Plastic modelling - Battlestar Galactica WIP

[Iriorne]

Hi all,

Early last year I started working on a plastic model kit of the Battlestar Galactica from the 2004 TV series of the same name (if you haven't seen it, you're missing out). After working on it off and on over the past year I've decided to make a big push and get it finished - I thought I'd share my progress here to help with motivation.

The base kit is the Moebius Models 1/4105 Battlestar Galactica. I also bought a third party set of decals and photo etched metal detail. Actual progress is pretty far along now, I just have to take some more photos.


Test fit of the main hull straight out of the box, held together with tape and rubber bands.


Aftermarket decals and photoetch.

The photoetch set contains replacement gun turrets, raised name plates, windows for the museum hangar and internal structure for the landing bays. The decal set includes decals for almost the entire ship, covering the armour plating as well as the spaces between all the ribs.

In addition I'm incorporating some of the modifications to the kit that I've other people use, including:

• Lowering the 'head' section to eliminate the height mismatch between the top of the head and main hull and correcting the head angle to make it level with the hull.
• Removing and re-making the armour plating on the sides of the head.
• Undercutting all the edges of the armour plates to give the appearance of armour plating sitting on top of the rib structure.
• LED lighting for the landing bays, 'neck' windows, landing bay garages and engines.

As I said, I'm much further along than those photos now, so some of this will be more of a retrospective than recent progress. I've gotten most of the boring, tedious bits out of the way, mainly just waiting on the electronics so I can start planning installation and assembly.

More soon

[Deonasis]

Cool, so finished it'll be ~35cm long?

[gamblor916]

Sweet! Love to see more progress.

[lancalot]

Wow .. would love to see more wip stuff !,, keep posting pic man... Is that all water slide decal? There seem a lot!! I always had problem with water slide ...any tips? Great stuff ...Keep it up

[Iriorne]

A couple more older photos. The lighting is pretty bad and they were taken on a mobile. I've tried to correct as best I can but they're not great to begin with.


Upper main hull (starboard). The most obvious problem here is that the ribs just merge into the plating on the dorsal surface.


Upper main hull (port side). You can see that I've chiselled out area to recreate the ribs and the appearance of armour plating. I should probably have continued chiselling another millimetre higher for proper accuracy but I felt it would severely compromise the integrity of the model and it wasn't worth the time and effort to fill in the back side of the curve so I could chisel deeper. That one piece had over 100 points that needed fixing so near enough is definitely good enough.

This armour plating is one of the more annoying issues to fix. To keep the production costs down the designer has taken short cuts, basically moulding the armour plate on. The nature of injection moulding means no undercuts, which results in some pretty ugly areas. This is from somebody else's build but you can see how thick the armour plating is compared to the CG model. In the first picture above you can see I've filed down the armour plating on the head. As of last week I've made replacement plating too, and it's a vast improvement.

Cool, so finished it'll be ~35cm long?

Yep, I forgot to say above but it should be about 35cm from the bow antenna to the engine exhaust. I believe the CG model was actually the basis for the design so it inherits some of the quirks from the show. Chief among them the fact that the landing bays don't actually fit inside the ship! If you watch the show carefully you'll notice they're always very careful about what angles they show the bays opening and closing from in order to hide this.

[...] Is that all water slide decal? There seem a lot!! I always had problem with water slide ...any tips? [...]

Yeah, 3 pages worth of water slide decals in the third party set, probably hundreds of individual decals, covering all the armour plating and the spaces in between the ribs. I've actually had a rethink in the last week and decided not to use the rib decals as I think they'll make it look too busy. Instead I'm glueing small chips of styrene into all the rib spaces to give it some physical detail without the cluttered appearance. Another boring and tedious process, but hopefully worthwhile.

My general work flow with decals is to lay down a gloss coat first to seal the paint and provide a smooth surface for the decals to adhere to. When cutting the decals, use a sharp hobby knife and score around the edges of the printed artwork to trim off the excess decal film. Dip the decals in warm water for 10-20 seconds, then rest on a damp paper towel, don't leave them in the water till the adhesive dissolves completely. After another 20 seconds or so the decals should move freely. Wet the surface of the model and using a soft wet paint brush slide the decals off the paper onto the model. You should be able to slide it around fairly easily to get it in position, then gently squeeze out any water from underneath the decal with a damp cotton bud.

I'm a big fan of Microscale MicroSol, which is a decal setting solution. I wasn't keen on decals until I tried this, but it really is fantastic. Just brush it on to the decal after it's placed and it will soften the decal film, helping it to adhere to contours (may still need to run a knife along any panel lines) and look like it was painted on. It makes the decals very fragile but I've found it pretty easy to work with. Don't be alarmed if the decals curl and wrinkle up - they should settle back down as they dry, and if you get any air bubbles just pop them with a knife and reapply a bit more MicroSol. You may need to use a cotton bud to squish down the decals if the film is particularly thick.

