“Boldly Going…Again!”

The Enterprise is finished.

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.

‘All I ask is a Tall Ship And A Star To Steer Her By’

It’s a very grand title for this one, I know. The line itself is taken from John Masefield’s poem ‘Sea-Fever’ and for those of you dear readers who are Star Trek fans will remember it being said a few times throughout the franchise’s history, it was even used the the quote on the dedication plaque of the U.S.S. Defiant from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (I’ve just shown another level of my geekness with that haven’t I!). So I think it’s a fitting title to share with you some models I’ve built in recent times. So come aboard, and lets set sail to the stars.

Now, there are only four to share at this time, the other completed kit is a Gundam kit, and I think they are worthy of their own post for later down the line. I also have a few that I’ve started but haven’t finished. I may do a work in progress post for those. As this blog is helping me get back into a regular routine for writing, hopefully, it will also help get those kits finished. These are only going to be light reviews if that, so at this point I will say that they are all painted using Acrylicos Vallejo paints, barring the phaser arrays on the Enterprise-D which were painted in ‘Dark Bronze’ by Green Stuff World. let’s take a look at the models.

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We’re starting with the U.S.S. Enterprise – D from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and ‘Star Trek: Generations’. This is a 1:2500 model kit from AMT (owned by Round 2 Models) and marks my fourth attempt with this kit, it’s only a few years younger than myself and the first time I built it would have been either the very late 80’s or very early 90’s. I do have some very fond memories of it, and this version has a nice looking set of decals that cover the surface and comes with a much better base that it had as part of the original ‘Three Piece Enterprise Set’. Once built, it is a nice model that looks good. As I say I have such fond memories building and painting the previous versions. But, it does pain me to say, that at this point, I think this fine ship deserves an update. On the box, it states it’s a snap fit kit. It isn’t. It was never designed to be, and because of the ‘tweaks’ to attempt to make it snap fit, it has created a fit issue between the saucer and neck section with the star drive section. which is a real shame. It’s also only nine pieces to make the ship, which isn’t an issue as such, It’s just such an old model that doesn’t fit with some of it’s contemporary’s that Round 2 have made recently and the price was an issue for me to, back in the day for the full three piece set it cost around the twenty pound mark, I paid quite a bit more just for this alone. The Decals don’t quite fit either, they feel like they were made for a different kit and felt quite thin and a couple had a tendency to tear. But with those faults aside it still looks a fine ship when finished.

Now, this is the first of two kits from the same series. This is the space battleship Yamato from ‘Space Battleship Yamato’ specifically the ‘2202’ version from the shows second series. If you can find it, I highly recommend this show (they just had different years at the end of the title the first series was ‘2199’ and series two had ‘2202’) and this is from Bandai’s ‘Mecha Colle’ line of model kits. They are small but pack a lot of detail. The boxes aren’t that much bigger than a twenty pound note, and are only a few inches long in this particular kit there were 3 sprues of parts one for the stand and the other two was the parts for the ship itself. There’s twenty five parts and its build around an inner structure piece. It is also snap fit and molded in grey and red, I painted mine but I can highly recommend these as a starter kit for those who want to have ago at model making, they even have name plates that you can cut from the box and stick to the stands. These kits are such a joy, and even with shipping (bear in mind I’ve imported this from Japan) one kit will cost a little over a fiver. Putting shipping aside for one moment this cost me all of £3.81 and for the other ‘2202’ era kits, that’s the starting price as you can get sets of ships and bigger ships, which obviously cost a bit more. The ‘2199’ era ships are all in the same size box and they’re £2.54 each. I got mine from Hobby Link Japan, and if you do go and take a look, Bandai’s Mecha Colle line isn’t exclusive to the Yamato models.

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Now, I know what your thinking; ‘You’ve uploaded the same picture!’ And on the surface, yes, I can see where you’re coming from. But no, it’s another ship, let me introduce you to ‘The Experimental Ship of Transcendental Dimension Ginga’…yep, that’s it’s name! Apart from the mouthful of a name, The Ginga is based on the Yamato mentioned above. As far as I’m aware this is a brand new ship exclusive to the modern series and first seen in the second series (‘2202’). I haven’t seen the original anime from the 70’s/80’s so I don’t know if it has been featured before. this had a slew of new parts made for it and features a landing deck at the top behind a new bridge module and the dome like recreation deck (the big blue bit). I would run the risk of repeating what I said above about the Yamato, these are just great kits. The only issue I had was the front nose of the ship. Mine wouldn’t fit flush to the ship so there is a gap that makes it look ever so slightly separate from the rest of the hull. Now this is a latter kit in the ‘2202’ line which means it has water slide decals rather than stickers. They are nice, but small, one is so small it was scary to apply and I don’t think I’ve ever held my breath so long to apply it. Even though the Ginga came in the same size box, it does cost a little more than the Yamato, this one costs £4.44 before shipping. But, do you know what, with the parts count and the detail at this small size, it’s great value.

Last one to share for now is the ‘good old lady’ herself. The Galactica. From Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ from 2003, this was such an amazing series, go and give it a look, this is my favorite of my builds so far, and the one I’m most proud of. It took me a while to complete this one as I procrastinated over it for a few years. It’s in 1:4105 scale and is oddly dwarfed by the 1:2500 Enterprise-D kit. It has a interesting story, when I bought this it was in a Revell branded box, but I found out that this was originally made by ‘Moebius Models’. How did i discover this? Well, Revell didn’t take Moebius’ logo and company name off the display stand. At first, I thought that was a bit lazy, but I also got excited as it was around this time that Moebius announced a kit of the Pegasus in the same scale. Revell had released the Viper’s mark 2 and 7, a Cylon Raider and a Cylon Warrior. Unfortunately, my dream of having ‘The Beast’ and ‘The Bucket’ (if you’re a Galactica fan, you know) side by side was dashed. Revell had no plans to reissue the Pegasus under their banner, and ebay prices for the bigger kit now isn’t exactly wallet friendly. One day, I will fulfill this dream. At the time of purchase, the Revell version set me back no more than twenty pounds, and it is a great kit. My only issue is the gator head front section. It doesn’t fit quite right to the main body and makes the ship look like it’s looking up, but that doesn’t spoil the majesty and impressiveness (if that’s even a word) that this ship commands. Of course, my idea to have a small fleet of Battlestars isn’t quite squashed. On the Galactica, I used brass-etched parts from a third party company called ‘Paragrafix’. This was mainly with the ship name and registry on both flight pods. On that frame of brass-etch parts was a selection of other ship names. But, there was one specific name that made me want to do another version of this kit. That name: Columbia, this was seen briefly in a flash back sequence in the Battlestar Galactica TV movie ‘Razor’ (and mentioned briefly in the original series too). Hopefully, I can find another Galactica kit at a reasonable price and I can make the Columbia happen.

Well, there we go. That’s my completed models so far. I’m not that far away from adding the Arcadia to the fleet, so I’ll do something similar to this when that’s completed. This oddly go’s hand in hand with Tuesday’s post about creativity. Snap fit kits are a good place to start if you want to give model making a go, and make sure you have fun if you do, there is no right and wrong and don’t be afraid to be creative, none of the models featured are screen accurate and I have taken artistic licence with some of the colour schemes. I’ll end here for now. See you again on Tuesday.