I noticed that TFA put glass in the Falcon laser turrets and had the turboguns outside controlled by separate consoles on the other side. Which is a nice improvement on the OT-era tech where if your forcefields failed you presumably got sucked out into space.
What? The design of the falcon turrets didn’t change. While the actual filming set might not’ve had glass in the windows, it certainly wasn’t intended that they were just open holes. NONE of the full scale or miniature ships in the original film had glass in the windows because it was too big of a risk for reflecting the camera crews, lights, etc. which was a huge problem for optical compositing back then.
They did make the guns move differently than they were originally designed to, though. It’s something that’s been done in the eu and toys and things before, but this was the first time it was seen in a film. One is that the larger “disc” assemblies on top and bottom of the falcon that contain the gunner turrets could rotate independently of the ship and each other. Problem is that if that were to actually happen, it would shear the ladder tube that you climb up or down to get to the turrets… The tube is clearly lined up with the turret windows, but the windows are NOT centered on the discs…
Second is the way the gun itself actually moves. This is something that a LOT of material seems to not understand. The gun is cradled in a “U” shaped bracket where it can pivot up and down along the longitudinal axis (nose to tail) of the ship. This “U” bracket is then attached to the ship via a horizontal (relative to the ship) post that can rotate left and right. When you consider the orientation of the gunners (the top gunner is lying on his back relative to the ship and looking straight up, the bottom gunner is lying on his stomach looking straight down) you see that from their perspective, it’s like operating a gun mounted on a tripod that can swivel left, right, up, and down. The default position of the guns when powered up is, therefore, pointing straight up and straight down relative to the ship.
When Finn jumps into the gunner position you can clearly see the swiveling post ALSO can swing around in pretty much any direction. I don’t really have an issue with that as it just means the gunner has more options, but it’s clearly not the way it was originally intended to move if you study the model.
Interestingly, as I was searching for pictures to illustrate this, I found the one below that shows the swiveling U bracket on the 5ft (the very first falcon) model had been damaged and replaced with just a rod by the time of ROTJ…
JEDIT: found a couple more images that do a good job illustrating my point
