John Payne's Building the Belisarius

When I feel like kitbashing a starship, I browse through my fan publications to get inspiration from others. Jackill's three "Star Fleet reference Manual" books, and the books "Ships of the Star Fleet" and "Star Fleet Prototype" are the major contributors to my mania, drawn by kindred souls.

In this case, it was Page 72 of "Starfleet Prototype" that got me thinking. Their USS Athabaska's primary hull was a shortened Reliant hull ("Knox-Class" in fan circles) attached to the secondary hull from the fan-created USS Belknap, which uses warp nacelles that are mounted to a Y-shaped pylon assembly that mounts onto the bottom of the hull. I thought "Ooo - that'd make an even cooler dreadnought." Now, what I usually do is take one of the more outlandish designs in these books (and some are way out there) and make it look "more sensible" to my eye. In this case, I went the other direction. I decided to let go and make the most bad-ass, over-the-top warship I could. I happened to have an Enterprise-A secondary hull left over from my USS Venture kitbash (and had been looking for something to do with it), and my local shop still has plenty of Reliants for 10 bucks each. I needed two for the three nacelles and four phaser cannon.

The first thing I needed to do was shorten the Reliant hull to a Knox hull. In most fan art, the Knox has a flat transom, which would require me to make one out of sheet, remount the impulse engines, and detail it. Well, there's nothing canon about that, so I simplified matters by cutting two inches out of the Reliant's length starting at the aft edge of the rollbar mount, and just gluing the kit stern back on. It helped to put strips of styrene inside the edges to act as interlocking tabs between the two pieces. A detail on the top - the

hourglass-shaped panel extending aft from the bridge to the impulse crystal - gets a serious hitch in its shape from the length reduction, so I used sheet plastic and putty to recreate the original shape in a shorter version. One thing I did NOT do is attempt to thicken the hull to it's correct scale depth. I probably will do that someday on a proper model of the Reliant, but for a fun kitbash I didn't want to make myself insane. Or more insane, depending on who you talk to.

While dry-fitting this new primary hull onto the Enterprise's neck, I noticed the Reliant's plastic is pretty thin. If I just glued the hull right to the neck, it would spend the rest of its life wobbling. I suppose I could put it in the back window of my car with a baseball cap on it, but I came up with a better answer: I cut a slot in the top and bottom of the Reliant hull, and made a tab for the neck that ran up through both slots. This gave me two good, firm places to grip and eliminated the wobble.

For the third nacelle strut, which would mount behind the bridge, I figured what better than a strut from the Reliant? I used the outer halves of each nacelle strut from one kit. I sandwiched some sheet in the middle to allow me to cut a plasma vent slot in the front and back edges, and cut an opening in the sides, into which I later inserted some ribbed sheet to look like a vent grille. Reliant's nacelles mount from the tops, so I now had to fill that old hole, and make a new mounting fairing a la Enterprise's on the bottoms of the nacelles. For this, I used a piece of Evergreen plastic tubing. I cut a lengthwise slot along the tube and glued that to the nacelle. To get the rest of the fairing's shape I globbed on some ApoxySculpt 2-part putty. It can be shaped very closely to the final shape .

with a wet finger and final-sanded to shape after drying. It has zero-shrinkage, and blends to a perfectly sharp edge against the plastic's surface. I used it to create a rounded front and aft end caps, and smooth the curve of the sides into the nacelle. Now that I had a finished middle strut I had to tab it into the top of the hull. Oops - there's already the tab from the neck there! Planning is not my strong suit. A little judicious carving got the engine tab to wrap around the neck tab and interlock nicely . This also allowed me to keep the third nacelle as a subassembly right up to final assembly

I sanded all that stupid panel detailing off the secondary hull and assembled it. Since the engine mounts would be under the hull, I cut off the strut fairings and filled the holes. At the point when the secondary hull/dorsal had dried, I glued the primary hull onto the neck. many ships in the aforementioned books had dorsals that were extended aft, and I liked that look. Using my tried and true trial and error method, I cut index card patterns until I had one that fit the contours of the Reliant underside where it met the neck. I used that to cut plastic sheet in the shape of the new dorsal I wanted, built up the aft edge of the existing one with thick plastic stock, and sheathed it with its new skin. I had to extend the torpedo shroud aft also, which was done with putty.

Knowing that the docking ports were molded too big by Ertl, I puttied them in, and later drilled them out with a smaller 1/8" bit, then scribed a vertical slit to represent the door halves. While I was at the hatches, I got Millenium Models' etched brass gangway doors for the primary hull. I used two, one port and one starboard. Also, noting that the hangar doors on the Reliant kit are completely featureless, I cut a pair of replacements from ribbed plastic sheet and inserted them into the kit parts.