Once the decals are down, reapply another gloss coat to seal, apply any weathering or washes, seal again, then matte/satin coat if desired.

I've not worked with aftermarket decals before, but I understand they can be more fragile than those typically included with kits. You can buy liquid decal film from hobby shops that you can spray or brush on to the decals (before use) to give them a bit more strength.

This is my 1/1000 refit USS Enterprise from a few years back. All the detail in that picture except the blue dome at the back is done with decals. Took lots of pricking, squishing and microsol to seat them down properly but the end result is fantastic, if I do say so myself. I'd say they were painted on, if I didn't know better.

[lancalot]

WOw...even the grey square are decal?... that really nice....love the Enterprise...any pic of the full ship...
Thanks for the tips...that great to know... need to get Microscale MicroSol then....was always afraid to use decal on my perfect grade gundam cause i had really bad result with them,they just looked like horrible stickers ...

[Iriorne]

I know what you mean about the sticker look. Try MicroSol, you won't be disappointed. They also make something called MicroSet, which is supposed to help adhere decals to the surface, I don't think it's required for use with 'Sol, but it might help prevent decal curling. Not too sure.

More (large) pics of the Enterprise for you:
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4
Image 5

It's basically a coat of pearl white, with a few areas painted (mainly on the warp nacelles, the deflector dish and a few blue panels on the lower saucer), then decals for everything else. The decals weren't a perfect fit, if you look at Image 5, you can see the decals at the saucer/neck join are misaligned, in order to try and get the port holes to line up. The tops of the nacelles were probably the biggest pain as the decals were one piece, trying to wrap around a stepped upper surface. Thought I'd mess them up but after much trimming and microsol they look pretty good.

Such a beautiful ship, I'm glad they kept so much of the design in the new movie Enterprise.

[lancalot]

That really good... i didn't know water slide can look like that ....totally amazed .... wouldn't it be hard to do on curved surfaces..and that the whole ship!! .... man must been hard for the nacelles!!

[Iriorne]

Yeah, compound curves are tough. Luckily most of the decals were in smaller sections so this wasn't a huge problem. In future I'd probably trim the nacelle decals into sections. Even cutting around the outline of the 'steps' wasn't really adequate and they were still a pain.

------

A major issue with the stock kit is the misalignment of the various sections of the 'alligator head'. If built unmodified, the lower jaw would sit a fraction of a millimetre too high, while the dorsal surface of the head would be about 0.5 cm higher than the body, and pointing at a slight upward angle.

Correcting this was pretty nerve wracking as it was difficult to work out where and how much material to remove and the potential to really screw it up was quite high. I colour coded the areas that were altered in the picture below.

Orange: removing the alignment pins on the lower jaw to allow it to sit flush with the lower hull.

Green: removing the top millimetre from the central section of the head. Also removed all alignment pins for upper and lower sections.

Blue: removing about half a centimetre from the 'shelf' on the upper hull.

Red: removed some of the detail on the back of the upper head to allow it to sit lower

Purple: constructed a shim to fill the gap cause by levelling the head.



This was mostly done last year, you can see some of the parts have a coat of primer and some styrene chip detail that I decided to add.



Close up on the shim, made from thin strip styrene that I laminated together. Scribed some mostly straight panel lines, should blend right in with another coat of primer.



Rebuilt armour plate for the nose section. Held on with blutack temporarily but will remove for painting and reattach at the end. Looks heaps better compared to the original kit detail. Also plenty of styrene chip detail in evidence here.



Reconstructed some detail on the engines. The CG model has recessed detail here while the kit was smooth. This was relatively straightforward to do and will stop it looking too plain. There's some fine scribed detail on some of the parts too that doesn't really show up well.



Starboard landing bay. Spent an evening super glueing little bits of aluminium foil into the upper sections to block light from the LEDs. Managed to avoid glueing my fingers together. Real pain though, probably should just have used some thick black paint (which I've since bought for other parts anyway).

I folded up one of the photoetch landing bay inserts too, to see how it fits. Should look good all painted up, and the etch will stop anyone seeing the slightly rough internal surface, not that you could see much through the opening anyway.

Next step is to paint the bay interiors and apply the runway decals provided with the kit.

[Soundwarp]

Awesome, so glad they spent some money and finished the series off. Yes the ending sucked but it was better that just being cancelled!

Awesome model!!!!!!!!!