U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek: Discovery (1/1000 Discoprise) Build

[Shin]

Hi all, starting a build log for my 1/1000 Enterprise model as depicted in Star Trek: Discovery. I know people have strong feelings (positive and negative) about the show, but I think most people agree this re-imagining of the original series Constitution class was firmly on the plus side. This kit was released from Polar Lights earlier this year and I think I grabbed the first one available at my local model store, along with the lighting kit.

 

First thing first - the combo was pricey, and doesn't even include Aztec decals (which were released a couple months later for another $25). As I have no experience with lighting models or creating lighting circuits, it made sense to me to start with the lighting kit. Obviously you could put together a similar lighting setup for much cheaper if you know what you are doing. The difficult part would be sourcing motors that fit into the nacelle cavities for the spinning part of the bussard collects. For someone who just wants a lit Enterprise and doesn't want to deal with doing the math and designing circuits, soldering wires, or sourcing all the different materials, I think the lighting kit is reasonably priced. 

 

Either way I finally had time to start this thing last week, and I'm very excited with what I've already seen. It is a much different beast than the 1/1000 Enterprise Refit I built (as well as being much larger due to producers of the show changing the in-universe size of the ship).

 

Some first pics:

 

Not pictured is the round black base and brass rod to connect the base to the ship.

 

Wonderful details, clear parts for all the windows, and as the kit is designed for lighting, wiring channels are built in. Another cool feature is that the pylons holding the warp engines are tabbed in such a way that there is low chance for misalignment of the pylons or engines, a common issue with other Star Trek kits from what I understand. 

 

 

The lighting kit has LEDS for the windows, bridge/sensor domes, warp and impulse engines. Through the use of clear parts, the "landing pad" of the shuttle bay back can also be lit up. Also included are small motors to spin the bussard collectors in the nacelles, and clear blue/red parts for the warp engines that replace the clear parts from the main box. Lastly is a circuit board for all the electronics to clip into, and that runs down the rod to a battery box that takes 3AAs. Sorry I didn't take photos inside this box, but you'll see them all during the build. 

 

Also pictured is the Aztec decal sheets as well as the photoetch set from Paragrafix. There are 3D printed bridges and other aftermarket resin parts available if you really want to pimp it out. I'm passing on the bridge because in theory the top dome is not a window that looks into the bridge, and not a detail I cared enough for. 

 

 

We begin! The instructions start with the nacelles and I started playing with the electronics in there, but a very important part when putting lights in models - light blocking! The idea being you don't want a hot spot of the light showing through the hull of your ship (unless you want to, which is an effect called Raytheon lighting which mimics the lighting of an area that can't physically be lit by a light source on the exterior of the model)

 

Sprayed the insides with black, then white. I'm using a flat white instead of a glossy white or silver because I read it diffuses the light better inside, lessening the chance of hot spots. You can see the standoffs inside the saucer where the LEDs from the lighting kit are designed to be attached. 

 

And the inside of the warp nacelles - didn't need to spray white in the front end because that's where the motor housing will go: 

 

Think that's enough for a first post! Next I'll go into the work I've done on the engines, and my thought process on deciding to supplement the lighting kit with more LEDs. 

 

Thanks for reading! I'm still a relatively new modeler and would appreciate any feedback, comments, critiques, or questions as this project goes along. 

Edited October 12, 2020 by Shin
typo

[Shin]

*I know there's a lot of text below, feel free to just look at the pretty pictures 😬*

 

As far as assembly goes I started with the bussard collectors inside the warp engines. Besides the instructions starting here, it made sense to work in the area with moving parts first, as they may require the most trial and error. 

 

 

The system is pretty neat - a housing for the whole thing. You put the motor in from the front (wire first so it sticks out the back) where it slides into position, you put the circular yellow light LED board in, run the wire out of the hole at the top, and then attach the clear piece through the decorative circular piece into the cylinder - which then connects to the motor. The decorative circular piece is glued to the housing, and the motor spins the cylinder/clear part. 

