Han is not hauling cargo with it, he is taking passengers and smuggling on the side, using smuggling compartments that shouldn't be there, because it a VIP tranport ship and not freighter. Nobody ever refers to the Falcon as a YT1300. In Empire strikes back, even the Impirial navy dont recognise the ship type. Now of course the back story of the Falcon has been added and expanded over the years, but does anyone else remember this Luxury yacht backstory version, or is it only me?
I will at least commend the fact it is pretty much a space semi. And it could fill a niche in trade that conventional haulers can't do. So YT-1300 space tug> X Wing S Foil heat sink retcon. The YT tugs being "short" distance or special cargo haulers in networks with larger bulk haulers makes it fit in. Odd that we never see variants with two cockpits is something a kit basher would love. Also for an interesting courier freighter look at the Ebon Hawk from Star Wars Kotor.
Fun Fact: In a poster meant to get investors interested in the original Star Wars film, there's a version of the Millennium Falcon that has twin cockpits.
See, the thing is, though, a "conventional hauler" wouldn't be that hard to design and could carry FAR more cargo - even in external pods - than this... thing.
@@SacredCowShipyardsthe "Sprinter" aka the Semi cab with a Box is a thing for a reason. Being modular as well to alternate between the Sprinter "box [space] truck on steroids" and the traditional Tractor/Tug external cargo pod/trailer (doubles, triples, etc) makes for a flexible set of services offered. "Bulk Freighters" are their own category... Welcome to [Space] MOPAR...
The 'pusher' barge with the containers stacked in front of it would kind of make sense for the engines to be mounted radially for turning the 'assemblage' left and right on the horizontal axis though up and down might be a bit tricky (and left turns might require a white cane) - as for 'Millennium Falcon', I'd describe it as a 'word soup' if the hull was an actual saucer but since it's more of a plate then I suppose 'word salad' would be more appropriate.
I0m not through the video yet,, and I dont know if it's mentioned... It's been some years but I think in the space sim "X-Wing Alliance" the developers showed the YT1300 docking with cargo containers via the "mandables." Right where Disney Lucasfilm put the escape pod.
there is nothing wrong with the Intermodel system. most of the criticisms are related to the idea of a forward-facing cannon which makes a lot less sense than having turrets. If their was a dumb idea regarding YT freighters it would be having a forward facing cannon. Why the hell would a cargo ship a forward firing cannon- only fighters have fixed forward firing cannons. The Intermodel concept is a great idea- There is no reason why the forward auxiliary craft would not have additional mauvering jets that would assist in maneuvering the loads. Its not a bad system. Not only is it not a bad system its likely the kind of system that will be used in the future if humans ever develop inter planetary cargo transport. Not one of the reasons he gave was a good reason for not having an Intermodel arm or outsized clamp used. Saying "we don't see them anywhere else" is silly as shit as all kinds of things show up never to be seen again in starwars. Its not like we have even seen another YT-1300 freighter. (officially the YT that is seen in the PT is the MF) The only legit criticism in this video is that its a retcon to make up for the problem that the MF is a freighter that cannot carry cargo.
I know this is thoroughly into apocrypha at this point, but I think the name came from something along the lines of them getting a fluke of luck and as a result they thought it'd fly fast like a falcon and last for a millenium.
_Millenium Falcon_ is another way of saying _Phoenix._ The phoenix is a magical bird that lives for a thousand years, dies, self immolates, and is born again. Also, apparently made up by (Arab?) traders on the Silk Road as a way to explain why they charged so much for cinnamon, since the story was that cinnamon was recovered from burnt up phoenix nests.
The YT-1300 Series as a freighter makes about as much sense as a T-47 Air Speeder (more often seen and known from the up-armored Rebel Snow Speeder) is a In-Atmosphere Tug/Hauler.
I always understood it to be more a space sprinter/transit van than a space semi or cargo ship... more designed to move small, high value cargo in a hurry... its more "we need to move some boxes of critical spares to this system, NOW... not "we need to move hundreds of tons of meh value cargo
Yeah, the best imaginable use-cases for it include; picking up this and that from here and there, running priority last-lightyear delivery or courier service, carrying your workshop/storefront with you with samples on hand, and as a diplomatic hero ship that happens to have a cargo hold to carry whatever is needed. Making it into a space train or space tug/tow is insane. It'd only make sense if you had a fleet of the things and needed to find a use for them, no matter how silly.
@@Simon-ho6ly If it is meant to carry small cargo then it should be categorised as 'transport' not 'freighter'. If you want a small fast ship to carry small cargo or passengers hopping between islands, you use a small yacht or a speed boat.
@@sompongpire3027 meanwhile if you want to move small loads, a few pallets etc here your insurance would be considered freight transport since you are doing it for hire... small cargo between islands you would use a ferry or small freighter.. also in universe the equivalents of yachts and speed boats exist
I had always thought of the Falcon as a fast, high value, low volume cargo transport. But even as that, it never struck me as being particularly viable.
I feel like the YT1300 would fit well into an entirely different role from how its depicted. It's a sub-corvette sized nimble craft that you can add a few guns (turn the dorsal and ventral turrets into cupolas), and re-add the missing middle bit as a torpedo launcher. Boom, motor torpedo boat in space, go defend a spaceport or set up an ambush in an asteroid field.
The fact that this "freughter" can go toe to toe with combat ships of any kind really lends credit to the idea of it being a pretty shit freighter. Though one better suited to illicit trade than an actual good freighter.
Corellian Engineering was well versed in making advanced ships with Electrical systems so generic that any after market piece could be added on from any other ship manufacturer so much so its basically a meme at this point. the TY-1300 is basically is the "hey kids, wanna haul cargo or fly a ship that looks like a piece of junk, well check out our YT-1300 series it can be a freight hauler, a personal transport, a gunship and a personal transport. come on down to Corellian Engineering ship yards and get your dream YT-1300 freighter today!" kind of deal going on. Corellian engineering wanted a ship that could be used for every conceivable role possible. but the issue of the YT-1300 freighter hauler ship is that its a pre-clonewars era ship and Corellian Engineering had actually stopped making the YT-1300 freighter by a new hope though many like the Millenium falcon are still around however cometially they were replaced by the VCX-100 light freighter which had magentic freight dock a ventral loading rack, a small short ranged tractor beam generator. it took all the stuff the YT-1300 did but only better plus it was bigger then the YT-1300. it was a vastly big improvement. and even the engineers over at Corellian Engineering realized the YT-1300's engine configuration was inefficient when it came to thrust output and was built for tight quick turns instead at the sacrifice of engine efficiency which was corrected when Corellian Engineering built the VCX-100 which ironically was built after Corellian Engineering was nationalized by the empire and one of the Corellian Engineering's VCX-100s the ghost. the genericness of the Corellian Engineering build ships is so generic one could probably strap a star destroyer hyperdrive to your YT-1300 or VCX-100 and safely say "this is fine"
What is also funny is that the mislabeling of ships as freighters which are more courier ships in star wars is quite common, and a lot of them are corellian engineering: The Moldy Crow (forget what class it is) (actually doesn't look related to the YT series), the Outrider (YT-2200), the Otana (YT-2400) (it actually has the cockpit on the centerline) among others. Some of the luxury yatchs (eg the Lady Luck) in star wars seem closer to these ships than the ships that you would actually call freighters. There are a lot of ships in star wars called freighters are actually good freighters, at least in legends, and at least one or two in Disney sw. Basically, all the good freighters in sw are fairly big and slow. The rebel transport ship (seen in esb and rotj) is actually a better freighter than a lot of the above mentioned ships.
LOVED THIS VIDEO!! Even so, the horrible retcon of "intermodal" is the only thing that allows the (albeit totally silly) shape make any sense. I thought of that before ep.5 even came out. Although with only 2 slightly larger containers. LIKE A SEMITRUCK. I even kitbashed one. I was 15 planetary orbits old and HAN SHOT FIRST. See, to me (just a single dumbass, granted) Han is running around in a supped up Peterbilt, with an Abrams engine stuffed under the hood! (IRL Tank mechanic) Yes, it would fit. Yes, it would cause problems. He then smuggles stuff under the floor of (what amounts to be) the sleeper. Now, the YT1300 are LIGHT freighters. They move cargo 1-3 containerized units at a timeand can land (deliver) at almost any relativly flat, firm location. Mediums move several hundred containers at a time and need a legitimate space port. The HEAVIES move cargo several thousand at a time. Here on Earth, we currently have light medium and heavy. Semi-trucks 1-5 containers (depends on national legalities) and can deliver almost anywhere to include your house directly. TRAINS haul several hundred at a time. Their delivery locations are much more restricted. Lastly ocean-going container ships haul several thousand at a time. and have the most restricted delivery locations. Each has advantages and limitations. FUTURE RETCON #15,234: The original YT1300 Han owned had the rotating cockpit, B-wing style. During some manuvers not covered in the operators manual, it jammed and Han had to land with it 90 degrees rotated he then had to spend four hours hand cranking the darned thing back to true vertical. It was then spot welded in place, never to be repaired.
Very nice illustration of the concept of a semi-truck style of single container long hauler. Following that analogy, the Millenuim Falcon configuration was more like a charter bus-size RV for passengers with a nice baggage compartment. Kind of like what a rock band might tour with. Thus making the Winnebago in Spaceballs the perfect parody of it.
@@h_in_oh However, only freight explains the mandibles. A large percentage of the ships mass is taken up by those therefore, they need a reasonable explanation. Freight containers provide that.
@@chrisgeddes26 Yes, freight containers explain the semi-truck design for the YT1300 series in general, but the exact configuration of the Millennium Falcon was more like converting such a truck into a charter RV with a baggage compartment.
I’ve always interpreted it as a “freighter” that was specifically designed to be a blockade runner, but they couldn’t advertise it as such, so they added token mandibles to make it sellable.
There was an old computer game where the millennium falcon style ships were used for loading and unloading cargo ships. Where the teeth of the ship needed to be used to pick up cargo containers in space for the tutorial.