Okay, back to working on the engines. For what I wanted to do I'd have to completely scratch-build new pylons. I decided where I was going to mount them, and cut up some index cards until I had the right-looking shapes for mounting struts. The struts would be of three pieces: the two pylons, and a cross-piece that went under the secondary hull. I build struts in laminations. The first thing to do is cut the overall shape in thick plastic sheet, say .040" or .060" thick. This is the center piece of the sandwich. Into the leading and trailing edges of this piece, I cut grooves to represent the exhaust vents that run down the length of the pylons. Each of the two outer sections were then covered in a thinner .020" piece, top and bottom, in the full shape (thus creating a slot where I cut the bit out of the middle piece). Now I needed to glue the outer sections to the center, carry-through, connecting section. I've tried various ways in the past, but I think I hit on a good one this time: I determined the dihedral I wanted (the angle at which the pylons rise from the ship). I got some blocks and propped the pieces up in their final assembled shape, made a good-sized bead of super glue at the joins and hit it with accelerator immediately. Bingo: instant, rigid fillets.

Now I needed to make the pylons airfoil-shaped (which, on a spaceship, is just for looks). The easy way is to lay a strip of plastic along the span of the pylon, then lay the final lamination - the outer skin of the pylon - on top of that. Glue the edges of the skin, and the strip in the middle will hold the skin in a bow to make an airfoil. Just to make it more complicated, I lay some gridded plastic inside before I skinned it, and cut holes to make open vents on the surfaces.

Once the struts were done, I made two more of those tubes-with-a-slot-down-the-side for nacelle mounting fairings. I made a wooden jig to hold them parallel at the right spacing, and glued the pylons to them.


Getting the nacelles onto the fairings was a whole other ball game. No matter what I tried with a jig, the completely irregular shapes of the nacelles made it too hard to get them stable in one. So I drew a centerline down the bottom of each nacelle following the seam, a matching centerline on the mounting fairings, put the glue on and eyeballed it. Then it was Apoxie Putty time for shaping the fairings and sealing the edges of the pylons.


 While I was at it, I built up the ridge that goes around the very nose of each nacelle. I know I have them protruding too much, but since I'm not doing the Enterprise herself, I figure there's room for personal expression.






The end result here was a totally completed engine subassembly that would glue into a slot cut into the bottom of the secondary hull.
 

Speaking of slots, it was about here that I inserted a brass tube in the square stand hole in the belly and sealed up the rest of the hole. A second bras tube that slip-fits into this one gets mounted in the stand itself. This makes a very firm connection between stand and model with equally easy removal. Once all the putty is dry, I dremeled the brass tube flush with the hull.

Turning my attention momentarily to the bridge and the B/C deck; I didn't want to use the kit's totally inaccurate superstructure. Andy "Stars" Henshaw (Accurate Parts, Australia) had sent me a couple of his prototype accurate Reliant parts many months before in a trade, so I used his B/C deck. The fit is perfect on this part! All you have to do is cut off the old one and drop Andy's on. Another thing I wanted to try was the dual-docking-port bridge seen on many fan designs. Well, I didn't want to butcher Andy's bridge so I

used the kit part for this. I simply cut the sides to shape, used sheet styrene for the new vertical walls, and extended the rear with scrap plastic. The docking hatches are holes drilled through and backed with a piece of sheet, with a scribed vertical line to represent the doors

The problem with the low-slung engine struts is that they block the side of the engineering hull, making it necessary to paint said hull, and the inside surfaces of the nacelle pylons, before gluing the assemblies together. What the hell, I figured I'd paint the whole model first.

I had to decide on a color scheme. All my other TOS Film Period kitbashes are painted ModelMaster Light Gray, which is nearly white. But this is a battleship. I didn't want to do this monster in that same pristine pearly look. I played with a few different grays - ghost gray, camo gray, battleship gray - and decided the best look came from ModelMaster Flat Gull Gray. I also wanted to paint the Aztec pattern on the saucer (something I've never done yet to any non-TNG model, .

believe it or not), so I needed a complimentary color (I hate mixing, give me a bottle). ModelMaster Light Sea Gray made a great companion color, and being a warm gray gave the ship and hint of tan. I used Walker templates (Reliant) for the primary hull, but this left the whole rest of the ship one color! Dammit, I had to do the rest or it'd look stupid. Mike walker is still working on his secondary hull templates, so I had to make my own. Looking at photos of the studio Enterprise model downloaded from various net sources, I made myself some index card stencils with a number of patterns seen on the ship. I airbrushed the Light Sea Gray lightly through these shapes, holding the stencils at random. I couldn't possibly duplicate what I was looking at in the photos (and this isn't the Enterprise! - a darn handy excuse!), but I tried to get the same "feel" of paneling. I varied the paint coming out of the airbrush to get varied shades of paneling. Once it was all done, it was pretty obvious that the paneling was too, well, obvious. I went over the whole model again with the Gull Gray to tone down the darker color. It's best if it looks like all one color from across the room, but the paneling begins to come out as you get closer

The blue panels were next. On the original Motion Picture Enterprise, the top of the secondary hull and the panels surrounding the deflector dish were "engineering green." When the model was repainted as the Enterprise-A, these panels were made blue. I chose a German World War Two aircraft color, RLM 76 gray-blue. Once again I fudged some random paneling on the topside panels using Flanker blue (knocked back with an overspray of 76). But the deflector side panels were a problem - the .

