CT Secrets of the Rebel Blockade Runner Tantive IV unveiled

I agree with the thruster wash blowing the cape.
However, at that altitude, assuming things work the same way in GFFA, any atmosphere would be so thin that a suit would still be needed. Spacesuits are needed to fly the SR-71 and U2 planes, as well as those who space-dive (those super-high altitude jumps from balloons). These are at roughly 50km, and the internation definition of "space" isnt until 100km. Also, fires can burn in space if the atmosphere is venting into space. Smoke, im not sure about but if its just burned chemicals id assume it would float like a tiny nebula.

All in all, Profundity could still be in atmo, but still require the use of a sealed suit.

 

remember vader and the troopers armor/helmets were made by gl/mcquarrie to withstand the vacuum of space originally in the story. they can withstand it for a short period.

on rebels recon pablo was asked if some stormies could survive in space after they got sucked out. he said yes but not for long. they need an airpack like the troopers that patrol the outside of the ds.

 

"fire in space" is pretty standard in Star Wars.

They're way above the shield:



and there's enough visible planetary curvature, to suggest that the battle in general takes place quite high up:

 

Indeed. To me before the buyout, it was clear they were able to operate for short periods in vacuum or poisonous areas (I thought there was an emergency 5 or so minute air supply built into the paneling on the back of the suit along with the other suit systems?) but post-disney it seemed that they 'nerfed' a lot of the stormtrooper corps'... well everything. Now everything says the suit can seal but without an external breathing apparatus like the TIE Pilots have, they cant survive.

That's what i liked about the scene, was that it seemingly brought the old thinking back into reality.
Sorry if i inadvertently diverted the thread.

 

well rebels was "post disney" and it says exactly what you just said... it was clear they were able to operate for short periods in vacuum or poisonous areas.

 

Indeed! As I pointed out earlier, that's an idea dating back to 1975.

And I love this shot. It's an intriguing echo of the Cloud City gantry scene in ESB.

 

The First Order's stormtroopers can't even do that:

Finn: Standard issue helmets are designed to filter out smoke, not toxins.

though it's unclear if this retroactively applies to OT-era stormtroopers as well.

 

You have diverted nothing but have demonstrated the willingness to make hard observations on hard data and trust the adults of a forum to sift through mountains of relations to arrive at a grain of defensible insight, like one does in the lived world. Maybe you will be singled out. Maybe you will not. Meanwhile, the author of the thread will be generating original content, through original knuckle bleeding research that requires his own thankless personal time, that forces readers to grapple with an exuberant miscellany of relations.

 

Fire balls when something's hit is pretty standard for Star Wars. But he only time I remember seeing smoke is the battle over Corisuant.

 

I. Most of the ISS views of the curvature of the earth, i.e., that are not deliberately using wide angle or fish eye lenses, show curvature consistent with the bottom image of Profundity. So that is an upper limit of altitude. The top image of Profundity shows a slightly shallower curvature. In realism-speak or Earth-wise, it's absolutely above any threshold where an ISS Darth Vader cape can be blown around. But they are teetering on the edge of realistic representations by having the defense that there is still air, still atmosphere, around or in sight. Vader's whipping cape and rising fires do not exist in a purely fantastical domain. It is a carefully calibrated medium between realism, fantasy and impression. It is at least a finer thing than purely fantastical depictions in Guardians of the Galaxy of a human surviving hard vacuum. Star Wars is at risk of Marvelisation in certain respects where it was held to certain internal universe rules. This effort by Disney is noted. They tried to toe a line of semi-realism semi-fantasy, in this specific regard, that did not break disbelief.


II. Mange observed that Antilles said, “Make sure you secure the airlock.”

It’s interesting that he says this after they have taken flight. It would be the sort of thing to say when they are just about to depart, but are still docked. That’s evidence for the Leia bridge scene being the first scene filmed, and only scene originally intended for the set that was built. It was only later that some of its dialogue was mooted or complicated by the reshoots which introduced Vader pursuing a rebel to a different entrance through a different airlock. So Antilles’ dialogue here *could be thrown out as wall breaking, if one intends for Vader’s spatial position directly behind the corvette to mean anything. I.e., RO is self-contradictory.

