Thank you Bill. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not. Trying to stick mostly with the easy stuff so I won't lose pace nickel and diming all over the Stage 9 plan.
TY. Made a decision to spend the weekend tidying up my loft to make it easier to work up there. Drill bolt mounted 2x3 ft plywood sheets to the tops of my bookcases for storing the sets up there. Moved the 2 bookcases away from the landing of the spiral staircase so to clear any obstructions interfering with moving the larger sets up and down over the spiral staircase. Did a mental review of how I intend to begin filling in the sickbay sets building out from the doors. Same thing for the quarters set. Got the last correct size wood dowel Saturday for doing the lower plumbing for the bains in engineering. Thinking that is next on my list of to do's. Noticed some tweaking of the aft of the bains due to the aft struts are not vertical enough needing to have both sides of the base pushed in. As well planning on making finalized struts with spacer notches in the to lock it in and keep it all level. Mapper out the roof panels for engineering with the intent on starting on them this last weekend. Put that on momentary hold to straighten up the loft workspace. Been dithering on building the finalized consoles in main engineering, but trying to stave off that urge due to feeling it would be better to start building the other remaining sets first before finalizing any of Engineering.
Am going to recut and build fresh beams for the engineering ceiling. I neglected to make the notches for the cross supports for the ceiling panels. Realized that when I started building the panel supports last night. That will be about a 2 night redo.
Rebuilt the overhead beams with notches for the cross beams. Cut and mounted temp panels and onion skin for the light panels / windows. Have 4 different sizes of wood strips to buy before finalizing the roof.
Thank you guys. Just a FYI early on I got in the habit of saving the templates For blueprinting later. Had a oops moment at the start of the project where I didn't save the template for the briefing room arches and had to sacrifice one of the beams to make a template for the final used arches and beams. ( it's ok I planned on building every set twice so it was ok to lose one beam that I planned on trashing when I was done. )
Just got back from a family vacation. Got the wood strips today to finish the ceiling cross beams. Will hold off on swapping out the temp panels for the ceiling so I can begin to focus on the remaining unbuilt sets.
Decided to take the summer break off. My son wanted to stay up later during the summer and I can't work undisturbed when the family is not in bed. Held off on doing the Quarter's set until I got some darkened enlargements of the quarters set plans. I am approaching the drawings as "as planned" cross checking them with the stills favoring "as built." Have found a few conflicts within the set plans but nothing major. However the gridded trace and gridded transfer of the floorplan has a 7 inch scale mismatch between the corridor I've already built from Mytran measurements, and the set plans. I've decided to remedy this by expanding the corridor panel between the quarters doors by 7 inches and pushing the corridor bedroom door panel back 7 inches and subtracting the 7 inches from the 2 foot panel next to the corridor panel for the bedroom door. Have a temp divider mounted on the cabinent so to measure the angle against the back wall in prep for cutting the proper fitted divider the angled wall panels will mount to. I've decided to speed up the process at arriving at finalized models I will be jettisoning the process of building a rough study model and then a second corrected final model. Instead now it will be only one model built in finalized form. Much slower this way getting the sets up to feel out the spaces. But this way anything done now is finalized and locked in.
I've since found several errors myself with those measurements I did (was it 3 years ago now?!) so I am not surprised. Comparing the set blueprints and cross-comparing the screencaps is certainly the best way to go, Robert.
Mytran I don't think the error lies with you but with Steve Sardanis who drew up the "Journey To Babel" sheet. We know of 2 mistakes on his sheet that are not on the 2 previous ones drawn by Mike Marshall. To Steve's credit he corrected the errors of the transporter pads in Mike's drawings of Stage 9. I think this can be chalked up to another of those mistakes being in a hurry and not having time to find and correct the errors to be careful. I think you measured the sheet very faithfully andcorrectly Mytran.
There's also the fact that the JTB drawing was probably only ever designed as a Director's guide to the stage setup. Nonetheless, it's a useful starting place, even if not as accurate as the blueprints with the specific callouts (Briefing Room, Captain's Cabin)
Absolutely Incredible! Thanks for taking on such an amazing project. Is there some way to do some kind of kit out of this? Even some 3d paper model thing? Every Trek person on the planet would want one.
Sorry Robert. Skipped over what you initially said about making it available. DUH. Fantastic work though. BTW there is another talented genteman on Trek BBS. I told him about your wonderful work and thought if the two of you combined your great talent you could make something TRULY amazing. It would blow peoples minds! The accuracy and overall look of your project would surpass the original by leaps and bounds. http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=212119 Spockboy
Thank you for the kind comments. Donny is aware of my project and I am aware of his. He has offered input that I already knew but was correct. He is at a late stage in the finishing his project and I am still in the early phase of mine. If we collaborated it would slow him down and may threaten to cause him to break pace on his project. I have no desire to hinder anybody in their efforts. It's the old adage of too many cooks in the kitchen ruins the broth. By both of us working independently we can have a free hand to cover more ground. The more people you have looking at the same material means more scrutiny to flush out the bugs and potential errors. He no doubt can or could catch things I miss and same for me in return. Mytran has been also putting this stuff under the micro scope for a while now. So are many others. This is good. People as well usually don't work together well unless there is a paycheck involved. That's just different styles, methodology, project goals to be achieved in order. My current goals to do within the project are things he no doubt dealt with long ago on his. ( like the remaining sets I have to build which he in CGI has already done. So helping me work out stuff he has already done would be great but also could slow him up which tests patience of anyone throwing themselves into their work bent on getting it out as fast as they can. Plus he has CGI skills which I lack. So to compensate I am having to do all this old school with a friend I work with who has volunteered to scan in all my work and author the PDF file / files for this project. So here us another area where I could potentially slow Donny down which I prefer not to do. That could irritate people waiting for his release if they felt I slowed him down. The man should have a free hand to do his work and a full open road out in front of him to allow him to go to town and be free to do it the easiest and best and fastest as he wants. I feel that way about everyone who takes it upon themelves to do their home work and apply themselves. He deserves the credit for his work as do others.
