Star Trek Voyager Maquis Ship

Some people think that Star Trek Voyager was the proverbial dead horse being beaten by Paramount. I for one think the franchise fell to a new low under captain Janeway. When I moved to Gaffa and lost UPN, I didn’t mourn the loss of Voyager. Star Trek was out of control at the end of The Next Generation and the bar had been forever raised to new heights by Babylon 5.

However, Star Trek did create some cool ships. Though I’m not as fond of the franchise as I could or should be, I do like building the ships.

Which brings me to the Maquis ship. This is one of the few models mass produced from Voyager. I think there are 5 (2 versions of Voyager, the Maquis and 2 kinds of Cozen). The Maquis ship appears only in the pilot episode, so it surprised me that they’d make a kit from it. I guess they were expecting Voyager to be a great success.

The Maquis ship looks to me to be a thrown together design, created for a single episode, which it was. I didn’t think much of the kit or its design at first, but as I worked on it, I warmed up to it.

Building the kit was straightforward. Once again, I had some accursed clear pieces which I once again backpainted black and glued into place. The biggest challenge was hiding the seam between the top and bottom bull pieces. I used putty and sanded. Then I used superglue and sandpaper of different grits (you just don’t get enough opportunity to say “grit”). It worked for the most part, though you can see a few places I couldn’t adequately get at.

There is a finite amount of time and effort any modeling job should take. After it exceeds that time, you begin to lose interest in the task and then shortly thereafter, the entire project. It’s important to sense when you’re approaching that limit and move on. Remember the 80/20 rule. It will take you X amount of time and energy to get 80% perfection. It will take you an additional X amount of time and energy to get the next 20%. The payoff quickly falls away. And besides, you never really ever get a perfect product.

So I moved on to painting. I forgot to wash the kit before I began. I did prime it with Plasti-kote One Coat Spot Filler & Primer. I had lots of it. Nevertheless, paint kept getting rubbed off from handling as I worked on it.

Most ships are gray. One flavor of gray or another and I was sick of it. I chose instead to do a red. Okay, it’s a muddy red, made muddy by adding gray to it, but it’s not your standard starship color is it? Well then. I mixed the color myself with my handy dandy Liquitex Basic Acrylic pallet and fired up the old Aztec airbrush and gave it a few layers. I used a hairdryer to dry the coats to make things go faster.

The Maquis were raiders fighting a space guerilla war against the evil Cardassians. Their ships are put together from whatever might be lying around. Combat was it's goal - not aesthetics. Color was anything but standardized. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

I painted the details pretty much as I wanted. When in doubt I used the suggested color from the instructions. When it was done, I weathered it extensively. I figured that the ship was a huge gun, photon torpedoes, phasers, disrupters and foul language. It was made for attacks on Cardassians, for cryin’ out loud - it’s a big gun and is going to get dirty.

I think I overdid the weathering. I had hoped that it would bring the model together. The blues and grays of the details would have worked better with a standard gray/white ship as shown on the box. I don’t think these detail colors worked as well on my burgundy blaster.