The intermodal freight aspect of the Falcon wasn't a retcon. It was what Lucas/Johnston had in mind for the mandibles and offset cockpit from the very beginning of those elements being added to the design. It follows Lucas's tendency to reverse vehicle designs. I agree it's incompatible with the actual retcon that was shown in the Solo film many years later. I cover it in my own video about the Norway class from Star Trek... ua-cam.com/video/ucSriQ92FM4/v-deo.html
@@bkane573 Yeah, I'm recalling KK saying that, unlike other sci-fi franchises, Star Wars has no books that they could use for story concepts... let that sink in for a moment.
My understanding - and I could have misinterpreted - is that Lucas wanted the YT-1300 to hold a single cargo pod between its mandibles, rather than the "string of pearls configuration" that the retcon saddled it with. The former doesn't not make sense. The latter is nonsense.
@@SacredCowShipyards Well pushing containers through space on long hauls isn't much different than semi-trucks dragging containers cross-country. And since it was the 1970s, when truck drivers were getting all kinds of love in the pop culture, it makes sense from a thematic perspective. Space itself is nonsense, so I don't have any trouble with this as a concept.
What even is a "Millennium Falcon"? Basically, a box truck that the owner turned into a RV, in spaaaaaaaaaaaace... The owner put in a 1000 HP engine then turbocharged and supercharged this box truck so it would be really fast. When I think how it is armed, I get Mad Max vibes.
"What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon? Oh ***** do you have any idea what this is going to do to my credit?! " The dessicated potato upon hearing the news of the Death Star's destruction.
Yes, aircraft carriers have offset bridges, but that is a compromise because of the need for a continuous flight deck. The first "carriers" has a standard bridge superstructure with a takeoff runway forward and a landing (wall planting?) runway aft. Then there were experiments with bridgeless carriers, carriers with takeoff facilities one deck below the top deck, bridges on the port AND starboard. As planes got bigger and faster, they needed more space to take off and land. This led to the invention of first crash nets, then arrestor lines and as jest came on board, launch catapults. The world's navies have pretty much settled into starboard offset islands for carriers, not that a lot of nations have carriers at all.
Damn, beat me to it😆👍 "Get your 7'2" asthmatic ass back here, or I'm gonna tell everybody what a bitch you were about padme, panda bear, whatever the hell her name was!"
I'm not sure if CEC is really building actual freighters. I know all the paperwork and licensing documentation says they are frieghters, especially during the time of the Galactic Empire. However, all of the CEC ships are highly customizable, with more after market addons available in the mid and outer rim worlds than for any other starship manufacturer. They seem to be deliberately manufacturing the base hulls for the equivalent of Technicals and Gunboats and selling them to anyone who might have issue with any sort of authority no questions asked. What I want to know was how much of CECs annual budget went to paying off government inspectors, because this company has been doing shady shit for a very long time and under several interstellar governments.
I think theres a massive argument to counter your entire freight thesis with "great lakes freighters". I think youre looking at sea OR litoral freight for nautical analogs. But George Lucas may have just pointed to Chicago to Milwaukee line freighters. "Why is it so fast but designed to sometimes push?" Attach barges when its calm. "Why cant it carry it internally?" Carry passengers instead on rough seas to overpay you". We dont get StarWars Galaxy Space, or Space at all really yet. But "great lakes transportation models" certainly sounds like the early millennia of a "long time ago" in a place "far far away". Takes so "short" for our "space" seas, you design for "lakes" and look insane. By now they've probably Alpha Red'd themselves
I can explain this more sober, but key points "joint transport models" worked on the Great Lakes. Like icebreakers on Coral Reef Heavy tropical cruises. Fill the berths with passengers when you can't push the freight. Starwars relies on "hyperlanes" cleared of obstacles. Over powered engines and empty carrying people wouldn't be suspicious, therefore perfect smuggling vessel. "No people, hurrying back" or "no cargo, carrying people". "I dunno must be a stowaway" for people, "I guess my last passengers left it" for cargo. It's a valid reason and thought train if you look at the Great Lakes Fleet is my point
Ive always held a headcannon that humans are not native to the Star Wars galaxy, and that they've actually been separated from a broader and more advanced universe due to The Force being, well, a possessive and manipulative ass. Words like "falcon" are just holdovers from a bygone era of their history; lost and forgotten to time.
Regarding cockpits offset from the center of balance, the Kushan and Taiidan Interceptors from Homeworld were built that way. The two fighters' designs are visually very different, but they're both essentially built around a huge array of mass drivers, and both function as heavier, up-gunned versions of their respective scout craft designs. The Kushan Interceptor's centerline is dominated by a pair of rotary cannons, with the cockpit offset along the craft's starboard side. The Taiidan design _wanted_ to mount the main cannon spinally, but their engineers couldn't get it small enough to wrap the rest of the chassis around without having to design an entirely new ship from scratch instead of modifying their Scout frame. The best they could come up with was to mount the cannon offset along the upper starboard side from the main hull. While the cockpit is visually along its centerline, the fighter's axial center of gravity is a bit up and to the right from the pilot. Fluff from the setting mentions that this takes new Taiidan fighter pilots by surprise, but once they get a feel for it, they can leverage that odd balance in dogfights by "rolling the gun," as they put it, dancing out of an enemy's sights in ways other fighters can't. As for the Kushan fighter, this is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect they figured the mass drivers they wanted were huge enough that the rest of the fighter would have to be built around them anyway, so the cockpit would end up offset from the centerline no matter how they laid it out. In that case, they may as well go for hangar efficiency and build them flat to stack in towers of holding racks. So, the cockpit ended up on the starboard edge of the fighter, rather than adding a hump along the top or bottom.
Oh, asymmetrical ships are almost a science fiction standby at this point, because, after all, there's no atmo in space, amirite? Never mind lever arms and moment arms and mass distributions...
I’ve always thought of it like a Greyhound bus in space. It moves passengers, luggage, mail, and small packages. If you compare it to single purpose vehicles, it fares poorly.
Just wanted to say that I've always been of the opinion the Millennium Falcon is more of a cargo plane like a C-47 than any sort of freighter. The various retcons seem to make less and less sense as time has passed.
Just a note but the single gun turret on the Falcon when it was Lando's was seen being a turret in the escape from Kessel if I am not mistaken. It was manned by Beckett till it got shot off and I could have sworn there was a second ventral one that got scraped off when Han did that little power slide maneuver (which was also supposed to explain why the forward landing gear pods were missing in ANH only to show up later in ESB). Correction, beckett was in the ventral turret when the gun got shot off (just watched it)
Yeah people don't seem to realise Han was just some Yokel who went "I've put my truck on 37's and slapped on a turbo I bought off of ebay and now I can't figure why this thing keeps breaking down. Still check out my new gun rack"
To me, the closest real world analogue to the Millennium Falcon is a film noir tramp steamer. This realization didn’t hit me until I recently binge watched some ancient Charlie Chan movies. One in particular set mostly on and in a tramp steamer of the period between our World Wars involved some high profile people and high value cargo that needed to get from point A to point B without the notice of customs inspectors or immigration officials. That kind of business was exactly the MF’s bread and butter. The tramp steamer had a nearly pointlessly small cargo capacity, could not be loaded or unloaded quickly, and had a few ratty-assed passenger accommodations that I will not grace with the name “cabins”. The ship had its own built-in cargo crane for use in ports that didn’t have them, and also an extra large gangplank to move cargo when the crane couldn’t be used for whatever reason because the ship spent most of its port time at lesser ports with few if any facilities, and occasionally would meet other ships to transfer cargo far out at sea away from nosy officials. It also had a reliable, powerful engine which made it faster than it looked. It even had a small deck gun for fighting off actual pirates. The Captain carried a revolver, but in his pocket, not a drop leg holster. Sound familiar? That may not be exactly what George Lucas had in mind when the MF’s physical design was finalized but that’s the role it fills in the SW universe. As for the ship’s physical layout… yeah, it’s shit. I personally put that down to those who designed all of the iterations that led to what we saw on screen not knowing much about how such ships should be built.
I like that at the start of the video I went "Oh, I'm going to know all this trivia", and immediately ran headlong into a self-correction from the Dockmaster about hamburger myths. And that the Falcon cockpit design echoes a real-world craft. Ding the learned-something bell. To the electronic warfare issue, see also: the advanced space superiority targeting computer can't put torpedoes into a 2-meter wide target. While the real-world technology to do better than that was being developed when A New Hope was being made. The Expanded Universe explained sightline-combat and the reliance on energy weapons via shielding and personal armor being so advanced that solid munitions were ineffective, while leaving it implicit that all the energy-weapon tech lost power over comparatively VERY small distance. But this is the kind of thing that went away with, say, the lore that stormtrooper armor did anything. At all. @22:00 is just objectively true. I can't imagine any of us saw the 'the mandibles can magnet clamp cargo' thing and ever thought it was anything but silly. I'll always defend the "Fill in the blanks with imaginative bullshit" approach Star Wars takes: it has proven an interesting hill to die on. But this video is far and away the most compelling I've seen from the Dockmaster about why it can make for the narrative equivalent of a glorified unforced error. Bonus 'Dockmaster gushes over efficient ship design like a bee over hexagons' at the end.
Great video dock master! There is nothing really to add other than with the ship being basically made of Legos it should have been really fragile, but it still holds together like a champion.
It's been a while since I read any of the star war books or comics, but I remember reading in one that the YT-1300 was a failed product that got orphaned real fast. So considering how us Humies on Earth absolutely love otherwise stupid things just because they are rare ( a lot of classic cars come to mind.). My own personal Retcon is that Lando and Han love the YT-1300 and fight over it despite it being a piece of junk because they are hipster "classic" ship collectors.
The Millenuim Falcon configuration was more like a charter bus-size RV for passengers with a nice baggage compartment. Kind of like what a rock band might tour with. Thus making the Winnebago in Spaceballs the perfect parody of it.
