Polar Lights 1/1000th USS Enterprise, TOS-vintage. It's a fun kit - not many parts and not many really serious construction problems, except the obvious one of "How the hell do I hold it while I apply the decals?" Speaking of which, the decals were quite good. Many are very large and weirdly shaped, especially the window/racing stripe combo on the secondary hull, and they look like they're going to be awful trouble, but they really aren't. They respond to Micro-Sol, but slowly.
Here we see the only decal problem I had: the tail end of the red "racing stripe" on the starboard warp nacelle folded over on itself, and all my attempts to fix it just made it worse. Some of the other decals folded over, but I was able to save them. But not this one.
My plan was that after painting and applying the decals I would draw yellow and light orange lines on the warp nacelle caps with felt markers (Sharpies, to be specific). But yellow and light orange Sharpies have absolutely no coverage over gloss orange paint. None. Zero. I know they work - I colored my thumbnail testing them - but there's absolutely no sign of striping on the nacelles, either in person or in photographs. Had I known this, I would have left the caps off so I could stripe them with oil paints separately, without having to manhandle the whole steenking ship.
But it's a nice kit and I enjoyed it. Who's up for a battle-damaged Constellation?
PS: I think I like RLM-65 as Federation paint. It's more blue than the actual studio models, which have a distinctly greenish tint if you ask me, but the blue seems right to me. It looks more right under bright halogen lamps and less right under fluorescents, but on the whole, I think it's going to be my de facto standard Federation paint.
PPS: Back when I used to play Star Fleet Battles I collected and painted a few of the tiny Amarillo Design Bureau models - some odd Federation frigate or somesuch, a Kzinti battlecruiser, a Klingon D7 and B10, a Lyran catamaran-hull thing, some Tholian grooviness and so forth. On what amounted to a whim the other night I bought about 40 more on eBay - pretty much a whole Federation and Klingon fleet, plus some oddities, like a pair of Kzinti frigates that are about the size of pieces of breakfast cereal. I could swallow most of the fleet whole, now that I think about it... Anyway, my point was that RLM-65 is going to be way too dark in such a small scale, but I do think I'll "scale" it by adding a lot of white so my Federation fleet will have the same bluish tint.
6 comments:
This used to be the old AMT kit. I see they fixed the top of the saucer section. Those lines were really annoying.
I like your choice color. One can't go wrong with RLM. Nice clean work.
How does one respond to comments like this :'}
That's a good question! I usually try to keep those sorts of comments cleaned up, but I've been away from the computer for a week and they seem to have sprouted like mushrooms.
But you're right about the old AMT kit, the lines were awful, and I remember most of my attempts at scraping and sanding them off were not entirely successful. But the Polar Lights kit has a very smooth saucer. There are a few raised windows on the engineering hull and around the bridge dome, but the decals conform over them nicely and I chose to leave them be.
Speaking of colors... I was going through my paint box today and found an unopened bottle of Model Master RLM-76, which is even lighter than the RML-65 that I used. I'm experimenting with it on a tiny Enterprise-D model that I got from somewhere - it's only about three inches long and consists of about eight parts; I think it's too small to have been in the "Enterprise Set" but I have no idea where it really came from. I suspect it's a Japanese "gashopon" thing, but I don't know.
The little 3 inch Enterprise I have came with the first release of the DS 9 space station back in the 90's.
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