BTS The Star Destroyer bridges of the Original Trilogy

I take the Rogue One Visual Dictionary's word for it. And the novelization. And, I suspect, the script.

 

Lt. Hija

Whatever was stated within the screenplay in 1975-76, by the time we get to 1978 and TESB the idea of what a SD bridge looks like has been defined and expanded into a more substantial bridge that is worthy of a ship the size of a SD. What you have in the ANH screenplay is almost certainly the remnants of early scripts of two man star destroyers where the bridge was a two man cockpit as Nibelung pointed out, they probably never got updated as the film ran over budget and these small scenes were rushed.

 

Django Fett wrote

What you have in the ANH screenplay is almost certainly the remnants of early scripts of two man star destroyers where the bridge was a two man cockpit

That's not correct, you just have to go to the first post and illustration in this thread to see that the bridge (or "cockpit") always had bridge windows in the very beginning and in the later Joe Johnston storyboard.
The only thing that changed in the final film is that we ended up with a much, much bigger viewscreen, i.e. apparently one to the port or starboard side of the Devastator.

The basic design philosophy was carried over to ESB, i.e. physical windows towards the bow (front) but holographic windows / viewscreens to the port and starboard side.

Considering that the Devastator is apparently a type of battleship with heavy artillery on its port and starboard side, I find corresponding port and starboard side viewscreens on the bridge (to select remote targets for the artillery crews or the like) more than appropriate, even though we only saw the main viewscreen in ANH utilized to show us a gunport on the lower port side of the Star Destroyer.

 

Lt. Hija

What i'm referring to is the earliest scripts, Star Wars The Adventures of Starkiller, where we have these two man 'wedge shaped' Star Destroyers, as noted by Nibelung. As the script was rewritten again and again over the years it may be a basic mistake by GL that has carried through to the story boards which weren't then used to create the set. It may have gone right up to the point when the blue prints for the set were drawn up, then the 'cock-pit' became the gunnery station however the script wasn't amended. As I've said before the two officers aren't wearing officers/nco's uniform but are wearing jumpsuits, something we don't see in any scene in ANH for command staff. There is also the simple case that ILM were very slap-dash in constructing the models, many of the larger ships don't match the actual set dimensions so to try and make sense of them could end up being pointless.


Whatever the intention before and during production of ANH it has ended up being more practical that this is a gunnery command station now and the real bridge is what we see Vader on in Rogue One.

 

I'm the last one who'd deny that there may have been last minute changes during production, but the set blueprint according to Rinzler (see first post of this thread) carried the annotation "Imperial Starship Cockpit" and not gunnery station, so the intention what this set meant to represent in the final film looks rather clear, doesn't it.

IMHO, it's very likely that the original script annotation "captain" for the character who is wearing the jumpsuit of an Imperial pilot is erroneous (my bet would be Commander Praji, TBPH). Yet, in ESB we see plenty of Imperial personnel wearing this kind of jumpsuit aboard the bridges of the Executor and the Avenger (and in ROJ aboard the Emperor's Super Star Destroyer), apparently Imperial starship pilots you'd expect to man at least the consoles helm and navigation.

 

Lt. Hija

The difference between the storyboards and the blue prints are obvious, the storyboards feature an area that has multiple crewmembers but the blue print features an area for just two personnel. The change has already occurred between storyboarding the scene and designing the construction of the set, that much is obvious but what hasn't changed is the wording or title for whatever reason. This isn't ROTJ when the art and costuming department made a massive blunder with imperial insignia, we have never heard anything from LFL and ILM to say a mistake was made. For whatever reason somewhere between the script was written, the storyboards drawn up and principal photography a decision was made to have two technicians in the scene instead of command crew. Whenever that decision was made it is likely they changed from "cockpit" to a gunnery station...and remember scripts aren't there to inform the viewers, the novelisation is for that.

 

Django Fett wrote

Whenever that decision was made it is likely they changed from "cockpit" to a gunnery station...and remember scripts aren't there to inform the viewers, the novelisation is for that.

Nevertheless the original OT novelizations are based on the scripts. In this particular case I can't follow your argument entirely.

The guy in charge is still the captain in the novelization, but the script's "chief pilot" Lt. Hija has now become "one of his chief gunnery officers". Nothing in the novelization remotely suggests that the location has changed from the "cockpit" or bridge to "a gunnery station".

The way I see it we were at first looking at a bridge viewscreen a la Star Trek in ANH. But by the time of the first script of ESB that concept retroactively changed - http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...-the-original-trilogy.50044307/#post-54151908 - yet by the time of ROJ, featuring the "converted control room" (i.e. the Emperor's throne room), we were finally provided with a good idea where that "main viewscreen" of the Devastator bridge would have been situated, i.e. on the port or starboard side of the bridge further to the back (see pentagonal viewscreen compilation in my first post in this thread).

As suggested in my post # 153 above, I see nothing but good reasons for the main gunnery control to be located on the bridge to control and command the vessel's heavy guns located on the port and starboard side by means of larger viewscreens equally located on the port and starboard side of the bridge.

