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$11 million sought to build X-wing, counter Kickstarter Death Star

A campaign vows to fight the Empire by building an X-wing squad. Also promised: a Millennium Falcon for 13 million Galactic Standard Credits.

Tim Hornyak
Crave freelancer Tim Hornyak is the author of "Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots." He has been writing about Japanese culture and technology for a decade. E-mail Tim.
Tim Hornyak
2 min read
Lucasfilm

There's no disturbing lack of faith among Kickstarter supporters.

After all, a crowdfunded project to construct the Death Star that was launched less than a week ago already has nearly 1,500 backers and an astonishing $364,772 in pledges.

Well, the Rebels aren't taking that threat sitting down. A rival Kickstarter campaign to build X-wing fighters has just taken off. Its goal is to build one of the famous spaceships from "Star Wars" and then more.

"If George Lucas produced 'Star Wars IV, A New Hope,' for $11,000,000 we figure we can finance a prototype of an X-Wing and train a pilot," organizer Simon Kwan, a product designer in Shanghai, writes on the campaign page.

"One update we'd like to include for our updated X-Wing is iPhone and Siri integration."

The stretch goal is to build a squadron of X-wings for $4,485,672,683, the worldwide box office take of all the films in the franchise, according to The Numbers, a film sales tracking site.

A further goal is "13 million Galactic Standard Credits: A Class YT-1300 Freighter (heavily modified) and a crew consisting of a Corellian smuggler and a Wookie co-pilot."

Tech Crunch, however, politely points out that such credits have been estimated at only 62 cents, making the Falcon cost only $8 million, which is of course less than the campaign's basic goal.

Details, details. What matters is we get an X-wing built, stat!

At least then we'll have a chance of countering a real threat to our planet: asteroids.