Fondor Haulcraft Remix

 In-Universe History

Following the success of the much smaller version, a larger Fondor Haulcraft was released later designed to answer common complaints about visibility to the left.  Unfortunately, this version of the design was much less well received and only a few examples were built.  It did share many parts commonality with its smaller cousin, which means that many of the examples are still flying actively in the galaxy.  

Real-World History

Lets get one thing out of the way first.  The Fondor Haulcraft from Andor is the coolest starship to come out of Star Wars since 1977 and the Millennium Falcon first graced our screens.  It hits all the right notes, and it evokes the Falcon without being too over the top or too similar.  Thats a hard thing to do, and the Haulcraft does it right.  Not only is it an effective design, it has personality and character and mystery and it looks good at every.  single.  angle. 

Millennium Falcon? Never heard of her.... 

So well done to the entire team that brought that ship to life.  But there is one thing that bothers me, and its a nit-noidal detail that only a pilot such as myself would pick on.  And that detail is that you can't see out of the left side of the cockpit.  Sure, I can explain it away as its space and who cares...but I can tell you from personal experience that if you're going to be flying close to another vehicle (dogfighting not withstanding) you need to be able to see it.  

Talk about a blind spot...

And so that detail drove me to want to do a remix on the design.  The rules remained that it needed to be in line with my scale for the X-wing miniatures game.  10 cm is the standard size for the docking ring, and also a 10cm width is standard for a two-place cockpit.  I made the decision that I would do a 2-place cockpit since I wanted it to stay in that area.  I also wanted to make sure that I solved the ONE problem I had in the original design while staying close to the Haulcraft geometry.  The geometry, therefore, involved a primary hull with two rotating wings that stretched out in front of the main fuselage and contained engine elements.  I made the deliberate choice to not-study the existing Haulcraft design too closely, just take the basic shape and run with it from there. If an element stood out in my head I made sure to include it.  

This is my third design in sketchup and I was pretty good at what the program can do, but there were some things that were still struggles; such as cylinders and windows and the interaction therein.  So I made a decision to do a cockpit that was close to the one that I did on Celestial Fire.  Unconsciously I began to channel one of my favorite obscure airplanes, the Tacit Blue that was a stealth test bed.  

As you know, one of my rules is to include real-world examples of aircraft or vehicles in my designs with the intention of rooting it reality.  For those unaware, the Millennium Falcon's cockpit was inspired by the B-29 with the turrets off of a B-17.  Tacit Blue actually would be a good basis for a Star Wars ship, so I am going to revisit it in full later.  

Back to the remix...  Having done the cockpit I made sure that it had a clear line of sight in all directions except a full 180.  I put my pilot hat on and started to look at lines of sight to make sure it was clear.  After all, that was the whole point.  So there were deliberate decisions made about what went where in order to keep a line of sight to the left and right.  For example, I put a single docking ring on the left side and it was placed far enough aft of the cockpit to ensure that there was still a line of sight.  

Then came time for adding the wings to the outside.  Just using my own rhythms and design influences, the wings are a lot further back on my version than the one in the show which has the advantage of making it look and feel more like a lunging cat.  My version also has thicker wings, since to me they need to have some kind of a purpose.  I made the assumption that they have ancillary equipment and are also radiators or heat exchangers of some kind.  The funny thing though, was that my placement of the wings ended up restricting the view from the cockpit even MORE than the original version.  What it did do, however, was to keep that lunging-forward viewpoint.  

One of the other things that really started to come together in this design was the greebling.  I think that the repetition of rolling from Celestial Fire straight into the Nubian and then this design really solidified how to greeble and how not to greeble.  Mostly, I had by this point noticed that in X-Wing scale the greebling tended to be basic shapes.  The fun was where to place them and what they might do.  From an engineering standpoint, to me it made sense to have them around key points of the ship, but it also became part of a process where the limitations of Sketchup played into where I placed certain things.  If I couldn't do paneling, I would change to greebling.  

One other thing that I started to do was place lights next to the egress ramp.  To me, this little detail just made sense.  

And of course I did a standard Corellian docking ring, but only on the left side.  It is the same scale as the X-Wing game Millennium Falcon.  

I walked away from the design feeling like it was something to top.  While Celestial is still my favorite, I think even to this day (several designs later) this one is probably a masterpiece. It had all the elements that I wanted to hit and was the moment I realized that this could be a fun little hobby.  I still look at it thinking "Wow...that would be a good one to have physically".   Weirdly, though, I didn't quite answer the one question I wanted to, which was to give it better visibility than the cannon version of the Haulcraft in Andor.  But if it showed up next to it, I think it would still make sense visually. 

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