# 1/350 TOS era Star Trek cargo ship



## Frank2056 (Mar 23, 2007)

I had an old Monogram "Passenger Rocket" kit sitting around for years. I had originally planned on building it as a cargo ship to go with my Leif Ericson, but I couldn't find an engine/shroud arrangement that looked good.

I finally got tired of seeing the box sitting on my pile o'doom, so I decided to combine some leftover parts from a 1/1000 1701 and try out some lighting and design ideas. Here's are the basic parts:










One experiment was to see if I could light this with two coin batteries and a minimum of LEDs. I also had a key chain flashlight from Digital Computers that looked perfect for a bridge. 

I started by designing the bridge, printing it out and gluing it to some extruded polystyrene foam. This is the final version, with crew.

As a small ship with a crew of 10, I figured that the captain and chief mate's quarters could be in the bridge area. The two red circles with the railings are hatches to lower levels.
The area at the rear of the bridge was to make room for a couple of fiber optics from the rear LED, but they ended up blocking too much light. Now it's just a long hallway:









The resin figures are 1/350 sailors from Gofy. They are long out of production and appear to be copies (or slightly modified versions of) the Preiser 1/350 sailors.









Everything except the crew and the railing are paper. The base is 1mm thick foam, for rigidity.









This is the cargo bay, printed and glued to 1mm foam.
One of my favorite authors Iain M. Banks died around the time I was starting this project, so I used his birthdate as the serial number. In his Culture series, GCU stands for General Contact Unit - a type of ship that is many, many times larger than this ship. "Cargo Cult" was the name of a GCU/AI in one of his books:









Most of the crew is either on the bridge or in the cargo bay. The missing crew member went AWOL as I was painting him. My cat assistant found him recently and pointed him out... too late to add him to the build. We can assume that the missing crew member is otherwise occupied inside the ship.

This is the shuttle (which I yet to finish). It's part of an LCVP from an old Lindberg kit. The nacelles are from a 1/144 jet, with scrap plastic endcaps. 









Finished pics in the next post.


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## Frank2056 (Mar 23, 2007)

Here are the finished pictures.

The blue section in the front is the enclosed deflector. I have a blue LED inside the hull and some crinkled aluminum foil to add some variation in the light.
The engines each have two tea light flickering LEDs. I bought about 10 of them at 50 cents each - I used the batteries for power. Unfortunately I miscalculated the current limiting resistor value and they're dimmer than they should be:









The decals were printed on my laser printer:









The probes on the nacelle caps are a little bent - I fixed them after these pictures were taken:

























The base is from a Glencoe (ex-Strombecker) Atomic Space Station:









I modified a couple of the tea lights to act as the 6V power supply. I had a low dropout 5V regulator that I designed years ago for a small weather station in the Mojave. The board is based on the Max1595; one of its suggested applications is powering white LEDs efficiently. I just plopped it down with some blu-tac (or white-tac in this case) :









Detail pics in the next post.


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## ClubTepes (Jul 31, 2002)

Looks like it could be a TOS version of the Jenolan.


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## Frank2056 (Mar 23, 2007)

It's hard to get a good picture of the engines and deflector lit. The tea light LEDs are dim (or off) in this picture. They're usually a little brighter:









The lit bridge. The dome area was where the LED flashlight's power button was located. I used it as the master and heat smashed some clear plastic over it. Some of the green masking fluid is still visible:









The pattern on the floor was intentional; it's not a dithering pattern (although it looks like one, dammit!)









The cargo bay - the docking port and the impulse engines are from mecha detailing sets. There's obviously a force field keeping the atmosphere inside the bay:









Here's a beauty shot. The green light under the starboard nacelle is a navigation light. There's a red one on the opposite side. They're both fiber optics fed from a white LED, both ends of the fibers were painted in the appropriate clear color (red or green). In total, I used six white LEDs (three in the cargo bay), four flickering tea light LEDs and one blue LED, all operating at 5V from two coin batteries (6V is slightly outside the operating range of the Max 1595). Obviously, battery life is going to be limited, but the regulator will continue to work until the batteries drop below 5.2V or so.










This turned out better than I expected (which wasn't much - I just wanted to use it as a testbed for some ideas).

Thanks for watching!


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## harristotle (Aug 7, 2008)

Seriously cool! I love the design, and you executed it perfectly. The added details of a visible bridge and hangar bay with crew members just takes it over the top. 

Do you have any video of it that would show the flickering lights in the nacelles?


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## Fernando Mureb (Nov 12, 2006)

Wooow!! It's amazing your ability to improvise! It must have been really fun.


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## Nova Mike (Apr 26, 2009)

Very nice build, well done, thanks for sharing:thumbsup:


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## John P (Sep 1, 1999)

That's downright elegant! very nice!


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## Griffworks (Jun 24, 2002)

That is most impressive! Excellent work and thanks for sharing!


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## kdaracal (Jan 24, 2009)

That is soo nice! Works great. You'd never know it was a bash. I built that Monogram last year, OOB, and that hull is a piece of garbage. Horrible fit. You took it to a whole other level!!


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## Trekkriffic (Mar 20, 2007)

I really like what you've done here. Love those old Monogram kits; harkens back to a more innocent time when space was new and exciting promising infinite possibilities for discovery. Your ship fits into the Trek motif really well. Good job!


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## Frank2056 (Mar 23, 2007)

Thanks for the comments, guys! I'll try to take a video of the engines this weekend. 
The original plastic was covered with rivets (the 50's version of aztecing and greebles, I guess) and sanding them and the other surface imperfections off really thinned the plastic in a few sections. 

The best part of the build is that it escalated on its own; each little sub-project worked well enough to warrant the next step. By the time I had all the subsections and electronics together, why not glue it up and paint it?

Using paper as an alternative to scratchbuilding works well, and you can add depth easily. 
Low voltage lighting works well, with the proper planning. I should have tested EVERYTHING as one unit before sealing it up, though. 
One sub project I didn't try (but may, in the future) is to use a CMOS 7555 timer or an output pin on a microprocessor to provide the power to the LEDs. Brightness (and power consumption) could be varied easily by adjusting the waveform duty cycle.


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