A couple observations, Dockmaster. It seems that the YT-1300 series is meant to be akin to a PBY Catalina or a Cessna Caravan: light transport in remote locations. It's the space equivalent to a bush plane which is a niche sci-fi doesn't usually look at all that often. But, as you pointed out, the execution is crap. As for offset cockpits, the F-82 Twin Mustang was a thing for a while, but that plane was designed to fill a very specific niche and was ditched once better planes came online to fill its role. If I were to fix the Falcon and its ilk, the first thing I'd do is make the cargo holds entire floors be elevators for rapid and easy loading and unloading of cargo. After that, I'd help make the EW explanation more canon by having the turrets use electro-optical sensors but that's going to be a pain in the backside because of all the other computational stuff needed to get reliable EO sensors to be good for accurate targeting requires some insane expenditure of funds and effort to rig up in a world where you have to push to knife fight range to hit a 1 kilometer long warship due to how intense the EW is.
Being a "Hero Ship," the MF has "Special Star Wars Universe technology" to make all these problems go away in anticipation of questions asked about the anticipated mentioned problems.
The Falcon was a cool looking ship. Law wise I think it's a light frieghtor in same way "urban SUVs" can off road or Chihuahua could hunt in packs to take down deers. I can image a group of people buying the YT-1300 as more of a life style decision. Till it went out of fashion. Then a space pirate got hold and added a mini bar and times two quad barrel guns. And 'fixes' the ship so it functions more like a pirate needs. Typo edits
I usually listen to these rants when they come out, but for some reason I cant seem to remember anything about this last weekend. That happens because of alcohol normally, but this time I didnt wake up with a headache, but instead felt strangely full and healthy. The stalk breaking shouldn't be a problem if you have materials strong enough that they can withstand being kicked in the ass hard enough to go from zero to lightspeed plus instantaneously like Star wars ships do. Or slam into the invisible space wall that takes them out of their super speed. Speaking of which inertial dampeners or whatever in star wars have to be absolutely insane so that nobody ends up with metal cans drifting through space painted red over ever corridor.
@@SacredCowShipyards I would argue about the ships stretching into infinity when they enter lightspeed but unfortunately I know enough science to get mad at everything for not following the rules of science. The quickly accelerating ship "stretching" is actually something star wars (unintentionally I'm sure) got right because the frame of reference of a non moving camera watching an accelerating ship would cause that visual effect. Quantum mechanics go brrrr.
when talking about the Falcon (and not the YT-1300 as whole) we must remember that it has been heavily modified not just by Solo but by pretty much everyone who has owned her in her long life. hell she was even nearly completely wrecked at one point (see the novel Millennium Falcon) and rebuild with parts from other YT-1300 models (specifically the front mandibles are from a differing model than she originally came with.) . the massively upsized engines as well as Hyperdrive systems consume a good deal of her original internal cargo space. honestly i would compare her more with a long haul Semi than a ocean going cargo ship. just like in the real world large cargo transporters like Trains an Cargo ships can't go everywhere. something like the TY-1300 can land just about anywhere there is enough open space to land. are there better Light Freighters in SW, yes of course. Han chose her because he just sort of fell in love with the ship when he first saw her (fuck the Solo movie its garbage, i'm going with the Han Solo Trilogy novels here). YT-1300s were ubiquitous, something that was all over the place when they were first manufactured so filled the used ship market after they faded from use. being highly customizable make them even a bigger draw. as for the turret on the stock model it was a turret just with its main setting slaved forward when you didn't have a gunner on hand.
This actually makes me way more confident in my freighter design for my sci-fi world. It's basically a big intermodal ship that petty much has the crew section up front, an engineering section and shuttle bay in the back, and a bunch of cargo containers along the spine. The ship is meant to ferry cargo down to the surface of a planet and is basically just a space semi. There's definitely much more massive ships for bulk freight that can't land, but this is just the hero ship that the main character buys used and already way past end of life because she's on the run and its what she could afford plus use to make money without too many questions.
When I first saw Star Wars I was blown away by the visuals. And I still see the Falcon that way. They got me when I was young. But, yes, when I try to think of it in a functional sense, it just pains me. I had never seen that prototype before and I do think that it makes much more sense and a blockade runner/smuggler ship. And it manages to look cool doing it.
@@SacredCowShipyards I think it was made up for the x-wing game, which explains it simple shape and rather lackluster amount of Canon information. But over the years I must have both destroyed and saved thousands of them
Also the YT series could be a tonge in cheek manufacturing for the elicit trade transports, they called is a freighter. And in a way it is, light high value freighter. To get around law enforcement regulations. Kinda like the high speed 'pleasure' craft manufacturing used in drug running.
The docking clamps thing isn't really a retcon, Han even mentions jettisonning the cargo when talking to Jabba in the first movie. You just don't think of it because Lucas never used it that way in any of the films despite how "popular" the YT-1300 was they are rarely even seen & never with anything in the mandibles. (The only other YT I recall was in Ep3 when Anakin & Padme are in the spaceport on Coruscant waiting to flee undercover & some people seem to think that that is the Falcon)
Iirc it was specifically mentioned to be the falcon, just in a previous identity as the "stellar envoy" under a different owner. They cover it in the the falcon novel (Granted, that's legends now) and I think in one of the DVD commentaries.
I mean, jettisoning cargo can happen from wherever, though, admittedly, in the YT-1300's case, you literally have to carry the cargo to an airlock, which may explain why he thought it was notable enough to mention.
The idea of a towboat being the ship for Han is a good one, he could have a mansion of cargo containers as his hideout he could simply push out to safety. The massive power to weight ratio with no heavy load would lend itself to the speed Han brags about. Radial thrust engine would lend itself to thrust vectoring say the cargo load being far too unbalanced but it needs a vertical set of engines to guarantee that; the cosine losses aren't too bad either but simple thrust differential from multiple engines works fine or better. Needless to say it needs a massive redesign to make sense.
Very enjoyable dockmaster. I would modify your freighter definition from "as fast as possible" to "as efficiently as possible" in regards to a fuel/mass/time matrix.
I LOVED the stop-motion ad, I will not lie, and not JUST because I was a big fan of the brickfilm scene back in the day. Honestly, I'd always wondered WHERE the cargo in the YT-1300 WENT, good to know the answer is "slowly and awkwardly, mostly"
If I'm not mistaken I think the only time I ever saw the Intermodal Freight TY-1300 outside of these images was in Star Wars TIE Fighter. I could very well be wrong on that (and probably am, it's been a hot minute since I have last played it), but I'm pretty sure that's where it came from.
In X-Wing Alliance, you fly a stock YT-1300, and pick up containers… which latch over the ventral gun turret position. or where the ventral gun turret would be if the stock YT-1300 had one.
In EVE online, Blockade Runners are categorized as "Transport Ships" and serve as a smaller version of an industrial transport with a fraction of the space, but better protected bays, higher speed, faster FTL jumps, and even cloaking in some cases.
The internal storage compartments could just be for provisions rather than actual freight? Us fragile humies do unfortunately need food, water and other essentials between stops, they don't need to be fast to load if the loading is done outside of a freight yard while the crew are on a rest stop. There's no speedy way to load a semi-truck cab with gator aid and methamphetamine but truckers still manage. As for the weapon turrets being in line with the cargo that never really proved a problem for WW2 bombers, admittedly I'd prefer one on top and one below to give full coverage but it's not a warship, I'd assume it's for discouraging pirates rather than actually going on the offensive. You could also detach the nose mounted cargo while in space to solve your manoeuvrability issues in a fight, as long as you've got tracking capability and you weren't going at maximum speed when you detached you can always catch up and reattach after the fight is over assuming you had the firepower and armour to repel the threat. If you're just planning on ditching it and running to preserve the vessel and the crew then that's what freight insurance is there for, give the pirates what they want and high tail it back to safety.
Nice video. One question is the speed not less and less important, I mean most modern container ship are driving not very fast. They need nowadays the same time as sailing ships. One more thing I did not read anything so I don’t have an idea if it is impossible, but could they not just ditch this arm in front and fix another to it, that would make loading a lot faster
AFAIK cargo ships get slower and slower to save on fuel cost. If that's not really a factor, going faster is preferable. But yeah, a normal freighter will not use an experimental military grade hyper drive generator either.
the thing about the modern ships not being much faster than old ships is that while their speed is low, their Rate is high, because the amount of cargo they can carry has gone up, so the cost per unit has gone down. A lot. as has the number of trips needed for a given quantity of goods to be moved. Also, their actual travel time has improved. First, by not being entirely dependent on the wind anymore they don't randomly have to deal with being blown off course, being unable to move for days at a time, having to cut their speed in half or worse because the wind is blowing the wrong way, etc. Second, by increasing the amount of fuel carried and the efficiency of the engines, they don't have to stop anywhere near as often as early steam ships, also reducing travel time. Third and finally, increase in size and improvement in design and navigation equipment means that a lot of weather that was dangerous for older ships can now just be ignored and sailed right through. All this adds up to the Throughput going up a lot, even though the speed of individual ships hasn't. Even so, in spite of all this, ships are used for things that need to be moved in large quantities, on a regular basis (when it seems like this isn't the case? the random stuff is going into shipping containers. The accumulated Shipping Containers are the thing that regularly gets moved in large quantities). Small quantities of things that don't make regular trips and need to actually be Fast go on planes.
You hit on the bi thing I discovered when playing a star wars roleplaying game on the tabletop where our party finally managed to get a hold of a YT-1300 and tried to haul cargo in it and spent half a session staring at the plans trying to work out how you were supposed to actually get the cargo in and out. Frankly we would have downgraded to our previous smaller cheaper ship if it hadn't already exploded.
I like to imagine the laser cannon were an optional upgrade you could buy dealer-installed, the original buyer of the ship declined, Han got his hands on an upgrade package and installed it. There's a concept of "for but not with" in navies and even in the standard automobile, where something is built with a use case in mind but then isn't fitted for it.
One thing I'd like to say in regards to electronic targeting being inconsistent is that it's there's a way to explain that. We also see ships like TIEs and X wings have live targeting feedback when in combat and droid fighters can also follow ships despite their eyes being functionally sensors. What I believe happens is that ECM jamming is best effective at longer ranges, making long range missiles and weapons less viable, but within visual range the sensors can get burnthrough, provided it's in the reticle for long enough. Let's not forget Luke was scanning Dagobah for life signs from orbit so these sensors are still plenty powerful. Fixed weapons in star wars can fire at an angle, it's how the X wing and ARC 170 can still be precise despite having hardpoints on the wingtip. Vader doesn't immediately fire on the rebels when he's persuing them in the trench, what's likely happening is that he's waiting for his sensors to find a flaw in the enemy shield to shoot them down in one burst. So the targeting system of the falcon isn't inconsistent, it just works at pointblack ranges, at which the TIEs were engaging, and it still isn't 100% reliable requiring manual input. Yes I'm headcanoning an explanation to clear oversight by whomever writes the lore but all in the spirit of the video.
