A spacecraft from the Star Wars saga was made with parts of tanks from World War II

@DefAviation ES 9·19·2023 · 21:59 0

The first scene we were able to see from the Star Wars film saga impressed many of us when we were children.

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That scene featured the Corellian corvette Tantive IV, the consular ship carrying Princess Leia Organa, being closely pursued by a much larger Imperial I class star destroyer. That scene is world famous, but there is an almost unknown fact: in that scene there were parts of tanks from World War II, specifically in the aforementioned Corellian cover.

That detail is not easy to locate. In fact, it is impossible to detect it at the scene, but a series of photos published by The Prop Den last Sunday did allow us to distinguish them, specifically in the escape capsule used by C3PO and R2D2 to escape from the corvette and reach the planet Tatooine, where they meet Luke Skywalker.

On these lines you can see the model of that escape capsule embedded in the ship. And below we can see the entire capsule.

Even then it is difficult to distinguish the details. But in the following photo of the capsule we find some surprises:

You can see a revealing detail here, circled in red. Do you recognize it?

What we see is one of the bogies of an American M-4 Sherman tank from World War II. These bogies held the lower wheels. The Sherman had three bogies on each side.

Below we can see another detail that will be familiar to fans of World War II tanks. It appears surrounded by two red circles:

This is the running chain of a German Panzer V Panther tank, a 1943 model that was also used in World War II.

And how did two World War II tank elements get to a Corellian corvette in an action that takes place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away"? We have the explanation in this another photo posted by The Prop Den:

What we see is the process of making the model of the aforementioned Corellian corvette for the first Star Wars film, today known as Episode IV. Look at what you see here:

These are boxes of model vehicles from the Second World War. In the foreground we see a box of a 2 and a half ton truck, and in the background we see the box of a Panther tank and another box . Between the two we see a garbage can with a board on top. On it there are die cuts of model parts. Thus, in the creation of the Star Wars ships, the most diverse objects were used to create the details, including parts of tanks from World War II.

Let us also remember that light weapons from the two world wars were also used in these films to make the different laser weapons that appear in Star Wars, in addition to some more modern light weapons.

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Photo sources: Frikipolis.com / The Prop Den (1) / The Prop Den (2) / Joost J. Bakker / Stahlkocher.