Hyper Saber – Inspired by Star Trek: Enterprise’s Engineers

Hello Everybody, Space….the final unexplored expanse….these are the first voyages of a new Lightsaber based on a tool from the Engineering Department’s toolkit found on the starship Enterprise (that is Enterprise NX-01 – you know the “first” one). Enterprise takes place 100 years before the iconic Star Trek TOS starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy etc and this prequel stars Scott Bakula and Jolene Blalock. As the lockdown in the UK grinds on and we slowly vaccinate everyone I watched a bit more TV than usual and one day opted to watch an episode of Enterprise and low and behold I found inspiration! The episode tells of a mission where the Enterprise gets caught up in a “space minefield” and a magnetic mine attaches itself to the ship endangering all onboard. It falls upon crewmember Trip Tucker to try and dislodge the mine but as usual, it isn’t as easy to do as it is to say!

Trip had to venture out and space walk to remove the mine and it was during this assignment that I saw what inspired this design. And the inspiration was one of the tools in Trip’s tool case and it was the tool known as a HyperSpanner (an original name!) It was hexagonal in cross section and was approximately 12in/30cm long making it the perfect dimensions to be converted into a For Tyeth Lightsaber. Here are a couple of photos showing the prop and you’ll see why it caught my eye:

It sorta looks like a lightsaber already and the facetted hexagonal ridges help create the impression of it having an emitter section and a pommel part. It has control buttons and a little hidden feature I’ll reveal later. So this new lightsaber I built was a little bit of an exercise in modelling rather than a full design but it was fun and worked so well (I think). So for the Trekkies (including Resa of https://graffitiluxandmurals.com/2021/03/09/o-halito/ – thanks again for the magazine you sent I said I was inspired by it 😉) here is my Hyper Saber…

So this is the “unofficial” Hyper Saber I built from an old HyperSpanner casing I picked up (just kidding, I modelled all of this saber from scratch – though I did use background images from the Star Trek Enterprise Memory Alpha wiki pages – thanks) Modelling the handgrip was fairly straightforward – I used a hexagonal cylinder (you can have a cylinder with a choice of how many sides it has from 3 to 360 so I chose 6 sides and bingo!). However, the emitter and pommel sections are in fact separate and made from….BOLTS! I used a feature of Blender that models nuts and bolts of various types and modify them to have different shaped heads and number of thread lines (the spiral portion of the shaft). By creating three bolts and lining them up next to each other I was able to combine the three together which formed the distinctive ridged sections. I used a further gold coloured bolt inside the emitter mouth to recreate the lightsaber blade emitter matrix. But on the pommel I made a Starfleet logo as a 3D decoration. It isn’t the complete badge of the Federation of Planets but just the basic A shaped badge with the elliptical ring because this tool predates the formation of the Federation.

The activation controls also got some 3D treatment too, look closely and you will see that the text on them isn’t just a flat texture but actual 3D parts (here you go Neil, extruded text for you!) which I gave a nice shiny gold material . There is also some engraving I added so here is a second gallery showing some finer details…

In the first two images you can see the On/Off/WP buttons with 3D text. On and Off speak for themselves but the WP I thought could stand for “War Power” and be used as a Power Boost if the blade needs a bit more cutting edge! But then while I was watching the episode of the show Trip and Captain Archer actually opened up the HyperSpanner and there was a CRYSTAL inside it! Now Trip’s crystal was probably Dilithium so I had to tweak the internals of this saber to accept it but it worked and to my surprise the blade it produced has a nice Ice Blue shade! Red crystals usually produce a red blade – must be strange Star Trek magic 🙄.

With that mystery blade effect I have just about wrapped up this design, I hope you enjoyed it – whether as a Trekkie or as a Star Wars fan! Trip and Captain Archer succeeded in dislodging the mine and Enterprise continued it’s mission to explore and so too must I venture forwards (cos I can’t find reverse!) and come up with more new sabers.

Thank you so much for checking Hyper Saber out, if you are a Trekkie, a first time visitor or one of my regular supporters you’re all welcome and appreciated. The support and love you show to my little site is fantastic and keeps me designing. I have some more High Republic themed hilts and a range of designs based on some famous Blasters, so there is plenty more to see in upcoming posts, I hope you will join me again! Till next time…

“Hyper Saber” is a For Tyeth Editions creation inspired by the “HyperSpanner” tool seen in the TV show “Star Trek: Enterprise”. This 3D model and it’s renders are made by For Tyeth and are ©Copyright of For Tyeth/FTSabersite 2016-2021. “Star Trek: Enterprise”, “Captain Archer”, “Trip Tucker” and “HyperSpanner” are all Trademarks/©Copyrighted elements belonging to Paramount Pictures studios. Star Trek was written and created by Gene Roddenberry.