TOS Turbolift

[Nerys Myk]

Might be my imagination but it seemed gold was less common among the hoi polloi, especially as the show progressed.

 

[Just a Bill]

If the turbolift was built in pieces, then you don't need room for the whole thing to see it from a corridor, just the back wall.

Agreed. We discussed this a few posts back:

The debate Mytran and I were having was whether or not that was necessary in this case. The size of the lighting gimmick wouldn't have been an issue in 1x09 WALGMO, of course, because we didn't see the lights in that scene. But lifts C2 and A3 are also really close to soundstage walls and fixtures, and we have seen moving deck lights in those (in both axes), so I still find the question relevant to my project.

How do we know it was huge? Is there a photo of it?

Not that I'm aware of (would love to see one!). Earlier this year I read on one of these forums that the mechanism was a slitted drum with a light inside. When I tried to make that work in my 3D model, it turned out that it needed to be much larger than I had originally envisioned. Part of the reason is the unavailability/impracticality in 1965 of miniaturized electronics, battery-powered high-lumens lighting, and such.

Another part is the physics. A light shining through slits in the edge of a rotating drum and projecting onto a planar surface is going to make light bars of differing thicknesses as the bar moves across the plane. Let's make an optimistic starting assumption that a 2-foot-diameter drum would be sufficient.

(6-foot Spock model for scale, since that is reportedly the height of Nimoy in his boots.)

The real drum would be opaque, but I've made it translucent for clarity. There are slits on opposing sides (otherwise you have to crank twice as fast; hard to do, especially in the freefall scene; might've been three or four slits in real life, if this was the solution). Radial lines show the beam cast through the forward slit, and yellow rectangles show the size of that beam on the visible surface inside the lift. There are two yellow bars to show the beam thickness at its narrowest (middle of window) and widest (top of window).

In this example, the beam is about 33% wider at the top of the window. This may not sound like a lot, but the human is very good at seeing differences. As I scrutinized several scenes of vertical light movement for this very effect, I did not observe the expected variation in the beams. So, either a different projection system is being used or the drum is larger – a lot larger. Let's double the diameter to 4 feet.

This is better. The distortion is down to the bars at top/bottom being about 14% wider than in the middle. I still think that would be discernible, but let's keep being optimistic and say it's not. Let's just see how big this thing is from a couple of different perspectives.

And of course the drum has to be rotated 90° in a different axis to make the lights move horizontally:

The cab portion of the turbolift set is a bit over 7 feet wide. Leaving room for a 4-foot drum apparatus on the sides and back means a circle of floorspace around 15 or 16 feet is needed. Maybe a bit more to accommodate whatever frame-on-wheels was needed to move, support, and stabilize this device.

Now I'm not saying my measurements are the right ones, or that this is the only way to build a solution. I'm just trying to use some convenient measurements to show why I believe that, if what I read about a drum was actually a Desilu reality, I think it would have to have been a pretty big drum.

My working theory is that the real apparatus was probably more like a slotted conveyor belt around a rectangular light panel, which could have been somewhat narrower, but I'm still trying to figure out how to build that economically using 1965 tech. This solution becomes even more preferable to me than the drum when I think about how Where No Man Has Gone Before had two stacked panels with the light beams moving across the span of both, and the lower panel was close enough to the ground that I don't think there would have been enough clearance for the enormous drum to not be partly below ground level.

For my scale model, I'm experimenting with an idea more like fluorescent tubes sliding on tracks, oscillating back and forth, off and on, so they are only lit up when moving against the cab's direction of travel. (Like sanding in one direction, picking up the sanding block for the return trip, then putting it back down again for the next swipe. Your hand is oscillating above the wood rather than looping around its back side, but the sandpaper is only "on" in the direction you want.) According to Wikipedia, slimline ballasts were introduced in the mid-1940s, and by the early '50s fluorescent tubes were producing more light than incandescents in the US.

However, although it seems feasible that this could have been a solution, it was definitely not the solution for Desilu becase we can see the apparatus' opaquing material (belt/drum surface) moving continuously in the anti-travel direction; looping, not oscillating. And in a few episodes, if we look closely, we can even see that opaquing material actually being rotated behind the mesh when a turbolift transitions between horizontal and vertical movement (Amok Time 21:55 is a good example). Sadly, this might be the only solution that will be feasible for my model.