While this is well drawn, there aren’t escape pods. And the front between the “mandibles” is not a loading door. Factory spec has a lifeboat between the mandibles that we saw destroyed in the Solo movie. This was also mentioned a lot in books.
It’s hard to stay on top of what’s canonical these days, so my info may have been overwritten by more recent canon.
I don't know specific details, but as a freighter, the ship would lock onto it's cargo in that spot, so it would make sense to double as a loading dock. As it's not really used as a freighter by any of the characters, though, it would also make sense to repurpose that area. Attaching an escape pod there would be fitting.
It doesn't look like it can actually hold that much cargo, unless there are other decks that I haven't seen. That would make it pretty inefficient in terms of overhead cost per unit of cargo.
And the front between the “mandibles” is not a loading door. Factory spec has a lifeboat between the mandibles that we saw destroyed in the Solo movie.
Seems reasonable for both to be true. If a life boat is attached, the door leads into it. If not, a ramp can extend and it functions as a loading door.
At any rate, I'm pretty sure I've seen this diagram floating around since before the Solo film came out, so it probably is a matter of canon marching on that it was created without the lifeboat in mind.
It's from the D20 Star Wars RPG, they weren't the most accurate to the cannon even at the time. An interesting historical point is that the earlier West End Games star wars RPG fleshed out a lot of the expanded universe that we know and love and were used as reference material for the expanded universe novels.
The YT Series was popular for its modular design. They wouldn't come armed with quad laser cannons, which would be illegal, but they're just saying there's some extremely high capacity power couplings in that area if you need them for extra shield generators or whatever.
It wasn't skinny. It had an escape pod that extended the length and a dish that didn't stick out as much which reduced the profile. So its relative dimensions were flatter, but it wasn't actually any skinnier.