Star Fleet: USS Saladin - simple conversion

This has been a mildly unpleasant period. I still have 40K forces, so I'd like to be able to say the Nurgle has been visiting me, but that really hasn't been true for some time now. I can only claim that his nephew (who is doubtless doing a bit of work experience at the office) has been duffing my lungs up a bit. The first day was a total write-off: I managed that feverish falling into and out of sleep thing that people only do in nineteenth century literature. The second day I just felt awful, and I have been steadily recovering. But I have only been getting better slowly, and one part (er, two, really) of me which has yet to reach perfection is my lungs. I keep coughing - a vexing dry cough which has come upon me again as I type this sentence. So I am far from dead, but a tiny, tiny, yet irritatingly elongated way from well.

"He's dead, Jim, but not as we know it!" Not quite, but let's use that to segue into the main topic, that of starships and whatnot. As I have mentioned ere now, I am quite keen on this Mongoose game: A Call To Arms: Star Fleet, derived from Amarillo Design Bureau's Star Fleet Universe games, which are themselves (stop me if you're getting bored or if I've erred, which I may well have by now) derived from the Star Fleet Technical Manual of the 1970s. Said manual included a few ships: the original Enterprise and her sisters, a three-nacelled dreadnought, a tug variant (the same size as Enterprise, give or take, and a destroyer and scout variant with the same saucer. Technically speaking, none of these are yet available from Mongoose, though I am quite happy to use their Constitution-class heavy cruiser as the original Enterprise, and their dreadnought as the old dreadnought.

So my lust for the past has driven me to think on creating the Scout/destroyer and the tug. I recently acquired another fleet box from Mongoose, and the raw materials for my design manifested themselves (courtesy of my kindly postman) one morning recently. Stricken with illness as I have been, carving up bits of metal with a knife have been the furthest I have been prepared to drive myself, and so I did. Brave fellow, eh? So let's get down to my latest endeavour. I looked into Memory Beta's entry on the Saladin-class Destroyer (which is very close in appearance to the Hermes-class Scout. I grabbed a few bits and bobs from Mongoose kits.

1) In picture A you can see the saucer and secondary hull from a Mongoose Constitution-class heavy cruiser, and the upper warp nacelle from a Federation-class dreadnought.

2) I carefully cut the neck of the cruiser's secondary hull from the hull itself. See picture B.

3) Then I glued it in its usual place. See picture C.

4) In pictures D & E I realised I needed a sensor/deflector dish, so nabbed one from a Mongoose FFB. I also drilled a hole in the warp nacelle so I would be able to mount the starship on one of the plastic bases.

5) In pictures F & G you can see the Saladin/Hermes sat next to a Constitution-class cruiser. Opinion is strongly divided on these ships (the single-nacelled Saladin/Hermes. Some think they are excellent, and others feel they look awful. My own opinion is that they are decidedly adorable!

6) Pictures H, I, J, K & L show the destroyer/scout together with the larger cruiser.


A final note here is that the destroyer/scout should really have a nacelle with smooth sides, and with some detail on the lower side. The main reason I didn't make such a model was lack of preparation and research. So next time look forward to some excruciatingly painful research! Next time probably will not be until October unless I win the Lottery, folks. I have a strong feeling that the next few months are going to be strongly based in recycling old bits and bobs of this and that - or in painting models I haven't seen in years - or in begging at GW for free paint! Anyway, until next time, folks, happy 'gaming!