Star Trek: TOS:- remastered "The Enterprise Incident" Diorama - micro build log

   Moving onto the remastered version, I'm basically just lathering, rinsing and repeating with the new colour scheme to match the bird of prey.

   With the wing sections built on both D7s I cut all the tiny pieces:-

and fitted everything together:-

leaving the nacelles and command module to be built. I forgot that I had a fibre optic filament to thread through one of them so that should try my patience no end! The finished grey D7s look like this:-

  
Now onto the bird of prey:-

   Partially built it looked like this:-

   ​And with all three built and mounted we have "The Enterprise Incident" Mk II:-

   And finally, "The Enterprise Incident" II-A:-

   The surprise I was working on was my attempt at a cloaked D7, using battery packaging, a tiny piece of fibre optic filament and a trimmed dud LED:-

   I forgot the episodes of CSI that show how latent fingerprints are brought up with superglue fumes, hence the opacity, but all in all it's come out fairly well.

Star Trek: TOS:- "The Enterprise Incident" Diorama - micro build log

   Another suggestion from spaceagent-9 (from Zealot.com) has got me started on "The Enterprise Incident". For Kirk's Enterprise I'm using a design by Glen Jupp which I've modified just a wee bit. I'll be using the design which spaceagent-9 has very kindly worked on and provided for the Romulan D7s. There are two versions of this scene so I'm going to have one detachable D7 which can be replaced with a Bird Of Prey in line with the remastered version. I'll be setting myself a challenge with this diorama, but I'm keeping it as a secret for the mo' just to add a bit of suspense.
   First off, the USS Enterprise:-

   I doubled the thickness of the bridge and, since I ran off two printings, I also added the circle of the bridge in another layer to add extra definition. The tabs on the nacelles were reduced to half the width in the photo as I'm working with my favoured card and those wide tabs were too much to handle. I also removed the tab from the secondary hull and joined the edges with an internal strip of paper. A circle of heavyweight card was needed to give the saucer the necessary depth.

   The pylons are notoriously unstable so I reinforced them by inserting a length of wire. Once all the sections were constructed I glued strips of curved card to the backs of the nacelles and secondary hull then cut them flush to the main body of these sections so that they were no longer hollow tubes. For the bussard collectors I used shaped Blu Tac coloured red.
For the base I've cut a corner from a box, curved the vertical face and papered all the surfaces with a starscape. 

   Working on the paint job for the Romulan version of the D7 was incredibly time consuming with just MS paint. This is the preliminary result:-

   This was culled from various images obtained in a search of interwebland and hopefully won't require too much manipulation to fit spaceagent-9's design. The main change will be turning it blue for Scene 1. 

   As always I started with the wings:-

   I printed enough duplicates to allow for four layers if necessary. The additional tiny turquoise pieces were taken from Wulf111's design and glued onto the back wing plate. I then started to build out from the main wing structure:-

   The layers start to appear now:-

   I'm working on all three at the same time so there are another two also at this stage. So... nacelle struts are in place and command modules are coming together. Now comes the really, really fiddly bit - lol. Remember this lot is multiplied by three!

   I'm just using blu tac for the command module bulbs - that way the addition of the paintwork piece doesn't add too much bulk. It's also made it easier for me to build one of the ships with a fibre optic filament threaded through the neck and out the torpedo launcher. This stage is incredibly time consuming due to the number of tiny pieces. The smaller pieces have to be coaxed into place with the dampened end of a cocktail stick as they're too wee for tweezers to handle. 

"A second Romulan ship is decloaking"

   Hopefully the green light in the torpedo launcher will show up better when I get around to shooting the video. 

This one is dedicated to Ziggy. RIP my wee fluffy pal.

   A video with sound 'borrowed' from the original episode is available here:- https://www.flickr.com/photos/linweseregon/

Wolf 359.

   With the Wolf 359 diorama almost finished I've decided to upload a (quite grainy) video to show the flickering of burning ships and the best of the fibre optics.

   There's still a bit to be done, eg photon torpedoes and some nondescript wreckage here and there. All the named ships plus the two Klingon cruisers are now in place so only the finishing touches are needed.
   I nicked some 0.25mm fibre optic filaments and attached 2mm bicone beads at the nicks: four red for the USS Bellerophon and five green for the Klingon cruiser. My previously built USS Enterprise A was damaged by plumbers so I demolished it and added it to the scene, even although it's not to scale - just kid on it's closer than everything else ;-). The video with light and sound can be found here:-

https://www.flickr.com/photos/linweseregon/

A Homage to Pavel.

   Here goes my biggest challenge. This is the Springfield class USS Chekov, named in honour of Pavel - even if a last minute USS Tolstoy was added. As usual I'm starting with the saucer of the now very familiar Galaxy class:-

    I obtained the name and registry from an orthographic, whitened out everything that wasn't letters or numbers and pasted it in place. I was then on less familiar ground:-

    The pod shape was obtained from the same ortho', the front and back from another ortho'. I had to recolour the pod to match the Galaxy design better. The saucer halves were not joined because I knew that a lot of shaping would be needed on the secondary hull before they could be attached. I also required a disc of thicker card sandwiched between the halves. The square of grey card was used for shaping the edges of the pod. I left the nacelle supports as they were, but stretched the curved hull sections to give a profile which was closer to the Chekov plans I've seen, ie long and shallow. The remaining piece (bottom left) was also taken from the first ortho' recoloured and extended. This was a rough draft which would need to be properly shaped by dry fitting and trial and error trimming. The result can be seen below:-

   I had to build up a support for the pod using other pieces of that previously shown grey square. The plans seemed to indicate that the space from the bridge to the rear of the pod support is level. The pod itself had to be hoisted so that the underside would be at the same approximate height as the underside of the nacelles, hence the thin box at the centre of the rear end. There was a consensus that a tertiary hull was present. For this I used a slightly modified Galaxy class secondary hull with struts from an Oberth class cut in half. This left the nacelles to be constructed:-

   The undamaged USS Chekov may have looked something like this:-

   Now all that's left is to blow the crap out of it!

