Galileo shuttlecraft with interior, figures, and diorama base - Polar Lights, 1:32

May 30th, 2023 - So, I'm sort of relishing this project for all the reasons in the description (different shape, different scale, some figure painting), but I'm also acutely aware that there will be challenges ahead, perhaps especially with the lighting. There will have to be decisions made, but for now, let's just enjoy the traditional box shot and a look at the first bunch of sprues.  

May 30th, 2023 - I can see that there are three main parts to this entire build -- the figures, the interior, and the exterior (being the actual shuttle). I've decided to do all the figures first, with their seats, then do the interior, and then build the shuttle around the interior, which seems to be what most people do. I've been watching AllScaleTrek.com's 2-part video of this build for advice and guidance, and this seems to be a good order of proceedings. So! Here are all the figure sprues, and the seven seats. Nice and clean and washed! 

May 30th, 2023 - Here are the heads, and one pair of arms. It's a bit hard to tell from the photo, and even IRL tbh, but they've been sculpted to look like the main cast, rather than the away team from the episode in which we get our best look at the shuttle, "The Galileo Seven". You can alter them a bit and paint them differently to resemble the away team, but I'm not going to go that far myself. For this build, we will tell a different story. Perhaps the gang are on their way to a conference on a space station somewhere, or just heading down to Earth for some leave. We'll figure something out. 🙂 

May 30th, 2023 - Bodies and arms - two sprues. Bodies all seated and in halves. I foresee a first challenge here - making the black boots shiny compared to the matt black of the trousers. Hmm. I guess a little jar of varnish or something? 

May 30th, 2023 - Yeoman Mears (in the episode), but now Lt. Uhura on the sprue. Some people have swapped out heads from their Enterprise Bridge kit to make episode-accurate figures, but although I have that bridge kit in my stash, I don't really want to adulterate it. Anyway, no big deal. Uhura is the bomb, so Uhura it is! 

May 30th, 2023 - Some of the seats and the tanks that stand against the wall in the back room of the shuttle - 2 sprues. The seats seem to be adjustable, in that the bum part clicks neatly into the Y-frame part, which would give them some tilt. I can't see why you'd do that, unless.... unless Dr. McCoy is tired from the trip and has reclined his seat to put his feet up... ehehehehe! Hmm. 

May 30th, 2023 - Final sprue, and apart from a sprue of transparent parts, this makes the whole interior parts kit. Clock-wise from top left: port side interior wall, console, and joysticks; starboard wall; floor pan, interior door and computers; and the interior walls, roof, and something else.

Lots of fun to be seen here already! The floor pan has a small rectangular hole, which is the flap that covers the doo-dads into which Scotty drained their phaser power packs to give the shuttle one last shot of power, so that they could escape from the planet. The ceiling part has the massive rectangular hole, which you glue a big window into. You can then slide off the exterior roof and look inside at the interior more closely. 😄 Finally, the interior door gets trapped between the two interior walls in such a way that tilting the shuttle from side to side opens and closes the door! 😄 

June 2nd, 2023 - With everything washed but a busy weekend ahead of me (which is why this photo is dated June 2nd, but posted today, June 4th), I decide to get started on assembling the figures, which I can stop and start doing as needed. I thought about painting the parts on the sprue, but I've done enough figure painting that I'm confident that I can do a good job with these things as whole figures. One thing I did do, however, was consult a good friend who is also an awesome figure painter, about how to do the eyes. Should I do cartoon eyes that are just black dots with simple eyebrows, or try to paint proper eyes. And if so, how? What she said opened my eyes (ahahaha!). No, she said to paint the eye whites onto their faces first, and then paint the skin colour around them. So in honour of my friend, meet Lt. Agata! 😄 

June 2nd, 2023 - Some time later that evening, the gang is all assembled. You get two pairs of arms that point forward, for the pilots, and I was wondering about how to line them up nicely with the joysticks before any of that was assembled. But, the arms and torsos are sculpted to fit together precisely, so there is no ambiguity about alignment. However, you can still reposition them a bit and let the glue and paint make up the difference, which is why I have Dr. McCoy being temperamental and waving his fist in the air. xD Spock and Kirk are flying the thing, and the rest of the gang sit in silent contemplation... 

June 5th, 2023 - I glued the chairs together and lined them up for painting. Actually, I meant to line them up diagonally so that the paint has more access to them, so I'll do that before painting. Anyway, the pieces are -- again -- very nicely sculpted. There are tiny inverted U shapes on the sides of the chairs, and tiny posts on the insides of the stands that sit up in them. I put a tiny blob of gel glue on the U shapes and on the posts, gently held them together for a minute or two, and then brushed some Tamiya Extra Thin around the joins for extra security. Theeeen, I put a little blob of poster tack on the bottom of the stands and *gently* pushed the whole assemblies into the holes in this piece of cardboard.