detailing there was very precise and intricate. I'd never be able to get a stencil that tiny, held securely to that curve. The only answer was to make decals. Measuring the curve, and constantly fitting it to the model, through trial and error, I finally got the shape right. Then I eyeballed the patterns from the photos and created the artwork in CorelDraw (The photo shows the finished decals in place. The deflector decal and yellow RCS thrusters are JTGraphics')

Once the major painting was done I glued the warp nacelle pylons into the cutout I made in the belly. I still hadn't glued the center nacelle on, because I needed to lay the model upside down to work on this part. The aft edge of the cross-strut was even with the surface of the model, but the leading edge is recessed about a quarter inch and needed a fillet. Using ApoxieSculpt, I shaped a half-round fairing that blended from the hull to the strut, leaving much of the strut exposed. The idea here is that the whole warp assembly is jettisonable in an emergency, so all that's in the way is this little fairing that will blow away first. While I was down there, it occurred to me that there should be aft torpedo tubes. I didn't want to hack apart the nice neck I made and try to blend one behind the main torpedo shroud. Keeping in mind that this whole project is kinda tongue-in-cheek, putting as much crap on the basic planform as possible, I eyed that ovoid cutout under the hangar deck and thought "Ah, what the

heck." So an orphaned torpedo shroud from another Enterprise found itself stuck rudely under the ship's butt.

At this point I stuck the ship back on its stand and glued the third nacelle onto the saucer. I designed the upper pylon joint with a bare minimum of need for filling, so paint touch up was also minimal.

And it was time for its overcoat of Future Floor Polish to give me a glossy surface for decaling.

As long as I was going nuts with the paint job, I figured I may as well do the same with decals. I hit the Federation Models website and ordered JTGraphics' insanely thorough sheet for the Reliant, and his Constitution Class details sheet for my secondary hull. Jeff Waclawski's products are excellent, and his attention to detail astounding. For the ship's individual markings, I made my own decals in CorelDraw 10, and printed them on Micro-Mark laser decal film using my Alps .

5000 printer. Those deflector side panels, though, needed to be transparent colors to blend with the RLM 76 blue panels to which they'd be applied, so I printed them on my Epson inkjet on Micro-Mark inkjet decal film. I also created some more details I noticed on the original model photos in decal form, such as the jagged panel lines on the plasma conduit covers on the neck and pylons, and some more random paneling for the blue sections (Photo shows Jeff's Enterprise and Reliant sheets, and my specific sheet). Oh - one other source. I got the red circle decals for around the docking ports from an old generic Red Wolf decal sheet

The ship's name is always an important consideration. It's always bothered me that, throughout Trek, we almost never saw a Starfleet ship that was NOT named after an existing Earth ship. These are nice tributes, but there are, like, 140 planets in the Federation, why not use, for instance, an Andorian name, or a Rigelian name? Unfortunately my imagination fails me in this respect too, as I barely remember my high school French, much less Andorian. This kitbash was to be a major battleship, so it needed the name of a great warrior. I happened to be reading a wonderful series of sci fi books by David Drake and Eric Flint, revolving around and actual historical figure, the 6th century Roman general Belisarius. He's portrayed as one of the greatest military minds in history. Okay, that was easy, Belisarius it is! NCC numbers are pretty much a random coin toss. My ship doesn't really need to fit into any continuity but my own. I just heck the Trek Encyclopedia to make sure the one I pick hasn't been used in canon. The Athabaska in (non0canon) Starfleet Prototype was NCC-2560, so I made my number around there. I sealed the decals as I went along with a brushed-on coat of Future Floor Polish, then finished off the model with a coat of MicroFlat.

As we all know the phaser turret balls on the Reliant are too small. I wasted a whole day scrounging around my plastic scrap box and my wife's dollhouse furniture scrap boxES looking for something appropriate to replace them with. Unable to find a thing, I sat disgustedly at my work bench and my eyes fell on the box of things I use for nose ballast in airplane models with nose wheels. It was there all the time! Yep, the phasers are shotgun pellets! There's something poetic about that. I think it's #9 skeet shot. I drilled a blind hole of the appropriate diameter and dropped the pellet in over a drop of superglue. They had a nice metallic sheen so I left them unpainted. Photo 18 shows an overview of the saucer with the Millenium Models gangway hatch on the rims, the phaser BBs and the customized bridge. All windows on the saucer are JTGraphics decals.

All that was left after that was the photography. The remainder of the shots are angles on the finished model.

Of course I had to put the puppy into action. I always comp up some "real" pictures of my kitbashes using Corel Photo-Paint, some astronomical photos and some special effects. You can see some composites of the most bad-assed dreadnought in the Federation (well, in MY Federation) in action on my website
 

Materials from the hobby shop:

• Ertl USS Reliant (2)
• Ertl USS Enterprise-A (1)
• Evergreen Plastic Sheet (.040" & .020")
• Evergreen Plastic tube (1/4")
• Evergreen Plastic Sheet, ribbed

From Federation Models (www.federationmodels.com):

• JTGraphics USS Reliant sheet
• JTGraphics USS Enterprise refit detail sheet
• Accurate Parts Australia Reliant B/C deck
• Millenium Models Enterprise refit etched brass docking ports (2)

From your local sporting goods store:

• #9 skeet shot (22 pellets)