1:350 Star Trek Pre TOS era ship S.S. Columbia

My friend Jack Holczer 3D printed a 1:350 scale Daedalus Class ship from the Star Trek universe and he sent me a kit. I have never been a big fan of this design but I wanted to build this up because its something that a friend created.
While developing the iconic look of the original USS Enterprise, Matt Jefferies came up with this preliminary design as well as many other variations. One of the ones that I like is the one with the engines down (upside-down from what we know as "correct"). That is the ship that I am going to build out of this kit. I was going to name it the USS Icarus (Son of Daedalus), But I decided to go with S.S. Columbia. This ship was mentioned in the original pilot episode of Star Trek starring Jeffry Hunter (The Cage). The S.S. Columbia survey vessel crashed on the planet Talos IV 18 years prior to this episode. It was never seen on screen, so I decided that this is what the Columbia looked like.

 Two things that I will change are the length of the hull and the length of the engines. I think both are way too long so I am cutting the hull in Half and cutting three sections off the engines.





3D printing with filament (vs resin) doesn't produce a very smooth surface. Lots of sanding was required to get this thing down to a sort of smooth painting surface. Even then I couldn't get all of the striations out as they run too deep. Its just an inherent part of the material.

So I decided that it was going to be an older, weathered ship. The paint scheme is very much influenced by the rough texture. I'm using Lou Dalmaso's trusty Aztec Dummy painting masks for the panel effects. I started with Tamiya XF-72 Brown, then XF-59 Desert Yellow, them XF-23 Light Blue. I went back over the panel lines with some more XF-72 Brown using a 0.2mm airbrush. Then I went over the whole thing with Flat white until the details were just barely visible.

Then it was time for some lights! I opted to put white styrene behind the windows rather than have them open and filled with something like Micro Krystal Klear. I think it looks much cleaner and more in line with the filming ship props from the 1960s.

One big 10mm Red LED flanked by two strobing RGB lights. It gives a nice effect that there is something going on behind the translucent red end caps. I haven't had much success adding video to this blog, but I'll give it a try for the next post.

I put all the lights into the body, but I didn't take any photos for some reason. So next up was the end cap for the back of the ship. I was going to need some blue lights for the impulse engines (big holes around the outside), Red, Yellow and Green for the optical landing system under the hangar door. Rather than run wires for two red, two yellow and a green LED, I filled the holes with Tamiya clear red, yellow and green paint, then lit behind with one white LED. I had some problems with the blue light leaking into the white so I came up with a compartment system as you can see below.

As the master of piss poor planning, the inside of the hull was crammed full of wires for the lighting strips that are illuminating the windows.
Some of the strips were too close to the edge to allow the end cap to go on. I also had inserted a very large lead fishing lure as a counter weight for to the Ball that will be on the front of the ship so there wasn't any room for all the shit I had added to the end cap for light blocking. I was really worried about shorting the electronics out if I shoved it in there and something touched something else. So I did a little rearranging and I got it to barely fit. I mean Snug. I was surprised that everything still worked when I was through!

 

 After all of that I wired up some blue lights for the ends of the engines and glued them into place. I almost went with pink but it was too much. Best to stay with a unified look.

I opted to not add running lights to the ends of the nacelles as there were none on the original USS Enterpise. As this is an earlier ship I figured they wouldn't have them either. Plus I was being lazy and didn't want to do all of that work. That's the real story. Ha!















So that is where she stands. Note the shorter hull and engines as I mentioned at the start.

The next steps are to gloss coat it in preparation for the decals that Jack will be sending me. I am also considering using some Tamiya brown panel line accent around the raised lines on the hull. But I am not sure. After that I will start working on the Ball. I still don't know if I want to leave it smooth or add raised features (2mm styrene half round strips). Or even dare to try to scribe some panel lines (not likely).

We shall see in our next update.