 

Unfortunately I had issues with both left & right assemblies - the LEDs bump into the back of the decorative circular piece preventing it from fully seating against the housing. I had to sand the back of the decorative circular pieces down, and then shorten the cylinders as well so that the clear parts would sit flush against the front of the decorative circular piece. The right one need much more material removed than the left, and I also had to add a taper to the cylinder to accommodate the extra lost length. 

 

 

A lot going on in this photo collage. In top to bottom, left to right reading order:

 

1. a look at the loosely assembled motorized inner bussard collector assembly. 

2. I shot the decorative circular pieces with Mission Models brass. I liked the color and thought it would help slightly add a yellow tint to the lights.

3. The clear dome part had the "fans" painted black with multiple coats to block the light. The ParaGrafix PE set comes with parts that you can glue on for this, but after cutting it out I wasn't convinced I could glue them perfectly centered on the dome. And as this rotates, any bit off would be very noticeable. 

4. The color I was going for was a red bussard collector with a orange/yellow glow from the spinning part inside. To help with this I shot the dome part with Tamiya X-24 Clear Yellow. Another thing I noticed was that the light sources were clearly seen through the clear piece. I attempted to diffuse the light by shooting it with Tamiya X-21 flat base. It didn't matter that I covered the black fan parts with the flat base, as their main function is to block light. The X-21 worked great at diffusion, but at the cost of brightness.

5. The bussard caps are the next step. The base kit comes with clear parts, and the lighting kit contains parts molded in clear red plastic. I knew I wanted to diffuse the light a little more.

5a. The first experiment was blasting the inside of the clear cap with X-21 base, trying increases levels of frost and checking periodically, until I had the thing completely frosted. As you can see, in light you can't even tell the lights are on, while in the dark the light is diffused wonderfully, but an unforeseen negative was a shadow was actually cast onto the frosted dome interior by the black fan lines. 

5b. The next step was to see what exactly it would it look like with just the red fan cap. It looks OK in the the light, a red cap covering the lit part. It's perfectly clear and all the details of the fan can be seen. In dark the cap is almost invisible, and all details of the an are still visible.

5c. To diffuse the light a bit and also darken the color of the red cap, I shot a couple light coats of X-21 flat base and then X-19 smoke. The resulting effect was pretty much what I had in mind for this part with the lights off - my only concern is how dim the light appears with exterior lights on. I'll reassess after I finish lighting the entire engine, but besides wiping off the X-21 and losing the diffusion, I'm not sure how else to make it brighter. I could potentially remove the interior of the decorative piece so there is nothing blocking the LED lights. 

 

A warning for those building this kit - the wires attached to the back of the motors are relatively delicate. While attempting another dry fit into the nacelle housing (probably my fourth attempt) they fell off. This means I will need to solder them back. Honestly no wires are meant to be bent repeatedly so this one's definitely on me. 

 

There's already a lot of text so I'll summarize about my decision to try and add auxiliary lighting - I wasn't entirely happy with the way the lighting kit lit the long blue parts of the warp nacelle (three bulbs on that long stretch can only do so much with hot spots), and I also wanted to add blinking navigation lights. I stumbled upon a website, Evans Design (https://evandesigns.com) that specializes in selling easy LED systems. That means they take all the math and circuit/resistor parts out of the equation - you just buy compatible lights and power supply and are good to go. Attach all the reds wires to reds and blacks to blacks in parallel, and it should run. From what I understand they started out supplying for model railroaders.

 

Either way, this opened up a whole new world of possibility for this model. I have a shipment of LEDs for testing purposes coming soon and if they work as anticipated, I have huge plans to augment the kit lighting with some extras, namely navigation and beacon lights, as well as some of the "spot" lights left off the kit. 

[Neil Lambess]

Awesome start

[Shin]

Thanks @Neil Lambess! 

 

First thing to update: I found out Tamiya X-21 flat base by itself does not adhere when I accidentally wiped a big chunk of of it off a clear piece just by handling it. In theory nothing would be handled after installation, but why risk things flaking off in the near future. So I removed all I could and then reshot it with X-21 mixed 50/50 with XF-86 Flat Clear. That fixed the adhesion issue and I was still able to frost the clear pieces effectively. 

