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Larry Wherthey's New Orleans |
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You will see here several images of my recently completed New Orleans class starship USS Rutledge. As with the recent posts to
CultTVMan's site, this is a 1:1400 scale representation of this ship, made from parts of the 1:2500 and 1:1400 Enterprise-D kits from ERTL.
Cult has an excellent breakdown of how to build one of
these ships on his site, and I won't duplicate that information here. For those that are interested, I woud like to point out a few differences in my rendition from those already posted. I tried to make my
version as close to the available images as possible, but did exercise some artistic license where physics and aesthetics demanded
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Beginning with the saucer, then. I felt that the saucer in the kit was of inadequate thickness for a full deck height at
the lip, so I inserted a styrene spacer between the upper and lower saucer halves. This had the added benefit of allowing me to generate the recessed sensor strip around the perimeter of the saucer
at a uniform depth back from the lip.
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I felt that the B/C deck of the studio model also needed attention. It is of inadequate height again for a true deck in 1:1400 scale, and
consequently also made the shuttlebay too short. I solved both problems by raising the deck with styrene, flaring it out slightly to make it proportionally more "correct" under the bridge, and
extended it towards the stern until the curvature of the hull permitted a shuttlebay door of reasonable height. While technically not "correct", to my eye it looks better.
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Similar techniques were used in the construction of the secondary hull, with the gap caused by stretching the hull being built
up with Milliput putty. Again, the spacer placed between the upper and lower secondary hull halves increased the edge of the ship to a thickness proportional to a deck height in this scale
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The warp pylons posed something of a problem. They tie to the warp nacelles at a point so far forward that the nacelles wanted to droop to
the rear. This was solved by cutting a channel into the pylons, inserting a small aluminum tube, filling the trough with super glue, and sanding smooth. No more droop. I also extrapolated a bit here - I placed
phaser strips at the upwards "kick" in the pylons - it is consistent with other Star Fleet design, and looks good, so why not?
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