K's Incredible Cross-Sections books have revealed, through their marvelous cut-away paintings, the inner workings of a plethora of real-world objects, including seagoing men-o'-war, airliners, nuclear submarines and skyscrapers. Now comes a volume that exposes the fictional Star Wars vehicles and spacecraft in similar exacting detail. Anyone who has ever wanted to see more than just the tantalizing glimpses the movies give of all that cool stuff--who has yearned to know, for example, what the inside of Boba Fett's ship Slave I is like--will find a feast for the eyes.
All the major Star Wars ships are shown, including X-wings, Snowspeeders, TIE Fighters, the Millennium Falcon, AT-ATs, and Jabba the Hutt's Sail Barge. The Death Star gets a four-page pullout spread. Each craft is painted in a colorful, meticulous manner, with three-dimensional sections sliced away to reveal complex and convoluted insides. Key components such as circuitry bays, fuel drivers, and warp vortex stabilizers are labeled, and interesting facts (a typical Star Destroyer carries 9,700 stormtroopers) are given. A few of the entries include detailed drawings of special features, such as the Millennium Falcon's Dejarik gameboard that Chewbacca and R2-D2 played with.
It's interesting to see how these ships, which of course were originally designed simply to look cool, have had deeper and deeper realism impressed upon them. Princess Leia's Corellian Corvette, the Tantive IV--originally "bashed" together from off-the-shelf model kits--now has a complete deck plan and engineering schematic, right down to the formal dining room.
A tiny Darth Vader!
What makes this book so fun is that although the drawings are highly detailed, they have a soft, colorful style often seen in children's books. And the drawings include characters from the movies doing interesting things, which is an enlivening touch. A stormtrooper, for example, is seen loading Han Solo encased in carbonite onto Boba Fett's ship. The painting of the Tantive IV presents the Corvette right after its capture by the Empire. In the Operations forum, Darth Vader can be seen throttling Captain Antilles while stormtroopers lead Rebel prisoners and droids off the ship, and in a side corridor on the lower deck, Princess Leia gives the Death Star plans to R2-D2 while C-3PO looks on.
The scale of the larger ships, such as the 1.6 kilometer-long Star Destroyer, is too big to see any human activity, and these illustrations are a bit stale because of it. But the enormity of the Death Star, where each of its hundreds of decks is little more than a line, is awesome.
A somewhat excessive amount of the book is devoted to the star fighters. The X-wing and Y-wing are pretty similar, and the innards of one look much like those of the other. This is also true of the TIE Fighter and TIE Advanced X1 (Darth Vader's ship as seen in Star Wars). It would have been be nice to be shown, instead, some exotic locales such as Jabba's palace or the Mos Eisley cantina.
Still, this book will provide hours of fun for gadget-oriented Star Wars fans as they pore over every last widget and doohickey.