The theory i have always liked was that it was intended to be a modular system. The cargo section would be an unpowered container, like a barge. The notch in the front of the falcon was the docking coupler. Shop a container to a port, drop it for unloading and dick to another pre-loaded container and leave. the falcon only had to provide crew quarters and propulsion which is why it is so massively over engined for its size. Like a tow boat that is built to push tens or hundreds of thousand tons, this was built to move mountains.
I always thought the millennium falcon was just basically Star Wars versions of a Tacticool name, like how gun manufacturers just take a basic lock? 18. Spray paint it in a black camo pattern and then add a piss poor holographic scope to it and all of a sudden. It's no longer a Glock 18 with a scope but a SCORPION FREEDOM DEFENDER.
A really badly designed Q ship because anyone staring at it for more than 5 minutes starts asking questions about how it's supposed to function as a profitable freighter and assumes it's smuggling something Which explains why Han had to ditch his cargo that one time at got in deep trouble with Jabba the Hutt XD
I am a big Stars Wars fan, from a very young age; married a woman who liked the movies as well, and infected all 3 of my children with the same enthusiasm. And yet every time I saw this ship, my brain was screaming " WHERE DO THEY PUT THE DAMN CARGO??!!" If I was a customs officer, every red flag imaginable would be waving from this thing.
There is a starwars novel specifically about the life and history of the falcon, from it's initial construction to what we know today. In the book the crew flies around the galaxy tracking down previous owners and learning everything they can about the ship.
I think the feel of the Falcon, as they reinvented it, was less freighter and more small cargo handler. If Star Wars is WW2 in space then the Falcon is an expy for a flying boat like the Grumman G-21 Goose. Think the plane from Tales of the Gold Monkey and Talespin. Designed to deliver small payloads and passengers to out-of-the-way locations. I mean seriously... Star Wars is WW2 in space yet they couldn't fork out funds for a model of the General Electric Gun Control system or steal the idea? Would make more sense than what Luke and Han were in...especially since one was flat on his back manning the gun and the other would be on his stomach.
2 minutes in and..........that ad read took some time and was very creative! Magic Spoon should be very pleased! will have to order some.
Seriously, you don't always (or often) see creators get that inventive with the ads.
@@PyreSimon Whistler's Brain Blaze ad reads are comparable, especially in the OGBB days
I like the ad reads on Puzzle in a Thunderstorm podcasts for a similar reason. They’re usually skits that involve some variety of absurd shenanigans.
Don't, the cereal is awful.
@@Briskeeenit's sugar free cereal. That's the chance you take. Some people love it while others hate it. Being diabetic, I've been considering trying it.
When I was a little kid in the early 1980s, I asked my Mom what "Millennium Falcon" meant. She said it meant it broke down so much it only flew once every thousand years.
Ahhhh. It’s the Ford Millennium Falcon edition.
That's a marvelous explanation
Only a true Star Wars fan would say that. Your Mom sounds awesome.
The good thing about being kidnapped to test cereals is that you can stay as long as you need to, cause what are they gonna do? Compress their own ship into a cube?
I wouldn’t mind testing cereal, if it comes with the mind wipe , It will save me tons on fermented grain based biofuel I use to wipe my own mind .
Dont tempt the Dock Master. I think he has a fetish for crushing ships...not that im kink shaming or anything lmao
@@povertybarnperformance Now we need to wait till aprils intro is just the space dock compressing itself into a cube.
Maybe if it were Cap'n Crunch.
Be careful not to annoy the Dock Master.
He might decide to interpret you fleshy being a form of transport and compress it into a cube to remove an annoyance.😅
I always figured that the “freighter” aspect of the Falcon had to do with the legal technicalities and transponder (ship ID) that allowed it to take shipping routs and not be subject to typical passenger screening the Empire would demand.
Better explanation than anything out of Lucasfilm or Disney.
We don't do common sense here. This is the Lucasfilm
Yes, that way they could avoid any ... "Imperial Entanglements".
The class of ship that the Falcon is, is more of a tug then a freighter.... It was made to pick up a group of cargo container and lock the spine holding the cargo in the containers to the left and right of the spine... Rather then be loaded to hold the cargo inside the ship it self.
@@jonathanbair523 That IS the latest retcon, yes.
The funny thing about the Millenium Falcon, to me, was that it positively reeked of late 1970's custom van energy. I actually saw it as a serious plus to the designers that it didn't have any shag carpet on the inside. Otherwise, it was a heavily modified cargo van whose owner was also its mechanic, and he wasn't very good at either.
Well, it did have one, it just wandered around a bit and did some piloting.
Don't forget the chrome dice hanging in the cockpit.
Spaceballs stole the shag carpet right from under their noses.
I was thinking "Space U-Haul" but now that I have read this... Yeah... 'Space Panel Van' sounds about right. It can be a *lot* of different things but it's not going to be the best at anything.
Or a Winnebago (ala Spaceballs)
I always thought it should have been classed as a courier ship instead of a freighter; specializing in hauling small, high value cargo that needed to get places fast... It DID have that sick holo-chess table though ;)
I think that's what light freighters are.
In the old expanded universe this is kinda what it was, think sorta like a sprinter/transit van with a "crew cab" layout
I asummed light fighter like the Falcon was akin to say a semi truck where as freighters akin to real oceanic one would be stuff like the Lucerhulk
@@vonfaustien3957 nah... For me light freight in the sense I work with it is the sort of size vehicle you can drive often on a car license... Small and relatively rapid... Final mile and local but can do long distance... There is a class in the middle in the old expanded universe that meets the space semi class but then there is a group actually bigger than the lucrehulk for just absolutely insane volume across long distance
@@Simon-ho6ly the Lukerhulk is almost 3 km across it dwarfs most star destroyers. Your telling me they've got a frighter in the same size class as the mandator or executor star dreadnoughts?
“Procured a sample population” is the funniest euphemism for “kidnapped a bunch of randos” I think I’ve ever heard.
Where's the lie, tho?
Ah, so that is the cause of all the UFO sightings (and alleged abductions 😂).
@@SacredCowShipyardshey, this video reminds me of one cool ship... Nostromo it's called, what's think? Is there or will be video.
As far as overgunning goes, I kinda view the single laser as something like a 37 mm autocannon bolted to a PT boat (or crammed into a P-39), whereas Han had to split the power, coolant, and energizing gas feeds so instead of one moderately honking gun that will toast a fighter or even rattle a corvette IF you hit it once, he slapped in a quad .50 cal mount top and bottom to vomit smaller dakkas.
Only that he didn't.
That would be true, if he had replaced the single laser cannon with a quad blaster cannon, but he installed an AG-2G quad laser cannon which has four guns of the same size as the original cannon.
Star Wars weapons seem complicated. Lasers, quad lasers, turbo laser, etc. Not like, "this is a Type X phaser, upgrade over the Type IX" or "quantum torpedo > photon torpedo". What's the heirarchy? They all seem like point defense guns, with no main weapons for actual ship to ship.
@@logicplague turbolaser>laser>blastercannon>blaster, I believe is the hierarchy. There is also ion cannons and blasters, but those can come in various sizes.
@@logicplague The problem is that the nomenclature is all messed up. There's personal scale weapons, fighter scale, ship scale, and capital scale weapons. So a laser cannon from a capital ship can be orders of magnitude more destructive than one from a fighter despite having the same name. Lasers and blasters are side grades in Star Wars and are constantly being improved on so one time one is somewhat more powerful sometimes the other. Blasters are a plasma weapon using ionized Tibana gas, lasers are sometimes solid state, sometimes they use excited Tibana gas. You really need to find a Janes type manual fore each weapon and ship. The real answer of course is whatever the writer needs to tell the story and the rule of cool.
@@snipersl270 Gotcha. To be fair Trek wasn't the greatest, phasers just went up by numbers for each new design, but quantum torpedoes were never really explained other than a blue upgraded photon. To say nothing of those transphasics lol. Disruptors never even had a scale to my knowledge, although they were aomewhat explained as to how they differed from phasers. Phasers were more versatile, and more complicated, where a disruptor is a straight up weapon.
I think the YT-1300 suffers from being mislabeled. If they called the model a "courier ship" and basically treated it as space UPS/FedEx et al, some of these hangups would actually make sense. A freelance courier would only take high-priority, commissioned deliveries which in turn would likely be fairly small to minimize what is doubtless exorbitant shipment cost. This in turn would explain why it would make for a popular pirate ship, since space pirates would most likely be dealing in human trafficking (which is technically what Han did with Luke, Leia and Obi-Wan) or drugs, or other illicit materials such as weapons or contraband.
Regarding the engine(s)... yeah, I can't explain that. It fairly obviously falls into the category of "stage magic" scifi tech.
I've always seen the stock YT-1300 as the space equivalent of a pick-up truck, with the highly modified Millennium Falcon as an armed technical. =^x^=
The Firefly-class from the show of the same name is about the best practical cargo ship I can recall in a scifi show or movie.
Star furies?
In the Expanse TV show, we encounter a number of actual freighters. For example, the Weeping Somnambulist and the Guy Molinari. But we do not get to see too much of how they actually work as freighters.
@@jasonudall8614 star furies are good star fighters, horrible freighters
@@tirirana NASA thought Star Furies would make a good design for space forklifts.
Firefly has the same problem of being relatively large compared to ours cargo capacity, making it inefficient for serious transport. The flexibility makes it similar to the yet-1300 however in that it can take a variety of small to medium size jobs and also land in atmosphere directly, allowing it to deliver outside of established infrastructure. So they aren’t exactly tug boats, instead they are more like crew cab pickups or sprinter vans
These freighters are designed to ship Star Wars toys. That's why you have to take the cargo 3 times further to put it into the cargo bays, it gives you longer to play with the toys before you have to put them down for shipping.
