The first (and arguably less important) task for the Portal 63 cosplay was obtaining a spear of the right design. I also had the additional requirement, beyond the spear being foam (or similar soft material) that it would have to be collapsible. This was both to make transporting the spear easier, but also because I would be wearing the costume throughout the day, including when attending panels and stage events. Having learned from previous years about being considerate towards those sat behind me, I would need to be able to partially disassemble the spear when sat down.

The best solution by far, given the collapsible requirement and the specific design, was to make the spear myself. This would count as the “new skill” for this costume as I’ve never tried to make a cosplay weapon prop before, let alone one as long as a spear. Fortunately a good friend of mine had some advice, and I have an ample supply of those most useful materials: 3mm foam and hot glue.

For the shaft of the spear I ventured to a (not very) local hardware store to acquire a 2m length of black plastic piping, along with three push-fit connectors and two end caps. I went for the 32mm diameter because I wanted the added thickness to hopefully make the final product more solid. The spear head isn’t a very wide design, so I figured there wouldn’t be too much of a torque on the joints to require more permanent securing methods.

I bought a pipe cutter to cut the pipe in half, and reduce the overall length as necessary. Then I glued the joiner sections with hot glue, one to each end of the lower pipe. The upper joiner would be the base of the spearhead, which I wanted to be detachable for portability reasons. I drew a cardboard template for the spearhead, and used that to cut out sections of 3mm foam to make the head and handle sections. A lot of hot gluing later:

Painting the parts was relatively straightforward, using a base coat of black and top coats of brown/silver acrylic paint.

Now I just had to make the rest of the costume…

The first planned costume for Destination Trek 2023, Friday 18th, was Boimler from Lower Decks. As this was intended to be a lower effort mostly-bought costume, there isn’t a lot to really say beyond sourcing and ordering the uniform and coloured hair wax. However there were a couple of parts which I did make.

Magnetic Starfleet Rank Pips Set

These were not made specifically for the Boimler cosplay, I had the idea to create a set of magnetic rank pips after my experience with some pin-badge style ones I had bought for previous conventions. By far the biggest issue, especially when applying them myself, was getting the spacing and alignment right. Any rank beyond lieutenant was basically impossible, so with a 3D printer I figured I could design a magnetic strip and a set of pips that would make aligning them a lot easier.

First I had to find a source for the size and dimensions of Starfleet rank pips, as well as their spacing. Fortunately a google image search yielded this:

This would make the design very straightforward, as simple shapes like cylinders are very easy to create and combine in Blender. One concern I had was the magnets I intended to use might have been strong enough so close to each other to make gluing them difficult, but it turned out this wasn’t an issue. The intent was to create a strip of five magnets, four “full” pips and one “junior” pip. This would allow any rank from ensign to captain possible, including lieutenant junior grade and lieutenant commander.

Printing the strip was relatively straightforward, but I had to print the pips twice. The first print had support structures which were very difficult to remove, and with the pips being only 8mm across I tried printing without supports. There was some material drooping, but not too much that I couldn’t remove it. I then used superglue to attach the magnets one at a time (to avoid the attraction between magnets dislodging them before the glue set.) Then they just needed painting, a base coat of black and overcoat of gold.

If you want to print a set of these pips yourself, I uploaded the STL files to Thingiverse.

Lower Decks Combadge

Modelling the Lower-Decks style combadge involved importing a 2D image of the communicator into blender to use as a template for creating a 3D version:

I also designed and printed a magnetic clip to hold the Combadge to a uniform. Printing and painting took a few hours.

If you want to print your own Lower Decks style combadge, I also uploaded the STLs to Thingiverse.