Or, Antilles’ dialogue can be put into the following context. The stern engineering access does not have its own airlock. The airlock services it took advantage of were in the gangway corridor that telescoped out from the Profundity. But it was shut by two external and one internal doors. No airlock of its own. And Antilles is referring to an airlock that is important, and that implies a more formal ingress/egress fit for a white-gown princess that does not involve walking between hot dirty radioactive stern engine nacelles, that is somewhere else. An was not secured as per procedure because they had to scram. He could be talking about an airlock, maybe not a huge one, that is in the starboard side hammerhead. They had to do something at some point before there was the rush of the plans coming on board. It was physically shut or closed before they took flight, but not locked out, not barred, not magnetically sealed or digitally secured (digital security at Endor bunker).

Frame by frame during Leia bridge reveals, beyond the reminiscent-but-not-SW77 "entry" point door, a duplication of large round white plastic door frame, maybe four feet beyond, which then maybe implies another four feet beyond that before one hits the starboard hull.


III. Evidence for the Vader shots being reshoots.
http://movieweb.com/rogue-one-darth-vader-scene-reshoots-star-wars/

I hypothesize that the shots of the full length of the corvette, that do not attempt in any way to demonstrate the relevance of the Vader shots, the Vader precipice, and the Vader hangar wall, were probably completed for the first version of RO. The Vader reshoots with the corridor interior sets, jammed door, closing doors, docking grip release, etc, might have been imposed over that already rendered CGI work, which already carried implication that ‘docking grips had been released’. The Vader footage and set work now piggy-backed on to that and altered or created a new (or ripped a new) conception over how ingress and egress worked with the corvette.

I hypothesize that the RO corvette set was originally built with *only the Leia bridge shot in mind, where the guy hands her the disk. It may have been something like a calming resolution scene where you get to breathe. The Leia CGI was a long pole item requiring lots of lead time and they would have started early to get that entire scene composited with matching lighting etc. They did not ever intend to purport that the RO set was the actual SW77 entry point. But they absolutely intended to evoke a sensation of nostalgia that gets repeat viewings. So they built that set economically to optimize for repeat viewers. If it was Not for simply causing nostalgia, and Was for actually representing the actual corridor from the actual SW77, they would have built the fully and explicitly replicated set from SW77.

There's other consequences of the Vader reshoots that I ruminated on but forget right now, that anyone can easily arrive at themselves. Just imagine how the entire sequence of departure from Profundity, with available footage, would have worked with zero Vader footage. It might have been too relaxing for what the psychologists were analyzing their focu$ group$ for. It had to be amped.


IV. Graphical demonstration of how neither RO corridor can be the SW77 corridor. The doors are ~4 feet wide, wall sections vary between ~2 and 6 feet wide (breaker boxes or red panels), the partial bulkheads/strength members/mine shaft timber shoring are all each ~1 foot wide.

Code:

SW77:       RO:
   \
 \ 4
 2 2
 1 1          \
[   ]       \ 4
 1 1        1 1
 5 5        5 5
 1 1        1 1
[  4       [   ]
 1 1        1 1
 6 6        6 6
 1 1        1 1
 4 4        4 4
 1 1        1 1
 =D=        =D=

 

As I mentioned in a post the other day, the two RO corridors are the same one. They're not intended to be the same corridors in-universe of course, but the lever that the Rebel soldier (played by Edwards) pulls down to release the docking clamps can be seen in the other shot as the camera tracks the running Rebel soldiers. If you're right, that can be a consequence of the reshoot. Though I don't think building another short piece of set should have been that more expensive.

 

Oh, sorry. I am casting around for language to strongly distinguish between the two uses of the same unaltered RO corvette set. A staid and stately use. A rushed and ill-considered use. The presence of the docking grip release lever in the Leia bridge scene creates some opportunities for trying to figure out how it was used in the original cut. I imagine someone casually pulled the lever down and the corvette casually fell out of the hangar. They kept the footage of the corvette casually falling, and reused that lever (and set) for a more action-packed departure. The prospect of them building another short piece of set for the re-shoot is an interesting conundrum. I trust they did not have gobs of time. Disney had to turn a quarterly profit on this movie in the very same way it had to on TFA. One way of controlling expense is to trust that most Star Wars fans don’t care if a set, even of such exceedingly specific fingerprint as the Blockade Runner entry point door, got reused. Lucas did it, and there is no higher authority of precedent. He greatly concealed this in many clever novel angles, and he needed them because of the sheer density of use his set got. RO corvette set has very few camera angles and very few cuts. So it probably made little sense to rapidly and expensively build more set for another, but only one more, two-second cut.

