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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Timo: [QB] Well, if you want them to work at the push of a button, you may be thankful that the official separation between decks in the Defiant is close to 4 meters even when the corridors themselves are only a little over 2 meters high... The extra space is where the turbolift horizontal-motion machinery goes! I once did something like this as an experiment. I didn't want to do an "alpine train" style thing with gears and sawtoothed tracks, nor a cable-based conventional elevator. Essentially, I went for a conveyor-type belt running along the wall of a vertical shaft and the floor of a horizontal one. I first tried building the conveyors out of actual plastic Lego tracks, the sort used in bulldozers and the like. That didn't work at all. But a long rubber band did the trick for both the vertical and horizontal movement: I made it run in a groove at the side or bottom of a simple rectangular shaft, so that it touched the side or bottom of the lift car. A single motor could run the system, coupled to all the belts with more rubber bands; a more advanced system should use separate motors for separate belts, or a gearbox system for giving power to only a single selected belt at a time. I had to reduce the friction between the car and the shaft somehow, too, and experimented with tiny wheels running either directly on the shaft walls or then on railroad tracks mounted there. Eventually, I just glued a dozen little plastic beads to the walls of the car so that these tiny points were the only things touching the corners of the shaft walls. Using two conveyors, on opposite sides, to support the full weight of the cab would probably also work - but it was hell to make the pressure of ONE belt against the cab even roughly constant along the length of a shaft, and two might be a big problem. The hard part was making a transition between vertical and horizontal movement. Going from vertical to horizontal was easy in the end - at the end of the horizontal conveyor, the lift would just plop into the vertical shaft (not very elegantly, though, but with proper guiderails it would work). The cab would shoot upwards past such a junction when traveling vertically, simply by giving it sufficient speed to clear the beltless gap. The beads would run along the four corners of the vertical shaft all the time, so the cab wouldn't be without support even in the gap - it would simply be without propulsion. The opposite direction was far more difficult. Finally I settled on building a set of rollers (Lego axles) emerging from the vertical shaft wall below the cab after the cab had reached a junction. Then the cab would drop back onto those rollers, which would move it sideways to the horizontal shaft and its conveyor belt. It was all manual, moving the axles into the shaft and then turning a crank at a carefully controlled speed to roll the rollers so that the cabin wouldn't tip over, but it worked. With the modern pneumatic Lego components, this should be easier to arrange, and it could be motorized, too. In the end, the system featured an ugly lift cab which couldn't house a single figurine, no workable door system, and machinery that vastly out-bulked the little cab and the meager few shafts (one straight vertical shaft, one horizontal L-shape, one junction). But in theory, it could be built in a more elegant form. The conveyor belts are a good starting point, and designing smooth, possibly smoothly curving shafts with functional junctions is The Real Big Problem. Perhaps in the flat Defiant, you could do the horizontal conveyors only, and use a separate pneumatic or mechanical platform for moving the lift vertically across the mere four-five decks. Not very elegant, but then you wouldn't need the rollers at junctions, just that single platform. Timo Saloniemi [/QB][/QUOTE]
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