The following is a brief explanation/collection of helpful tips for those who are interesting in building their own ships using a Touch of Trek.

To start, all the ships I've made for PMC so far are all in Mozzie Scale; named so for the PMC user Mozzie who created a very player friendly set of ships back in 2012. Why not 1:1? While I have respect for any who try their hand at full scale starship recreations (shoutout to you, MineTrek), I find them to be a bit much in terms of playability. Ships in Star Trek are actually massive, and in lieu of having multiple decks full of copy/pasted crew rooms and boring maintenance, I prefer building ships that have all the good bits crammed in close and easy to access, not to mention that certain systems such as working shields and the red alert flashing lights have limitations due to the selection size allowed with Minecraft's fill commands.

Tip #1: Download world edit.
World edit is an absolutely invaluable tool for building starships in Minecraft. With it you can copy, paste, flip, and rotate selections by right/left clicking with a wooden axe to select two points.

To start working on a new ship, first, pick the design you want. Ships with many angles and curves may be more difficult to pull off, so be wary of that. Find an image with a top view of the ship (having a second monitor really helps here) and use it as a reference as you begin to sketch out the outline of the ship. At this stage, it may be wise to pick out the color of your hull. Consider using a block that has slab/stair variants. Make sure the outline is an uneven number of blocks! Remember, you'll likely want you captain's chair in the exact middle of the ship, and if your ship is an even number of blocks wide, you won't be able to do that. You can use world edit to select half of the outline, and while facing that finished half and standing in the exact middle of the outline (the way you character is looking as you do this is important) type //copy, then //flip, and finally //paste. This will ensure your outline is perfectly symmetrical and can tell you if you need to make any adjustments or not. I recommend doing this periodically as you continue work on the hull.

Once you feel you have a good top view outline, find an image with a side view of the ship. You can repeat the process, building a side profile outline of the ship. Usually there is not much symmetry in the side profile so you won't need to use world edit. At this stage, make sure you account for the deck height of the ship. The standard deck height I use allots for 1 floor block, 3 wall blocks, and 1 block for lighting. If building multiple decks, you may want to add a gap between them for Jefferies tubes or general wiring. When you are satisfied with both of the outlines, you can begin to fill in the hull. Sometimes it may help to build a wire frame that connects the two outlines.

Tip #2
You may find at various points that you are unhappy with your hull design, or that it's not good enough. Keep it up! Don't be discouraged, just keep adding details and it will start to come together.

Once you are satisfied with your hull, you can begin laying out interior walls. Often I don't have a grand plan for where each room will go, I just create plenty of large rooms, and typically smaller rooms along the outer edge of the ship for crew cabins. Keep symmetry in mind, and also the location of any turbolifts! Key rooms any ship should have: Bridge, Engineering, Sick Bay, Shuttlebay, Mess Hall, some sort of Research/Lab, Transporter Room. Often times, you can find deck plans online that others have drafted for your ship design and get inspiration for rooms you should include.

When it comes time to add functional elements, you are more than welcome to visit the USS Zenith and explore behind her walls and under her floors. You are welcome to copy/paste any code you find in the command blocks. Just remember that certain commands may be set for a specific set of coordinates and must be changed for your ship. For example, the Zenith uses three command blocks to change the walls of the ship to the animated red light version (and three to change them back). Each block has coordinates for each deck, and if your ship is built outside of those coordinates, it won't work for you without changing the coordinates. There are various resources you can find online that explain how /playsound, /tp, and other common commands operate, and again feel free to experiment using the code and command blocks you find on the Zenith. Be aware if you plan on making chained command blocks, the orientation of the command block matters, as well as the 'always active/requires redstone' and 'chain/impulse/repeating' options found within.

Advanced systems on the Zenith, such as the transporter, rely on the scoreboard system. Essentially, clicking a button activates a command block that changes an invisible score. Other command blocks detect the change in score, and start off a chain of commands. In lieu of such a difficult system you could simply set a different transport destination for each transporter pad.

There is a separate tutorial for getting tricorders to work here, and the same process can be used for the combadges, just with warped fungus on a stick instead of carrot on a stick.

I will likely update this blog post with more information, FAQ, etc. over time.