I have always wondered about the whole freighter without a cargo bay thing. Back in the eighties when I was a kid, the talk in the playground was that the Millenium Falcon was actually built as a very fast 'one off' luxury yacht. It was old and due to its bespoke nature, spares where a nightmare to get hold of, hence its jury rigged wiring and bodged maintenence. When we first see the ship, Han is not hauling cargo with it, he is taking passengers and smuggling on the side, using smuggling compartments that shouldn't be there, because it a VIP tranport ship and not freighter. Nobody ever refers to the Falcon as a YT1300. In Empire strikes back, even the Impirial navy dont recognise the ship type. Now of course the back story of the Falcon has been added and expanded over the years, but does anyone else remember this Luxury yacht backstory version, or is it only me?
The luxury yacht would have worked surprisingly well with the Lando backstory in Solo.
I will at least commend the fact it is pretty much a space semi. And it could fill a niche in trade that conventional haulers can't do. So YT-1300 space tug> X Wing S Foil heat sink retcon. The YT tugs being "short" distance or special cargo haulers in networks with larger bulk haulers makes it fit in. Odd that we never see variants with two cockpits is something a kit basher would love. Also for an interesting courier freighter look at the Ebon Hawk from Star Wars Kotor.
A tug makes sense since it would explain the overpowered engines, off center cockpit and especially the clear lack of internal cargo bays.
Fun Fact: In a poster meant to get investors interested in the original Star Wars film, there's a version of the Millennium Falcon that has twin cockpits.
See, the thing is, though, a "conventional hauler" wouldn't be that hard to design and could carry FAR more cargo - even in external pods - than this... thing.
@@SacredCowShipyardsit could be a fast but expensive delivery like someone needs parts fast for their generator or they die
@@SacredCowShipyardsthe "Sprinter" aka the Semi cab with a Box is a thing for a reason. Being modular as well to alternate between the Sprinter "box [space] truck on steroids" and the traditional Tractor/Tug external cargo pod/trailer (doubles, triples, etc) makes for a flexible set of services offered.
"Bulk Freighters" are their own category...
Welcome to [Space] MOPAR...
The 'pusher' barge with the containers stacked in front of it would kind of make sense for the engines to be mounted radially for turning the 'assemblage' left and right on the horizontal axis though up and down might be a bit tricky (and left turns might require a white cane) - as for 'Millennium Falcon', I'd describe it as a 'word soup' if the hull was an actual saucer but since it's more of a plate then I suppose 'word salad' would be more appropriate.
Like I said, if they ever actually mentioned that detail, even in passing, it'd help with the setup.
Mork 2024!
I0m not through the video yet,, and I dont know if it's mentioned...
It's been some years but I think in the space sim "X-Wing Alliance" the developers showed the YT1300 docking with cargo containers via the "mandables." Right where Disney Lucasfilm put the escape pod.
there is nothing wrong with the Intermodel system. most of the criticisms are related to the idea of a forward-facing cannon which makes a lot less sense than having turrets. If their was a dumb idea regarding YT freighters it would be having a forward facing cannon. Why the hell would a cargo ship a forward firing cannon- only fighters have fixed forward firing cannons.
The Intermodel concept is a great idea- There is no reason why the forward auxiliary craft would not have additional mauvering jets that would assist in maneuvering the loads. Its not a bad system. Not only is it not a bad system its likely the kind of system that will be used in the future if humans ever develop inter planetary cargo transport.
Not one of the reasons he gave was a good reason for not having an Intermodel arm or outsized clamp used.
Saying "we don't see them anywhere else" is silly as shit as all kinds of things show up never to be seen again in starwars. Its not like we have even seen another YT-1300 freighter. (officially the YT that is seen in the PT is the MF)
The only legit criticism in this video is that its a retcon to make up for the problem that the MF is a freighter that cannot carry cargo.
I know this is thoroughly into apocrypha at this point, but I think the name came from something along the lines of them getting a fluke of luck and as a result they thought it'd fly fast like a falcon and last for a millenium.
_Millenium Falcon_ is another way of saying _Phoenix._ The phoenix is a magical bird that lives for a thousand years, dies, self immolates, and is born again. Also, apparently made up by (Arab?) traders on the Silk Road as a way to explain why they charged so much for cinnamon, since the story was that cinnamon was recovered from burnt up phoenix nests.
It's as logical as a Millenial and flies like a paralysed falvcon?
The YT-1300 Series as a freighter makes about as much sense as a T-47 Air Speeder (more often seen and known from the up-armored Rebel Snow Speeder) is a In-Atmosphere Tug/Hauler.
I always understood it to be more a space sprinter/transit van than a space semi or cargo ship... more designed to move small, high value cargo in a hurry... its more "we need to move some boxes of critical spares to this system, NOW... not "we need to move hundreds of tons of meh value cargo
Yeah, the best imaginable use-cases for it include; picking up this and that from here and there, running priority last-lightyear delivery or courier service, carrying your workshop/storefront with you with samples on hand, and as a diplomatic hero ship that happens to have a cargo hold to carry whatever is needed.
Making it into a space train or space tug/tow is insane. It'd only make sense if you had a fleet of the things and needed to find a use for them, no matter how silly.
@@Simon-ho6ly If it is meant to carry small cargo then it should be categorised as 'transport' not 'freighter'. If you want a small fast ship to carry small cargo or passengers hopping between islands, you use a small yacht or a speed boat.
@@sompongpire3027 meanwhile if you want to move small loads, a few pallets etc here your insurance would be considered freight transport since you are doing it for hire...
small cargo between islands you would use a ferry or small freighter.. also in universe the equivalents of yachts and speed boats exist
@@LibertyMonkWhen you need a few couplers from Space O'Reilly's.
I had always thought of the Falcon as a fast, high value, low volume cargo transport. But even as that, it never struck me as being particularly viable.
I feel like the YT1300 would fit well into an entirely different role from how its depicted. It's a sub-corvette sized nimble craft that you can add a few guns (turn the dorsal and ventral turrets into cupolas), and re-add the missing middle bit as a torpedo launcher. Boom, motor torpedo boat in space, go defend a spaceport or set up an ambush in an asteroid field.
The bigger, badder, Skipray Blastboat.
The fact that this "freughter" can go toe to toe with combat ships of any kind really lends credit to the idea of it being a pretty shit freighter. Though one better suited to illicit trade than an actual good freighter.
@@DrewLSsixi think that was always the point. Every single owner of the Yt series used it for anything but cargo
Corellian Engineering was well versed in making advanced ships with Electrical systems so generic that any after market piece could be added on from any other ship manufacturer so much so its basically a meme at this point. the TY-1300 is basically is the "hey kids, wanna haul cargo or fly a ship that looks like a piece of junk, well check out our YT-1300 series it can be a freight hauler, a personal transport, a gunship and a personal transport. come on down to Corellian Engineering ship yards and get your dream YT-1300 freighter today!" kind of deal going on. Corellian engineering wanted a ship that could be used for every conceivable role possible. but the issue of the YT-1300 freighter hauler ship is that its a pre-clonewars era ship and Corellian Engineering had actually stopped making the YT-1300 freighter by a new hope though many like the Millenium falcon are still around however cometially they were replaced by the VCX-100 light freighter which had magentic freight dock a ventral loading rack, a small short ranged tractor beam generator. it took all the stuff the YT-1300 did but only better plus it was bigger then the YT-1300. it was a vastly big improvement. and even the engineers over at Corellian Engineering realized the YT-1300's engine configuration was inefficient when it came to thrust output and was built for tight quick turns instead at the sacrifice of engine efficiency which was corrected when Corellian Engineering built the VCX-100 which ironically was built after Corellian Engineering was nationalized by the empire and one of the Corellian Engineering's VCX-100s the ghost.
the genericness of the Corellian Engineering build ships is so generic one could probably strap a star destroyer hyperdrive to your YT-1300 or VCX-100 and safely say "this is fine"
What is also funny is that the mislabeling of ships as freighters which are more courier ships in star wars is quite common, and a lot of them are corellian engineering: The Moldy Crow (forget what class it is) (actually doesn't look related to the YT series), the Outrider (YT-2200), the Otana (YT-2400) (it actually has the cockpit on the centerline) among others. Some of the luxury yatchs (eg the Lady Luck) in star wars seem closer to these ships than the ships that you would actually call freighters. There are a lot of ships in star wars called freighters are actually good freighters, at least in legends, and at least one or two in Disney sw. Basically, all the good freighters in sw are fairly big and slow. The rebel transport ship (seen in esb and rotj) is actually a better freighter than a lot of the above mentioned ships.
I believe those rebel transports are actually... strategically acquired freighters. The Quasars definitely were.
@@patchmoulton5438 yup, the quasar was definitely a freighter
LOVED THIS VIDEO!! Even so, the horrible retcon of "intermodal" is the only thing that allows the (albeit totally silly) shape make any sense. I thought of that before ep.5 even came out. Although with only 2 slightly larger containers. LIKE A SEMITRUCK. I even kitbashed one. I was 15 planetary orbits old and HAN SHOT FIRST. See, to me (just a single dumbass, granted) Han is running around in a supped up Peterbilt, with an Abrams engine stuffed under the hood! (IRL Tank mechanic) Yes, it would fit. Yes, it would cause problems. He then smuggles stuff under the floor of (what amounts to be) the sleeper. Now, the YT1300 are LIGHT freighters. They move cargo 1-3 containerized units at a timeand can land (deliver) at almost any relativly flat, firm location. Mediums move several hundred containers at a time and need a legitimate space port. The HEAVIES move cargo several thousand at a time. Here on Earth, we currently have light medium and heavy. Semi-trucks 1-5 containers (depends on national legalities) and can deliver almost anywhere to include your house directly. TRAINS haul several hundred at a time. Their delivery locations are much more restricted. Lastly ocean-going container ships haul several thousand at a time. and have the most restricted delivery locations. Each has advantages and limitations.
