Welp, according to DST's
Facebook Feed, they've had to switch factories, and the ships are still not in production (I say ships because they're doing a re-run of the All Good Things Enterprise-D, as well).
But, speaking of the Sovereign class, I have been doing a little work on the clock one.
Project, The Third!Here's how it looked before (not my photo):
I first added black electrical tape to the areas flanking the command decks, and used a silver pen to add the line details there. That rubbed off fairly quickly, but I plan to do all that with paint later in the project anyway. I also added black tape to the corresponding area on the bottom of the saucer, either side of the engineering hull, and to the divide between the bussard collector openings on the front of the nacelle.
Then I removed the clock from it, which was easy to pull the hands off, and inside, it's just a generic clock motor wired to the slightly over-complicated lighting circuit. I also added some mottled plastic inside the port bussard collector, to better simulate the cloudy effect seen in the films.
You can see in that first picture, the hole where the clock hands were. The winder for the clock stuck out underneath, near the deflector trench.
It's incredibly cheaply made - Just a cast of a completed AMT model kit, a strangely complex wiring job, and a generic clock motor with a dummy battery wired to the main batteries, and a poor, inaccurate paint job.
While I had the nacelle apart, I messed around a little :p
I got bored of looking at the bridge hole, so I fashioned a bridge out of Blu-tak.
And detailed it with silver pen and marker.
There is some lighting in the saucer, and a few windows are cut-through, but the bulbs aren't terribly bright, and there is some heinous light bleed, so to kill two birds with one stone, I coated the inside of the ship with a chrome spray paint.
It didn't have the amazing effect I was hoping for, but I do intend to replace the lights with brighter LEDs. I think I may end up rewiring the ship entirely. The circuitry that's in her at the moment is needlessly complex, and drains the batteries.
The ship's warp nacelles do not feature transparent field coils, they are molded out of the same stinky granular plastic as the hull, and are just as thick. I sanded some of the dark blue paint off the nacelle, and wired a blue LED in place of the Bussard collector's original Rice Bulb.
But the effect was underwhelming, due to the thickness of the field coil plastic. So I took a dremel(ish) tool rounded sanding head to the inside and thinned the coil out to about a quarter of it's original thickness.
I pinched in a white LED to light the Bussard for a test, and in low-light, it looks pretty good!
But in bright light, not so great. I may have to give the feild grill a blue-wash. The plastic colour tends towards yellow, which looks wrong in bright light.
I may have to put a second blue LED into the back of the nacelle, to balance the light a little, but I'm currently experimenting with reflectors inside the nacelle, to bounce light around a little more, so I'll see how that goes when I have it refined a little more.
I've been leaving the starboard nacelle mint for the moment, for comparison's sake.
I sanded off the chrome paint in a couple of places to test some ideas I had for strategic light-bleed, to light the deflector and the registry lighting.
It's rather underwhelming at the moment, and the camera only barely picks up the deflector in the darkest of conditions, but the plastic is still very thick there, and it's still just a Rice Bulb, so there's a ways to go yet. The registry spot is only barely visible, even to human eyes.
That's all for the moment! Here's one of my favourite photos from this project so far...