As people watch RO enough times back to back with SW77 they’ll start to see that neither the Leia bridge nor the stern escape RO corridors are the SW77 corridor. (Did Disney think of that? Worry about that?) It creates a problem for curious thinkers who do not expect the not-immense Blockade Runner to be a Tardis house of mirrors. What are the odds that a ship the size of the SW77 BR would have three sections that are aesthetically identical, but with a quantifiable, different topography? The re-shoot corridor is most certainly not the Leia bridge corridor, for the corvette’s hammerhead is not to be found up the corvette’s 11-engine array astern. The design leitmotifs of the MF are certainly repeated in various places throughout the ship (comfy tan fake leather upholstery). The SW77 BR entry door, with its fingerprint of red light pattern over the threshold, fingerprint of lights and controls on the side, the fingerprint of circuit breakers and red panels in its immediate environment, is a hard-to-fake monolithic icon. But it now occurs three times in one ship ( if the RO corvette is the SW77 BR, a point upon which I do not leap to any hasty conclusions - they may still be variants or sister ships, and the expository dialogue of SW77 has been handled very roughly, as it is). Is there an in-universe aesthetic that finds left-dogleg corridors to be attractive? Are they in vogue right then? Is there an in-universe engineering reason for having three left-dogleg corridors in the same corvette-sized ship?

The answer of course is that Disney was calculating for economic nostalgia. The first scene with Leia would have revealed useful and material information that people have craved to know since 1977 - what is the Blockade Runner cockpit like and how does Princess Leia fit into a context of being in command of this beautiful ship. So we would have gotten that reveal, via that set, and that dose of calculated nostalgia in the non-re-shoot. Very well. When the marching orders came down to embiggen the awesomity of the dollar printing turnip, the powers took the opportunity to one-up the dose of calculated nostalgia they already had in the can. If one watches carefully for what the director is trying to do to your limbic system in the escape scene, which is now placed prior in viewing sequence to the non-re-shoot, one sees that the reveal is dialed to compel a euphoric apotheosis into a chicken soup childhood wonderland (where most of Generation X's life is still yet ahead of them). (Compare to the emotional effect of the Leia bridge scene and tell me I am mathematically incorrect.)

Hija has his work cut out. For the time being I will place trust in the explanatory power of the TIE Boarding Craft, which receives a nod in RO, because it best supports an entry point in the conventional port cylinder (or starboard, doesn’t matter). But, that will wait till I see what Hija comes up with.

 

Sorry everybody that I was gone for almost three weeks, but house improvement had become an inevitable necessity (I had hoped I could do more Tantive IV work in the evenings, but was too exhausted). Since the main hallway set design for ANH and RO has been brought up and since I still had to deliver something I promised, here we go:



What you see in the hammerhead section is a faithful reproduction of the RO hallway set (by using the elements of the original ANH main hallway set blueprint, illustrated right and matched in scale to a Tantive IV of 148.8 meters length).

The hammerhead Illustration is based on the assumption that the gas cylinder (surrounded by a control panel) we see behind Antilles in RO is supposed to be the same one seen behind Vader in ANH. Frankly, the deck plan looks rather awkward to me (i.e. I don't believe any practical engineer would come up with such a layout contraption).

Alternatively, the RO gas cylinder is one we didn't see in ANH (i.e. it would be where in ANH the camera was standing shooting the scene) and the corridor segment in the ANH background where the prisoners are held was supposed to be the door to the cockpit (as Mange suggested), but there actually wasn't a (bulkhead) door but the brown, circular hatch instead!
The screencap of the guard standing in front of it and raising his blaster ("Last Rebel Standing"?) appears to come from a deleted scene that didn't make it into the film, nevertheless his fate looks rather clear to me:



(i.e. the guard appears to be one of the two bodies on the right side, as there is no visible record of another hallway side room variation with that particular, circular hatch, AFAIK).

