Galileo Shuttlecraft from Star Trek

[bgt01]

REAR LANDING GEAR

The rear landing gear on the actual Galileo is an old aircraft part. It’s basically a plate at the end of a piston. I built mine starting with a white popsicle stick. I colored it gold with a Sharpie, then used my pin vise to hollow out some of the end. For the silver part of the piston I used a smaller diameter bamboo skewer and colored it with a silver Sharpie.

Using reference pictures, I scratch built the plate out of 2mm chipboard colored with gold Sharpie. I hand-drew the mounting tabs for the plate and used my metal pick to punch a hole where the mounting pin would go. I glued these on using heavy amounts of Super Glue gel because this part had to be strong. I cut a piece of the bamboo skewer to length for the mounting pin, colored it gold and Super Glued it in place.

Next, I cut the gold popsicle stick at an angle for mounting to the hull. Again, I used a lot of Super Glue gel. The real part has triangular sections on each side with some detailing. Trying to replicate this in detail would have taken a lot of time and trial and error, and at this size wouldn’t show up all that well. So, I approximated it using more gold colored 2mm chipboard cut to strips and Super Glued on.

Next, set up another jig using scrap 2mm mounting board to get rear of Galileo to the correct “landed” height. I put the landing plate in line with the gold piston and figured out how long to cut the silver piston. I cut the silver part and Super Glued it into place. Drilling out the gold piston makes it look like the silver piston could retract. After letting that dry a long time, I took Galileo off the jig and enjoyed the fruits of my labor. It all sits really well and looks great!

[bgt01]

DISPLAY

The final step for me on this trek (see what I did there?) was to create a display base that looked like the scene from “The Galileo Seven” when the Galileo is first seen on Tarsus II. The actual base is an old picture frame with the glass removed. The frame sits face down so the back is the “ground.” I cut a piece of foam core to size for the ground. I found a picture of dirt that looked like the dirt on the original soundstage, printed it on card and glued it to the foam core. Using screen caps from the episode and Photoshop I made files to recreate the soundstage rocks. I printed these on card and glued them to 2mm chipboard. I Super Glued bamboo skewers to the back of the rocks and pushed them into the foam core where I wanted them. The rocks aren’t exactly in the same as they were in the episode due to the size of the display.

The final touch was to add the crew. Again, I used screen caps from various episodes for the crew. I scaled them to size, printed them on card and glued them to 2mm chipboard. After a lot of slow, tedious trimming, I edge colored them, glued bamboo skewers on and pushed them into place. And, yes, I know I have more than seven crew and it’s unlikely the entire senior staff would go on a landing party…but I don’t care. It looks cool! I wanted the display to have that ’70s cardboard pop-up-toy-feel like old playsets of the day. If I’d had this when I was a kid I’d have played the crap out of it!

And with that, I’m calling it a wrap for the Galileo. I still need to tweak the door, but all in all, I’m pretty pleased with the model. As usual in hindsight I see lots of things that could be improved on: better centerline molding, better pylons, better pylon bracing, better door hinging, actual retracting landing gear with recesses in the engines and hull, more detailed rear landing gear, removable roof, lights….ARGH! But to be fair, this is a great model as is. All it really needed was a more accurate repaint and a better interior, which I think I gave it. My thanks to Joerg Stammen for creating a really fun model to build. If any of you have this model I encourage you to build and improve on it.

[elliott]

Nicely done model and a great build thread! I've really enjoyed following along. Thank you for a most enjoyable ride. Good job!

[gotham]

Shame the build's now come to an end, but looks really good on the base with figures. It's been a pleasure following this build - I hope you'll be doing more soon.

[spaceagent-9]

great job!!

[THE DC]

Really appreciated your work and the detail of the build thread.

Will you be uploading your alterations to the downloads section?