One more thing to note here. The figures have long legs and need to sit reclined a little bit, and so the seats need to be glued and then allowed to dry with a slight tilt. However, it's hard to judge how much tilt you need. As you can see here, I overshot it in some places, but I'm not too worried about that. I can compensate for that later on. Anyway, tomorrow (after the mother-in-law leaves), primer for the seats and figures! 

June 7th, 2023 - With the Citadel Grey Seer primer nicely dried on the seats and figures, I get the pots and brushes out. Vallejo Black for the trousers, boots, shirt collars, and some hair (Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, Spock); Vallejo Medium Fleshtone for the skin, and Beasty Brown for Uhura and the hair on Chekov, Kirk, and McCoy. I tried to make Kirk a tiny bit blonder than the other brown-hairs by thinning his paint, but not sure how well it turned out. We'll see about that.

To rewind a second, I had to prime them on their hands and knees, and then flip them over and prime their front sides. To apply a final, quick, touch-up of primer, I stuck their feet to the card with poster-tack. (Over night, Sulu got a massive cramp and had to lie down). For the actual painting, I hit upon using these crocodile clips. The boots are actually solid parts of the figures, i.e. the back half of the figure attaches to the front half from the knees upwards, so the mild pressure from the clips won't mess anything up.

I decided not to paint eye-whites, as my expert figure painter, Lt. Agata advised, because when it came down to it, and I was there, in the moment with the brush and the paint and yadda yadda, I couldn't really see close enough and I didn't fancy getting Mr. Handy out and messing around with the magnifier. Lazy, I know, but ech. Even so, I took her advice generally about over-painting the details -- in this case, the black uniform collars -- and then brushing over the mess with the next biggest area of colour.

Shirts tomorrow, and Spock gets a slight trim on his fringe. 😄 Meanwhile, the seats are all drying nicely from a blast of Tamiya TS-29 Semi Gloss Black, left over from the Revell TOS Enterprise stand.

 

June 14th, 2023 - Finished! One week later, I have primed, painted, glossed, decaled, glossed, and finally matte varnished all seven figures. The seats were primed, painted, and glossed. I left them glossy, to look more like shiny plastic and break up the acres of matte varnish that will eventually rain down on the interior.

Anyway, for the faces I went with a cocktail stick to poke and scratch on eye-dots and eyebrows. Again, the faces are very well detailed, so with a nice flesh paint job and a mere suggestion of a face, the imagination fills in the blanks. Here the figures are, not yet glued in to their seats, but just resting. 😄

Shirt colours from Vallejo's Game Color range: Sun Yellow (72.006); Bloody Red (72.010). Blue science uniform is Revell Aqua Color - Light Blue. Trousers, boots, and hair: Black (72.051). Hair, and also skin for Uhura: Beasty Brown (72.043).

I've already started preparing the next big step in the instructions, which is the control console, so more on that very soon! 

June 14th, 2023 - One final pic, to illustrate how I gave them the final matte varnish. By covering up their already glossed boots, I did achieved a nice shiny boot leather effect, compared to their matte trousers and shirts.

The decals were fiddly, yes, but still totally doable. I brushed on a little bit of Micro Sol on their cuffs, to help those rank stripes sit down and stay down, and that was enough. Overall, it was a very fiddly process of painting, touching up, painting, touching up, and so on.

One caution: Painting the black shirt collars and trousers first was an excellent idea. However, the black of course showed clearly through the red, blue, and especially the yellow shirt paints. Best thing to do is paint some white on top of the black over-paint, then paint the final colours. Obvious in hindsight, really, but I got excited by the whole operation and didn't think of it right away. 😄 

June 16th, 2023 - Time to start building the actual shuttle! The first thing to do is glue all the little computers on to the walls. The computers are transparent, for 'easy' lighting, although once glued into place it would be hard to thin the plastic behind them manually because there is no marking on the reverse of the wall. I suppose you could carefully Dremel inside the marked squares before glueing. But anyway, I thought that would be too much faffing about with the lighting and wires and so on. I don't want to get too involved with lights in this one, beyond nacelles, control console, and overhead lighting. 

June 16th, 2023 - All computers glued into place, including the little swing-arm targeting/sensor things at the front. I pushed tiny amounts of poster-tack into the glueable holes from behind, and small blobs into the seat post holes on top. The seat stands have a relatively large, squareish base that will hide the missed areas there.

One other thing to note: the control console has four transparent parts (not counting the round 'radar' part which you'll see in a moment). However, the smaller square part that goes in between the two rectangular parts is not lit up and has no controls other than a separate set of levers, the radar disc part, and a small decal of buttons. In effect, you just need to glue it onto the console part and then prime and paint the whole thing as one unit. I suppose that it was easier for them (not to mention more logical, captain), to keep all those console parts on one sprue. 

