Let's talk Turbo Lifts for a bit. Specifically, Turbo Lift maintenance. After zipping back and forth and up and down for hours, days, and weeks on end, they surely need a tune up from time to time.
@Jim Botaitis has called out two of these maintenance areas on the Enterprise: one Deck 6 aft in the primary hull and one in the secondary. Here is my vision of how that might be done on Deck 6. This space is also used for Environmental Engineering (EE in the blueprint below) and general Engineering Maintenance Shops (EMS), so I may have to rearrange things a bit more once I start laying those to areas in.
The first thing you might notice is that even keeping just a few spare lift chassis around takes up a lot of space. This is exacerbated by the fact that I split up the lift cars into an inner hull and outer hull. I did this for more modular service, but I may have to rethink that decision if I want to have room for the environmental and general maintenance shop. Much credit goes to
@Mytran for laying out the proportions and scale of the Turbo Lifts in
this thread.
There are several unique features of this elevator area. First, the mag-rails (or whatever they would use) temporarily extend into the shop area so that the car can be picked up by a portable maneuvering arm. The crew might also use anti-grav devices, but handling may prove unwieldy since the car is only slightly less tall than the deck height. For this reason, the floor is recessed in this area to allow the car to be lowered a few inches before it is rotated around for service.
Here's a car all cleaned up and in final checkout before being returned to service. The floor will be assembled after the car is loaded up into the rails of the Turbo Lift shaft in the center of the room. A stack of ceiling and floor caps can be seen in the background on the left.
Three outer shells in a staging area, laid door-side down. The one in the foreground has been reconditioned. The two in back are waiting to be serviced. In my Blender file, I have sliders for wear and scratches to easily change the state of the parts.
A view from inside the shaft looking aft. From this spot, however, you'd find yourself dropping to Deck 9 pretty quickly. Some kind of safeguard would be needed to prevent someone from wandering in here, but I thought it was an interesting view.
A stack of caps and three internal shells in the staging area. Each car is assigned a number, seen here above the door opening, along with the stardate of last service just below.
Lastly, here is what the car may look like mid-rotation with a manipulator arm before it is moved to the working area. I still need to add the interior handles and the panels in the tall rectangular windows. Note that the opening does not extend through the exterior shell. I like the idea of the shafts having lights built into them so that you see your progress, so another point of rework might be to relocate the vertical rails forward to allow that.
ALSO: the elephant in the room is that the squared off corners in the front of the car don't allow it to rotate in the shaft. However, when the doors are fully open, they take up this space. I'm kicking around the idea of just making a cylindrical one-piece unit, with the doors serving as a locking mechanism once the lift is at its destination. That would allow the lift to rotate in the tube while travelling. The elevator doors would then become a structural / safety device first and ingress / egress method second.
Please let me know your thoughts about these ideas. I know there are plenty of issues with staging and logistics, and how all this would work. My brief time in a large welding shop at an earthmoving equipment manufacturer informs my ideas, but I'm certainly no expert.