Back when I was working on my pulse rifle build in 2021, I started trying to collect props from Alien / Aliens. In the years since, I've been lucky enough to collect some, thanks in part to Harry in 2022. But back in 2021, I realized that even if I did manage to find any, I wouldn't really have a place to display them. At the time, I was in the process of building a new house, and long story short, I started planning on a making one of the house's corridors replicate a section of the Nostromo.

I'd been to installations/museums based on movies & fantasy/sci-fi worlds before, and felt they often ended up feeling cheap or fake. Looking at a bunch of Nostromo set photos, I thought some of the detail worked great when it was dark and only onscreen for a few seconds, but if you looked at it under more light, or got to stare at it as long as you want, it was less convincing. So I was pretty sure that getting the materials right was going to be a huge part of making this all work when you stood in it.

My other concern was the design. There's a physical volume the corridor had to fit into, which meant I couldn't just replicate some part of the Nostromo exactly. Even if I could, my favorite bits of the Nostromo aren't all in one part of the ship. I love the engineering deck, but it has a lot of non-sensical random greebles everywhere. It also doesn't have the iconic door shapes that everyone can recognize. So I decided the right approach was probably to design a corridor that evoked the Nostromo, playing on the iconic shapes we all know, while not trying to slavishly match any particular part of the set.

With these two things in mind, I realized I needed help. I didn't have the time the design would need, and I definitely didn't have the skill required to work with the necessary materials - I can 3d print stuff, but I can't do much with metal (yet?). So I figured I'd find people to help me with the overall construction, and resign myself to just building the small scale props that the corridor needed. After some searching around I found Turner Exhibits, a custom design & fabrication company who understood my goals and had the capabilities I wanted, and we got started.

Here were our first attempts at the design, just focusing an overall layout within the space we had.

Looking back, from the other end.


Incorporating item display cases.


We couldn't resist trying to include the self destruct system, thinking that maybe we could get it to be interactive.


Going forward, I'll be trying to assemble this thread out of various photos, designs, and emails I've kept throughout the project, so it'll take me some time. I recognise I'm cheating a bit, in that much of the work you're going to see is being done by professionals, not me. But I figure no-one is going to appreciate this thing as much as the members of this forum, so I hope you'll forgive that.

Next up, doors.

If you haven't found them already, perform a search for "museo alien".
An Alien fan from Barcelona has done similar.
There are walk-through, and in-progress videos, on their YT channel.

We had five entryways into the corridor, three single and two double. We looked at every door in the Nostromo and tried to select the ones that we felt were most memorable, while still meeting the dimensions we had to work with. Don't get too hung up on the small details / semiotic standards / etc in these shots, those are mostly placeholders at this point for things we'd have to figure out later.

Annoyingly, the primary entrance into the corridor was through an off-center single door at one end of the corridor. We decided the most important thing was that the corridor made sense while you were standing in it, so we hid a sliding single door inside the fake double door. Here, you can see how the right side of the fake airlock door will slide left to reveal the single door exit.


Two single doors on the right side led into small storage rooms. Since those rooms were going to be dark most of the time, we figured we could use the Medbay door, which features a window. One of these would get more interesting later on in the project.


Next was the first double door, past the single doors on the right side. For functional reasons in the room on the other side, it had open down the middle. So we went with the ship exit doors here. The dimensions for it aren't correct, but we felt it still looked good / recognisable.


Finally, the actual double door at the far end of the corridor led into the house's mechanical room. We needed a minimum width for functional reasons, so we went with the most iconic Nostromo door, swinging open on a single side hinge (there's a room above all this that meant we couldn't even entertain the idea of it sliding up). Since the mechanical room will be mostly dark, the windows won't break the illusion by highlighting something that isn't in-universe.

The negative shape of this door is just as iconic, so we put a permanently open version of it two thirds of the way down the corridor. This created a smaller vestibule for the display cases and EDS, separating them from the rest of the corridor a bit.

We also thought about powering some of the doors, but ultimately decided that the safety requirements that came along with powered mechanisms would be too much of a hassle.

Next up, the pallet, and some actual fabrication.

I did find this during our development, but thanks for the heads-up nonetheless. It's very cool, and I'd love to visit it someday.

Luckily, we had already chosen to avoid the Nostromo's living quarters as an aesthetic, so that by the time I did find the museo, I felt confident we weren't going to be just duplicating their efforts.

Good luck to you! I can't wait to see it done!