Now, since we already know that there were at least two pentagonal hubs aboard the Tantive IV in ANH (i.e. the one where Antilles was killed by Vader and the smoke filled one from which the stormtrooper party came looking for the "passengers") I for one have absolutely no problem with a pentagonal hub just behind the cockpit as it probably contains "command section" controls and overrides for the hyperdrive, the engines and the environmental systems etc. that don't necessarily have to be inside the cockpit (which I believe to contain helm, navigation, communication and scanning) - this ain't Star Trek.

The interesting thing about the pentagonal hub where Vader killed Antilles is the visible, circular ceiling, also noticable in other behind the scenes images of that location:



It looks to me that this particular pentagonal hub is apparently located in the center of the reactor or cylinder section, i.e. the com-scan antenna is somewhere above the ceiling, the hatch behind the stormtrooper watching Antilles being lifted by Vader is probably an access hatch to components of the antenna, while the unusually high circular hatch behind the round-up prisoners is probably some kind of Star Wars "Jefferies Tube", enabling maintenance access to the starboard side cylinder / reactor. Once you see the deck plans, you'll hopefully agree that this particular pentagonal hub with all its known extensions fits and looks best there.

Coming up next is - of course - the part about "how" Vader and his stormtroopers boarded the Tantive IV, stay tuned.

 

I didn't really realise until listening to the OT radio broadcasts that they pronounced it as Tanter-vee.

 

No worries. I hope you're pleased with the result of your home improvement!

Looks great! There are a few things I don't agree with (I still think the door behind the troopers in ANH is the outer bridge door) and a few question marks (life pod #8? I've never read a suggestion that there would be an escape pod there. Both sides looks similar to docking ports).

Looking forward to your deckplan!

 

What is the source of the statement that the round brown-painted metal object behind the kneeling rebel is an airlock door?
Is the brown disk represented in the set blueprint?

 

Mange wrote

I hope you're pleased with the result of your home improvement!

Thank you, I am (but I would have rather liked to proceed with the Tantive IV, TBPH )

There are a few things I don't agree with (I still think the door behind the troopers in ANH is the outer bridge door) and a few question marks (life pod #8? I've never read a suggestion that there would be an escape pod there. Both sides looks similar to docking ports).

I couldn't blame you for thinking that (i.e. the RO filmmakers just used the wrong cockpit access hatch or door) as both the ANH novelization and the radio drama suggested that the Antilles scene should be near the cockpit. However, that would inevitably turn the door seen behind the arriving stormtroopers into an exterior hull door... (when I get to that part I will - somewhat reluctantly - examine how much water the "hold the command section" theory actually holds).

Using the occasion to illustrate how the film sets would actually fit inside, I also felt compelled to illustrate the "Access Option B" I described in the first post of this thread. So you see that a 'midship' main hallway close to the personnel hatch of the VFX model would actually lead into the upper part of the life pod section, i.e. where the top part of the launch tube of pod # 8 would be.

Hernalt wrote

What is the source of the statement that the round brown-painted metal object behind the kneeling rebel is an airlock door?
Is the brown disk represented in the set blueprint?

There is no source indicating the brown hatch to be an airlock door. According to the blueprints these pieces of the film set were originally just intended to be the hatches leading to the life (or escape) pods (and mounted at 'astro-droid level') in the corridor running parallel to the main hallway set.
Nevertheless, these brown hatches later got reused and elevated for the Antilles scene, i.e. one behind a stormtrooper watching Vader strangle Antilles and the other one in the background behind the round-up Rebels (and - of course - for Threepio to be able to get inside of what I'm certain is an "anti-flash chamber" just in front of the actual life pod launch tube):



The way I see it these brown hatches serve the same function as the white bulkhead doors, except that they signal passengers "No admittance - for authorized personnel only!"

 

Lt. Hija, is that the ANH set?

