One of the main reasons Star Wars continues to endure is our love of its grimy starships. In opposition to the smooth, stately spacecraft of most pre-1977 sci-fi TV and film, the kitbashed, realistic-ish vehicles of the faraway galaxy were new and exciting thanks to their smudges, cracks, and incongruities. Ever since Star Wars spaceships became a permanent part of the shared geek consciousness, studying these fictional craft has become a fandom in itself.
Now, there’s been a crucial new development on the spaceship canon front. This fall, a new reference book — Star Wars Encyclopedia: The Comprehensive Guide to the Star Wars Galaxy — will include drill-downs on several nifty ships from Andor, complete with previously unknown in-canon details. But how does all this nomenclature work anyway?
How Star Wars ships get their designations
Luke identifies The Empire Strikes Back’s snow-speeders as “T-47s,” and in A New Hope he mentions his “T-16 [Skyhopper] back home,” but not all Star Wars vehicle canon is that simple. Case-in-point: the Millennium Falcon. Canonically, it’s a modified YT-1300 light freighter built by the Corellian Engineering Corporation. But how do we know that? It’s certainly not spoken in A New Hope. It's not in the 1976 novelization, the original Marvel comics adaptation, or even the first Star Wars Blueprints, published by Ballentine Books in 1977.
And yet serious Star Wars aficionados can tell you the Falcon is a YT-1300 modified light freighter. Wookieepedia adds that this designation was made official in a 2014 Rebels episode called “Fighter Flight,” but the YT-1300 designation predates the modern canon by several decades.
This designation seems to have been established in 1987’s Star Wars Sourcebook, the guide to the first Star Wars Roleplaying Game. Other games, like the Star Wars Customizable Card Game, doubled down on much of this canon, which was also repeated in other reference books like the 1996 book Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels. Nowadays, any new reference book is generally considered canon, but fans have been turning to the technical side of the source material for decades to learn all the grubby little details of their favorite starships.
New Andor starship canon
Over on Twitter, fans noticed that pages from the upcoming Star Wars Encyclopedia confirmed the in-universe model and manufacturer details about the ships from Andor. The main revelation here is that the show’s most intriguing ship — Luthen Rael’s “haulcraft” — now has a full designation. According to the book, Luthen’s ship is a V-21.1 Chevlex made by Fondor Yards Commercial Ventures. This means the destination “Fondor Haulcraft” is implicitly the ship’s nickname.
Although the Comprehensive Guide to the Star Wars Galaxy won’t be published until November 19, Wookieepedia has already incorporated the details on several vehicles from Andor and Kenobi into its descriptions. Are our lives significantly improved by knowing that Luthen’s ship is a V-21.1 Chevlex? Maybe it’s not a big deal, but considering the ubiquity of the YT-1300, the smallest details in Star Wars tend to last for a very long time. Besides, with Luthen returning for Andor Season 2, his V-21.1 Chevlex Fondor Haulcraft could become iconic. Maybe he’ll even decide to give it an actual name.
