We quoted Han Solo to insure the Millenium Falcon

A lot more than you might think…

It will come as no surprise that we’re big Star Wars fans here at InsuretheGap HQ, and we’ve had many conversations about the ins and outs of what it’s like to live in the Galaxy Far, Far away.

It’s not just discussions about what food is like, how easy it would be to become a smuggler or whether you’d just end up in the Empire. Oh no, we also talk about insurance too! And with that in mind, we set about working out just how much it would cost to insure some of our favourite ships – just on the off chance we found ourselves suddenly transported to the outer rim with a big stack of credits.

Take a look at our ship and character profiles below and see which you fancy most! You’ll certainly need a decent job for some of these!

MILLENNIUM FALCON

We begin with our favourite ship, the Millennium Falcon (well, it’s between this and Slave 1). It surprised us a little to learn this was the second most expensive ship to insure – costing Han Solo (presuming he doesn’t split the bill with Chewbacca) £414,533 a year.

This is largely due to the risk that being a smuggler and Rebel entails, coupled with the litany of modifications made to this iconic freighter. Let’s hope Solo has some high stakes smuggling jobs on the cards to cover such a costly sum, as Luke and Obi Wan’s 17,000 Credit fee for passage to Alderaan certainly wouldn’t even begin to cover it!

CORELLIAN CORVETTE

The Corellian Corvette – or Blockade Runner – from the beginning of A New Hope is a large, powerful ship with a small piloting crew but a large passenger capacity. It’s the largest ship in our line-up and also the most expensive to insure.

We don’t find out exactly who pilots this ship which drives the price up somewhat, as does the risk of carrying stolen Death Star plans…

SLAVE 1

There was a heated debate in the office when we were trying to decide whose ship was better – Boba Fett’s or Han Solo’s. In the end, we agreed to disagree, but we’re sure it’ll come up again soon – particularly as it appears Disney has decided that Boba Fett escapes the Sarlacc and lives on.

TIE ADVANCED X1

Darth Vader’s ship was supposedly a modified prototype of what would eventually be known as the Tie Advanced. Additions such as hyperdrive bump the price up because crossing a galaxy in the blink of an eye is astonishingly easy to get wrong (“Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it.”).

LANDSPEEDER

Speaking of dusting crops, Luke’s Landspeeder is easily the cheapest to insure. In fact, it looks pretty reasonable for a 19-year-old, too. This thing goes 150mph! A Ford Focus ST can roughly match that top speed, and insuring a 19-year-old on one of those is certain to be more that £544. Still, there’s less to crash into on Tatooine.

KHETANNA

Jabba’s sail barge, the Khetanna, is our top pick if you want the most bang for your buck. It seems like it’s basically a giant floating pub complete with bands and giant cannons, and apparently it can carry 500 passengers. With that in mind, five and a half grand on insurance seems like a pretty fair deal.

LUKE’S X-WING

Luke’s X-Wing is actually pretty standard when it comes to modifications, so these haven’t had much of a bearing on the insurance costs. Being a Rebel and a Jedi Knight, however, are pretty risky occupations, and this adds quite a hefty extra onto the overall costs. He seems to be a pretty stand-up guy, too so we reckon he’d declare the swamp damage.

SEBULBA’S PODRACER

Here’s a slimy fellow. Sebulba’s podracer is basically a sportscar of the Star Wars world, and a powerful one at that. We had to class this as ‘heavily modified’ since it’s essentially two engines he found and cobbled together to form a vehicle.

Podracing is also monumentally dangerous, so we had to bump up the price due to the risks involved. Our bet is he wouldn’t have received a single credit after his crash in The Phantom Menace, either, which probably serves him right.

OUR METHODOLOGY

We started off researching each of our eight chosen vehicles so that we could create a ‘profile’ – much like our own systems do. Our profiles were generated by considering normal things such as weight and size, as well as some factors which we had to use some artistic license to assign values to, such as maximum speed in atmosphere.

Luckily, fans from all over regularly contribute to databases by compiling insights gleaned from the movies themselves and from the wealth of official books, fan fictions, publicity materials, and toys.

When it comes to insurance, there’s two main things to consider: what and who. We’d worked out our what, now it was time for who. Creating profiles for each of our eight pilots (or owners) was actually easier than the vehicles because there’s less categories to consider and more information can be gathered through educated guesses.

The only issue we had was working out what to do when we simply could not find a certain piece of information. When this happened – as it did with Sebulba’s age, for example – we simply assigned the top-level weighting to this element – the cost of which hopefully covers any risk associated with the unknown.

Once we’d worked out our vehicle and character profiles, we could create an algorithm to generate a price to insure the vehicle for a year. One Galactic Credit is worth roughly $0.50 (~£0.37) – giving us the ability to convert our generated costs into something a little more… Earthly.

So, there you have it. Eight insurance quotes for eight incredible vehicles. Are you a Boba Fett or more of a Han Solo? And which ship would you most like to own? Let us know over on Twitter @InsuretheGap and visit our home page to learn more about our services.