 

As mentioned last post I received a shipment of various LEDs to test from Evan Designs including a mixture of different sized SMDs and a couple colors, but mostly cool whites/warm whites. 

 

 

After checking all the lights by connecting each one directly to the 2AA power supply (both the "pico" cool whites burnt out under a minute) my first task was to try and even out the blue grills. After trying a few configurations I settled on butting the lights under the clear grill pieces and facing them away towards the the back wall, where diffused light will bounce back.

 

 

The top third of the photo is the kit lighting effect. It is made up of three bulb LEDs - one positioned in the front pointing back, one in the middle pointing forward, and one from the back pointing front. It is absolutely serviceable but has noticable hotspots - it's much more discernible in real life than in the photo. The bottom photo shows the results of the custom LEDs, 4 "mega" sized cool whites. It is both much brighter and provides an even glow. 

 

With the experiment complete and deemed a success, I reevaluated what possibilities I could do with more lighting. I took quite a bit of time studying the scenes of the Enterprise in the second season of Discovery to see what was lit (some of it very different than what is shown in artwork and design imagery). It's a little tricky because some things change from scene to scene - some lights are clearly visible in some and don't turn on at all in another. There are a few sure things so I started with those, then made judgement calls for the rest of my lighting plan. Then I busted out the drills:

 

 

The top right photos show the beacon lights on the bottom of the nacelle - I drilled them out to roughly the same size as the collision/navigation light holes Round 2 put on the saucer. They trickily sit in the middle where the two halves of the nacelle joined, so I taped them together for the process. Result lit on the bottom right (more light blocking will be necessary). The beacon lights on the nacelles are probably the biggest point of contention - artwork and models from video games shows four lights ("There are FOUR LIGHTS!") - two front and two aft, on top and bottom. As far as collision lights it probably makes sense for all to be on, but the only one ever turned on and visible in the show is the front bottom, so I'm rolling with that. There are also a couple scenes where it looks like there are flashing red navigation lights on the bottom front of the nacelle. I decided to forego that feature. The remaining smaller "beauty" lights took some creative drilling to angle the lights to try and create some of the spotlights present on the ship.

 

I think there is only one specific light I saw that would be too small in theory to recreate (above the rear shuttle bay on the secondary hull), though others may end up limited by practicality (attaching points or running wires) - we'll see when I get to them. There are also some light effects which would be impossible or improbable to recreate that were generated using CGI, but we do what we can.

 

Here is a nacelle with the test lights in there and the blue grill exchanged for the test clear one.

 

 

I'm debating how to paint this. Ideally I would spray the nacelles before attaching the clear pieces, but the piece is split into two halves which will need seams filled at the top/bottom. My current approach will be as such: prime and paint the sides, attach clear pieces, attach lights, glue halves together, putty and sand top bottom, then mask off the sides and prime/paint the top bottom. Luckily most of the top/bottom areas are on raised areas which should assist with this. 

 

Until next time!

Edited October 19, 2020 by Shin

[Shin]

Sorry for lack of updates, real life took over for quite a while. But was finally able to pick up where I left off, the engines! (To be fair there was a lot of experimentation over the past couple months with the LEDs to get the results below).

 

I lined the SMDs up along side the chiller grill to bounce the diffused lighting to light the chiller. I think it worked pretty well. 

 

 

Top left - after a lot of testing on how to light the end cap, I determined that putting it putting it at the end of the nacelle would be too bright, while attaching it to the clear blue nacelle piece would be too dim. I split the difference and glued a strip of styrene between the peg holes and attached the SMD to that, facing backwards. 

Top right - there is an accent light that shines on the pennant on the side of the nacelles. It's a tiny dot light, and originally I was hoping just drilling a small hole would be enough to let the light shine through. I decided I didn't like it and attached a small strand of 0.25mm fiber optic to the hole, and glued the other end directly onto one of the SMDs lighting the engine. 