 

Ok. That nice CGI make up of the pentagon area helps solve a mystery. The rebel who I thought was kneeling, at 03:42 in SW77, is footage that has been inserted from other takes for other time sequences in other parts of the Elstree set. The frames at 03:42 are surrounded before and after with frames showing rebels kneeling, unambiguously, and this forces the assumption that the rebel at 03:42 is kneeling also. Not so. 03:44 shows clearly where the lines in the white door threshold molding are. They are at average eye line. For a rebel at 03:42 to kneel down far enough to make them be at his kneeling eye line, he'd be practically crawling. Furthermore, there is no logical spatial eye line between that brown round door (now at waist-high or knee-high level) and the entry point (white honeycomb) door. So that set of frames at 03:42 was inserted as an imperious editing choice, probably because it is precisely of a rebel raising his weapon, the last to do so, to bring the tension to its breaking point. Deeplyobsessed shows more than two locations for a hobbit door aside from being the hatchways to the escape pods. (They split into an upper and lower half that slide away.) Maybe one will turn up that perfectly matches the frames at 03:42.

 

Yes, it's a CGI reproduction of the film set as Hernalt has correctly noticed, and the Rebel in front of the brown circular hatch is seen at the very beginning of the stormtroopers breaking into the main hallway, but that footage must originate from a different scene (I plan to complement the later deck plans with screencaps to help visualize where each scene takes place).


How did Vader and the Stormtroopers board Princess Leia’s ship?

Almost as mysterious as the entry point for Vader and his Stormtroopers is the method they chose to accomplish that, which fortunately can be narrowed down to three different options:



Option A: Through the starboard ‘mandible’ of the pliers’ contraption at the ceiling of the main bay
While the port side mandible never touches the Tantive IV in its final resting position inside the main bay of the Devastator, the same doesn’t look that clear for its starboard counterpart which almost appears to touch the starboard ‘neck’ of Leia’s ship (intentional VFX composite suggestion?). Once an access to the captured vessel has been created, stormtroopers could pour into the vessel in quick succession via a chute. Such a mechanism would make it rather impossible for the crew of the captured ship to infiltrate the Star Destroyer in reverse (assuming, of course, they even could repel Imperial boarders in the first place).
The contraption rests on tracks but appears to be foremost designed to move cargo inside the bay and/or to hold and examine smaller vessels (and neutralize these if necessary) before these are ‘processed’. The mandibles might also be used to refuel smaller Imperial spacecraft, i.e. they are perhaps probe-and-drogue fueling booms (and the contraption may also contain the device/s that “vaporized” the Tantive IV to erase all traces of Vader’s illegal seizure of this consular ship, according to the extended original ANH screenplay).
The mandibles of the new VFX model built for TESB don’t remotely suggest these could be personnel chutes - in case that was a concept for ANH, it’s fair to assume that it was abandoned by the time the new VFX Star Destroyer model main bay was created for TESB.




Option B: By means of TIE Boarding Craft
Interestingly, one vehicle depicted in the 1977 Star Wars Sketchbook was the “TIE Boarding Craft” that never made it into the final film but would become the TIE Bomber and Needa’s TIE Shuttle (with solar fins bent outwards) in TESB and, last but not least, what could be probably designated as “TIE Fast Attack Craft” (seen briefly in the hangar of the second Death Star during Vader’s arrival and depicted in a Ralph McQuarrie ROTJ pre-production painting attacking capital Alliance ships).
What’s the story behind the design? In the original ANH screenplay drafts, the commander of the Imperial cloud city prison facility Alderaan (…) had boarding craft intercept and examine Solo’s Corellian pirateship as a security measure before bringing it into a hangar of that facility. Nevertheless, the style of Joe Johnston’s sketch suggests that the boarding craft was still a candidate in the late ANH production stages to bring stormtroopers into Leia’s ship, but ultimately discarded for reasons unknown. Dr. David West Reynolds re-discovered that idea and had that boarding method suggested in Star Wars - Incredible Cross-Sections (1998), which was ultimately picked up by the RO filmmakers as the means to board Admiral Raddus’ Profundity (but how did Vader get off the Lambda-class shuttle and into the Profundity…?).