FUTURE RETCON #15,234: The original YT1300 Han owned had the rotating cockpit, B-wing style. During some manuvers not covered in the operators manual, it jammed and Han had to land with it 90 degrees rotated he then had to spend four hours hand cranking the darned thing back to true vertical. It was then spot welded in place, never to be repaired.
LOL love that retcon of yours.
@@EclipseWarlord Thank You!
Very nice illustration of the concept of a semi-truck style of single container long hauler. Following that analogy, the Millenuim Falcon configuration was more like a charter bus-size RV for passengers with a nice baggage compartment. Kind of like what a rock band might tour with. Thus making the Winnebago in Spaceballs the perfect parody of it.
@@h_in_oh However, only freight explains the mandibles. A large percentage of the ships mass is taken up by those therefore, they need a reasonable explanation. Freight containers provide that.
@@chrisgeddes26 Yes, freight containers explain the semi-truck design for the YT1300 series in general, but the exact configuration of the Millennium Falcon was more like converting such a truck into a charter RV with a baggage compartment.
“Nuke the entire site from orbit…”
-Dockmaster probably
I’ve always interpreted it as a “freighter” that was specifically designed to be a blockade runner, but they couldn’t advertise it as such, so they added token mandibles to make it sellable.
There was an old computer game where the millennium falcon style ships were used for loading and unloading cargo ships. Where the teeth of the ship needed to be used to pick up cargo containers in space for the tutorial.
Freighters gonna freight. Don’t frieght the player, frieght the game.
The intermodal freight aspect of the Falcon wasn't a retcon. It was what Lucas/Johnston had in mind for the mandibles and offset cockpit from the very beginning of those elements being added to the design. It follows Lucas's tendency to reverse vehicle designs. I agree it's incompatible with the actual retcon that was shown in the Solo film many years later. I cover it in my own video about the Norway class from Star Trek... ua-cam.com/video/ucSriQ92FM4/v-deo.html
Not that anyone is surprised Disney can’t follow the lore properly.
@@bkane573 Yeah, I'm recalling KK saying that, unlike other sci-fi franchises, Star Wars has no books that they could use for story concepts... let that sink in for a moment.
@@DarinRWagner Hold on, let me go get my bottle of whiskey. I'm gonna need to be in an altered state of consciousness to understand her claim!
My understanding - and I could have misinterpreted - is that Lucas wanted the YT-1300 to hold a single cargo pod between its mandibles, rather than the "string of pearls configuration" that the retcon saddled it with.
The former doesn't not make sense. The latter is nonsense.
@@SacredCowShipyards Well pushing containers through space on long hauls isn't much different than semi-trucks dragging containers cross-country. And since it was the 1970s, when truck drivers were getting all kinds of love in the pop culture, it makes sense from a thematic perspective. Space itself is nonsense, so I don't have any trouble with this as a concept.
What even is a "Millennium Falcon"? Basically, a box truck that the owner turned into a RV, in spaaaaaaaaaaaace... The owner put in a 1000 HP engine then turbocharged and supercharged this box truck so it would be really fast. When I think how it is armed, I get Mad Max vibes.
"What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon? Oh ***** do you have any idea what this is going to do to my credit?! "
The dessicated potato upon hearing the news of the Death Star's destruction.
The sound design was on point though (ignoring the whole sound in vacuum thing).
Agreed, the thrum of her engines onboard or that 1970s turbofan whine on some of the slower camera passes are absolutely iconic.
Ah yes. "Minor Retrofits". By the way, she was apparently "Up Armored" as well.
On the topic offset cockpits. Most super heavy machines have it, even aircraft carriers have it.
Yes, aircraft carriers have offset bridges, but that is a compromise because of the need for a continuous flight deck.
The first "carriers" has a standard bridge superstructure with a takeoff runway forward and a landing (wall planting?) runway aft.
Then there were experiments with bridgeless carriers, carriers with takeoff facilities one deck below the top deck, bridges on the port AND starboard.
As planes got bigger and faster, they needed more space to take off and land. This led to the invention of first crash nets, then arrestor lines and as jest came on board, launch catapults.
The world's navies have pretty much settled into starboard offset islands for carriers, not that a lot of nations have carriers at all.
Aircraft carriers do it because that's the only real way to have a continuous deck.
that ad transition and incorporation was next-level genius
"What the hell is an aluminum falcon!?"
Oh God no you must smell like feet wrapped in burnt bacon.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought my Dark Lord of the Sith could protect a small thermal exhaust port that's only two meters wide!"
@@siechamontillado "That thing wasn't even paid off yet! Do you have any idea what this is gonna do to my credit rating?"
@@logicplague "What?! Oh, oh 'just rebuild it.' Oh, real f-----ing original. And who's going to give me a loan jackhole, you?"
Damn, beat me to it😆👍
"Get your 7'2" asthmatic ass back here, or I'm gonna tell everybody what a bitch you were about padme, panda bear, whatever the hell her name was!"
I'm not sure if CEC is really building actual freighters. I know all the paperwork and licensing documentation says they are frieghters, especially during the time of the Galactic Empire.
However, all of the CEC ships are highly customizable, with more after market addons available in the mid and outer rim worlds than for any other starship manufacturer. They seem to be deliberately manufacturing the base hulls for the equivalent of Technicals and Gunboats and selling them to anyone who might have issue with any sort of authority no questions asked. What I want to know was how much of CECs annual budget went to paying off government inspectors, because this company has been doing shady shit for a very long time and under several interstellar governments.
I think theres a massive argument to counter your entire freight thesis with "great lakes freighters". I think youre looking at sea OR litoral freight for nautical analogs. But George Lucas may have just pointed to Chicago to Milwaukee line freighters. "Why is it so fast but designed to sometimes push?" Attach barges when its calm. "Why cant it carry it internally?" Carry passengers instead on rough seas to overpay you". We dont get StarWars Galaxy Space, or Space at all really yet. But "great lakes transportation models" certainly sounds like the early millennia of a "long time ago" in a place "far far away". Takes so "short" for our "space" seas, you design for "lakes" and look insane. By now they've probably Alpha Red'd themselves
I can explain this more sober, but key points "joint transport models" worked on the Great Lakes. Like icebreakers on Coral Reef Heavy tropical cruises. Fill the berths with passengers when you can't push the freight. Starwars relies on "hyperlanes" cleared of obstacles. Over powered engines and empty carrying people wouldn't be suspicious, therefore perfect smuggling vessel. "No people, hurrying back" or "no cargo, carrying people". "I dunno must be a stowaway" for people, "I guess my last passengers left it" for cargo. It's a valid reason and thought train if you look at the Great Lakes Fleet is my point
Ive always held a headcannon that humans are not native to the Star Wars galaxy, and that they've actually been separated from a broader and more advanced universe due to The Force being, well, a possessive and manipulative ass.
Words like "falcon" are just holdovers from a bygone era of their history; lost and forgotten to time.
Regarding cockpits offset from the center of balance, the Kushan and Taiidan Interceptors from Homeworld were built that way. The two fighters' designs are visually very different, but they're both essentially built around a huge array of mass drivers, and both function as heavier, up-gunned versions of their respective scout craft designs.
The Kushan Interceptor's centerline is dominated by a pair of rotary cannons, with the cockpit offset along the craft's starboard side. The Taiidan design _wanted_ to mount the main cannon spinally, but their engineers couldn't get it small enough to wrap the rest of the chassis around without having to design an entirely new ship from scratch instead of modifying their Scout frame. The best they could come up with was to mount the cannon offset along the upper starboard side from the main hull. While the cockpit is visually along its centerline, the fighter's axial center of gravity is a bit up and to the right from the pilot.
Fluff from the setting mentions that this takes new Taiidan fighter pilots by surprise, but once they get a feel for it, they can leverage that odd balance in dogfights by "rolling the gun," as they put it, dancing out of an enemy's sights in ways other fighters can't.
As for the Kushan fighter, this is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect they figured the mass drivers they wanted were huge enough that the rest of the fighter would have to be built around them anyway, so the cockpit would end up offset from the centerline no matter how they laid it out. In that case, they may as well go for hangar efficiency and build them flat to stack in towers of holding racks. So, the cockpit ended up on the starboard edge of the fighter, rather than adding a hump along the top or bottom.
Oh, asymmetrical ships are almost a science fiction standby at this point, because, after all, there's no atmo in space, amirite?
Never mind lever arms and moment arms and mass distributions...
@@SacredCowShipyards You mentioning arms made me remember the spaceship Outlaw Star from the show Outlaw Star. It might make for an interesting video.
I’ve always thought of it like a Greyhound bus in space. It moves passengers, luggage, mail, and small packages. If you compare it to single purpose vehicles, it fares poorly.
Just wanted to say that I've always been of the opinion the Millennium Falcon is more of a cargo plane like a C-47 than any sort of freighter. The various retcons seem to make less and less sense as time has passed.
A fast transport for low-volume, high-value cargo, like mail and packages, perishable foods, luxury items and so on.
The Falcon was good for one thing (besides being a hero ship): a courier for high value, low volume, cargo. Like drugs and weapons.
Re frighter....see Tea Clippers...
In their time..the fastest..very fastest ships
Good thing then Dock Master I'll be sticking by the "Firefly" class of ship
Just a note but the single gun turret on the Falcon when it was Lando's was seen being a turret in the escape from Kessel if I am not mistaken. It was manned by Beckett till it got shot off and I could have sworn there was a second ventral one that got scraped off when Han did that little power slide maneuver (which was also supposed to explain why the forward landing gear pods were missing in ANH only to show up later in ESB).
Correction, beckett was in the ventral turret when the gun got shot off (just watched it)
I've never heard the hamburger story. And I've been obsessed w/ Star Wars from Star Wars until Force Awakens
Makes me think it is more of a courier ship than a freighter in the traditional sense.
Lessons to take away:
- The correlions should really leave ship building to the Kalamari.
- never let Han customise his ship.
Yeah people don't seem to realise Han was just some Yokel who went "I've put my truck on 37's and slapped on a turbo I bought off of ebay and now I can't figure why this thing keeps breaking down. Still check out my new gun rack"
To me, the closest real world analogue to the Millennium Falcon is a film noir tramp steamer.