Bottom: I used small SMDs for the beacon and accent lights. The beacon light shone directly into a hole, but the accent lights are offset a little bit so I tried to do a little light blocking by gluing aluminum foil in the nacelle first. The SMDs I got are of a "cool white" color temperature, which I thought were a little too blue, and the warm whites were a little too yellow. I tried to get a color temperature closer to what I wanted to by tinting a clear piece of styrene with Tamiya Clear Orange to warm up the light a little bit. Not shown in the photo is my covering this with black fabric paint after gluing to not have any light bouncing back inside the nacelle. The beacon light will also have a small piece of 1.5mm fiber optic to diffuse a little light from the SMD, and also sit flush with the surface of the nacelle. 

 

 

Top left: All non-lighting kit lights are now installed inside. I cut the wires to end at a similar length, then split them and sanded away the enamel coating. 

Top right: All the red together, and all the black together for one final light test. 

Bottom: The wires are all wrapped together, and then attached to a pin connector wire that will be what runs down the nacelle pylon. The connection between the lights and the connector are heat-shrink wrapped. 

 

 

Slap the bussard motor/light assembly in, run the wire through the hole, and here's one final look at the innards of the nacelle. I have glued the two halves together of each nacelle and they are curing as I write. 

 

One HUGE bummer is I was a bit risky, using a lighter to activate the heat-shrink wrap for the wires. On one of the nacelles I must have gotten too close/left it on too long, and melted part of the plastic. The good news is that most of it's on a recessed part of the nacelle, the bad news is that part of it is ridge detail. Going to do my best to rebuild it up with Apoxie sculpt and scrape the ridges back in.

 

 

Next step will be waiting for the glue to cure, then filling and painting the nacelle half seams. 

Edited January 11, 2021 by Shin

[LOX]

Looking good, it seems to fit rather well ? At least better than the Voyager kit from Revell.

Nice job on the lighting to, very clean installation.

 

And on a side note, I think Star Trek Discovery is a good show ... different, but good. And visually spectacular with beautiful scenes.

Especially after watching all the old star trek series on Netflix, I think discovery is refreshing and modern.

 

 

 

 

[Shin]

On 1/12/2021 at 12:01 PM, LOX said:

Looking good, it seems to fit rather well ? At least better than the Voyager kit from Revell.

Nice job on the lighting to, very clean installation.

 

And on a side note, I think Star Trek Discovery is a good show ... different, but good. And visually spectacular with beautiful scenes.

Especially after watching all the old star trek series on Netflix, I think discovery is refreshing and modern.

 

Thanks @LOX, so far all the plastic pieces have fit great. The motor fitting was good as well, but I can see the provided lighting kit will be difficult to stuff all the wires and control board into the secondary hull. I too have enjoyed the show - it's different than other series which is fine, and they certainly didn't seem to skimp on special effects and the starship sets which helps with the viewing experience. 

 

Back to our programming: after a month and a half you'd think I'd have finished the engines by now, yet here we are...

 

One thing I forgot to mention last post, I had actually painted the nacelle halves before installing any of the clear pieces. There is some debate on what color this Enterprise should be - dark grey or that of a metallic sheen. In TOS the Enterprise was painted a light grey (with maybe a little green tint on the show). The aesthetics of the Discovery show (as well as the USS Discovery herself) has most Starfleet ships seemingly clad in metal plating - perhaps to bridge the NX-01 (Star Trek: Enterprise) era starships. In a Facebook post John Eaves, one of the designers of the ship for the Discovery show, addressed this when asked about what color the ship should be:

 

 

This matches what I see in the show - the ship seems to reflect light more than a painted surface should, so I went with a metallic. After testing the metallics paints I had on hand, I decided to go with Mission Models Duraluminum. I didn't want it too bright, but also heard feedback that if you go too dark on the base color the Aztec decals may not show up that well. I think I wanted a look a touch darker than the Duraluminum, and am gambling that the overall sheen will darken after the Aztec decals and a matte coat dulls down the shine. 

 

So I sprayed a primer coat of grey Stynelrez, lightly sanded with high-grit pad, and then three light coats of MMP Duraluminum in a ratio of 10:2:2 paint/poly/thinner with a couple minutes between each coat. 

 

The dark accents I went with Vallejo Metal Color Gunmetal, carefully hand brushed. 

