USS Princeton
This is the USS Princeton, a Niagara class ship. It was briefly seen in the Wolf 359 scene and it was heavily damaged. There were a few pics of it available on the net so I was able to piece together what it was supposed to look like. The original model was a new model, built with damage in place, and was never meant to be more than that. However, I wanted to build it for some reason, so I did.
As you can see it has components from several different ships. I took the saucer from a 1/2500 scale Enterprise-D, the secondary hull from a 1/1400 scale Enterprise-C, and the warp engines are shortened copies of the 1/1400 scale Enterprise-D engines. All the pylons and the neck are built form scratch. The secondary hull was extended a bit and then the top widened.
I painted it the normal scheme I use and tried making the decals myself. The decals turned out poorly, so I scrapped them and bought a custom set from JTGraphics. Those decals were top notch, as always, and they added all the details I wanted to add. I did manage to use the window decals I made, so my decal venture wasn't a total loss. But I just have an ink jet printer, so I can't do all the nice things an ALPS printer and do.
Not So Great
One of the reasons I don't like this model is that the warp engines, didn't turn out well. I should have bought some aftermarket engines, but I tried making resin copies. They didn't turn out well, to say the least. They were hard to shorten, and very heavy. I managed to shorten the engines a bit, but the solid chunks of resin don't like being cut, shaved and sanded.
I also had a problem with scribing the panel lines. I should have marked it off before I took off the raised lines, but I didn't think ahead. Also, I rushed the masking, and the paint scheme isn't really good. From far away it looks ok, but once you got a little closer, it looked bad. It just added to the general yuckiess that the model had.
Another mistake was the saucer bottom half. It was a splice of two front halves of the 1/2500 saucer, and when I finally go them together it didn't have the right shape. It looked caved in was too small. It was also very fragile and I managed to break it more than once while trying to glue it to the top half.
I also had a problem with bubbles in the resin on the warp engines, and that's why I had to make the strange pattern on the bottom engine. I had to fill and sand smooth some air bubbles on the bottom engine after I painted it, so I had to cover it up. It turned out ok, but not good. I really should have bought some engines to modify.
Overall, I'd say this in a below average model for me. I don't think I'll do things the hard way anymore, now that I know what the hard way is. I learned something about how to do things, or rather how not to do things. It wasn't a total loss, but I didn't really like it that much. It broke in a move and I didn't bother to fix it. I just tossed it in the garbage, since none of the parts were worth saving. I'm not going to make another, so this is all that we will ever see of it.