Zousho's U.S.S. Defiant build report

[panzer]

As there are still no instructions for some ships on Zousho's site I will post my build reports of the Defiant and the Sabre/Saber class U.S.S. Yeager here. I've already posted them to another board about three years ago.




There are bigger papermodels of this starship on the internet, but I want to make as much ships an possible on 1:1700. Martin Saenger's Stargazer, the Trek models by Diego Cortes as well as the Cardassian Galor/Keldon and the Klingon Vor'cha by Marko Haertel are already designed in this scale so I decided to take it as my standard.

Because of that, I didn't choose the hand-drawn design by Ninjatoes or the computer-drawn variant by Steve Perry but the one from Japanese designer Zousho which is on a scale of approximately 1:1900. It can be found here.

The Defiant's original length from the Deep Space Nine Technical Manual is 170 m, but Bernd Schneider explains in an article on his excellent website why 120 m is more likely. That's why I've assumed this length for the spaceship. This was resulting an overall model length of 7,1 cm at 1:1700.

There are no instructions for Zousho's models, so I think this could be helpful.

[panzer]

I used 160g/sqm ( I think it's 43 lb) cardboard. The orginal model has only a few gluetabs on so I've added some to several parts, e. g. to the "nose" of the Defiant:







Sorry for the quality of some of the pics, my talent as a photographer is quite limited...

[panzer]

The biggest part is the main hull consisting of only two parts. There are many cut or fold lines. Some of them should only be cut or scored to a certain point. I hope that this can be seen on the pics. In every case you should try the fitting of the parts without glue first!

This is the upper part of the main hull, again with some glue tabs added.



I've glued the three parts for the internal support structure on another layer of cardboard. This makes them much more stable. The lines on the inner white surface (1st picture) mean nothing. I just used the reverse side of some misprints. :D



The lower part of the main hull. The glue tabs I've added on the outer left and right flap are definitely wrong. I've had to cut them away while assembling. Otherwise it is impossible to bring the part into right shape.

[panzer]

These are the two finished parts of the main hull. It took a few attempts before I've got them into the correct shape:

[panzer]

During the drying time of the main hull parts I've build the stern. This was the most difficult component to me because two of the parts are quite small. I know that there are some people out here building micromodels from paper but for me it was just tedious. :D Maybe my fingers went too fat during the last two decades...:o



In the meantime the main hull parts have dried so I assembled them.

[panzer]

The assembly of the bridge is comparatively easy:

I've first colored the edges of the three bridge parts with light grey felt tip pen and then glued them on each other. The flaps on the bottom part have to be folded downwards and then fixed to the longer of the small stern parts mentioned in the last post.

This is how the completed hull with nose and stern looks like. There is just some fine adjustment to do at the bottom. You'll see this later on the pics of the finished ship.

[panzer]

The next step is fixing the in- and outlets of the warp engines. Before that, they must be glued to the matching black/white layers for stability reasons.








I must confess that I still don't know what these two parts are for:




The surfaces for glueing are quite small so I've let it dry overnight. Next day I've added the surface of the warp engines. Here I've found the same problems with the small surfaces for glueing, so I worked step by step with enough time for drying between each step.

[thokamous]

looking good man

[panzer]

And finally this is the finished Defiant!

I forgot one thing: The original model comes in pdf format without the ship's name and registry. So it must be converted into jpg or bmp before labeling. There are some free pdf tools on the web if you don't have the extremely expensive Adobe Acrobat Professional. Some of them, e. g. Leadtools ePrint, do it even better and give the ability to choose a resolution up to 1600 dpi.

Sorry if my English is is sometimes hard to understand but I've graduated from school about 20 years ago and don't use much English in my job and my everyday life so many things are lost in the meantime. Besides of that, I don't know some technical terms...:o

Nevertheless, I hope you know what I mean.










Bottom







I've also made a simple display stand for the Defiant.

I don't want to use needles for fixing my models so I've had the idea to develop a support using a copy of the ship's bottom part as a support plate. This solution is quite stable because of the special shape of the ship's underside. For stability reasons I've also glued a coin to the inner surface of the stand.

The small flaps at the stern of the three scaled parts must be folded upwards after glueing to the black surface:





The display stand comes on three different scales: On the original scale used by Zousho, on a scale of 1:1700 at a presumed legth of 170 m like it is written in the DS9 Technical Manual and on a scale of 1:1700 at a presumed length of 120 m. Make sure that you use the same printer setting (e. g. "100%", no change" or "fit to page") as for the model. Otherwise the stand will not fit.

You can also use it for any other scale by changing the print percentage or the jpg file itself.

Attached you'll find the two pages with the display stand's parts as pdf, right below it is as jpg. Page 2 is to be printed on the reverse side of page 1 because the grey box is just the back side of the dedication plaque.
http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/a...ay-Stand-1.jpg
http://i196.photobucket.com/albums/a...ay-Stand-2.jpg

[Millenniumfalsehood]

Very nice! Those little parts are supposed to go in the 'jaws' that hold the nose in place.