 

Then we get to the progress in my last post, installing the clear pieces, lighting, and closing the halves. 

 

Like many WWII aircraft, closing the halves results in a seam line running along the top and bottom. My filler of choice for this was "sprue goo", a mix of leftover Tamiya Extra thin cement in which small chunks of Tamiya sprue were mixed in until it was a thick consistency. If it's stringy, you need a little more TET. I added a couple drops of green paint to give it some color. Sprue goo's major benefits are that it sands exactly like a polystyrene part, and scribes through easily if needed. You wouldn't use this to build areas up as it doesn't provide structure, but is great for gap filling. 

 

 

I originally wasn't planning on filling the areas with this recessed detail, but after sanding the rest of the nacelle I thought I would try and be brave in this build. I went at it with sprue glue, sanded to the surface of the rings, and then used a micro razor saw and scriber to gouge out the recessed parts. I'm actually surprised at how well it turned out. 

 

 

I was a touch overzealous with the sanding stick so you can see a little flat part, but I guess you can't win them all.

 

Luckily where most of the joins are are on raised details, so I masked off the areas and primed again. 

 

 

Top: Masked bottom of nacelle

Bottom: Top of nacelle primed. You can see the successful filling and sanding of the gap. 

 

So after tape and masking fluid removed, here's where we are:

 

 

Unfortunately there is a little cleanup needed because of some overzealous liquid masking, but overall not too shabby. Any small scuffs in the surface may be covered by the Aztec decals. 

 

Next will be to finish painting the dark gunmetal accents, but otherwise I think I can move onto the pylons. I may not attach the fins and accent pieces to the engines until after decals, we'll see how they are laid out. 

 

Thanks for looking, even if you're just taking in the photos and not reading my small novels. 

[Shin]

Short update - attached the pylons halves together. I could have sworn I took a photo of the wiring inside before I closed it up, but I guess it is lost to whims of my phone camera. 

 

I kept the pylons off the nacelle before painting for seam purposes - didn't think I'd be able to fill/sand easily the part where the nacelles/pylons meet if I had them attached.

 

The wires from the lighting kit are THICK - I only used two (bussard lights and motor for spinner) and I feel they barely fit into the wire channel in the pylons - even then I had to use Bondic to slightly glue them together so they would sit flat to be able to close the pylon halves. I don't know what wizardry I would of had to do with three wires - luckily my nacelle lighting wire is much narrower. 

 

 

I'm toying with the idea of not filling the seams inside the "potato slicer" hole, mainly out of pure laziness, but we'll see. I've already applied some sprue goo on the outside seams, and will be sanding those after a couple days dry time.

 

 

 

[Shin]

Apparently I'm on a monthly update cycle, hopefully my next post will actually have something that will look somewhat recognizable. But alas, pylons...

 

I ended up attempting to fill and sand the insides of the potato slicers. By the end of the process I used a combination of Apoxie Sculpt, sprue goo, Perfect Plastic Putty, and Mr. Surfacer 500 to see what would work best as filler.

 

First shot here with Apoxie sculpt, they were mini-trenches at this point that I needed to fill. Sprue goo on the exterior to eliminate those joint lines.

 

Once sanded, wrapped up the nacelle to protect from the primer and paint - then primed the pylons with grey Stynelrez.

 

 

And I just could not get rid of the entire seam on the inside. I ended up trying to putty and sand four times, and still a little bit showed through the primer. I only decided to stop because I think I was starting to do more damage than good - the shape and edge bevels had started to deform.

 

So with that I applied the MMP Duraluminum. The finish seemed to come out a touch rougher than what I was able to get on the nacelle.

 

 

One thing that can also be seen is a slight "halo" around the potato slicer, a slight ridge from the molding process in the area. If I had a time machine I would sand the whole thing down so the area was flat, but at this point I'm well past ready to move on from these pylons. My hope is that the matte coat I plan to use at the end will dull down the speckliness of the paint and that halo. 

 

As always thanks for following, next step will be to finish detailing the engines/pylons and attach them together. Looking forward to that light test. 

