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The Nebula class starship was always pretty cool design, and when I saw it at the close of "Generations", I fell in
love with it all over again. When I built my version of the Farragut, there weren't very many accurizing parts around, so I had to improvise.
There were a lot of pretty nice resin versions around,
especially the one made by Macrotrek, but the solid resin parts didn't lend themselves to lighting very well. Although I didn't have the patience to drill out all the windows, I wanted to at least light
the warp pods, the deflector dish, and the running lights.
Since the secondary hull had to be hollow for lighting (I always put the batteries there), I set out to modify the D kit's secondary
hull to be more like the Farragut's. I removed the warp pod wings from the bottom of the secondary hull, then I cut the edges a little straighter on both halves. I warped the bottom half of the secondary
hull over a stove, since there was more curvature in the Farragut's hull. To clean up the hull edge and planarize it a bit, I glued a piece of sheet styrene to the mating sides of both halves with an
opening for the inside of the hull, and used putty along the edges to smoothen it out. When gluing the hull halves together, I placed another piece of sheet styrene between them to create the
secondary hull deflector edge. The deflector dish aperture is very different from the D's, and so I built it up with putty. The D's deflector dish was trimmed down to fit the new aperture.
For the
neck, I inverted the D's neck, trimmed off the part which mates with the saucer, and cut/sanded it to meet the secondary hull. The little mating piece for the original D on the top of the secondary hull
had to be removed, and sheet styrene/putty was added to match the new neck. All this involved some putty and sanding. The rest of the secondary hull spine was built up using sheet styrene.
To the
top of the spine, I added the remaining warp pod wing, with a piece of sheet styrene to fill the "U" gap. The trailing edge was also trimmed to match the angle of the Farragut's. I then added
some more sheet styrene on top of this assembly with a shape matching the video stills from the end of "Generations", until the saucer was level with the secondary hull.
I also used
various thicknesses of sheet styrene to build up the weapons pod neck aft of the warp pod wings. The switch for the lighting was also placed inside the neck, as seen in the photos. The piece I used for
the weapons pod was one taken from a resin kit, which looked interesting, but was obviously inaccurate. Still doesn't look to bad, though.
Finishing consisted of using Floquil primer for the base
color, and Testor's "Licht Grau" shade of light gray for the contrasting Aztec color. Pactra's makes a roll of varying width racing stripe tape, and pieces of the thinnest width were used for
windows. A combination of D decals and Graywolf lettering finished the job.
Although the still don't show it, the lights on the nacelle ends, the weapons pod top, the saucer top, and the secondary
hull bottom blink in unison, even though the nacelle lights don't blink on the original one. I thought it should be consistent with the D's nacelle running lights. I used Microlite bulbs for the warp
engines, and some other assorted incandescents for the running lights/nacelles and deflector dish. All the lights run off a 3V source of (2) AA batteries, and a 9V for the blinkers. These fit in the
secondary hull.
To update my version to current standards, I'm getting the more accurate weapons pod separately from Warp via Comet. I would ultimately like to update the weapons pod and neck to
be more realistic. All in all, though, I was pretty pleased with the way my Farragut turned out, lights and all.
Kyu-Woong Lee
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