Work in Progress: Neutrino Probe – Business End

Well, well, well, what do we have here? Might that be a long overdue update on the Neutrino Probe project? “No, that’s impossible!”, you might think. After all, the last update was almost exactly one year ago! How could this still be a go? Well, you better believe it ’cause this baby is alive and kickin’! Still not positive? Jump past the break to look for yourself. Have you ever been told that you’re hard to convince of something? [More…]

Picard’s Starfleet Briefcase

tn_picards_briefcase

Ah, Starfleet cases. They come in all colors and shapes and I love all of them! Especially the ones that were used by the engineering staff to carry around their great little tools and instruments. But that’s not the only use for them, of course. They’re also very useful to store PADDs for example. And that’s exactly what Captain Picard uses his briefcase for in the TNG-Episode “Starship Mine” (6×18) when he leaves the ship, which is due for a Baryon sweep that requires a complete evacuation. [More…]

Cardassian PADD

cardie_padd_tnIn “Star Trek”, the idea of the paper-less office has been perfected. No pieces of paper, no pens, but only so called PADDs are used to note, capture, save, copy and transmit any kind of information.

Not only humans however use this kind of technology (see Voyager PADD), also several alien races like the Cardassians have realized the comfort of easy to use mobile [More…]

Buildup: Small PADD (VOY)

tn_voy_padd_sHow do you build a PADD? Well, it’s easy, if you have the right kit. In this tutorial I want to show you how to build up one of Matt Munson’s small Voyager PADD kits. Although he claims to build these is under an hour, I would recommend to take a little more time… [More…]

Type I “Cricket” Phaser

tn_tng_cricketI got this small prop in kit form from a fellow ASAP member. When I first started this project, I thought that such a small object could not be a lot of trouble during buildup. The exact opposite was the case. It took a lot longer than I anticipated to get this one done. I also had to do a lot more research than I had planned. [More…]

Buildup: Type I “Cricket” Phaser

tn_tng_cricketThe Type I phaser from TNG, a prop barely 9 centimetres long. To do a replica of this can’t be much trouble, right? Wrong! The smaller the object is, the finer are the details and the more time has to be spent to make the prop look good. I will describe here what I did to build this “cricket” phaser up. When I got the kit from a member of the ASAP board , it was in a pretty raw shape, which is not uncommon for resin castings however. This meant that the surface had to be smoothed out (especially [More…]

Tutorial: Sonic Driver

tn_sonic_driverIn this tutorial I will describe the process of building one of my resin Sonic Driver prop kits. Though it’s a relatively simple kit that essentially just needs to be painted, the partially complex shape of the prop can make the preparation work quite tricky and requires some expertise. [More…]

Sonic Driver

tn_sonic_driverSince I’m a big fan of engineering tools that are used by LaForge, O’Brien or Torres to repair the ship, I’m always looking for adequate reference material to extract some useful information.

Because of this, “Star Trek: Captain’s Chair” is a true treasure chest for me as well as probably for many other prop enthusiasts. This software enables you to not only move freely on the main bridges of the Enterprises 1701, 1701-D, 1701-E, the [More…]

PADD Stylus

tn_padd_stylusThis is one prop I got entirely by accident. While watching “Nemesis” once, I noticed that Picard was using a kind of input device to enter data on a PADD.

A closer look revealed that this prop was nothing more than a pen-shaped butane torch with some golden vinyl tape added to the handle. When I realized that, I remembered that I had something similar in my workshop lying around [More…]