I completely understand, and I admire you for being concerned that you would be "slowing him down" I just imagined his coverings on your builds and how amazing it would look (photo real practically) "It would have been glorious" Keep up the great work!
Thank you. Heads up....Careful there with the quotation marks. You don't want to make it appear you are casting doubt on my statements you are quoting. Just to be safe allow me to flesh it out further so there won't be any question. Donny can do CGI which costs zilch in build cost. For him no wasted materials and instant on results. On mine I have to do the physical build and takes time to be sure before I even feel ready to commit to building each component. Even when I am not sure and locked in on what the specs on a part may be I may build anyway to feel it out against stills to find the correct spec on a part. Not always time efficient and wasteful. Materials are tight and not much room for screwing up and multiple do overs. So the route I am taking is by far slower. I however trust it cause I am familiar with it. I've been doing this form of physical model build since I was in grade school. ( the earliest surviving pic I have of such work is a 48 inch battlestar I built in my bedroom when I was 14 when the Battlestar Galactica series was still airing in 1979. I'll think I can pony up the pic for the proof. ) So the route I am taking is not out of my comfort zone. Just the scale / scope of the build is. When I pointed out different examples of how I could slow him down that is not all I am concerned over. The time I have on the side outside of family time is slim and not much when i am not tired. Donny may be married or single. If he is single then I envy him cause he just has more tons of free time to throw in to his projects. ( plural I corrected myself since I referred to his work in the singular ) I am sure Donny will post whenever he feels the need to point something out, and his input is always welcome. I usually try to post updates once a week and on Sunday nights coming out of the weekend hoping to show maximum results for that week ending. This week has been slow. Last night I did get some work done on the Bed Ward floor map. When I traced it out and stepped it to compensate for the 9 inch error on the Steve Sardanis "Journey To Babel" sheet I think I screwed up and stepped the movement to correct for his error..the opposite direction I needed to go and shortened the wall next to the door between the examination room and McCoy's office. So instead of having all the inboard sets transferred and scaled up I just went with the Bed ward since I know it's relative position to the corridor is correct. But for tonight since we are in this discussion I guess I can post a few pics to show where I am at. The next pics in line are of the folders I've organized to keep all my templates for the entire project. Next one is of the bridge templates...a couple of templates fell off the page when I was pulling it out of the folder. The next pic is one of the Engineering templates. This is just to show I am making a effort to keep track of everything and have it handy for when I start drafting out the drawings. The first one is the scaled up transfer and the trace of the printout. The next one is one of Matt's measurement files printed out to a large poster. ( my foot is deliberately in the bottom of the shot so to give an idea of the size prints I am working with. The next ones are printouts of the high rez darkened printouts on 2x3 foot posters of the Set plans for the quarters and high rez 9600 dpi scans of the plans from MoST. And after that the Poster sized McMaster printouts I had been working from. Note in every pic you will see that individual sheet's ruler. This is just to give an idea of how careful I am trying to be to minimize measuring error by going large. Now that i have the large print outs from a couple of the production drawings from MoST I can now see some measurable differences in the bridge plans from the series and the McMaster plans. Not as pronounced as I would like but there. And so far the new scans are agreeing with each other and I think co-oborate each other. I wish I had more series production plans to compare against to establish a more consitant baseline I can just sign off on as definite. As to your asking about making this a model. A while back I had this discussion with a friend who commented that his son would like the same thing and that he could print it out off of my finished plans and build one. While this was not something I had considered it is definitely doable since I planned on authoring it all out on 11x17 to be printed on 11x17 in 1/12th scale. The closest thing I had considered up to that point was having anyone wanting to build from the plans could print out a 1/12th scale proof for making a scale model as a guide to build from. And he pointed out since I had it all or will have it all set up on 11x17 sheets then printing it all out for the purpose of a model would then be already there ready to do with no changes or modifications to the file PDF. I had planned on doing it all on 8 1/2 x 11 but soon after doing some initial drafting / blueprinting that it would be too small for for some of the templates I have and wanted them to be all printed out all in one piece. So although it was not my intent that potential you asked for are already structured into how the file will be released. I would like to say it was planned on my part but that alternate use kind of incidentally fell in place. Found it. This was the second one I built in 1979. Drove my parents batty with it. Had to trash it in 1980 to placate them. That was when I was wanting to be a hollywood model effects miniature maker. Cardboard and tape is all I had since I was limited to what yard mowing money I could earn.
Wow! That is a collossal amount of work. Love the Galactica as well. So gigantic. I too used to make paper models. I remember making one of the Phoenix from Battle of the Planets and many others. I am very glad and appreciative of you for taking on this project. I am curious as to how you intend to paint/detail the model. In theory, because L.E.D.'s run cool, one could actually make a lit version of the model which would be mind blowing. Thanks for the tip, I never considered that the "quotes" could be considered to be sarcasm, but I guess they could be. I was being sincere in this case however. Thanks again. Spockboy