The guys at Varooma.com did some research and came up with the infographic below to break it all down for us. So here is the logistics of building and operating the Millennium Falcon. Since the technologies that Millennium Falcon uses do not exist till date, they have been substituted for the next best things we have in the real world.
In the universe of Star Wars, Millennium Falcon is manufactured by Corellian Engineering Corporation. It is actually a cargo vessel that can carry up to 100 metric tons of cargo and it has the maximum speed of 1050 kilometers per hour (later customized by Han Solo and Chewbacca to suit their smuggling business). Its Hyperdrive System is “Isu-Sim SSP05 Hyperdrive” and is rated “Class 0.5.” It spans around 34.75 meters from head to tail. First off, the costs of the raw material, the talent, the team and the space to construct the ship. Since it is a spaceship, obviously, NASA scientists are to be given the job. A full time salary for approximately 100 NASA trained construction crew would cost around 5.2 million pounds and another million pounds for leasing a NASA airfield and building a hanger. It would need approximately 23 tons of steel and titanium for construction which would cost us around 900 thousand pounds. Our real-life Falcon would have Magnesium 5 inch plating as the substitute for the Millennium Falcon’s Armor Plating. It would cost us 750 thousand pounds. A high-power phone jammer costing 1000 pounds could work for the communication jammer. Our Titan supercomputer could replace Falcon navicomputer which would cost 68 million pounds. There’s Trophy active protection for 200,000 pounds to function as the Falcon’s deflector shield. Nuclear Propulsion Reactor is our closest real world equivalent of the falcon’s quadex power core which bags up another 63 million pounds. We would need 110 million pounds for two Falcon heavy rockets to substitute Girodyne Sublight Engines, 1.8 billion pounds to substitute the hyperdrive generator with the FTL travel research center technology, 230 million for cannons plus 2.5 million pounds for missiles and 500 thousand pounds for the Falcon Dish Antenna. In total, the technology department would cost us roughly around 2.5 billion pounds. Staffing the Falcon with two fully trained NASA pilots and two gunners would cost about 170 thousand pounds a year. Now, wear and tear is inevitable in any kind of ship. So, maintenance of our Falcon would cost us around 2.9 million pounds per year. Assuming that the ship docks at the imperial class spaceports for fuel, fluids and food for the crew and stays in the space at least 3 months per year, it would set us up for 5000 pounds per annum at the rate of 0.37 pounds for 1 Galactic Credit. To lift the Falcon up to space, we need to set up a control center and a full ground crew of 15–20 crucial positions. The cost of salaries and all for the ground crew would go up to around 750 thousand pounds per year. According to NASA, the average cost to launch a space shuttle is approximately 310 million pounds. All in all, the cost of building a real-life Millennium Falcon would be a whopping sum of around 2.8 billion pounds (4 billion US dollars approximately). And the annual expense would be almost 5 million pounds (7.15 million US dollars approximately). Actually, there is someone in Tennessee who is attempting to build a life-sized working model of the Falcon. It looks like you can have your own Millennium Falcon after all, only if you have the dough. Featured photo credit: Varooma.com via varooma.com
