For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept, Haynes is an English publishing company that specializes in maintenance and repair manuals for cars, motorcycles, and the like. If you've ever bought a fix-it-yourself manual for your car that didn't come from the car's manufacturer, odds are it was either a Haynes or a Chilton. Recently they've started branching out into tongue-in-cheek novelty editions, some of them offering serious advice about non-automotive topics presented in a cheerfully self-parody of their car-manuals style (there's one about taking care of babies, for instance), and others based on historical items a person couldn't reasonably be expected to own (such as the WWII-vintage B-17 bomber or the Titanic), or licensed fictional vehicles of one kind or another written in an in-universe style.

I have a number of both subtypes of the latter kind. I used Klingon Bird of Prey as research material for the Surprise's appearance in Shepard's 11, for instance (particularly the deck plans, though this is not immediately evident within the story), and the one about the International Rescue mecha from Thunderbirds is quite lovely.

Anyway, I was thumbing through the Millennium Falcon one yesterday and noticed a couple of amusing things. One is that there's a page detailing other modular configurations of YT-1300 freighter that were ostensibly available from Corellian Engineering Corporation, one of which is Daggerdisc from UF - essentially the Falcon with the cockpit on the other side.

The other is that there's a section in the book detailing the history of the particular spaceframe Star Wars fans know as the Millennium Falcon herself. At one point, this document makes the claim that - in the hands of an owner long before Lando Calrissian - the ship was called the Wayward Son.

Sadly, the book does not contain parallel confirmation of one of my favorite UF-universe conceits about the YT-1300. I had always assumed that, like the Y-wing fighter, YT-1300s were originally sold with proper hull plating, and the Millennium Falcon is all knobbly and Pompidou Centre pipes-on-the-outside like that because a) she's old and busted and b) Han Solo is shit at maintenance. (It's been mentioned a couple of times that Daggerdisc has all her plating, and that in the 25th century this is considered startling and unlikely, like finding a 1964 Impala that hasn't been converted into a lowrider.) But no, according to the Haynes manual, they were like that from the factory. For UF purposes, as is so often the case, I reject their reality and substitute my own, but there it is.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Genuinely curious: does this apply to all the Star Wars imports into UF, or just the YT-1300 and the Y-Wing?

The knobbly look was sort of de rigeur among pretty much every ship in Star Wars. Even the X-Wing and A-Wing have a lot of weird protuberances and antennas and stuff, and its common right on down from the Death Star all the way to TIE Fighters. The only thing I can think of that has that smooth 'well-clad' look is the Lambda-class shuttle.

-Merc
Keep Rat