USS Siren
The USS Siren is a ship based on the USS Centaur seen in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was never given a class name and the registry number was never mentioned. The ship was clearly a kit bash from Excelsior and Reliant parts from ERTL kits, so it would have been easy to make it on your own. Victory Productions decided to do the same and make a conversion kit for the Excelsior. It was a pretty simple conversion, with the painting as the only hard part.
There were quite a few little pieces in the conversion kit. You got new warp nacelles, the rollbar, a bunch of little blisters, and a piece to fill in the gap in the Excelsior's saucer where the roll bar attached. The rollbar would have worked fine as it came, but I felt that it stuck out too far, so I cut a chunk out of it to make it sit closer. It turned out pretty good, and I looks much better to me.
In as you can see, the bottom of the sauce has several little blisters on it. This would have made painting the 'aztec' pattern on the bottom quite difficult. The conversion's instructions suggests that you paint the 'aztec' pattern first and then put on the blisters, and it worked great.
Painting and Decals
The painting scheme was pretty much just like the Seldon. A base of Testors' Light Gray with the paneling done with slightly darker grey. All the blue is done with decals except for the ring around the bridge, that's Dark Blue (in the little bottles). The black on the nacelles is, of course, black. The aztec pattern on the saucer was done with Walker Enterprise's Aztec Templates, which you can get at Federation Models. The rest of the paneling was pretty much random squares, rectangles, and lines. The photon torpedo areas are Testors' Euro I Gray.
The decals are a mix from Don's Light and Magic, McDaniel Models, and the original kit decals. They all worked quite well and I would recommend Don's Light and Magic decals to anyone thinking about building and Excelsior or Enterprise-B kit. They are top quality.
This conversion took me a long time because I put it off so much. It was a good project, and not to hard. Victory Productions doesn't exist, but you can find the conversion on eBay from time to time. The only problem is it is not accurate. But it would still look good. The decals really made my model turn out well, so I would invest in those if you want to make this model. The Siren is not in scale with any of my other ships, but oh well. It looks good.
One final note. You may have noticed that there aren't any little bumps for the phasers on the model. I took the pictures before I glued them on. I can't remember why I did that. Oh well. Here's one last picture of the Siren, but this time with the phaser 'bumps' on it.
This poor baby got really banged up in the last few moves. The nacelles are drooping and is in desperate need of repair. It's on the 'To Do' list, but as any modeler knows, that list is a mile long.