Give Me All The Excelsior Classes

My recently completed total repaint of the Eaglemoss U.S.S. Excelsior, and a custom full color 3D print of the U.S.S. Hood from Gameprint

Much as it is Eaglemoss Collection editor Ben Robinson’s hope to one day own a model of every TOS Constitution Class ship that ever appeared on screen (for which I count 3 versions of the Enterprise, Constellation, Defiant, Yorktown, Lexington, Intrepid, Excalibur, Hood, Potemkin, and Exeter), I aspire to owning models in the same or similar scales of most of the major Excelsior class vessels to appear in the TNG era. Excelsior-classes regularly showed up in TNG as the admiral’s sweet rides, mostly in stock footage, and deliberately shot so their registry wouldn’t be visible, and therefore not changed! The first to appear was the U.S.S. Hood in Encounter at Farpoint carrying William Riker to his new assignment on the Enterprise-D. I felt this made Hood the second most important “original flavor” Excelsior class in Trek history, so I decided to order a 3D printed model of it from Gameprint. At the same time, I was completing a total repaint of the Eaglemoss version of the ship, so this post will be a feature on them both.

Oldies!

So it’s been a while since my last post, but I thought I might give you guys an insight into my early modeling efforts. Some of these ships are super old now, easily 15-20 years… but they’ve held together! There’s an Ambassador Class, a Sovereign, and a USS Prometheus which SEPARATES!!! Enjoy!

U.S.S. Ambassador NCC-10521: Final Gallery

U.S.S. Ambassador, Pt. 5: Ready for trial runs…

Looks like someone “post-it-noted” the Enterprise.

When you last saw it, this is how the ship looked. Covered in tiny bits of masking tape, and still without most of its markings.

U.S.S. Ambassador, Pt. 4: What do all these bits do?

This will be an “extra” installment of this series, since I’ve actually caught up with myself in my progress on the model!

Star Trek is notoriously easy to make fun of. It is extraordinarily earnest, and flips jarringly between being adorably dorky and silly at some times, and eye-roll inducing levels of preachy at others. In all the many-splendored Trek series, the “romance” stories are clichéd and unwatchable, and some episodes of the original series are plainly racist or sexist by today’s standards, despite significant attention being drawn to how “forward thinking” the show was meant to be for its time. One of the aspects which always draws the attention of sci-fi satirists is the techno-babble – that heady mix of science-y sounding words added to your made-up elementary particle of choice. My personal favorite command is “Commander Data! Hurry! Narrow the annular confinement beam!” The rough translation of which would be “shrink the circle-y thing that keeps things going in a circle!” The shows also get some scientific ideas plain wrong (the hair-rendingly irritating misconception of evolution in the infamous Voyager episode Threshold being one) and leads to misconceptions about astrophysics which both irk and amuse the pedant in me no end. (I once read a Star Trek “choose your own adventure” book in which the Enterprise‘s warp engines would get red-hot and blow up if you made the ship do a loop-de-loop.)

U.S.S. Ambassador,Pt. 3: Windows Are Really Boring

The two red blobs at the front of the engines are rather large Bussard collectors – partly inspired by an early concept for the Enterprise D by Andrew Probert. The small red blobs on top are soon to become Starfleet pennants.

I was getting to the point where sitting this model to dry either upside down, or rolling gently side to side on its curved hull was proving a little unsatisfactory, not to mention unceremonious for my new flagship. So, I fashioned a display stand out of a thick flat disc of MDF wood I bought for about 80 cents from Michaels crafts store.

U.S.S. Ambassador, Pt. 2: Paint Lies To You

Once I returned to the US in early August, I was keen to get on with a couple of modeling projects before other activities heated up. On my first day back, I made a trip to the hobby store to pick out some spray paints and base colors for my project.

With a few pencil outlines on the nacelles to show the bussard collectors and whatever the yellow thing is between those and the blue grilles on TNG-era warp engines. A glance at the TNG Technical Manual didn’t enlighten me.

Building the U.S.S. Ambassador, Pt. 1

As a teenager, I had alternating phases between several transport fixations. Star Trek starships, trains, ocean liners, and extraordinary modern buildings would bounce back in forth in my head the way that stats and team rosters might for a more sportingly inclined child. While I have ultimately pursued a career in music (my other great love), for a long time, my career ambitions vacillated between architect, ship-naval architect, production designer or concept designer for sci-fi and movies, and industrial design for railroads. I studied both free, fine art, and careful draughtsmanship, producing many highly accurate side-profile images of famous liners, trains, and starships alike. At all times, I was drawing. Drawing was a way of fully grasping an object and what made it distinct. It was, in a sense, a form of analysis.

The U.S.S. Ambassador, NCC-10521 – adapted from both the Sternbach and Probert versions of the Ambassador Class, and with extended nacelles. Somehow the longer nacelles always looked “faster” to me.