Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Transporter Room Miniature
Welcome to the Star Trek: The Motion Picture Transporter Room Miniature webpage. The webpage will detail the processes, materials, time and cost involved with creating this famous device.
Design Work
The first thing that I had to do to design this model was determine how large it was going to be. This was determined in a rather unusual way. The first thing that I worked on on this model was the transporter pads. From photos that I had of the pads, I determined that there were 40 hexagonal shaped grid units across a transporter pad's diameter. After a lot of searching, the closest material I could find that could replicate this hexagonal pattern was the square shaped pattern found in plastic knitting material. This is the plastic material that people use as a basis to knit pictures with string.
A grid of forty squares across, results in a transporter pad that's four inches across. After this, I took a lot of still photos off the TV of the transporter room from ST:TMP and ST: The Wrath of Khan. Based on these pictures, I was able to figure out the size of every other feature in the transporter room based on the size of the transporter pads, which were based on the grid size of the knitting material. What ultimately resulted was a model that was 27" wide by 26" deep by 15" tall. That puts the model's scale at approximately 1:7.8.
Constructing the Model
Below are a couple of photos taken of the model at a very early stage of construction. Note that the large white cylinder in the pictures is just a temporary paper representation to help you visualize the model's eventual size and shape.
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Making the Interlocked Hexagonal Grill
After I had drawn up the plans for the model on paper, I had to determine what to make the model out of. This was not a trivial task and it took me months to figure it out. The most difficult part of the entire model will probably be making the interlocked hexagonal shaped crystals that form the back wall of the transporter room. After consulting with a half dozen specialty plastics manufactures, and them in turn consulting with many more sub-manufactures, I was simply unable to find anybody that could provide me with clear hexagonal rods of the size I needed. I then decided to try to find clear equilateral triangle shaped rods of the correct size and then combine six of them together to form the hexagon rod that I needed. I was able to find equilateral rods in the size I wanted but I will have to buy 3000 feet worth of it. I will probably only need about 300 ft. worth though! Ouy vey! This much material will probably cost me about 600 dollars. At this point, I have not gone any further with this part of the project since I'm currently only interested in having a solution to the problem.
Transporter Room Cylinders
A less difficult, but expensive part of the project was determining how to create the large cylindrical shapes that make up most of the actual transporter room. I very soon determined that I wanted to make these shapes out of both clear and black plexiglass. I called a specialty plastics manufacturing company in Denver and found that they could provide me with a Plexiglass cylinder that was 3/8ths of an inch thick and 24" in diameter. They could also provide me with the 18" diameter cylinders I would need for the sub-flooring under and over the transporter pad flooring. Although finding this material was relatively easy, that doesn't mean it's going to be cheap to buy. The 24" diameter cylinder costs over 600 dollars/ft., and the 18" cylinders are over 300 dollars/ft. Add to this all of the additional cutting I'll have to have done on those pieces and this part of the project will probably cost me well over a thousand dollars. I have also not yet bought this material.
The Metal Grill Flooring
Another difficult part of the project was determining what to make the metal grill work out of that makes up the flooring that you step onto after you step off the transporter pad and its underlying flooring. After months of thinking about this problem, I decided that 3/32" thick sheet styrene plastic would suite my needs very well. I had considered using sheet brass for this but I decided that plastic is much easier to work with and will look just as good. I decided that cutting the plastic into 3/8" strips that are 12" long would be correct size I would need. Then, after all the blank strips are obtained, I would then have to cut a series of notches into the strips so that the strips could interlock together when connected in perpendicular directions.
At first, I tried to cut all of these notches out by hand using an X-Acto knife. After about five hours of cutting and very sore hands, I only had notches cut in about three strips. It was pretty obvious that at this rate it was going to take me months to cut the thousands of notches I was going to need to create the grill work. Then I hit upon the idea of lightly gluing about fifteen of these strips together vertically to make a solid block of strips. Then I could use my band saw to cut out fifteen notches at a time. By using the band saw to cut out notches in parallel, I was able to do in a few hours what would have otherwise taken me many months of time. Below is a picture of what individual plastic strips look like with notches cut in them as well as what solid blocks of strips look like after notches have been cut in them by the band saw. The picture below that shows what the plastic floorwork looks like during construction.
A shot of the raw plastic grillwork
A detailed view of the attached plastic floorwork in an intermediate stage of completion
After all the styrene strips were cut and notched, I then cut the strips down to the correct width so that they would fit correctly on the model's underlying plywood base. I glued all of the vertical strips down first to the base and then the horizontal interlocking strips. After all the strips had been attached, I then painted the entire structure with silver acrylic paint.
The Transporter Pads
The transporter pads were made of white plexiglass cut into a four inch diameter circles by the use of my band saw. After the edges of the pads were smoothed, the knitting meshes were glued onto the tops of each pad. Then I attached a ribbon of white plastic around the edges of each pad. Finally, a white paper ribbon was glued on top of the white plastic ribbon of each pad.
The Transporter Floor and Ceiling
The transporter chamber floor and ceiling upon which the transporter pads will be glued will be made of 1/4" thick black plexiglass sheeting cut into a circular shape. The edges will have to be polished and then twelve holes will be cut into the two pieces to facilitate light that will be used to illuminate the transporter pads that will be attached to them.
The Transporter Room Walls
The transporter room walls are made from 1/4" thick pieces of clear plexiglass cut to the correct size. These plexiglass pieces will then have many additional pieces of styrene plastic attached to them. The results will be painted a medium gray color to facilitate the use of blue colored lights that will be projected onto them during filming.
Lighting the Model
Photographing the Model
Last Updated: February 4, 2002
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