Thanks guys!
long rant below...
Darth Humorous and Treadwell,
thanks, I will keep your suggestions in mind!
Sofaking and Scratchy,
Thanks guys. It still needs a lot of work, but its basic shape could actually work as the life sized replica. An architect friend of mine offered to take a look at the model, to see if he could make some structural suggestions. I'll let you know what comes of that. But basically, his first impression is that it seems completely feasible.
so, now for the long rant... I just did a bunch of fresh photomatches of the ANH and ESB cockpits, and a number of notions I've been harboring for a long time have been totally shattered.... I know not to trust photogrammetry completely, but I've been able to make enough practically dead-on matches from numerous angles to believe what I'm seeing.
first of all, none of the blueprints for the cockpit are correct to anything that was built... ouch.
The photo of the under construction ANH cockpit with the backwall off and one of the art directors standing in it, is the closest of all the photos to the original drawings. It has a basic inner diameter of 8', and conforms to most of the rest of the plans (aside from a few extra steps up from the floor, and the orientation of the console.)
But then, with the set piece as it's seen in the movie proper, everything goes to hell. In order to make things fit, all the panels have to be overlapped in various ways to crunch down the cockpit diameter to somewhere around 7' 9'. Doesn't seem like a lot, but it cuts off large portions of many panels to work. It also shows the source of the misaligned upper strip lighting seen behind Han. My gut instinct is that George saw the cockpit that fit the plans and said it needed to be smaller and tighter. Which makes sense when he's later resistant to Kershner's expanded ESB cockpit.
The ESB cockpit itself seems to retain the reduced diameter. The plans for the ESB cockpit, which are exact copies of the ANH drawings, but with a little extra depth, don't seem to have been followed much either. Even down to the extra depth, which is noted at 18 more inches, is probably only 15" in the movie set. (there is a note on the drawing that says the exact extra depth was "to be discussed".)
So, at the moment I'm building three concurrent cockpits from scratch, using various photomatches in each. The first cockpit that fits the plans, the second that fits ANH, and the third for ESB. A bit of good news, it still looks like many panels were definitely recycled directly in ESB, as almost all of the details I've matched fit across all three cockpits. Those recycled panels are instanced components in the model (so when I edit the details on one panel, the others follow suit) and I'll be refining and adjusting from all three sources simultaneously.
am I insane? I think the above answers that question nicely. But in the end, I truely will have a screen accurate ANH Cockpit, which is the titular claim of this thread...
(Thanks, if you read all that)