Wednesday 2 April 2014

Star Trek: TOS:- "The Tholian Web" Diorama - micro build log

   Details and tips on the building of the USS Enterprise can be found in "The Enterprise Incident" thread - I'm way too lazy to go through it all again here ;-). The only real change is the swapping of Blu Tac for 2mm bicone red beads with 0.25mm fibre optic filament threaded through the nacelles:-
    I've used Glen Jupp's pattern for the USS Defiant with a green overlay put in place using a program called ImageJ:-
   Instead of using a disc of thick card to build the saucer, I've cut a thin strip of green card and glued it around the circumference. This ensures that there is sufficient internal space for a green LED which will hopefully penetrate the card and give a nice glow.
   For this one I used pale green beads for the bussard collectors and I've threaded filaments through them too. The almost finished Defiant looks like this:-
   The red wiring will be painted black, as will the fibre optics if they start glowing green outside the nacelles. If you thought that my previous efforts were small wait till ya get a load of this!
   The Tholian webspinners have a crew of teeny, toty wee Tholians the size of atoms - lol.
   Coming in at 4mm these are by far the smallest ships I've built. There's still a bit of touching up to do around the edges and then I'll start them spinning. It'll just be gold thread this time as I can't see any way of building up fibre optics that wouldn't be a totally nightmare! I used a circle of fairly thick card coloured black and glued thread at 10mm intervals horizontally. I then glued some more thread 10mm apart at an angle with gold thread at the back of the Tholians and black thread at the front:-
   The excess thread was trimmed before everything was mounted. It's not much to look at side-on - lol - but head-on it's not too shabby at all! The Enterprise is in the foreground with lit up bussard collectors:-
although the lights don't show up because of the camera flash! The Tholians are in the mid-ground with the disc mounted vertically:-
   The Defiant is mounted just in front of the starscape backdrop. I managed to fit a second LED inside the secondary hull so that a more even green glow was achieved:-
   The final pic shows the red light better and the blurred Defiant better shows the difference between the glowing hulls and the unlit nacelles:-

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