Well, Dear Reader. It’s been a while. Time to get back on the horse. Lets get to it!
So welcome back once again with a look at the finished U.S.S. Enterprise as she appeared in the second series of Star Trek: Discovery. It’s been a while now, but if you remember, I spoke about this kit way back in the post ‘Boldly Going…‘ where I took a look at the kit in it’s disassembled form.
A few weeks back, I had finished this marvelous kit. This is the first time where I’ve completed a Star Trek kit and not felt like I wanted a second shot at it. And it has been an interesting learning curve, there are things I would have done differently especially in decaling the warp nacelles, but I’ll come onto that in a moment. This kits biggest success for me was in it’s simplicity, and i don’t mean that in sense that its a snap fit kit, but this is a kit I can easily recommend for new builders. with the kit being molded in the the colour it needs to be, you don’t need to have model making skills to make this look great, you’d need to colour the clear pieces and the deflector dish, but that’s it. You can afford to be bold with the decals they’re nice, sturdy and forgiving and finish the ship off perfectly, you just need a little patience and you’ll do well with them.
As you can see in the pictures, I elected to paint my copy of the model (You can find the colours I used in the previous post about this kit), and overall, I like it. I do sometimes look at it and wonder ‘should I have used Steel rather than Dark Steel as the base colour’, I do look at it and think it’s too dark, but then I think it fits quite well with Discovery’s tone and colour palette, plus, the white of the paint and decals and the the other lighter colours pop against the darker base.
Now, in the big picture of things, my thoughts are largely positive. There was something I did notice in regards to the port side nacelle pylon.
It’s not easy to see here, but the port nacelle hangs a little lower that the Starboard one. At first I thought I had the saucer section just mis-positioned ever so slightly. But no, that was fine. I feel like this is something I did wrong, though what that was isn’t clear. The piece fixes perfectly into where it sits on the engineering section and there is no visible warps in the part. It’s the one thing that lets an otherwise perfect kit down.
Also, in regards to the engines, the decals were a struggle to lay down. As I assembled the nacelles I attached the four fin parts before painting. Now, if you remember back to my original post I mentioned that a slight molding issue meant there was a gap between the part and one of its connector pegs on one of those aforementioned fin parts, as if a small bubble popped in the process during the kits creation. Well, I glued that down only to discover that the decals should have gone on first before those parts. I had to do a little selective trimming and Micro Sol was very much my friend. But, if I was to have another go at this one again, I would have done the decals first then use canopy glue to stick the fins down.
There was only eight smaller detail decals that I didn’t use, these were four that covered the deflector housing behind the deflector dish and eight little details that sat towards the front of the warp nacelles. These were really fiddly and I couldn’t get them to sit well. Thankfully, their omission from the build hasn’t harmed the final look.
I had a a couple of decal misplacements on the saucer section, but otherwise I’m really happy with how this kit turned out. Polar Lights have done a really good job with these Star Trek: Discovery kits and I’m looking forward to a second attempt at the Discovery itself and the Shenzhou. Lets hope we get more kits from the Discovery series later down the line.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. I recently went back into my Pinterest account and had an idea. Originally I had in mind of having a gallery tab so that you could see more of the models I’ve built, but I’m conscious of filling up space I have on WordPress for photo’s at the moment. Once I’ve figured what the best way is to use Pinterest for this, I’ll start directing you there for more photo’s.
It’s Halloween this week and I have something in mind to talk about in the next post, in fact I’m watching part of what I’m talking about as I write this. So, until next time, I’ll see you soon, and I won’t leave it as long this time.
Writing Wrongs And All that other stuff 