   I just need to add some debris, blacken the white wires and mount it.

Fancy Slaying A Chimera?

   Aye, you've guessed it - next in line is the USS Bellerophon, presumably named after the mythical Greek hero. This Nebula class ship is a monster! I'm using a design for the USS Sutherland which is tagged modelosdepapel.com.ar and is by "Edward" - I can't recall where I found it. I started with the ventral saucer sections and internal supports:-

   Then moved to the dorsal saucer sections:-

   Trying to join the halves with the internal supports and the gazillion tabs on the lower half proved to be impossible - I ended up with a warped mess. I had to trim the internal supports to practically nothing and completely remove the outer ring (which was supposed to be notched, folded over and joined to the upper disc). I reprinted the lower disc, cut round the outer ring, joined it to the rim of the upper half then attached the lower half. This kept the saucer edge smooth and the discs unwarped. With that done I moved on to the pod, purely because it has the next largest pieces:-

    By my standards this ship is huge - I haven't measured it yet, but the saucer must easily be a whopping 3 1/2" wide.
   This design is posing problems. There are loads of notched tabs that have to be glued and then folded under with no way to apply pressure to make the tabs stick. However, despite the vast number of notched tabs and the lack of purchase when gluing them I might as well persevere with it since I only have the nacelles left to build. It's slow going because I can only affix two tabs at a time and I have to leave time for them to dry before moving to the next two.
    I constructed the pod and cut the pieces for it's support structure:-

    At first glance the support looked like it would be murder to join up, but it went together easily enough. The next section I worked on was the secondary hull, again with those bizarre notched tabs:-

    For the lower half of the secondary hull I removed the tabs and used strips of paper to join the pieces. With most (if not all) of the other ships I could remove all the tabs, but the unique design of this model means that I've had to retain the vast majority of them. 
   The nacelle pylons joined up really well and the design gave exactly the right shape for attaching the nacelles and pod support.

    I trimmed the tabs off the curved edges to maintain the correct profile and avoid 'bulking up'. The nacelles were the last parts to be constructed:-

   I discarded the white ovals as I felt they were surplus to requirements. The tabs from the ends and the bussard collectors were removed and I joined everything with internal paper strips as usual. A cocktail stick helped in curving these pieces. Then all the sections were put together:-

    All the other ships are dwarfed by this beastie:-

    The Bellerophon is only slightly longer than the Yamaguchi - it's the width that makes it such a monster.
Well that's only the USS Chekov left, unless I can find room for some random ship pieces and spaceagent's proposed 'Planet of the Titans' Enterprise. The Chekov seems to be another Galaxy class kitbash with parts from the Oberth and Cheyenne classes - hull support pylons and marker pen nacelles, respectively. The rest will need to be scratch built. Oh goodie! lol.

A Matter Of Honour.

   The Klingons had to be at Wolf 359, so in honour of that bunch of psycho hotheads here is the first of the two Klingon representatives in my diorama; a 1" cruiser:-

  The building process of this ship is covered in another post so I'm only showing the completed model here. The command module pieces were too small for me to use so I used a tiny blob of Blu Tac instead.
   "Qapla' -victory is ou... Oh shit!"

    This Klingon is dead; it is defunct; it has shuffled off this mortal coil; it has ceased to be - he's fucking snuffed it! I had to have a wee homage to the Monty Python team here ;-). The black welding rod shouldn't show against the black background.
Two more to go!

Buran Buran.

   Couldn't resist the Barbarella pun ;-). Today was 'Bite The Bullet' day and I've started on the Challenger class USS Buran. All my sources agree that the saucer is made from two upper halves of Galaxy class parts. I've opted for the Hudson Valley Gift Shop version:-

   My sources also agree that Galaxy class nacelles were used, but just to be awkward they are at a different scale. I had to print them at approximately twice the size of the saucer scale (whatever that was...):-

    There seems to be some agreement that the nacelles are slightly longer than the saucer. There is then some divergence - some sources think that the engineering deck is thin and straight-edged, others think it's a modified Galaxy secondary hull. I've opted for the latter. To make things awkward again, this is in yet another scale; somewhere between the saucer and the nacelles:-

   The photo shows the pieces I'll be using for the engineering deck (as well as the finished nacelles. The bottom three pieces are currently a rough guide for the shape of the underside. More modification will be needed since the Buran doesn't have those markings. The real fun is yet to come when I try to recreate the submarine tower for the upper nacelle support. Apparently it was taken from a Russian Typhoon kit. I might also reprint some of D-Whale's nacelles as the ones here are a bit 'blocky' for my liking.

    The pieces I cut above for the engineering deck didn't work - it ended up looking like a grey banana and it was too big. I reprinted the pieces and trimmed curves into the joining edges. I also found a design by rocketman on Deviant Art for the Red October, which is a Typhoon class Russian sub. Reworking the conning tower gave the parts necessary for the nacelle supports.

   The tower piece still on card needed to be shortened and reduced in depth and angled for the lower support. I used parts of the Galaxy class nacelle support to construct a way of attaching the engineering deck to the saucer.

     With these sections connected I drew on my damage guide.

    The only reference photos available made a guessing game of where the damage should be and because of this I've left the lower nacelle intact. I used my usual wire wool and shredded offcuts to simulate parts being blown off the saucer and upper nacelle.

    The wires are for another flickering yellow LED.
    The USS Buran turned out to be less of a challenge than I expected; I doubt very much that I'll be able to say the same of the USS Chekov!