Ironically (IMHO), the RO filmmakers inadvertently made the “Tantive IV-boarded-through-TIE-spacecraft-Theory” look somewhat weird: While it makes perfect sense to use TIE twin-pod craft as a means to board a vessel that can’t be taken into a Star Destroyer’s main bay, is the Galactic Empire really constrained and forced to apply the same boarding method for vessels secured in its main bay, considering that the payload (i.e. the number of stormtroopers a TIE Boarding Craft can carry) is inevitably restricted and determined by the boarding craft’s size?


Option C: Through an extendable gangway, concealed by not yet opened (and later closed) side panels in Devastator’s main bay
Once any captured vessel has been secured and neutralized, a gangway would be of immense help to facilitate the transfer of Imperial personnel to and from the captured ship. But if such a thing exists, couldn’t it also help from the start to a) cut an opening into the captured vessel, b) install a transitory airlock and c) drop off a whole bunch of stormtroopers and d) retract until the boarded vessel has been secured (as there are apparently Imperial concerns that the boarded crew, assuming they’d repel Imperial invaders, could bring a detonating device inside a Star Destroyer).

I think Option C is the most plausible boarding concept, and one emphasized by Alan Dean Foster (ghost writer) in the original novelization of ANH, too (however he assumed that the hallway the stormtroopers broke in and the one where Leia was being led away are one and the same): “The hallway they eventually emerged into was still smoking around the edges of the smoldering cavity blasted through the hull of the fighter. A portable accessway had been sealed to it and a circlet of light showed at the far end of the tunnel, bridging space between the rebel craft and the cruiser. … [Darth Vader … watched] [Leia] with interest as she was marched through the accessway into the cruiser.”

Still, what we can actually see outside the main hallway in ANH rather appears to be another room inside the Tantive IV, just in front of the main hallway’s bulkhead door, that has been demolished as collateral damage by the detonating device that pulverized the bulkhead door: We can clearly see deformed horizontal elements and erratic cables running behind these, which ultimately don’t really suggest sophisticated Imperial boarding equipment:

 

Fast mentions

I. The movement from TIE Boarding Craft>BR to BR>Devastator berth may hide clues to a choice by Lucas over how to tune to the highest dramatic impact possible. Which could require that the original BR as conceived in size relation to the Devastator was larger. But Lucas wanted a particular optics of oppression, and the BR got small enough, or the Devastator got large enough, for that maneuver to be visually conceivable. No more need, per se, for the optics of parity, or less asymmetry, by the proxy of the Boarding Craft. It was to be an overwhelming, unmitigated, unmediated experience.

II. Cheap solution to RO use of Boarding Craft + Shuttle. Use the fact that ESB AT-AT's have helmeted pilots. (I think I've heard from apocrypha that TIE's are pressurized.) Add a helmeted pilot to Shuttle, and evacuate Shuttle. Now just get Vader from evacuated Shuttle over to one evacuated instance of what should be some large number of still functioning airlocks. Close external door. Pressurize that airlock. Retain the internal pressure of rebel ship. Retain the health of potential prisoners. TIE Boarding Craft has more options than that.

 

Can't really comment right now, but I must say that the cables etc. behind where the Stormtroopers enters the corridor was quite the catch! I've never seen that until now! And option C does seem to be a contender.

Good work!

 

Also notice the panel (in the image insert with the firing stormtroopers) with these ANH typical circular indicator dome thingies. If that panel were part of an Imperial boarding mechanism, I'd have to wonder a) who actually operates it and b) why it was put at such an exposed place. For me it's easier to believe that it is an interior component of the Tantive IV that merely withstood the blast that pulverized the bulkhead door.

Admittedly it's a rather odd thing, that in both cases (ANH & RO) we are probably 'looking' at gangway mechanisms which we never saw on screen.

 

That's certainly the way they're portrayed in Rebels - though Rebels tie-in media suggests they lack proper life support.

I think the idea is that they're pressurised enough to hold an atmosphere in - but normally, oxygen is fed directly to the pilot's suit. Thus, as in the Season One finale Fire Across The Galaxy, the Rebels can be in the TIE unhelmeted for a short time, but not for a long mission.

 

55:09 / 2:30:43, Empire of Dreams, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Nw_VeZk_q0U