[Shin]

The nacelle cap pieces were clear styrene, so the entire thing had to be light blocked (minus the rear openings). I did this via handbrushing the inside with multiple layers of black Styenelrez, and airbrushing the exterior. I did have to hand paint the exterior "inside" of the cap, the faces that run up to the clear part. I followed this same process with the base color. It looked a bit darker than the rest of the ship, but not as dark as the accent areas, so I made a mix of Vallejo Metal Color Dark Aluminum (10 drops), and Exhaust Manifold (4 drops). I may accent the ridges layer with a darker wash later.

 

The Paragrafix photoetch set came with a part to pop on the rear grill, instead of masking off around the little holes. I'm not entirely happy with the result of this, both from how light transmits through the clear piece (can't be helped), and also the references showing the holes should be small hexagons (versus ovals as molded into the piece and used for the PE). I toyed with hollowing out the clear piece (using one of the non-colored clear pieces I had left), but I couldn't control how much was removed and kept gouging into the ridge detail. And I'm not creating PE for the errant detail, so rolled with what's there.

 

The inside was light diffused using the same methods above, X-21 and X-86 to frost them up.

 

 

I also finished the rest of the dark accents on the nacelles and pylons with handbrushing Vallejo Metal Color Gunmetal. 

 

Don't think I mentioned (though they can be seen in previous posts), there are small rectangle grill like pieces near the back end of each nacelles on both sides, they were painted with a mix of 1:1 Mission Models Gold and Bronze.

 

The only pieces left were the fins on the rear of the nacelles and the bar on the side. Same painting methods and base color/dark accents as the rest of the engine. If I could do it over again, I wonder if I could attach these earlier rather than later - there are some light leaks from the holes these pieces sit into, and also the attachment points are a bit unsightly - it would have been tricky to putty those areas smooth, but may have been worth the effort. The biggest reasons I left all these pieces off was I thought it would be easier to decal the nacelles first, then attach these pieces. I'll figure a way at the least to get the light blocked. 

 

(note: the CG ship has a row of tiny accent lights running across the outer perimeter of that dark accent area on both sides of each fin - no way that I know of to mimic that at this scale)

 

 

With that, all the parts of the engine are ready. I press fit in the fins on one nacelle (again, will glue after decals) and installed the red cap, then wired everything up to see the final result. I included a video (made a YouTube account just for this hah), hope that's OK. 

 

 

And if not, here's a photo of the final results:

 

 

Pretty happy with where I am so far, and it's taken quite a while to get there. Will probably tackle the saucer next - think that'll be less tricky than the secondary hull. 

 

 

[Shin]

Carrying on! Started with the saucer. I actually had way too much paint leftover from when I did the engines to just dump, so I ended up spraying the bottom saucer with MMP Duraluminum at the same time. Like the engines, the inside was sprayed black, then white to light block and disperse interior lighting. 

 

 

Problems immediately when I began to run in the wiring. After positioning the two rear impulse engine lights, they want you to run the wire clockwise on the inside pointing in. You can see after the first light, my wire was not long enough to reach the top holder as the instructions indicated. Yellow tape to temporarily hold everything in place. 

 

 

So I played around with the lights until I found a way to make sure all the tabs were accounted for, then held it all down with Bondic. The LEDs have a distinctively blue cast, so I tried to push the light towards a more neutral white by spraying the clear parts with Tamiya clear orange after frosting them. It... did not work. I tried again with yellow, and the results were still less than stellar. I may try and introduce a warm white light in there to try and balance our the color temperature. At this point, I've stripped all the clear parts. 

 

 

In the show, at one point we get a panning/zooming shot coming across the impulse engines. You can see some sort of texture in there, not apparent until the camera is pretty much right up on it. To try and mimic this (and make this model distinctively mine), I figured I would use a very small honeycomb pattern PE I found on eBay (I assume for engine grills).  Cut to size, then glued to the back of the clear impulse parts. 

 

 

This photo shows both success of the texture getting the effect I want, but also highlights a couple problems - even with frosting the clear part I'm not sure it will adequately disperse the light to even out across the entire impulse engine piece. The other is a complaint from other builders - the impulse engines read as purple when lit up. 