This realization didn’t hit me until I recently binge watched some ancient Charlie Chan movies. One in particular set mostly on and in a tramp steamer of the period between our World Wars involved some high profile people and high value cargo that needed to get from point A to point B without the notice of customs inspectors or immigration officials.
That kind of business was exactly the MF’s bread and butter.
The tramp steamer had a nearly pointlessly small cargo capacity, could not be loaded or unloaded quickly, and had a few ratty-assed passenger accommodations that I will not grace with the name “cabins”. The ship had its own built-in cargo crane for use in ports that didn’t have them, and also an extra large gangplank to move cargo when the crane couldn’t be used for whatever reason because the ship spent most of its port time at lesser ports with few if any facilities, and occasionally would meet other ships to transfer cargo far out at sea away from nosy officials. It also had a reliable, powerful engine which made it faster than it looked. It even had a small deck gun for fighting off actual pirates. The Captain carried a revolver, but in his pocket, not a drop leg holster.
Sound familiar?
That may not be exactly what George Lucas had in mind when the MF’s physical design was finalized but that’s the role it fills in the SW universe.
As for the ship’s physical layout… yeah, it’s shit. I personally put that down to those who designed all of the iterations that led to what we saw on screen not knowing much about how such ships should be built.
The freighters in Cowboy Bebop make a ton more sense. A tractor power unit that locks on to cargo trains. Also, subtle history joke is appreciated.
Regarding the Haynes Manual, I have the TIE, Death Star, and X-Wing manuals.
My brother has the Klingon Bird Of Prey.
Sooo... the YTs aren't so much freighters as they're space U-Hauls.
At least the Ebon Hawk could fit a large swoop bike in its cargo hold.
Parasite craft ftw.
@@SacredCowShipyards
Selling gizka in 4,000 B.B.Y.
"Take them off my hands."
Selling gizka now:
"No low-ballers. I know what I've got."
I like that at the start of the video I went "Oh, I'm going to know all this trivia", and immediately ran headlong into a self-correction from the Dockmaster about hamburger myths. And that the Falcon cockpit design echoes a real-world craft. Ding the learned-something bell.
To the electronic warfare issue, see also: the advanced space superiority targeting computer can't put torpedoes into a 2-meter wide target. While the real-world technology to do better than that was being developed when A New Hope was being made.
The Expanded Universe explained sightline-combat and the reliance on energy weapons via shielding and personal armor being so advanced that solid munitions were ineffective, while leaving it implicit that all the energy-weapon tech lost power over comparatively VERY small distance. But this is the kind of thing that went away with, say, the lore that stormtrooper armor did anything. At all.
@22:00 is just objectively true. I can't imagine any of us saw the 'the mandibles can magnet clamp cargo' thing and ever thought it was anything but silly.
I'll always defend the "Fill in the blanks with imaginative bullshit" approach Star Wars takes: it has proven an interesting hill to die on. But this video is far and away the most compelling I've seen from the Dockmaster about why it can make for the narrative equivalent of a glorified unforced error.
Bonus 'Dockmaster gushes over efficient ship design like a bee over hexagons' at the end.
Bees make cylinders. They just don't stay that way because, in part, they're building in wax.
@@boobah5643 "Efficient bee-shaped space' then.
Great video dock master!
There is nothing really to add other than with the ship being basically made of Legos it should have been really fragile, but it still holds together like a champion.
Captain Sulu: Oh, my... The Millenium Falcon is another name for the Great Bird of the Galaxy.
It's been a while since I read any of the star war books or comics, but I remember reading in one that the YT-1300 was a failed product that got orphaned real fast. So considering how us Humies on Earth absolutely love otherwise stupid things just because they are rare ( a lot of classic cars come to mind.). My own personal Retcon is that Lando and Han love the YT-1300 and fight over it despite it being a piece of junk because they are hipster "classic" ship collectors.
The Millenuim Falcon configuration was more like a charter bus-size RV for passengers with a nice baggage compartment. Kind of like what a rock band might tour with. Thus making the Winnebago in Spaceballs the perfect parody of it.
A couple observations, Dockmaster. It seems that the YT-1300 series is meant to be akin to a PBY Catalina or a Cessna Caravan: light transport in remote locations. It's the space equivalent to a bush plane which is a niche sci-fi doesn't usually look at all that often. But, as you pointed out, the execution is crap. As for offset cockpits, the F-82 Twin Mustang was a thing for a while, but that plane was designed to fill a very specific niche and was ditched once better planes came online to fill its role.
If I were to fix the Falcon and its ilk, the first thing I'd do is make the cargo holds entire floors be elevators for rapid and easy loading and unloading of cargo. After that, I'd help make the EW explanation more canon by having the turrets use electro-optical sensors but that's going to be a pain in the backside because of all the other computational stuff needed to get reliable EO sensors to be good for accurate targeting requires some insane expenditure of funds and effort to rig up in a world where you have to push to knife fight range to hit a 1 kilometer long warship due to how intense the EW is.
Being a "Hero Ship," the MF has "Special Star Wars Universe technology" to make all these problems go away in anticipation of questions asked about the anticipated mentioned problems.
The Falcon was a cool looking ship.
Law wise I think it's a light frieghtor in same way "urban SUVs" can off road or Chihuahua could hunt in packs to take down deers.
I can image a group of people buying the YT-1300 as more of a life style decision. Till it went out of fashion.
Then a space pirate got hold and added a mini bar and times two quad barrel guns. And 'fixes' the ship so it functions more like a pirate needs.
Typo edits
I usually listen to these rants when they come out, but for some reason I cant seem to remember anything about this last weekend. That happens because of alcohol normally, but this time I didnt wake up with a headache, but instead felt strangely full and healthy.
The stalk breaking shouldn't be a problem if you have materials strong enough that they can withstand being kicked in the ass hard enough to go from zero to lightspeed plus instantaneously like Star wars ships do. Or slam into the invisible space wall that takes them out of their super speed. Speaking of which inertial dampeners or whatever in star wars have to be absolutely insane so that nobody ends up with metal cans drifting through space painted red over ever corridor.
That's more compression than torsion, though.
@@SacredCowShipyards I would argue about the ships stretching into infinity when they enter lightspeed but unfortunately I know enough science to get mad at everything for not following the rules of science. The quickly accelerating ship "stretching" is actually something star wars (unintentionally I'm sure) got right because the frame of reference of a non moving camera watching an accelerating ship would cause that visual effect. Quantum mechanics go brrrr.
With the love of cubes surpiced we havent hade a borg cube yet XD
The YT 1300 makes me think of a public transport bus somebody did limited modifications to make into a HGV.
when talking about the Falcon (and not the YT-1300 as whole) we must remember that it has been heavily modified not just by Solo but by pretty much everyone who has owned her in her long life. hell she was even nearly completely wrecked at one point (see the novel Millennium Falcon) and rebuild with parts from other YT-1300 models (specifically the front mandibles are from a differing model than she originally came with.) . the massively upsized engines as well as Hyperdrive systems consume a good deal of her original internal cargo space.
honestly i would compare her more with a long haul Semi than a ocean going cargo ship. just like in the real world large cargo transporters like Trains an Cargo ships can't go everywhere. something like the TY-1300 can land just about anywhere there is enough open space to land. are there better Light Freighters in SW, yes of course. Han chose her because he just sort of fell in love with the ship when he first saw her (fuck the Solo movie its garbage, i'm going with the Han Solo Trilogy novels here). YT-1300s were ubiquitous, something that was all over the place when they were first manufactured so filled the used ship market after they faded from use. being highly customizable make them even a bigger draw.
as for the turret on the stock model it was a turret just with its main setting slaved forward when you didn't have a gunner on hand.
Interestingly, the F and P variants don't have much storage space back by the engines either.
This actually makes me way more confident in my freighter design for my sci-fi world. It's basically a big intermodal ship that petty much has the crew section up front, an engineering section and shuttle bay in the back, and a bunch of cargo containers along the spine. The ship is meant to ferry cargo down to the surface of a planet and is basically just a space semi. There's definitely much more massive ships for bulk freight that can't land, but this is just the hero ship that the main character buys used and already way past end of life because she's on the run and its what she could afford plus use to make money without too many questions.
When I first saw Star Wars I was blown away by the visuals. And I still see the Falcon that way. They got me when I was young. But, yes, when I try to think of it in a functional sense, it just pains me. I had never seen that prototype before and I do think that it makes much more sense and a blockade runner/smuggler ship. And it manages to look cool doing it.
One issue that I never hear brought up is now almost half of the livable volume on these ships is dedicated to corridors. Who loves hallways so much?
I always liked the design of the BFF-1 Bulk Freighter, though that was in a different size class than the YT-1300
The GR-75 is my idea of a sensible cargo ship design.
You can even SEE that it is essentially a shell filled with shipping containers.
@@MonkeyJedi99 another good one
The BFF is, by all appearances, a decent freighter, though it has limited information so it's hard to say.
@@SacredCowShipyards I think it was made up for the x-wing game, which explains it simple shape and rather lackluster amount of Canon information.
But over the years I must have both destroyed and saved thousands of them
The Family Guy's Star Wars parody pointed out a couch
couldn't even fit through the main doors.
Now I'm wanting to hear your thoughts on Star Trek's version of this. The Earth Cargo Service freighters from Enterprise.
The Millennium Falcon always reminded me of a bomber plane more than any type of cargo vessel.
Also the YT series could be a tonge in cheek manufacturing for the elicit trade transports, they called is a freighter. And in a way it is, light high value freighter. To get around law enforcement regulations. Kinda like the high speed 'pleasure' craft manufacturing used in drug running.
Attaching to the cargo boom sounds like an idea that came from the marketing department.
The docking clamps thing isn't really a retcon, Han even mentions jettisonning the cargo when talking to Jabba in the first movie. You just don't think of it because Lucas never used it that way in any of the films despite how "popular" the YT-1300 was they are rarely even seen & never with anything in the mandibles. (The only other YT I recall was in Ep3 when Anakin & Padme are in the spaceport on Coruscant waiting to flee undercover & some people seem to think that that is the Falcon)
Iirc it was specifically mentioned to be the falcon, just in a previous identity as the "stellar envoy" under a different owner. They cover it in the the falcon novel (Granted, that's legends now) and I think in one of the DVD commentaries.
