Chances are at some point in your life you wanted a Millennium Falcon of your own. The iconic Star Wars craft is burned into the minds of thousands of fans who grew up watching Han and Chewbacca punch the hyperdrive for another last minute escape. Sometimes building the Falcon out of LEGOs just isn't enough to satisfy those needs, and we get to wondering how much the Millennium Falcon would cost in real life. Unless Elon Musk is reading this, I don't think anyone going to be writing any checks.
The folks over at Twizzle got to wondering how much it would cost to produce a real life working Millennium Falcon. After crunching the numbers and applying a good dose of real world logic, they determined that the Millennium Falcon would cost 1,988,348,881 British pounds, or $2,474,132,337. I'm not sure how many credits that translates to in Star Wars terms, but if the Falcon is a hunk of junk then how much does a good ship cost?
Twizzle took several factors into account in reaching the final verdict of over $2 billion. They considered everything from insurance to how much the rent on the hanger where the ship is built would cost. Annual costs for the Falcon would roughly equal $2,776,819.70. That's factoring the cost of insurance (which is high due to its pilot being a smuggler with "more than one driving conviction"), repair cost, and the amount of money spent to keep the ship stocked with food and fuel. The Falcon is known for getting into scraps, plus it needs quite a lot of upkeep, so the repair cost by itself comes out to $2,525,157.60.
Next comes actually building the Falcon, which means renting the space and hiring the team of engineers and builders who are going to put the thing together. That'll set you back about $10,115,376.13. Then you have to hire a crew to man the Falcon, and each one of them needs a paycheck to bring home. The Millennium Falcon typically has a crew of four (pilot, co-pilot, and two gunners) so based on typical pilot fees, that comes out to a combined $83,750.24.
Finally, comes the technology of the Falcon, which makes up the bulk of the expense. The biggest challenge comes with the hyperdrive, which doesn't exist yet, so you have to wait and pay for engineers to invent it. Combined with the lasers, supercomputer, and deflector shields come to a whopping $2,443,441,380.12.
That $150 LEGO set isn't looking too bad now, is it? If that's just the cost of one relatively lousy 100-year-old ship, I don't even want to think about what something like the Death Star costs.
