1:2500 scale USS Enterprise Lineage project

Millenniumf

Sr Member
I've been working on this one for a while, but I hadn't thought to post about it here for some reason.

This is going to be a fairly complete lineage of all ships named USS Enterprise, from the sloop-of-war from 1775 to the Enterprise-G in 1:2500 scale (or as close as I can manage, at least). I've completed all the starships from the Round 2 7-ship Enterprise set, and I'm currently working on the real life ships. I am also going to be making a display for them all which will require learning some new techniques like how to thermally form plexiglass.

Here are all the ships so far:

The NX-01 Enterprise

This one was pretty much built out of the box, because the kit was really nice as-is. I painted it in Stainless Steel, with Russian Orange for the Bussard collectors, Sky Blue for the warp grilles, and some details picked out in brass. I also gave it an overall wash in Tamiya black panel liner. I did notice some seams that needed correcting when I looked at the pics, so I fixed those, but I'm too lazy to take new pics, lol.

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The TOS Enterprise

The kit in the box was basically the same one that was released in the 90's with no modification at all, and as such it required a great deal of work to make it resemble the original ship. I started by sanding the edges of the saucer section to a steeper angle, and then I reshaped the B-C deck to more of a teardrop shape and rounded the bridge dome. I also sanded off all the windows and raised details, and then filled the dimples. I added a thin layer of styrene to the front of the secondary hull behind the deflector housing, and then I filed the grooves in the sides of the hull down so they were more sunken. I thinned down the pylons and squared the edges, and then worked on the shuttlebay. I cut it out completely and thinned the sides of the hull, then added a bit of styrene to the tail and a half dome cut from a piece of sprue. Then I drilled into the tail and added a piece of stretched sprue which I sanded down into the dome on top of the tail. I then turned my attention to the warp engines. I replaced the raised details with styrene and filed grooves below the reactor control loops. I also replaced the field recovery generators on the ends of the nacelles. The last thing I did was thermoform some 010 styrene over the end of a large eXacto knife handle and cut it out into a dome, then drilled a hole in the center to glue it over a piece of thin stretched sprue for the deflector. I then painted and decaled it.

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The Refit and Enterprise-A

These two weren't too hard because the kits were very nice just out of the box. After gluing them together, I painted them in Tamiya pearl white to give them that metallic look of the filming miniature. But I knew the Enterprise-A was not the same color as the Refit. The paint job was a bit more blue than the "engineering green" and so I ordered the decals from Federation Models, since they looked more blue than the original kit decals. Plus... I sort of messed up the decals and needed to get new ones anyway, lol. I also decided to use the old AMT decals for the name and registry markings on the Enterprise-A, mainly for nostalgic reasons.

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The Enterprise-B

This is easily one of the worst model kits I've ever put together. Not a single part wanted to fit together. But as I had it on hand and didn't want to have to buy a resin kit (not to mention I don't think an Enterprise-B resin kit exists?) I just had to make it work. I glued the subassemblies together, then sanded all the raised details off them. I also decided to rebuild the aft torpedo launcher because it was just a blob in the stock kit. I puttied the joints, and then base-coated it in white. However, I used spray paint, and apparently didn't shake the can enough because it refused to dry, so I put it in a paint drying oven, but it still refused to dry and of course, the model ended up warped and bent from the continued application of heat. Naturally, after I'd destroyed my work I discovered that the solution to that is to give it a coat of water before you apply heat... Anyway, I bought a new in box kit with the TOS, Refit, and Enterprise-B and did it alll over again. This time it dried and I was able to get the decals applied and the accents painted. It's not a perfect paint job, but I was tired of looking at it and just wanted it off my workbench, so I called it good.

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The Enterprise-C

This was significantly easier than building the Enterprise-B, but still required some reworking. The stock kit was an amalgamation of the Enterprise-C and the Yamato/Zhukov, with most of the details agreeing with the Enterprise-C, but the secondary hull having a more broad aft end like the Yamato. I took some of the sides out by cutting long slits into the hull and reducing the shuttlebay width, then bent the sides in and glued them in place. Finally, to provide some support for the modification I filled the back end with polyurethane resin and then puttied the join. As far as the paint job goes, I wanted to preserve the existing gridlines on the saucer without having to rescribe all of them. So I painted the saucer black, then sprayed a coat of clear over that, and then painted it white. I then sanded down the gridlines with some fine grit sandpaper, revealing black lines. I did need to even them out somewhat with a mist of white, but I'd say it was sucessful in preserving the gridlines. Applying the decals wasn't without its challenges, though. I applied the saucer decals, but noticed to my frustration that not all the markings matched the hull details... Specifically, for whatever reason, the edges of the teal coloring was the wrong angle on one of the extensions on top of the saucer, and some of the escape pod marks were off by a hull panel or two. So I had to match a paint color for the decal and then mask and paint the missing areas, plus paint the escape pods. After that business was done, I painted the accents, then applied the registries and sealed it.

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The Enterprise-D

This one was a pleasure to build. For such an old model, it's a really easy one to modify to get it accurate, as the hull shape is generaly correct with only a few things that needed correcting. Aside from standing the edges of the saucer and engineering hull to make them a bit more blunt, I added some details to the back of the neck as well as adding the observation windows just in front of the captain's yacht. Then I painted it in black primer and gave it a coat of Tamiya Dark Ghost Gray. The decals accurately reproduce the hull plating, but they're much too bold and contrasty. However, they also have the windows on them. I decided to paint a clear coat over the decals and then mist a light coat of Dark Ghost Gray over them to take out a lot of the contrast, then I used some Q-tips to scrub the paint from the escape pods. I then... *sigh*... set about restoring over 3,000 tiny windows. I used a .005 Micron drafting pen and an eye loupe, and it was quite an ordeal but I really love the way it turned out. And while I was at it, I decided I might as well add the windows to the saucer and engineering hull edges. After that was over I applied the pennants and registries and then sealed it all with a clearcoat, then I painted the accent colors and gave it a final sealing coat.

