Fixing Porsche's Star Wars Ship

so recently Porsche unveiled what they call the tri wing s 91x pegasus which is the result of a six-week collaborative process between the designers at Porsche and the art department at Lucasfilm to design a Starfighter for Star Wars I was following the process since they announced it and I was interested to see what they would come up with and the results were well okay that's really just not a Star Wars design honestly it doesn't even really look like Porsche design either so I thought it would be a fun little project to reinterpret this ship into a familiar design language kind of acting in the role of an art director who says okay you've got a good basic shape and some cool ideas but let's just take the final step to make it into a proper Star Wars design now I'll share more about my design itself in a bit but first I would like to talk about some of my baseline thought processes as it pertains to Star Wars design now I understand that Star Wars exists in a pretty broad universe it encompasses a number of different styles even in the very first movie virtually no two designs looked alike there was no prescribed layout that ships were expected to follow but even though a TIE fighter in an x-wing have virtually no common features they inhabit the same world effortlessly so what makes a spaceship inhabit the world of star wars and what makes the Porsche design in my opinion just some spaceship well part of the problem is that the Porsche ship is designed in a way that seems kind of unaware of the sort of world that Star Wars is because it looks like a futuristic aircraft concept by and large the spaceships of star wars are not futuristic a long time ago isn't just poetic license it informs the feel of the entire world from the hand props to the vehicles and when you really look into it you'll find that most Star Wars designs have some kind of basis in a real historical vehicle which brings us back to the porsche pegasus fighter if you look at it what sorts of vehicles does it evoke in essence it looks like a futuristic car glued to a modern Delf bomber honestly the designers weren't shy about admitting that they literally cut and paste different designs together to get this spaceship so I don't think the glued together characterization is unfair because it's actually something they're kind of strangely proud of but it's not like it yielded an ugly ship the design is pretty cool-looking but that's not the point here the point is that it fails to capture the essence of what makes Star Wars designs work and fit together in the same universe the more I look at it the more it looks like something from star citizen which obviously is not an insult because those are cool ships but it's not the look you should be going for if you're trying to make a Star Wars design now despite everything that I've said about the historical basis of designs and Star Wars the shape of this fighter isn't a problem in theory it's just a missed opportunity because not every Star Wars design has a historical counterpart but I think it still needs to be detailed correctly with classic industrial components and not futuristic ones for instance Star Wars doesn't really favor these in sets and unattached thin overhanging panels even the more flowing and organic designs and Star Wars favors solid shapes and simple lines not these sorts of razor-sharp elements and for what it's worth all these little sharper bits aren't really a hallmark of Porsche design either which makes this ship all the more confounding to me but overall we can use an authentic Star Wars approach to detailing to really push the Porsche design into the correct world of course much of the shaping itself needs to be reworked first and to do that I went back to the original design brief that the designers got for this project Doug Chang's challenge was to combine an x-wing Y wing and Ewing with the Porsche Taikan canonically as an interesting side point the ship would appear to be designed by income which means in addition to the x-wing and the UAE elements it opens the door to sky hopper and snowspeeder aesthetics as well I figured that the original design basically didn't accomplish any of these points so I gave myself a little bit of freedom as well because yes it could easily be argued that my ship doesn't have too much Porsche ty can in it or Porsche at all but if we look at the original design aside from the headlights and the taillights which are honestly kind of blatant and goofy it doesn't have any explicitly Taikan elements either now the cockpit area does evoke an automobile but it's so vague that it could resemble any number of cars and ultimately it doesn't really evoke the x-wing or the y-wing either in fairness there is a little bit of Ewing in there with the spread of the wings but I think that we can do a lot better I knew that I wanted the hard geometry characteristic of incom ships but I also did want some of those softer shapes to give some recognition to the Porsche origins so I decided to unify these two aspects with a rounded sloping core structural element that was soft and automobile like on the leading edges and sharp and industrial on the trailing edges ultimately this shape would fan out to encompass the engines which are virtually the only other explicitly rounded parts of the ship by having these sharp edges overlap with the rounded ones we can effectively blend these elements creating a more unified appearance the central spine of the ship which includes the cockpit is shaped like an inverted x-wing fuselage that is instead of a long nose and a stubby aft end we have a stubby nose and the aft has been elongated I took the x-wing canopy enlarged it and rounded it off to communicate a tiny bit of Porsche Flair which I borrowed very vaguely from the rear windows of a number of different Porsche models one thing I did leave off was what is perhaps the only Star Wars element on the original Porsche design an astromech droid and that was more of a public statement rather than an artistic choice the very fact that the Porsche designers apparently thought that they needed to include the Droid is to me something of an admission that the design doesn't really work so I intentionally left it off of mine to demonstrate that the design should look Star Wars without any blatant placement of a familiar element oh I also introduced folding wings into the design to give the ship a smaller landing footprint and while it's a common element on Star Wars ships I don't think that they need an articulated element but it did seem like an appropriate choice for a ship with such a large wingspan but that's really all I to say on the issue Porsche designed a pretty cool spaceship I'm not gonna pretend that they're inept or something and I don't want anybody to think that that's what I'm saying but I do think that the design misses the mark and it falls short of what I would consider a Star Wars design is my redesign a better ship no I'm not saying that at all but I do personally believe it fits the original design brief much better than the ship they designed but I'll let you guys decide the verdict ultimately I'd like to give a shout out to my friend Angeles Carter Ennis who as usual provided the absolutely stellar renders of my ship for this video honestly 50% of how these ships look is just how they're lit and rendered and he does an excellent job I'd also like to thank the nearly 160 amazing patrons who support my work every month on patreon you guys helped make this channel economically viable and I hope you all know how much I appreciate your support and to the rest of you thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: EC Henry

Views: 465,237

Rating: 4.8848481 out of 5

Keywords: star wars design, star wars porsche

Id: wJevc8fQVEg

Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/VGAPixel]

This ship does not fit within the design language of Star Citizen.

[u/Gonji89]

Yeah... The one Porche designed was fucking dope.

[u/Slabwrankle]

I think I prefer the Porsche version to the redesign. His argument doesn't really stand up when you consider the prequels.