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still alive

how are you looking at doing the build out? 3d printing, or laser cut pieces? Or just plain ole do it by eyeball and hand?

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

I'm guessing most of you already know about the plastic floor pallets that were used everywhere in Star Wars and Alien sets, since I learned about them here and the RPF. If you stare at the classic photos of the Nostromo engineering deck, you see it on the floors, walls, and ceilings. So we knew we'd have to spend some time getting them right.

Lots of people have tried to source them over the years, or find something similar that'll do the trick. There's a good thread on the RPF about it: https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/a ... le.150618/

Since we wanted the materials to be right, that meant we had to make actual metal ones. We assembled a set of dimensions from sources online and a ton of eyeballing of set photos, and then manufactured a test piece. At this point, we were trying to figure out our manufacturing approach, and details like the hole sizes, gaps between the bars, and how it felt to walk on.


We had also talked about having a place where there was acid scarring on the floor, so we tested that out on our prototype. Finally, we beat the heck out of it with metal chains to see how it'd look with some weathering.


A few months later (while working on other design/fabrication problems), we had our second iteration with a variety of improvements on the bars and the underside. We deliberately left a small gap between the upper metal section and the lower, so that when you stand in the middle of the pallet, you get a small amount of movement as it flexes, and there's a satisfying metal clank to your footstep as the sections meet.


Somewhere around this time we also managed to actually get our hands on one of the original pallets, and were able to measure it ourselves. We were happy and more than slightly relieved to see that our guesses were close enough, and that we didn't feel the need to re-design.

Next up, the Bridge.

We ended up using a variety of fabrication techniques, but no 3d printing - or at least, none that I can remember. We wanted everything you could see and touch to look and feel like the right material, but that still left us plenty of room to reduce cost & weight in other ways. I'm going to go over some of the interesting ones in future posts.

Aww man love those floors!

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still alive

Yeah, that's amazing...

Can... Can you make MORE of those floor pallets...?

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Closest one I ever found was this... I like it, it gets the point across, but it could be better..

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Vestil-48-i ... 19#overlay

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still alive

Around this time, some other changes in the building meant that one of the side rooms was now empty. It's a strangely shaped storage room, because there's a staircase above it, so it ends up being a triangle when viewed from the side. We asked ourselves how it could be incorporated into the corridor, and almost immediately realised the sloped ceiling would be perfect for the Nostromo Bridge.


We liked the way this would give you a place to sit and spend some time in, while also providing an interactive opportunity. While not correctly in-fiction, it'd be fun to be able to talk to MUTHUR here via a keyboard. It was also a space that I could build some smaller props for, like the flight helmets.


It's a really small, cramped room, so we could only really fit a single chair in there. But by also putting a fake wall inset in from the real wall, we thought we could include a bridge window to the left of the chair.


We wanted to see if we could sell the illusion of you being in space by letting you look through the window. We thought about using multiple video displays, but thought we wouldn't be able to fit them to the window itself and maintain the window shape from the set, due to all the different shaped sections. We could have a large single screen set back from the window, but thought that'd be too obviously flat / fake. After some thought, we decided we'd try enclosing the outside of the window itself in a black, curved volume, and embed LEDs within that. We did a small test of it, and thought it looked promising enough to move forward with that as the plan.


Next up, the frame.

I had to laugh at this, because I remember that back when we first finished the test pallet, I told the folks at Turner that I was sure Alien fans other than myself would want one if we got it right.

I don't know what kind of scale they'll need for it to be economical for them, but I'll ask and get back to you. With the R&D done on it, hopefully it's not too expensive to reproduce them.

I would add that if you have to cut down on certain things folks would be fine with that. Just having a 1" tall plate covering, most folks would gobble up...

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

Whole project is amazing!

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still alive

The first thing we needed to build was a frame for the corridor. This would allow us to build & assemble the entire corridor in Turner's warehouse, before dismantling and relocating it into the building at the end. In addition to allowing the corridor production to proceed independantly of the building, it allowed us to plan for everything in the corridor to be detachable for maintenance. The floor panels, for instance, can all be simply lifted up from the bottom of the frame, for the inevitable day someone drops their keys through the gaps.

Assembling the floor of the frame.


Corridor frame complete, but no bridge section yet. Standing on the pallets when they're on top of the frame floor, you'll be several inches above the actual floor, and there'll be some strip lighting below you.