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The Enterprise-E

The latest one I've completed is the USS Enterprise-E, and it needed quite a bit of work to accurize it. The first thing I did after gluing all the subassemblies together was fix the greebles behind the Bussard collectors, as they were pretty lumpy and indistinct. I replaced some of it with styrene stock, and the round greebles I replaced with some lamps from an AMT tractor trailer. The grooves on the front of the Bussard collectors I filled with putty and then reshaped them somewhat to make them more accurate. I then turned my attention to the deflector tunnel, which needed to be reshaped as the tunnel is round and the one on the miniature is square. I filed the tunnel into a square shape, then filed down the deflector dish since it was rather indistinct. I cut another one from a spare kit and thinned it down, keeping it unglued so as to paint and attach it after assembly. I glued the tunnel into the secondary hull and then supported the back of the tunnel with superglue in order to give support to the backside of the thinned styrene. I also reshaped the torpedo launchers and carved holes into them for the apertures, and then filled the groove on the underside of the secondary hull and the one on top of the hull, then glued on a small bit of styrene for the lamp housing on the top of the shuttlebay doors. I added similar lamp housings on the back of the nacelles. Then I glued it all together and painted the base color and added the hull plating decals, which are not as accurate as I'd like. Not only are they missing all the tiny little random panels, but the ones on the warp engines are just simple rectangles when all the panels on the filming miniature are just as complex as the rest of the hull plating. After applying the hull registries and pennants, I applied a bunch of tiny hatches and markings from the PNT Models Sovereign class decal set. I then painted the secondary colors, and I have to say I wish that Round 2 had included the impulse engines in the markings, as the striped look of the exhausts is a pretty iconic part of the design.

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And with that, I've gotten all the Enterprise kits from the 7-piece set built, including an extra Refit!

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I'm still not done with this project. I was generously gifted a sloop of war, CV6, CVN-65, and a tiny shuttle pin that is roughly 1:2500 scale! So I'm working on those models at the moment and have been making good progress on them. I'm also going to make the Ringship XCV-330, as well as the Enterprise-F and Enterprise-G, which will be 3D printed. And when they're all done, as I said, I'll be mounting them all to a display base.
 
Really like the work! Well done!

And, if I may ask a tenuously-related question: how long did your Micron .005 pen last? Is there some trick to them that I don't know about? :D I've tried using them to black line models (such as panel lines, and especially windows!) and find they stop working after just a few minutes' use.
 
Really like the work! Well done!

And, if I may ask a tenuously-related question: how long did your Micron .005 pen last? Is there some trick to them that I don't know about? :D I've tried using them to black line models (such as panel lines, and especially windows!) and find they stop working after just a few minutes' use.
If you have a gloss or satin coat any kind of pen stops working pretty quickly. I just found this out with a Bride of Frankenstein 3D print I was painting and needed to get really thin eyebrows done that would have been impossible for me to paint. You really need a matt surface for them to have something to bite into, but then it's also harder/impossible to remove if you make a mistake.
 
Really like the work! Well done!

And, if I may ask a tenuously-related question: how long did your Micron .005 pen last? Is there some trick to them that I don't know about? :D I've tried using them to black line models (such as panel lines, and especially windows!) and find they stop working after just a few minutes' use.
Still going, actually! I was just really gentle with the tip and let it flow into the windows of the C, and was equally gentle on the D when I marked on the surface. Like Dave said, I used them on matte paint and it worked really well, but you can remove them I found by gently scrubbing with a q-tip soaked in alcohol. This will remove a little paint too, but usually you can get it off the model if you do it before the ink totally dries. I had a bottle of alcohol on standby for this, though doing it under magnification meant I rarely had to use it.
 
Hmm. That's good to know. My preferred hobby paint has a slightly satin sheen to it; maybe that's the problem.

Do these pens require using a very light touch? My other theory is that I've just damaged the nib somehow. I tend to use it with normal "gentle handwriting" levels of pressure, just kind of pulling it along the contours.
 
Still going, actually! I was just really gentle with the tip and let it flow into the windows of the C, and was equally gentle on the D when I marked on the surface. Like Dave said, I used them on matte paint and it worked really well, but you can remove them I found by gently scrubbing with a q-tip soaked in alcohol. This will remove a little paint too, but usually you can get it off the model if you do it before the ink totally dries. I had a bottle of alcohol on standby for this, though doing it under magnification meant I rarely had to use it.
Thanks for the reply!

Maybe I just haven't been gentle enough with mine. :) Got a project coming up that could use this, so I'll know soon... :lol:
 
It helps if you think of the tip of the pen as a bunch of tubes that deliver the ink to the surface. You're wanting to draw out the ink through surface tension and ionic attraction, so if you let the tip rest on the surface and drag it across instead of putting pressure on it, ink should flow out pretty readily because the ink is slightly charged and is attracted to the surface of the model through static electricity. If you apply pressure though, you're likely crushing the microscopic tubules that the ink flows through, and/or clogging them up with fine dust. If it isn't flowing though after running it along the surface a few times, it might have dried slightly in the tip, so just mark with it on a piece of paper to get rid of the dried bits and let the ink flow again and you should be good. ;) (y)
 
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