The Millenium Falcon and its missing conceptual development

As far as I can tell, there is no significant concept development of the Millenium Falcon between the intial blockade runner design and the subsequent 'real' Falcon. One moment it's the blockade runner, the next it's the falcon as we know it.

For a design departure that radical, you'd think there had been some sketches or mockups of some sort, right? The roughest, earliest drawings I've been able to find, are the thumbnails McQuarrie did for his revised Docking Bay 94 painting in A Gallery of Imagination, and clearly those were almost fully fledged designs!

So where did it come from? Am I just missing something obvious? (And no, it wasn't inspired by a burger.)

You're probably thinking of this quote from Cinefex #65, p80):

Among the largest of them was the *Millenium Falcon*—whose redesign by Joe Johnston was purportedly inspired by Lucas’ idea of a hamburger in space. “The original concept called for the *Falcon* to sail like a giant sunfish,” explained Lorne Peterson. “It would lift off on its horizontal axis, then rotate into a vertical configuration and fly opened on edge with the front mandibles pointed forward. We never actually shot it that way, though, because George decided he liked the look of it flying horizontally.

I have a pet theory that it was inspired by a John Berkey painting. But still, from that idea, to the final McQuarrie drawing? A huge hole...

I always thought it was inspired by a human hand.

I don't disagree with that*, but that still doesn't explain why there is no visual development of the new Falcon design. You don't just build a $150.000 (1977 dollars) model without a plan. Hell, russians don't take a dump without a plan, how would you build a model spaceship?

* Currently wishing I could find out when the cockpit interior was built in relation to the final design/model

I've heard the story about an olive next to a hamburger = Falcon.

Yeah, I'm not believing it either, but that's the only one I've heard, not any fish or hand theories.

I've heard the hamburger story in the context of the redesign: They needed a idea for the redesign, and George was holding a hamburger with a bite missing. So he said, "how about this, with an olive as the cockpit?"

I've never seen any direct quotes from Lucas in which he said that the Falcon was based off of a burger. But I've seen the story perpetuated over and over again, as if he had (as with so many other half-truths and non-truths; sourcing claims is not something people are big on).

So let's take it from the top; Dale Pollock, in Skywalking page 210:

And who else [but Lucas] would refer to the *Falcon* as “a hamburger-shaped spaceship”?

 Doesn't indicate anything, except that the Falcon is somewhat hamburger-shaped. Says nothing about the design process. And then from the previous quote:

[...] whose redesign by Joe Johnston was purportedly inspired by Lucas’ idea of a hamburger in space.

Which could just as easily have come out of Johnston saying something along the lines of: "You know, George said just the other day, that the Falcon looked almost like a burger flying through space," and the writer not being careful enough with his choice of words, much like the 'Slave 1 was based on a streetlamp'-myth (untrue).

Love this by the way.

I heard it was based on a bed that Lucas really liked:

This one, I think.

But it was probably this one.  It's too much of a coincidence.

The resemblance is uncanny.

Here's the only storyboard I've ever seen of the Syd-Mead-esque Falcon redesign. In fact, it's the only other rendition of that cockpit I've seen aside from McQuarrie's production painting.