As I've worked on a replica of the Millennium Falcon's cockpit over the years, there has been a mystery spot that has always eluded me. But I may have solved the mystery.
The problem area is a box of levers hanging from the canopy, directly over the dashboard console. In A New Hope, Han Solo reaches up to pull one of these levers after they run into the lone TIE fighter in the destroyed Alderaan System. This area is in perpetual shadow, and I've never really know what kind of levers were up there. You can only really see them in silhouette:
Some months ago, on a routine scouring of screencaps from ANH, I came accross the lever that Ben Kenobi uses to deactivate the tractor beam on the Death Star.
which also turned out to a part of the tactical display on Yavin.
The art department on Star Wars was pretty heavy on repeating parts throughout the movie. If you made a small prop in one area, why not recycle it in another. So I got to thinking, is this lever our mystery part? I had nothing really but a hunch to go on, but I decided to model the lever anyway, and see if it fit.
The lever itself uses another part that shows up in a number of places. The long piston-like part was used both as an acuator on C3PO's legs, and as the hyperspace throttles on the Millennium Falcon's cockpit.
Once built, I added them to the cockpit, and after some careful adjustment, they seem to fit very well.
This is a render in silhouette
And here's that bluescreen shot again:
not a bad match at all.
and now, here are some renders of the full cockpit.
Do you know what the original level use was? Is it a part of something or was it manufactured specifically as a prop?
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