Author: Hans Jenssen & Richard Chasemore
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2007

Glossy full colored and labeled diagrams of almost every ship that you can think of from any of the Star Wars movies. Wondering where the bathroom on the Death Star is? Well you won’t find that, but just about everything else.

Complete Cross Sections: The Spacecraft and Vehicles of the Entire Star Wars Saga is an entirely different sort of review. This was a fun review. It will inspire two different schools of thought though. If you’re a Star Wars fan, and like me someone geeky enough to want to look at 139 pages of fully color, beautifully drawn technical schematics of almost every ship that appeared on screen in the 6 Star Wars movies, you’ll love this book! I’m also a role-playing gamer, and I run adventures as well. If I ran a Star Wars campaign I would definitely use this book as a visual reference for ships.

So I just had fun looking over this book. There were small paragraphs of descriptive text with the ships, but the detail was in the diagrams. Great detail in fact. This book lists authors on the back covers but it was the pictures that carried the books, and the illustrators, Hans Jenssen and Richard Chasemore, who get their names on the large shiny silver front cover. In fact, I’ve listed them as the authors for the purpose of the book, as they definitely deserve credit and recognition for their artwork here.

The Millenium Falcon? It’s in there. AT-AT? In there. X-Wing? TIE Fighter? Star Destroyer? Death Star? All in there. The Death Star’s diagram was a 4-page centerfold type pullout, as were several other larger ships, but it was a bit disappointing. But I guess that fine detail on something 99.4 miles in diameter, housing 1.2 million personnel, even with four pages to work with is going to be tough.

The book did also make sure to include dimensions, top speeds, etc, just in case you want to read about the ships like the back of a baseball card.

I’d previously read the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. That was about 15 years ago, but as I recall it was soft color with black and white schematics. This is glossy and in full color. Much more stylish!

If you’re looking for a book to read there’s not a lot of text here. There’s no “story” here. It’s a reference book for your inner Star Wars geek. Even if you just want nice detailed color drawing of the ships, without having any curiosity about where the hyperdrive conduits are on the ship, you’ll enjoy it.

The illustrators even included a glossary of Star Wars terms in case “blaster cannon” and “hyperdrive” don’t mean anything to you. That’s cool, but I’m not sure that you’d be reading the book at that point if they didn’t.

Of more interest was a section where they described their creative process in putting together all the drawings. Obviously an impressive amount of work, in doing the drawings and in going through the steps of making sure they matched the continuity of the books. Lucas Films isn’t going to let anything make it to the shelves if it’s not, so lots of collaboration and care was taken there.

I did find that some of the cutaway drawings got a bit confusing, when trying to look at many captioned arrows pointing to different levels on the ship. Some ships offered a small untouched image so you could get a feel for what the ship looked like from the outside, without trying to envision that from the cross-sections. It would have been helpful on all of the ships, especially the ones from the prequels, which have not burned themselves my mind from dozens of watchings, like the originals.

I’ll admit, looking at the ships from the original Trilogy made me giddy like a kid. A numerical score here is kind of tough. I don’t know that it’s really meaningful even as I apply a general all-purpose figure. Either you find the book cool or you consider it a needless overkill of information. I’m not sure how much middle ground there is.

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Topics: Complete Cross-Sections - The Spacecraft and Vehicles o, Hans Jenssen, Richard Chasemore, Star Wars