Star Trek Colors

I'm slowly recovering from shingles - probably more slowly than most people do because my bone marrow has been completely killed twice this year. The worst problem from a modeling point of view with my shingles is that my eyesight still isn't very good. Better than it was, but I still find intense close-range work (like painting figures) uncomfortable and, frankly, unrewarding.

But over the Independence Day holiday I watched a minor marathon of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes on BBC America. This compelled me to dig out a couple of newish Polar Lights Star Trek models from my collection, and I've found them pleasant to tinker with - they don't require much in the way of intense focus or concentration, or at least not yet, and I can work on them inside, out of the 115 degree heat in the garage, where my main workbench resides.

One of them is a Klingon D7 battlecruiser from The Old Show; the other is an Enterprise, also from The Old Show, which comes with a breathtakingly large and complete decal sheet. They're snap-together kits, and you know what that means: low parts count, simplified surface detail, thick plastic, and a tendency toward poor fit. It means a lot of gluing, clamping, filling, sanding, regluing popped seams, resanding, refilling and so forth, but I happen to enjoy that. (If scribing panel lines is one of my least-favorite modeling tasks, filling and sanding is one of my favorite.)

I also got to use up most of the scrap sprues; I cut them to random lengths and glued them inside the Enterprise to reinforce the mortises that the warp nacelle pylons fit into, a joint that looked pretty rickety to me in the basic kit.

I'm almost at the point of painting, and now I have to confront the issue of color. I've already decided that I'm doing to paint the D7 my way. Decades ago I built a D7 and painted it with a combination of blues and greys that really appealed to me, and that's how I'm going to do it again (and in Klingon markings, naturally. I've never liked the Romulans). Besides, I have my own vision of what Deep Space Fleet ships look like, and it doesn't seem to mesh with the Trek authorities.

But the Enterprise is a slightly different matter. For one thing, it's fairly iconic, and wild ahistorical paint schemes look strange. For another, it's important to me that models of the Enterprise look like the Enterprise. So what color is the damn thing? According to Internet sources, it is best matched with a greenish-grey color that WalMart calls "Concrete". Others insist on white. But on my TV, and on the TV that plays in my head, the Enterprise was always light blue. The preserved studio models aren't light blue, but the ship as it appeared on my clunky old TV was light blue.

So I've made my decision: I'm going to paint it RLM 65 light blue and see how it looks. I suspect RLM 65 will be too dark and I'll end up repainting it RLM 76 or even Model Master "Duck Egg Blue" (I painted an Enterprise-D once in an Aztec scheme of light gull grey and duck egg blue, and I thought it turned out very nicely). But that's my plan, at least for now. I just have to finish all the sanding and filling first.