Bridge ceiling console started getting its metal inserts, and smaller MDF detail pieces. After these were all fixed in, we'd move to priming it.


The rest of the Bridge was farther ahead, and had received its primer coat. You can also see behind the Bridge chair a detail wall that separates the corridor from the Bridge, with the corridor's wall pallets behind it. We thought it'd be interesting to have a heavily obscured view between the two spaces, so you get glimpses of movement / lighting between the two.


The EDS column mechanism was finished at this point.


Lighting test of the column lights that wrap around the EDS columns.


The EDS keyboard, ready for our custom keycaps.


Another shot at night, looking at the consoles when we're in the emergency lighting state.

Beautiful!

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still alive

Ace~

The Bridge ceiling console assembled and primed. The sides still awaiting the upholstery that'll cover the sloped MDF edges & gaps. All the missing sections and holes on the front face will be filled with buttons / switches / keyboards / etc.


All the various metal sheets that go over the wall consoles, in the main corridor and the vestibule display. Lots of holes for buttons & switches as well, but also additional ones for mini display screens and hose attachments.


Putting together the various bits of the EDS interior to see how it'll look. Not ready for actual assembly yet.


Our space bowl. This will wrap the outside of the bridge window and hold the twinkling LED stars. Doesn't look terribly convincing here, but as you'll see, once it's in place and under the right lighting it works well.


With the metal priming and assembly well underway, we had to start making choices around paint colors. As many people before us have found, objects in the film can look like they're different colors in each scene, due to the varying lighting conditions, so we had to make some choices here. The upholstery square is there because we were trying to figure out what color the bridge chair should be.

Oh, and here's a short video showing a test of the EDS mechanism.

https://imgur.com/a/CoYfwXc

You are doing God's work!

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still alive

Airlock MDF was now assembled, so we were able to test the sliding mechanism. The right half here slides left.


Laying out the lights in the Bridge ceiling console. Just a few of them.


The Bridge window with our space bowl behind it. This is in much brighter lighting than the Bridge will have once it's in place. But I can tell you now that every photo I'll show of this will be misleading, because the camera picks up the black material in the bowl much more than your eyes do in person.


Starting on the wiring between all the interactive elements of the wall consoles and their associated lights. We want something to change on the consoles whenever you mess around with anything interactive.


The vertical cases in the vestible area, now primed. Originally, all four of these were going to be the same. But mid-way through design we changed a couple of them to be vertical displays, designed to hold some props I've managed to collect. More photos of that later.


Here's another video, this time showing the locking & disengaging mechanism of the EDS cabinet, as well as the column raising mechanism in-place.
https://imgur.com/a/lkT3sX2

Next up, weathering tests, electronics, and upholstery.

Well nothing I build will ever impress me again.

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still alive

Gorram! Can’t wait to see the door opening.

Are you going to do an airvent iris aperature?

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

No, we didn't bite off one of those, sorry. In retrospect, it would've been really fun to have a vent to crawl through, and it could have contained one. Oh well, next time!

At this point I am trying to find an outfit I can work with to help me make one. Your work makes me really, really, really want to bite the bullet and get a 3d cnc cutting machine.

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The impossible takes a while longer and goes over budget too...

Like the paint colors, we had choices to make in our weathering process. There were a few reasons for this, and I touched on them way back in my first post. Our corridor pulled elements from multiple corridors in the Nostromo, instead of trying to strictly replicate a specific one, so there's no specific ground truth to work off. The lighting variability across scenes makes it hard to select a single vision. And finally, some weathering might look ok for a short time onscreen, but when you get to stare at it in the real world, it can make less sense. So we started on these weathering tests to provide visuals for us to talk about when trying to figure out what our weathering goals should be.


The door at the far end of the corridor, assembled and functional, but without the epoxy treatment.


After months of working towards it, we finally had our upholstery on the flight chair.


One of the two vestibule vertical columns that we converted into a display case with integrated lighting, and some cardboard for testing.


Electronics & interactive elements getting set into one of the primed wall consoles.


Couple of videos this time. First, a short video of the wall console's electronics doing some idle lighting movement.
https://imgur.com/a/rGK8vXm

Second, a video showing the different small screens that'll be inset into the wall consoles, running various bits of footage from the movie's Nostromo displays. You can see where one of them fits into the rectangular hole in the upper right of the wall console in the pic above.
https://imgur.com/a/iq2bIuM

it's all just so amazing Robin. Are you planning to have an Alien hiding somewhere in the corridor?
You are making a lot of fans over at the RPF where I reposted some of these.

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still alive

I'm not actually putting any actual Xenomorph / egg / etc in the corridor. I tell myself that it's because living things don't hold up so well when you get to just stare at them while they're frozen. I remember seeing the full size Alien Queen model in person, and being a bit underwhelmed. But the real reason is that I don't think I could handle it - I'm a wuss, and still find the Xenomorph scary as hell. Seeing one in an environment that should hopefully look just like the film would be a bit too much for me.

But who knows, maybe we'll end up putting a Big Chap in there or something later. Or one of my friends will sneak one in there without telling me, and I'll die of a heart attack.

We weathered one of the pallets to match the ones inset in the floor of the engineering deck. While accurate, we felt this was too far for the floor in our corridor. We liked the burst of color we got from it though, so we decided to keep it for the vertical columns, while having the floors retain their dark metal.


EDS kept moving forward, bit by bit - lighting on the keyboard hooked up.


Meanwhile, we started the final painting on all the primed metal bits.


The Bridge ceiling console, freshly painted, finally got its upholstery as well.


Next up, paint, paint, and more paint.

Ha that's ok.. love what you are doing with the ship. Just don't be surprised if a Xeno finds it's way in. Thanks for all the updates!

