Millennium Falcon Docking Bay Doubles As Table

A glass table makes a perfect display case for showing off whatever’s important to you, but if you want keep the dust off of your treasures, closing up the sides is probably a wise move. It might not be a bad idea to put some lighting in there to make sure everything is easy to see. You might as well make the lights RGB and remote controlled, so you can fiddle with the look from across the room. Of course, you could go all in and just make the thing a diorama…

It’s not hard to imagine the line of thinking that convinced [Erv Plecter] he should turn a simple glass table into a docking bay for a model of the Millennium Falcon, and looking at the final results, we think it was the right move. With an incredible attention to detail, what started out a generic looking table and rather modest toy, have been combined into an interactive display that could woo even the staunchest of Trekkies.

If you’ve ever considered lighting a model, this project is an excellent example to follow. The Hasbro toy that [Erv] started with certainly wasn’t what you’d call studio quality; the little lighting it featured wasn’t even accurate to how the ship appears in the films. But with some reference material, fiber optic cables, and enough Arduinos to drive it all, the final lighting is truly a marvel. We’d say the engine is our favorite part, but those tiny lit panels in the cockpit are hard to beat.

While the Falcon is clearly the star of the show, the docking bay itself is certainly no afterthought. The back-lit panels, with their inscrutable Imperial design aesthetic, look fantastic. The addition of small details like crates and barrels, plus the glossy black PVC sheet used for the floor, really brings the whole scene to life. It’s almost a shame that the ship itself is so big, as a smaller model would have left more room to toss in a few Stormtroopers and droids out on patrol.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody augment a “toy” grade model with additional lighting effects. While the scale miniature aficionados in the audience might turn their nose up at some of the artistic liberties taken on these low fidelity models, we think any normal person would be blown away if they saw them in person.

13 thoughts on “Millennium Falcon Docking Bay Doubles As Table

  1. Does the writer mean “trekker”? The term used described someone who really can’t separate reality from fiction, and typically dresses like their favorite character might.

    1. If you actually know the difference between the two terms off the top of your head, and further comment about it online…I got a pretty good idea of which side of the fence you might be on.

  2. The scene and detail look amazing, but the video doesn’t give justice to the work involved IMHO. The optic fiber of the cockpit at the very beginning seems to be the cherry on the cake, yet there’s 8 minutes on “I can switch the led strip from different colors”.

      1. +2 Started… 10 seconds later went double speed. 10 seconds after that, started skipping. Finished in under a minute and I don’t think I missed a single thing. The entire video was just about changing the colour with the remote!
        *very* disappointing.

  3. Everyone else probably knew what he meant by “GTP panels”,
    but I had to Gooooogle it,

    https://galactictradingpost.com/

    Man, that is expensive!
    (I’m not saying they are charging more than they need to run a business, I just don’t have that kind of priority for my non-essential cash). Though I would like to someday decorate the interior of a building like that, like the guy that remodeled his apartment to resemble ST:TNG sets.

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