Later, the complete frame, along with the side section for the Bridge midway up on the right. In the front, you can also see our test pallet on the frame floor, and a test of the under-floor lights. Much later, we were able to test those under-floor lights in the almost complete corridor, and weren't super happy with them, so it's unclear we'll end up using them.


The bridge required some extra framing because of the weight we were planning to hang from it.


The volume of space within the building for the corridor had a bunch of HVAC pipes that needed to go through it. Instead of trying to hide that stuff, we decided we'd incorporate it into the corridor design. So we left gaps in the corridor's ceiling, and painted the HVAC pipes black. Our hope is that when you look up through the gaps in the corridor ceiling, you'll see the dimly lit shapes of the mechanicals up there, adding further depth to the corridor's dimensions.

Corridor volume, with the HVAC piping above. There's a slope to the ceiling that won't be visible within the ceiling, except for the far right side where you can see the side room that'll contain the Bridge.


A minor side effect of leaving the corridor ceiling open is that we won't be able to fully finish the corridor lighting until it's in the building, due to light leakage from the warehouse.

Next up, some material tests.

Man you guys are spending some money!

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still alive

While the frame was being worked on, we started to look more carefully at materials. As mentioned in an earlier post, we really thought they needed to look and feel right, or the corridor wouldn't stand up to a viewer who got to spend some time in it. Even for fairly obvious materials, like something that needed to be metal, we wanted to find opportunities for cost reduction and/or ease of fabrication.

So Turner put together a series of material tests, along with example pieces from the sets, and we used them to talk about what was working & what wasn't. At the same time, the tests let us explore fabrication approaches for some of the materials where there were choices to be made.

Upholstery tests for the soft materials on the front & sides of the wall-mounted consoles.


The metal base of the vertical pillars. Instead of building them entirely out of metal, we tried reducing the cost & weight by building it out of MDF, and then wrapping that with a thin sheet of metal. We then weathered the metal with a combination of chains, hammers, and sanding blocks, before finishing it with hand-applied detail work.


The doors were an interesting problem. We really wanted that smooth / curved look, like they're vacuum formed plastic. But the size of them was daunting, and there's a fair bit of detail in their shapes. So the test we tried was to build them out of multiple layers of MDF, and then coat that in multiple layers of epoxy. We were really happy with the result, it looked accurate, felt great, and was straightforward to produce.


We also tried the same MDF and epoxy approach with colors to see if we could use it as a fabrication solution for other parts of the corridor. The large silver metal square and the small black one on the right were more tests of the metal wrapped MDF approach used on the vertical pillar bases.


Also up for discussion was how weathered everything should be. We wanted something that was clearly used, but not so dirty that people didn't want to touch it. Much later, we found this fear was probably unfounded - when people are presented with a panel with as many buttons, dials, and switches as the corridor side consoles have, they can't resist playing with everything. This was a weathering test for that discussion.


Next up, some design improvements.

I'm going to be out for a couple of weeks, sorry. I'll continue this as soon as I'm back.

This is glorious. The resources being put into this is incredible. Kudos on everything achieved so far.

I'm sure the final outcome is going to be like something crafted straight out of Shepperton Studios in '79.

And those photos of the floor pallet .......yes, please please ask the guys at Turner about them on behalf of all of us!!! Thank you!!

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All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? Another glorious day in the Corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm. Every meal's a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Corps!

While the frame and material tests were going on, we were continuing to refine the design itself, adding detail to some of the areas we'd only roughed in earlier.

We were really happy with the acid scarring test we did on the original test pallet, and wanted to incorporate it somewhere into the corridor design. We thought it'd be fun to have an acid hole in the ceiling of the corridor with a corresponding hole in the floor below. The logical place to do it was to the right as you enter the corridor, since the entrance is offset to the left of the center. That'd put the hole off the path that people will actually walk when moving through the corridor.

Here's a shot of the design, with the red circles indicating the acid scarring locations in the ceiling and floor. We also left some extra clearance underneath the floor grate with the acid scarring so we could embed a monitor down there, facing up. That would allow us to render an image on the monitor that made it look like the scarring led down into further decks of the ship below. It wouldn't be a perfect illusion, due to the lack of parallax, but we figured it'd still be better than just having blackness below. You can also see that the airlock door has now been fully detailed out as well.


The side consoles in the corridor were blockouts in the initial design, so now we had to lay them out fully. In addition to the obvious lights / switches / dials, there are other elements here, like the open, circular shapes that are nozzles for hoses to attach to, before they lead off into the walls / ceiling of the corridor.


