Are you going to get the turbolifts to actually WORK? Whereas, you can push them through the turbolift tubes themselves or ... ?

I've got Windows95 and my digital camera connects to the USB port which is all right to me as I've got two of them. But the camera SOFTWARE unfortunately needs Windows98 for a proper installation!
Anyone know how to get around that problem?

As soon as I have got Win98 I can finally post pics as promised months ago when I first posted a thread about my LEGO ships.

About the uniforms: I used the method you described, painting plain red/gold/blue "uniform" tops with black markers. I even used stickers (painted grey) to imitate the First Contact style uniforms.

Now for the turbolifts, I do hope to get them to work. This will probably be the trickiest part of the building process. I've got to make these things go vertical and horizontal. It could be interesting how I actually solve this loittle problem. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear em.

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.

When I was younger, I lived in Connecticut (US home of LEGO). One year long ago, a kid wanted to make a scale model of the Goodspeed Operahouse out of LEGOs. Not only did LEGO sell to him in bulk, they actually made LEGOs for him in colors that were not then available, like grey, to make his model more exact. After he finished it, they put it on display at the Eastern States Exposition.
While the Defiant is Paramount's property, and thus a little harder to use for promotions, LEGO might be interested in helping you.

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You're a Starfleet Officer. "Weird" is part of the job.

Okay, I'l try to help you. There is a computer tool called MLCAD that is specifically designed to do 3D models of LEGO. It's excellent for outlining these kind of modular projects (you can construct several parts separated, and then merge them all in layers)

Look for it at www.mlcad.org.

For further assistance, visit www.lugnet.com. They have LEGO forums for almost everything.

Play well...

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"One's ethics are determined by what we do when no one is looking"

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If anyone has a Star wars action fleet E-wing starfighter or Tie defender toy they want to sell, please E-mail me at [email protected]

Hey, every construction needs a blueprint! Especially one that is so important

Also, if you have any pics, sketches, or .dat's, I'd love to see them.

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"You left spacedock without a tractor beam?"

"It won't be installed until Tuesday."