 

This photo also shows one piece of PE that I used from the Paragrafix kit - the circular docking port there in the middle. It has openings on the doors to mimic the areas to be lit, so I drilled straight through the plastic to open it up. The existing LEDs don't do too much to get light in there, so it may need to be lit independently depending on what I do with the rest of the saucer lighting. 

 

Thanks for looking!

 

 

Edited June 11, 2021 by Shin
Bondic, not Bondo

[Thom216]

Some niiice work going on here!

I'd be tempted to get that lighting kit if it wasn't so 'spensive. 

 

[Shin]

8 hours ago, Thom216 said:

Some niiice work going on here!

I'd be tempted to get that lighting kit if it wasn't so 'spensive. 

 

thanks Thom! To be honest if I had a time machine, I'd go back and not buy the lighting kit. It's certainly not a bad kit, but unfortunately does not provide me with the type nor level of illumination I want from my model. Technically this can be a very straightforward build, kit + lighting kit, someone can probably knock it out in a couple weekends and have a decent looking Enterprise model. I should have just bit the bullet back then and invested in looking more deeply at alternate lighting solutions.

 

From the last post, the two problems to overcome were purple colored lighting, and diffusing the impulse engines. I tried my usual X-21/XF-86 mix and that helped, but as suspected the bulb LED wasn't going to cut it. I thought moving it back may lessen the hotspot, so I clipped the entire tab off (remember, my lights were glued in at this point), and physically moved it away from the clear engine piece, only to find it was too dim. So I busted out a Mega LED from Evan Designs (5mm LED, similar to the ones I used above for the warp nacelles) and put that behind - bingo, evenly lit impulse engine depending on how far I went. An added bonus, this LED was a warm white (instead of the cool whites in the engines) which helped a little with the color. Unfortunately it was still a little pinkish at this point.

 

In an attempt to diffuse the light a little more and shift the color it a little redder, I trimmed some small pieces of clear thin Styrene, and sanded it to frost it. I was going to spray it with Tamiya clear red, but then remembered I had bought a Pro Acryl transparent red paint to try out, so shot that on instead. I put that between the light and the clear impulse part, and was pretty happy with the result.

 

Top left: result of diffused clear impulse part, diffused clear styrene shot with Pro Acryl Transparent Red behind it, illuminated by a warm white LED. 

Top right: I was going to paint the frame then use the Paragrafix PE, but in testing it looked great when looking straight on the engines, but from any angle, it looked exactly what it was - a flat part glued onto a raised object. The clear parts of the frame were clearly visible (sorry, PE not in the photo, it just shows the areas I hand painted with primer in preparation of the PE)

Bottom left: masking job with small rectangles. I knew this wasn't going to be perfect because the insides are not perfect rectangles, they have small curves at some corners. Ended up having to toothpick scrape some excess paint off, and hand brush in some gaps.

Bottom right: result after spraying Stynelrez primer, then 1:1 Vallejo Metal Color Dark Aluminum and Exhaust Manifold (almost the same color as the nacelle caps). I think I maybe should have gone with the darker Gunmetal for this, but that's OK. I'm surely not masking those small windows again.

 

 

Here you can see it all together - the LED I made a stand for, the two floating lighting kit LEDs that I'll have to figure out where to point, and the transparent red pieces I glued behind the inside of the impulse engines. 

 

I was half tempted to put a tiny LED behind each of the impulse engine windows to really mimic the screenshot from above, but that would be an unneeded cost and probably cause its own headaches. Maybe if they ever make a 1/350 scale of this ship... 

Edited June 12, 2021 by Shin
typo

[Thom216]

Neat solution to the impulse lighting. It looks so good.

[iaf-man]

whatever happened to this project?

[Shin]

On 4/6/2023 at 7:12 AM, iaf-man said:

whatever happened to this project?

thanks for asking, and good timing on your post! I was away from the hobby for a while, and when I came back I got distracted with 3D printing and figure painting. This Enterprise has been sitting on my desk taunting me for it looks like a couple years now hah. I've made a little more progress since my last update, but I intend to pick this up full time within the next week. Updates incoming!