We tried to include as many interesting interactive opportunities as possible, using reference from the film and other bits of tech / devices that felt complementary. We also embedded small video screens. The imagery on them, along with all the lights, will be affected by the interactive elements. Of course, we'll also be pulling as much of the video imagery from the movie as possible.


The wider consoles to the left & right of the display case in the vestibule were opportunities to be creative. Since there wasn't as clear a match to something in the movie, as there was with the side consoles, we had a bit more leeway to pull some of our favorite shapes from other surfaces in the sets.


The MUTHUR console was a fun one to lay out. Thankfully, there are a bunch of good reference shots in the movie itself, and a number of well lit shots of the set in behind the scenes materials. It gave us multiple screens for interactive response opportunities, and the main display and keyboard where we'll allow you to talk to MUTHUR. I've run Aliens RPG campaigns, and players talking to MUTHUR through an interface that matches the in-movie UI has been a highlight in them.


Next, further design improvements, and the EDS.

Right from the start of the corridor, we wanted a centerpiece interactive element of some kind. The Emergency Destruct System that Ripley uses to destroy the Nostromo seemed like the most obvious choice. It's iconic and memorable, with lots of fun interactive steps, and there's a ton of great reference in the movie and in the behind the scenes photos. We figured it'd also provide a great opportunity for interactive payoff if going through all the steps resulted in the corridor being filled with flashing warning lights and the classic audio countdown.

With such a complex interactive piece, we needed to know exactly how it was all going to fit together. First, the overall layout, figuring out how the elements outside the EDS container would operate. We didn't really have enough room in the corridor to embed the container in the floor, so we opted to put it directly below the levers. You'll still need to pull down the levers to disengage the lock on the lid though.


The internal details. We had to figure out how each of these pieces would be manufactured, and how they'd fit together. The interactive metal pieces needed to be metal, and were small enough that they'd be machined, but there are other challenges in there. The rounded slice of the colums needed to slide sideways to reveal the button, the vertical transparent columns need to glow internally, etc.


The final result: each separate piece of the EDS that needs to be fabricated, color coded by the material it'll be made of.


A couple of other bits in the Bridge design. The chair console, the weight of which required the extra frame support. Can't wait to hang a pen from it!


And the Bridge wall, to your right as you enter from the corridor. It's a little hard to see from this straight on shot, but the various pieces of it extrude to different amounts, such that when you enter the Bridge, there's some obscuring going on, hopefully adding to the play of light & shadow in the room. Because the room is cramped, we also decided to embed a mirror in the wall at the end, behind the triangular shaped grill in the bottom left of this image. On entering the room, at the right hand side of this image, we're hoping that the mirror just reads as a dark space extending to your right. It's low, and in the tight part of the room triangle, so the viewer will hopefully be unable to get to a viewpoint where they can see themselves in the mirror.


Next, fabrication, finally.

With design and tests behind us, it was finally time to start fabricating things. The first few months were mostly focused on metal pieces. This meant a lot of progress on individual elements, but no real assembly of the corridor itself yet.

Plasma cutter at work. Some of these sheets would be going over MDF, using the approach we liked on the pillar bases back in the material tests.


Other pieces would be getting welded together to form something, like these pieces of the bridge chair.


Meanwhile, smaller pieces were being machined. These metal pins are part of the airlock door mechanisms.


Putting together the wall pallets. In the set, the walls and ceilings were made of pieces of the same plastic pallets used on the floor. We opted to build similar ones to our floor pallets, but reduced their weight and cost by building thinner bars, an option we felt we had due to the fact they never have to support any weight.


There were also a number of smaller ones, which run along the walls below the large ones.


Testing them in the frame, along with our original test floor pallet.


Next, more fabrication.

Doing gods work!

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still alive

Still focusing on fabricating the metal pieces we'd need, no real assembly.

Arms for the wall consoles.


Pieces of the wall in the bridge. You can see where they fit in the design a couple of posts ago. They'll be placed over the top of MDF shapes, following the strategy we tested in the earlier materials tests.


The EDS shell. The pieces are being held together temporarily at this point, for later welding.


The lid of the EDS, with some pieces of the flight chair arms.


Handles for the EDS levers.


The frame for the Bridge window.


Pieces of the flight chair.


Next, more fabrication, and some assembly.