USS Voyager

I missed most of the Voyager phenomenon. I saw the pilot and watched it for a while but quickly grew bored of it. A lot of sci-fi fans and modelers were also disillusioned with the series. Maybe it was Nelix, maybe it was the constant techno-babble and the prime directive in the face of genocide, but Voyager was a let down for me. I caught a few episodes during its run but when I moved to Gaffa, I lost UPN and missed the last two years, including the finale, which I heard wasn’t bad.

Nevertheless, the ship is kinda cool. I bought my USS Voyager kits on ebay when I started collecting models. I found a place in England where I could buy German kits for a decent price and picked up three. I then found one of the limited edition kits and payed a bit for that. Lastly, I picked up the 3 kit model (Voyager, Kazon and Maquis ships). I was happily watching Voyager models sell for twice what I paid for them until last year when people started dumping cases of them! So the Voyager model wasn’t a good investment. Might as well build one.

Assembling the kit wasn’t hard, but did offer a few challenges. The kit comes with variable angle nacelles. They’re supposed to be hinged to the secondary hull. I tried to make the hinge thing work, but I only one really worked properly. Instead, I just cemented them half way up. I wish I’d glued them horizontally instead.

Speaking of the nacelles, this model once again taught me that I’m just not very good with clear pieces. I did the usual Tamiya clear paint/aluminum foil thing and then tried to connect the clear part to the plastic and didn’t do a good job. The forward deflector behaved itself a lot better.

The ship has many clear windows. I decided to try something different for them. I read somewhere about lighting a model without lights by using reflective tape. With this in mind I put reflective tape behind all the clear windows and taped them on. Taping worked better than gluing. Man, I hate clear parts. The final effect of the reflective tape is questionable, but it was something different.

I mixed the color for the ship from my usual collection of Liquitex Basics Acrylics. I created a warm blue-gray that I was very pleased with. I airbrushed the top base coat and sealed it with Future floor wax. I decided that brush work over Future on starships should be avoided and so masked off certain panels for the darker gray and hit it with my Aztec airbrush. I also airbrushed the yellow on the nacelles to get a crisp even coat. Yellow is a challenging color to begin with, I needed an airbrush.

The phaser strips were painted yellow oxide with a brush. The brown things on the ship (will someone tell me what they are) were painted Burnt Sienna and highlighted with Raw Sienna. The panel lines were done with a marker. The windows were also done with markers. Modelers take note: add artist markers to your tool box.

I ordered third party decals since I really liked the color and didn’t know I was going to screw up the clear pieces again. I ordered a set from Federation Models, where I’d gotten the decals for my Enterprise D. Those were from JT Graphics. These were from ST Modeler and though better than the ones that came with kit, they were not as good as the JT Graphics decals. The instructions were lousy, the decals too numerous and confusing. I used about half of them. It didn’t come with a replacement shuttle bay landing platform, which surprised me, but it did come with a decal for the secondary deflector array on top of the ship. That alone probably made the purchase worthwhile.

The final details were picked out with a brush and a bit of highlighting and bright color was added to liven it up here and there.

I can’t say this is my best work, but it’s not an ugly ship. If I ever get sick of it, I have a few more in the basement.