 

http://cdn.brianstoys.com/media/cat...d-diecast-imperial-cruiser-dca-30829377-2.jpg


Also:

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/Pix/cards/wide/anh030.jpg

Remember how fast the ship moved toward the Death Star in this shot? A ship moving that fast toward the Death Star (to the point of almost becoming a tiny "speck") is either:

a. going to crash into the Death Star
b. going to dock inside the Death Star

I go with "b". No need for a "shuttle" to transport Vader and Leia to the Death Star, when the Imperial Cruiser/Star Destroyer will do the job just fine by itself.

 

My point in all of this, is to argue that the Star Destroyers of the OT were originally conceived to have been much a craft that was much smaller and much faster than they ended up being in ESB and ROTJ. This wasn't just in the design phase/pre-production, but even as the ship(s) appeared in the final film (the first SW). Rather than the size of the Blockade Runner re: scale vs. the Star Destroyer forcing a re-think of the latter craft's size, I think it was the absence of the Death Star in the second film that was responsible for the conceptual re-think of the ship's design. "What's going to take the place of the Death Star? I know! Let's not only make the Star Destroyers (obviously) bigger in size, but add running lights to them!"

 

"Make the star destroyer props bigger and more detailed" yes - but they still reused the old props. They even copy-pasted the running lights from the new props, over images of the old destroyers.

 

Exactly. Yes, they re-used the old props (the 3-foot mode from the first movie). But they also built a new, 8-foot model. This reinforces my point that there was a conceptual re-think of the Star Destroyers between the first film and the second film. Re: what I said in the last post about them "docking" inside the Death Star; The SW (ANH) Star Destroyer ("Imperial Cruiser") could dock inside of the Death Star (and in the case of the "Devastator", it most likely did, judging from that shot). The Star Destroyers of ESB and ROTJ? Not a chance, even with the so-called "bigger" Second Death Star.

 

But according to the (undisputed) height examinations of the Death Star's equatorial rings (approx. 1.5 km in height, IIRC) any Star Destroyer that doesn't exceed that "Max Headroom" could theoretically dock inside the Death Star (assuming you'd have hangar bays as tall as the equators).

 

I see where you're coming from. The screenplay does identify the "window" as the main viewscreen. However, there is at least one good reason to move this scene from the bridge to a gunnery station and that is that its crew are looking through a window (or perhaps a force field such as that we see in ROTS): We see a small gun swivel to the direction of the escape pod. Another reason is of course that it physically can't be the bridge as it's of course isn't in line of sight with the escape pod (and thus the crew cannot have swiveled a physical gun towards it).

According to Ralph McQuarrie's production drawing that includes the dimensions of the Death Star, the waistband trench is one mile tall, giving the ISD ample of space to dock with the DS (and there are other ways to dock besides than in a hangar). However, it seems to actually be the other way around: When the starship sizes were revised during the production of Star Wars, the Star Destroyer was actually intended to be much, much larger and if anything actually was downsized for TESB. There's a quote included in Stephen Sansweet's book Star Wars: From Concept to Screen to Collectible on how big the Star Destroyer really was intended to be:

 

Found some really interesting pics of the sort of variations in design. Concept art is really cool.

 

I don't know if anyone's mentioned this or if it's relevant, but we see a Star Destroyer docked inside a bay within the Death Star's equatorial trench in Rogue One when Krennic is departing for Eadu.

 

Screen shot? because I was looking through the screen caps myself and don't see a star destroyers docked during that scene...

 

Far left. Last docking bay. Timeframe 55:52-56

 

Ahh never saw that... cause I was on low battery. Great detail and notice!

 

I'm a sucker for little details. I think they make some of the biggest impacts when they're noticed, that is!

 

as am I... as am I

 

If the trench is 1 mile tall - and the hangar bay slightly less (0.7 miles?) and the Star Destroyer is slightly more than half the height of the hangar (0.4 miles?) then that puts the star destroyer in the trench as at least a mile long.

Somewhat bigger than the 0.6 miles long (955m) that has been proposed for the Rogue One Star Destroyer length.

 

Where was that proposed?

 

Here:

 

Thanks Iron_lord! I missed that. Well, in this instance, I think Lt. Hija is plain wrong: It's a standard ISD-I.

 

I tend to the view that models, movie screenshots, etc. shouldn't be taken over-literally - you can't always take bridge size, for example, as a hard-and-fast thing that forces any official statements that contradict it, to be "erroneous" and "mistaken".

So - when they say an ISD is 1600 m, then, even if it makes the Rogue One apparent bridge size a little problematic - I live with it - I treat the movie shot as slightly exaggerating the size of the bridge, rather than it being a different class of ship.

Same with very slight differences in the structure of the gun turrets on the Rogue One ISDs compared to the ANH ISDs. It's not that they're different ships - it's stylistic filmic differences - they're, in-universe, identical.