LEGO Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 Bridge 11385 – Part 2
The Enterprise was back in spacedock for Part 2: start at bag six, push the bridge toward completion, and try not to lose anything beneath the desk.
Naturally, the first obstacle was not LEGO. It was the technology.
⚠️ Back to Starfleet Engineering
We returned to LEGO Star Trek set 11385 after finishing bags one through five in Part 1. The transporter room was complete, Scotty’s spinning mechanism had been repaired, and the bridge had its basic deck frame.
About fifteen minutes in, the router rebooted and knocked us offline for roughly ninety seconds. Since a firmware update following AIDA’s earlier cyber-attack problems, it has been increasingly temperamental.
🖖 About the Build
This 1701-piece set celebrates Star Trek’s 60th anniversary by recreating the bridge of the original U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701. The bridge occupies one side, while the reverse forms an original-series corridor. It is a clever display concept, although the heavy reliance on stickers remains disappointing.
🧱 Where We Are in the Journey
Part 2 began with bag six and focused on filling the remaining gaps in the circular deck, constructing the outer bridge walls and starting the workstations.
The target was bag ten, leaving the remaining consoles, turbolift doorway and Kirk’s chair for Monday.
🔧 What Happens in This Episode
We began Part 2 exactly where we had left the Enterprise the previous night, with bags one through five complete, the basic circular framework of the bridge in place and the transporter room sitting alongside it. There had even been some successful engineering between streams: the transporter mechanism that had broken during the final demonstration in Part 1 had been repaired, so Scotty could once again spin around properly inside what chat had variously christened Spock’s Sonic Shower and the Dysentery Impeller.
Before we could make much progress with bag six, however, the evening developed a rather more serious technical problem. Since the cyber attack on AIDA earlier in the week, the router had been behaving strangely following a firmware update, and about fifteen minutes into the stream it decided that this was the ideal moment to reboot itself. The entire connection disappeared for around ninety seconds while we waited for everything to come back online and checked that the stream had survived.
That was not the only technical mystery we managed to solve. The jukebox and several sound effects had also stopped working properly, and the culprit turned out to be the new DJI Pocket P4 camera. When connected to the computer, Windows was deciding that the camera should become the primary audio output device. At least we now know what is causing it, even if actually persuading Windows not to do it is a problem for another day. For the moment, the background music was working, the internet had returned and we could finally get back to the Enterprise.
Bag six introduced Dr. McCoy and Nurse Chapel, while the main construction work involved filling the remaining gaps in the framework we had built during Part 1. There were six matching deck sections to make, so rather than building each one individually, we assembled all six together. This worked reasonably well until I discovered that several pieces had gone on backwards and had to be corrected.
Obviously, this was Gary’s fault.
#blameGary was therefore restored to active service almost immediately, with FlyingFox21 helpfully confirming that “Gary broke it.” Gary subsequently acquired responsibility for missing pieces, backwards pieces, technical failures, buses and trains as the evening progressed. Considering he was not even there for most of this, it was an impressive contribution.
McCoy, meanwhile, lasted considerably less time than Nurse Chapel. While moving the minifigures out of the way, he fell onto the floor and vanished beneath the desk. There was little point attempting a rescue operation while surrounded by LEGO, cameras and cables, so he was officially declared missing until the end of the stream.
The usual hunt for tiny pieces continued throughout the evening. Some disappeared into reflections, others were directly in front of me, and several prompted the traditional request for chat to tell me whether anybody could see the thing I was supposedly looking at. Our highly specialised LEGO vocabulary also continued from Part 1, with lantern pieces, triangy bits, grabby bits and various other components that LEGO really ought to consider adding to the official parts catalogue.
From bag six we moved through seven and eight surprisingly quickly, filling out the deck and beginning the framework for the outer walls of the bridge. As those sections rose around the circular base, one of the cleverer parts of the set started becoming much clearer. Turn the bridge around and the reverse side of those walls forms a corridor inspired by the original-series Enterprise, so the finished model effectively gives you another little display environment behind the main bridge.
Unfortunately, the bigger the Enterprise became, the more awkward it was to actually reach. The table we use for these streams is an old exam-room table on what might generously be described as permanent extended loan from a school, and the bridge was rapidly beginning to demonstrate that I could do with something larger. Pieces on the far side required increasingly ambitious leaning across the build while trying not to put my weight through something we had just spent an hour constructing.
My back was already objecting to that arrangement, and the large studio light was once again turning the room into an oven. There was also the recurring problem of gradually sliding down the chair, which brought us back to the seat belt Gary was apparently supposed to provide about two Christmases ago. Another outstanding item for his increasingly long list.
While all of this was happening, chat wandered quite happily away from Star Trek and into trains. TheCollector31’s knowledge of preserved railways led us through the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, railway museums, the Hogwarts Express and memories of steam trains, before I remembered one of my old schoolteachers who had managed to have an accident involving the overhead cables on the Newcastle Metro. Mr Smith then reported that Gary had stolen his bus and subsequently his train, which seemed entirely consistent with the evidence already presented.
MaximumHomerdrive arrived and immediately admired the “sweet Millennium Falcon” on the desk. Rather than waste time correcting such expert spacecraft identification, we accepted that this was indeed the Millennium Falcon. At various points it also became the Millennium Falcon from Firefly, which should clear up any remaining confusion.