I mean, jettisoning cargo can happen from wherever, though, admittedly, in the YT-1300's case, you literally have to carry the cargo to an airlock, which may explain why he thought it was notable enough to mention.
Going by the Falcon, as it's seen on screen, effectively calling it a freighter is a stretch. It's pretty much a bush plane...in space.
The idea of a towboat being the ship for Han is a good one, he could have a mansion of cargo containers as his hideout he could simply push out to safety. The massive power to weight ratio with no heavy load would lend itself to the speed Han brags about. Radial thrust engine would lend itself to thrust vectoring say the cargo load being far too unbalanced but it needs a vertical set of engines to guarantee that; the cosine losses aren't too bad either but simple thrust differential from multiple engines works fine or better. Needless to say it needs a massive redesign to make sense.
@@gvplacencia I'm thinking why don't we see outlaws with safe houses to store their treasures and stuff in star wars.
The idea is great. The execution is... not.
The flying Winnebago version from SpaceBalls made a lot more sense for how it was used.
Very enjoyable dockmaster.
I would modify your freighter definition from "as fast as possible" to "as efficiently as possible" in regards to a fuel/mass/time matrix.
I LOVED the stop-motion ad, I will not lie, and not JUST because I was a big fan of the brickfilm scene back in the day.
Honestly, I'd always wondered WHERE the cargo in the YT-1300 WENT, good to know the answer is "slowly and awkwardly, mostly"
If I'm not mistaken I think the only time I ever saw the Intermodal Freight TY-1300 outside of these images was in Star Wars TIE Fighter. I could very well be wrong on that (and probably am, it's been a hot minute since I have last played it), but I'm pretty sure that's where it came from.
In X-Wing Alliance, you fly a stock YT-1300, and pick up containers… which latch over the ventral gun turret position. or where the ventral gun turret would be if the stock YT-1300 had one.
The YT-1300 pushing a wobbly string of cargo containers through space fits the impractical and hazardous nature of most Star Wars tech.
Not wrong.
Don't the "blockade runner" ships kind of slot into the Corvette class? Small, fast, maneuverable with light armor and armaments?
Officially they are all corvettes in-universe.
In EVE online, Blockade Runners are categorized as "Transport Ships" and serve as a smaller version of an industrial transport with a fraction of the space, but better protected bays, higher speed, faster FTL jumps, and even cloaking in some cases.
Ship classes are a whole nightmare deserving their own episode, but largely "yes".
Well the falcon has always been described as a hunk of junk. Even a moisture farmer would know a proper freighter upon seeing one.
The one with the central cockpit exists in-universe as the YT-2000. As well as definitely being the source of the "Ghost"
The ghost was a VCX-100, not a yt-2000
The internal storage compartments could just be for provisions rather than actual freight? Us fragile humies do unfortunately need food, water and other essentials between stops, they don't need to be fast to load if the loading is done outside of a freight yard while the crew are on a rest stop. There's no speedy way to load a semi-truck cab with gator aid and methamphetamine but truckers still manage.
As for the weapon turrets being in line with the cargo that never really proved a problem for WW2 bombers, admittedly I'd prefer one on top and one below to give full coverage but it's not a warship, I'd assume it's for discouraging pirates rather than actually going on the offensive. You could also detach the nose mounted cargo while in space to solve your manoeuvrability issues in a fight, as long as you've got tracking capability and you weren't going at maximum speed when you detached you can always catch up and reattach after the fight is over assuming you had the firepower and armour to repel the threat. If you're just planning on ditching it and running to preserve the vessel and the crew then that's what freight insurance is there for, give the pirates what they want and high tail it back to safety.
That severely cuts down on its already limited cargo capacity, though "where's the water go" is a long-standing question for all SW ships.
Nice video. One question is the speed not less and less important, I mean most modern container ship are driving not very fast. They need nowadays the same time as sailing ships. One more thing I did not read anything so I don’t have an idea if it is impossible, but could they not just ditch this arm in front and fix another to it, that would make loading a lot faster
AFAIK cargo ships get slower and slower to save on fuel cost. If that's not really a factor, going faster is preferable.
But yeah, a normal freighter will not use an experimental military grade hyper drive generator either.
the thing about the modern ships not being much faster than old ships is that while their speed is low, their Rate is high, because the amount of cargo they can carry has gone up, so the cost per unit has gone down. A lot. as has the number of trips needed for a given quantity of goods to be moved.
Also, their actual travel time has improved. First, by not being entirely dependent on the wind anymore they don't randomly have to deal with being blown off course, being unable to move for days at a time, having to cut their speed in half or worse because the wind is blowing the wrong way, etc.
Second, by increasing the amount of fuel carried and the efficiency of the engines, they don't have to stop anywhere near as often as early steam ships, also reducing travel time.
Third and finally, increase in size and improvement in design and navigation equipment means that a lot of weather that was dangerous for older ships can now just be ignored and sailed right through.
All this adds up to the Throughput going up a lot, even though the speed of individual ships hasn't.
Even so, in spite of all this, ships are used for things that need to be moved in large quantities, on a regular basis (when it seems like this isn't the case? the random stuff is going into shipping containers. The accumulated Shipping Containers are the thing that regularly gets moved in large quantities). Small quantities of things that don't make regular trips and need to actually be Fast go on planes.
What that guy said.
@@laurencefraser I still hope they bring back sailing boots, they look nice and it would be better for the environment.
You hit on the bi thing I discovered when playing a star wars roleplaying game on the tabletop where our party finally managed to get a hold of a YT-1300 and tried to haul cargo in it and spent half a session staring at the plans trying to work out how you were supposed to actually get the cargo in and out. Frankly we would have downgraded to our previous smaller cheaper ship if it hadn't already exploded.
Did it really take this long to go over the Millennium Falcon?
When you're beating a REALLY big dead horse, you go through a lot of bats.
We try to space out our true Sacred Cow moments. Gotta give y'all time to recover.
YT-1300 is more an UPS Delivery van than an actual freighter
I'd consider it more of a fast courier ship than a freighter.
That's essentially how it was being used to smuggle things. Small, high-value cargo that needs to get somewhere fast (and avoid being stopped).
I like to imagine the laser cannon were an optional upgrade you could buy dealer-installed, the original buyer of the ship declined, Han got his hands on an upgrade package and installed it. There's a concept of "for but not with" in navies and even in the standard automobile, where something is built with a use case in mind but then isn't fitted for it.
One thing I'd like to say in regards to electronic targeting being inconsistent is that it's there's a way to explain that.
We also see ships like TIEs and X wings have live targeting feedback when in combat and droid fighters can also follow ships despite their eyes being functionally sensors.
What I believe happens is that ECM jamming is best effective at longer ranges, making long range missiles and weapons less viable, but within visual range the sensors can get burnthrough, provided it's in the reticle for long enough.
Let's not forget Luke was scanning Dagobah for life signs from orbit so these sensors are still plenty powerful.
Fixed weapons in star wars can fire at an angle, it's how the X wing and ARC 170 can still be precise despite having hardpoints on the wingtip. Vader doesn't immediately fire on the rebels when he's persuing them in the trench, what's likely happening is that he's waiting for his sensors to find a flaw in the enemy shield to shoot them down in one burst.
So the targeting system of the falcon isn't inconsistent, it just works at pointblack ranges, at which the TIEs were engaging, and it still isn't 100% reliable requiring manual input.
Yes I'm headcanoning an explanation to clear oversight by whomever writes the lore but all in the spirit of the video.
The theory i have always liked was that it was intended to be a modular system.
The cargo section would be an unpowered container, like a barge. The notch in the front of the falcon was the docking coupler. Shop a container to a port, drop it for unloading and dick to another pre-loaded container and leave. the falcon only had to provide crew quarters and propulsion which is why it is so massively over engined for its size.
Like a tow boat that is built to push tens or hundreds of thousand tons, this was built to move mountains.
See, if it just handled a single, large pod, I could deal with that. The whole "string of pearls" configuration is nonsense.
I always thought the millennium falcon was just basically Star Wars versions of a Tacticool name, like how gun manufacturers just take a basic lock? 18. Spray paint it in a black camo pattern and then add a piss poor holographic scope to it and all of a sudden. It's no longer a Glock 18 with a scope but a SCORPION FREEDOM DEFENDER.
I don’t think even a standard sized sofa would fit up the side ramps.
To quote Emperor Sheev Palpatine, "What the hell is an aluminum falcon"? 🤣
The Millennium Falcon is not a freighter but a Q ship or large armed hotrod.
A really badly designed Q ship because anyone staring at it for more than 5 minutes starts asking questions about how it's supposed to function as a profitable freighter and assumes it's smuggling something
Which explains why Han had to ditch his cargo that one time at got in deep trouble with Jabba the Hutt XD
The Falcon is, yes... but what about the ship she's based on. She's a hotrodded Edsel.
I am a big Stars Wars fan, from a very young age; married a woman who liked the movies as well, and infected all 3 of my children with the same enthusiasm.
And yet every time I saw this ship, my brain was screaming " WHERE DO THEY PUT THE DAMN CARGO??!!"
If I was a customs officer, every red flag imaginable would be waving from this thing.
Big bonus to the Millennium Falcon in that it’s made of “Indestructium”! That thing is hit by and crashes into EVERYTHING and keeps on going… 😜
There is a starwars novel specifically about the life and history of the falcon, from it's initial construction to what we know today. In the book the crew flies around the galaxy tracking down previous owners and learning everything they can about the ship.
I think the feel of the Falcon, as they reinvented it, was less freighter and more small cargo handler. If Star Wars is WW2 in space then the Falcon is an expy for a flying boat like the Grumman G-21 Goose. Think the plane from Tales of the Gold Monkey and Talespin. Designed to deliver small payloads and passengers to out-of-the-way locations.
I mean seriously... Star Wars is WW2 in space yet they couldn't fork out funds for a model of the General Electric Gun Control system or steal the idea? Would make more sense than what Luke and Han were in...especially since one was flat on his back manning the gun and the other would be on his stomach.