Star Trek at 60 and Printing the Final Frontier

Today, September 8th, marks the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast of Star Trek. It therefore seemed only fitting that today's blog entry should be Star Trek themed.

Ever since I bought my 3D printer, one of my hobby goals has been to crack the challenge of printing decent gaming miniatures using an FDM printer. While resin printers are generally considered the gold standard for miniature production, I've been determined to see just how far an FDM printer can be pushed with the right settings, profiles, and a healthy dose of patience.

Fortunately, the Bambu Lab community is incredibly active, with users sharing a huge range of files and designs through MakerWorld. One creator I've been particularly impressed with is Drakonius, who has produced a growing collection of models based on the bridge crews of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager.

The original models are designed primarily as display pieces and stand around 18 to 20 centimetres tall. That's great for the display cabinet, but somewhat less practical for the tabletop! The challenge therefore became finding the right scale for gaming purposes.

Scaling miniatures for FDM printing can be a balancing act. Reduce them too much and the printer starts to lose the finer details. Faces become indistinct, fingers merge together, and subtle uniform features disappear. Scale them too large and they end up looking like giants alongside my existing collection of Star Trek miniatures.

To achieve something that felt right, I looked at the real-world heights of the actors. Marina Sirtis, who played Deanna Troi, is around 5'4", while Jonathan Frakes, who played Commander Riker, stands at approximately 6'4". By using those height differences as a guide and then scaling accordingly, I eventually found a size that allowed the figures to remain recognisable while still fitting comfortably with the rest of my collection.

The results have exceeded my expectations. As the photos below show, the models have retained a surprising amount of detail despite being printed on an FDM machine. They also possess something that many commercially produced miniatures often lack: realistic proportions.

Dr Crusher and Captain Picard

Troi and Riker

Many tabletop figures tend to exaggerate hands, heads, weapons, and poses in order to make casting easier and improve tabletop visibility. These Star Trek figures, by contrast, look much more like actual people. I particularly like the natural and relaxed poses. The characters look as though they've stepped straight off the bridge of the Enterprise rather than into the middle of an action movie.

And then there's Worf.

For reasons known only to miniature sculptors, almost every Worf model I've encountered depicts him charging into battle with a bat'leth raised above his head. While that's certainly an iconic image, it does somewhat overlook the fact that Worf spent a considerable amount of time doing things other than swinging Klingon weapons around. Seeing a model that simply portrays him as the Starfleet officer and bridge crew member he was for most episodes is actually rather refreshing.

La Forge, Worf and Data

There is one notable casualty of the scaling process: poor Geordi La Forge. Thanks to the limitations of FDM printing and the challenge of reproducing his iconic VISOR, his miniature ended up slightly larger than LeVar Burton's real-world height would suggest. Printing the model at the "correct" scale resulted in the VISOR becoming unreliable and losing definition, so a modest increase in size was required. It's one of the few occasions where resin printing would have a clear advantage, being able to capture such fine details with much less effort. The good news is that Geordi remains instantly recognisable. The bad news is that he now appears to have enjoyed a few extra growth spurts between seasons!

Looking at the finished figures, it's remarkable to think how accessible this technology has become. A few years ago, producing recognisable Star Trek crew members on an FDM printer at gaming scale would have been considered extremely challenging. Today, thanks to a combination of improved hardware, better slicer software, community-created profiles, and talented digital sculptors, it's becoming increasingly achievable.

It's a fitting tribute to Star Trek's 60th anniversary that, six decades after the Enterprise first appeared on television screens, fans can now create their own bridge crews at home and bring a little piece of the final frontier to the gaming table.

Live long and prosper.