The science-fiction conversation continued alongside the bricks. Battlestar Galactica came up, including the original series and the remake, which I much prefer for the additional depth it gives the story and characters. That wandered into Logan’s Run, older television and the usual collection of completely reasonable conversational detours that happen when everybody is supposed to be concentrating on building a Star Trek set.
As the outer structure developed, additional supports began locking everything together and giving the bridge some much-needed rigidity. The skeletal grey framework gradually became recognisable as the walls and workstations surrounding the command area, while the corridor on the reverse became increasingly obvious. Maximum’s observation that it was “nothing but gray, just like I remember” was not entirely inaccurate at this stage.
Then we reached the consoles and returned to one of the major complaints from Part 1: stickers. None were being applied live because I would rather do them carefully off-stream than attempt to line them up while leaning between cameras. Finding one of the set’s rare pre-printed pieces only made the situation more irritating. If LEGO can print that component, there really is no convincing reason why so many of the consoles, displays and controls in a £160 licensed set needed to be stickers.
The first major rear console included Spock’s viewer, and fitting the completed assembly into the bridge became a small engineering challenge of its own. By this point the model was large enough that turning it around and reaching the attachment points without dislodging something else required a little care. Eventually it slid into position and immediately made that section of the bridge look much more complete.
The new DJI camera should become considerably more useful once the entire model is finished. Because it is on a gimbal and can be moved around so easily, the plan is to bring it down from its current camera position and take it through the completed bridge for a proper close-up walkthrough. Holding the unfinished model up to that camera during the stream already gave a much better impression of how the bridge and corridor will look from something approaching a minifigure perspective.
Chat continued providing perfectly timed distractions. Stryker_500 had triggered one of the delayed jump scares, which eventually fired and led to Mr Smith threatening him with a baseball bat. Stryker apologised to the bat on the grounds that he already had too many friends, only for Mr Smith to clarify that the bat was not there to make friends.
We also had a welcome raid from Potatofreaker, arriving after a stream of Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown. Potatofreaker had not even realised the LEGO set was already available, so the raid turned into a convenient opportunity to show our new arrivals what we had built so far: the repaired transporter room, the increasingly substantial bridge framework, the corridor on the reverse and the first console now sitting inside the wall.
McCoy was still on the floor.
By the later part of the stream we had moved into bag nine and constructed the second rear console, followed by the two seats positioned in front of the workstations. Part of the railing around the bridge also went into place. Even that managed to become awkward when the instructions asked for small supports to be attached after surrounding pieces had already been installed, leaving rather less room than would have been useful.
Despite that, everything eventually fitted without the Enterprise undergoing an unexpected structural failure. By this point the model had changed considerably from the flat framework at the beginning of the evening. The bridge walls were standing, two proper consoles had been installed, their seats were in position, part of the railing was complete and the rear corridor was taking shape.
We had originally hoped to complete another five bags and reach the end of bag ten, with the possibility of going even further if things moved quickly. In practice, bags six through nine were a respectable amount of progress, and by the time we were ready to open bag ten my back was hurting enough—and the studio was hot enough—that continuing simply for the sake of another bag did not seem particularly sensible.
That means the Enterprise gets a third and final construction session on Monday, replacing the planned Construction Simulator stream. We will start with bag ten and work through the remaining bags to fourteen, completing the rest of the outside structure, the remaining consoles, the turbolift doorway and, eventually, Kirk’s captain’s chair.
Before then, I will also deal with the stickers. That may require partially dismantling sections we have already built, including quite a lot of the transporter room, but it means everything should be properly decorated when we return. I can also go through the remaining bags, find any pieces that need stickers and prepare those in advance rather than interrupting Monday’s build every few minutes.
Gary finally appeared near the end of the evening, which was useful because after spending most of the stream being blamed for backwards LEGO, missing components, buses, trains and various technical disasters, he needed to be informed of his achievements.
We finished Part 2 with bags six through nine complete and the Enterprise bridge finally looking like a bridge rather than an ambitious collection of grey framework. Potatofreaker had brought their community aboard during the evening, and we ended by sending ours onward to Rox_ya_Sox, who was building Gundam models—a suitably construction-themed destination for the raid.
So the Enterprise remains in spacedock until Monday. The transporter works again, Nurse Chapel survived, two bridge consoles are operational, the walls and corridor are taking shape, and McCoy is presumably still somewhere beneath the desk.
All we need to do now is finish bags ten through fourteen, survive the stickers, recover the doctor and keep Gary away from anything important.
📺 Watch the Episode
Watch Part 2 here and see the bridge take shape through technical failures, missing minifigures and sticker complaints:
Visit Dr Ravenholm on YouTube, like, comment and subscribe, and follow the full LEGO Star Trek playlist.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
Join the next shift live on Twitch or YouTube. With raids, running jokes and technical surprises, the bridge crew is as much part of the build as the bricks.
🌌 Community & Links
The mission continues beyond the stream, with plenty of places to stay connected between shifts.
Live aboard: Catch future missions on Twitch and YouTube.
Join the crew: Continue the conversation and general chaos on Discord.
Follow the signal: Find me on TikTok, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and X.
Support the mission: Visit Fourthwall, Teespring or Streamlabs.
Explore more: Hear my music on Spotify and Apple Music, then explore the Business Centre, brochure, About Me and blog.
🚀 Until the Final Shift
The Enterprise is taking shape: four more bags complete, two consoles installed, McCoy somewhere under the desk, and one final session ahead.
Live long and prosper—and somebody keep Gary away from the router.
— Dr Ravenholm
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