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still alive

Lots and lots of painting now, as everything gets its final coat before assembly and weathering.

The Bridge Chair, finally all painted and assembled.


EDS levers and frame, ready to go into the corridor.


The EDS cabinet, ready as well.


One of the wall consoles, painted, and ready for all of its inserts.


Vestibule display cabinet and consoles in the same state.


The left console a few days later, with a bunch of its sub sections inserted. The upper right rectangle will hold one of the video screens. All the other holes are for interactive elements, except for the row of circles at the top, which cables insert into.


Next - we're almost there. With painting mostly done, it's finally time to start putting it all together on the corridor frame.

Walls and some of the ceiling on the frame.


Lower & upper corner pieces in, along with piping - they'll be painted after this.


A shot looking straight up at the acid hole in the ceiling.


Meanwhile, off to the side the Bridge wall has been painted and assembled, with the mirror at the low end.


Airlock door, finished with our epoxy treatment, and with its finished inserts.


A shot later in the evening, with the painted EDS in place, and the wall & vestibule cabinets on the frame. Looking promising!


We're almost done with photos of pieces outside the corridor now - it's time to see everything move into place.

oh dear lord jesus it's happening!

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still alive

Gorram! Love that corridor.

I figured I should probably do a post covering the timeline of all this. Someone asked me about it today, and I realized I hadn't talked about it at all in the thread. Hopefully it's interesting.

The design work, covered in the first few posts, started around the start of 2021. Most of the broad strokes of the design had been figured out by May 2021, but then in August we added the Bridge section, and that caused some reworking. It also took some months to fill in all the finer details of the design, and then even more months to figure out how to convert that design into manufacturing steps. An example of that is the exploded EDS breakdown back on Page 1, which was completed around March 2022. Design wrapped up fully around May 2022, essentially a year and a half after we started.

We did get a bunch of non-design work figured out in that same time though, and much of that is covered back in Page 1. The pallet samples, the frame build, and the material tests all started while we were still in the detailed design phases. The frame assembly was finished around February 2022, and that allowed us to get started on the floor / wall / ceiling pallets while design was still working on the interactive details for the consoles / bridge / etc. The pallets were all manufactured and on the frame by May 2022, right as the design wrapped.

The manufacturing of metal pieces started around April that year as well, with many pieces of that covered at the end of Page 1 and first half of Page 2. Assembly of them, for pieces like the Bridge Chair and EDS, started right after the pallets wrapped up in May. In July 2022, we start priming the metal pallets, and rolled onto the other metal elements right afterwards. All the finicky bits of the EDS moved along in parallel.

In September 2022, with the larger metal peices behind us we turned our attention to CNCing all the big MDF pieces, like the Doors and Consoles. This is the middle half of Page 2. A lot of the smaller detail pieces of metal machined in the prior months were assembled here as well. Around here is where we started working on the electronics for the interactive elements.

It's in January 2023 that we start to put together the bigger metal and MDF pieces, shown towards the end of Page 2. The following few months were really fun, as all the separately manufactured pieces came together. It was hard not to post tons of redundant photos of this period, because it was so exciting to finally see the real shapes appear. The set of photos in the first post of Page 3 is also from this time, around April 2023.

Assembly continued, and things started getting primed. In May 2023 we started looking at the final painting & upholstery choices. In June we started to insert the hundreds of small lights and interactive elements into the wall & ceiling consoles. Weathering tests in September. Upholstery had arrived. Doors became functional, electronics got wired into everything, and lighting tests began. Around November we start painting things their real colors, and combined with assembly, it occupied all the work over the following months.

This all gets us to the most recent post above, which is where we were at in March 2024. The rest of 2024 was spent assembling parts within the corridor, and that'll make up the rest of the photos I'll gather up for this thread.

The reason someone asked me about this today was that this happens to be the day that the corridor installation has begun. Back on Page 1, in the frame post, I showed a photo of the volume in the building that the corridor was designed to occupy. Today, Turner Exhibits started the process of transplanting the frame and all its contents out of their warehouse and into that volume - just over 4 years after it all started.

it's great to hear all the work and time you put into this. I can relate it took me two years to build my alien. But when you are in love you do strange things like we did. I can't wait to see the finished product as I am sure you can't either.

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still alive

The larger pieces were the first things to make their way into the corridor - walls / ceiling / vertical columns, display cases. Larger pipes and venting in the corners, all now painted. None of the finer detail yet.


Another shot further down, in front of the entrance to the vestibule.


The Bridge was in a similar place. The right wall as you go in doesn't attach to the frame, which allows for this shot from a position outside of the Bridge itself. When it's in place, this won't be possible. Sorry for the blackouts, I didn't take a photo without people in it.


In front of the Bridge door, looking at the console. None of the electronics and finer detail in yet. Also, still all unweathered - the dust is not part of the design.


The two display cases in the vestibule were finally ready to show off their contents.

Back in 2022, when I picked up Ferro's helmet from Propstore's auction, I mentioned I was building a shrine to it, and that I'd post photos when it was done. Sorry it took this long, but here they are.

As mentioned, this is all still focused on the larger detail. We had a big pile of junk we'd been collecting for months that we were hoping to use to greeble out the space once the big shapes were all in there.


And here's a bonus pic of what it all looks like from the outside, sitting in the warehouse. That's the sliding airlock door on the truck in the foreground.

F-ing gorgeous! Very, very impressive!

In regards to your dropship helmets, can I ask for details on Spunkmeyer's? I see that it's missing some pieces; there is a pretty good 3d model available that could be used to restore that, if so desired [ Tronchavigas models ]

Is the Smartgun Screen Used also?

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Cpl Aron "septic" Williams
A10/TQ0.0.82146E1