June 16th, 2023 - Ready for priming! Inset are the levers and an inset control thing that fits into one of the rectangular transparent parts on the control console, along with the floor hatch cover. I decided that even though it doesn't make sense really, I'm going to have that hatch open so that you can see the wires inside. We'll pretend it came loose during some turbulence. 😄 This might even be why Dr. McCoy is having a tantrum! 😄  

June 17th, 2023 - Having primed all that stuff, I came back and snipped off the rest of the big parts. From right to left: the door, the rear wall, and the interior wall. This is two halves which, when I dry fit them, clicked together so nicely I thought I'd just paint them that way too. Again, I've pushed poster-tack into the tiny holes where those funny tanks fit into the wall, and put small blobs over the small offsets that jut out from the wall to hold the tank bodies in the right place. 

June 17th, 2023 - After I primed the floor part I sprayed both sides with Tamiya TS-48 Gunship Grey. This the near-black colour that I chose for the carpet. However, the final effect -- which you can see on the left, on the underside of the floor tray -- made me panic a bit because I thought it's too dark, and with seven black (albeit glossy) chairs, the floor of the shuttle will become a light trap.

So, I shook up the last few molecules of Tamiya AS-10 Ocean Grey (RAF) that I had lying around, and did an overspray. It's a bit hard to tell in the photo, but that did a really really nice job of diffusing the darkness and giving it more of a carpet-like texture too.

The TS-48 Gunship Grey makes an excellent light blocker too. 

June 18th, 2023 - Both wall pieces have been painted Vomit Green (my own name for what is actually Tamiya AS-29 Grey Green (LJN). The colour is a bit washed out in this photo, perhaps, but it's there. I've masked it in preparation for adding the Tamiya TS-68 Wooden Deck Tan to the cornice and the lower half of the walls. 

June 18th, 2023 - With painted stuff drying everywhere, I turned my attention to the control console, which is a nicely detailed time-sink in itself. First I glued the rest of the transparent parts into place. Then I decaled them (I forgot that top decal, which I only now noticed looking at the photo). 😄 Then I painted black behind the three transparent parts, and then I glued the separate levers and mini-computer thing into place, painted them, and then glued in and decaled the radar/dart board. 😄

One thing to note here - be careful not to clip off the little tab on the radar disc. It's not fatal if you do, but it does help the thing stand up straight and gives the glue a precious few microns more of surface onto which to work its gluey magic. 

June 19th, 2023 - Computers and other wall gadgets masked and painted. I mixed some Vallejo Black (72.051) and Dead White (72.001) to make the grey, which honestly was a much lighter shade than what it dried down to (in this photo). I left it, because it looked okay dry, but when I added the decals (which you'll see soon), the little colourful dots do not really 'pop' out as much as I would have liked. In other words, the contrast is too low. 😄 But, it's not a killer. What is worse is that with all the little raised does on those computer pieces, the decals really, really do not sit down nicely, even with lots of Micro Sol. So -- again -- if you make this kit, DO file them down and let the really nice decals do all the talking! 😄 

June 18th, 2023 - Bear in mind that everything is still a bit wet and gloopy. Anyway, I wanted to say that you really should take the time to file down the transparent console parts -- maybe not the right-side one, but definitely the other three. Mario says this in the AllScaleTrek build/review video, and I did file down the unlit, painted one in the middle, but kind of skipped over filing down the others. And, of course, it gets messy with the Micro Sol and everything. We'll see how it goes after a few more dabs, but I've already made a couple of slits in that big lower one.

(Aaaand my control levers are non-canon red, because I mixed up some red already for the door (also a non-canon choice, but more on that later), and didn't want to waste it). 

June 20th, 2023 - The light in this photo gives the floor pan a really nice dark teal colour, which it is totally not (the next photo shows a more accurate floor colour). That aside, here we can see the excellent Vallejo Desert Yellow (70.977) on the tanks (with the metal parts painted Gunmetal (72.054)). I am inordinately pleased with the colour matching I achieved there. 😄 😄 

June 20th, 2023 - Close-up of the little hatch compartment. I used a cocktail stick to scratch on the wire colours -- red, blue, and orange, on top of the Gunmetal again -- while the edges of the panel are 72.052 Silver. The panel has a nice, accidental, weathered effect, which is a bit odd because it's supposed to also be carpet, but eh, looks nice so I leave it. 😄 

June 21st, 2023 - Final bit of detail work this morning - putting the tanks together. The little curly pipes (which I misidentified as joysticks in the beginning) fit very nicely into special slots inside one tank half. I filed the bottom stand piece from the extra tank and made it as a spare tank that I will glue onto the floor or something. 

June 21st, 2023 - Because assembling the interior part involves some thought about lighting, I decide to dry-fit the interior tray to the exterior tray. The gap for lighting those two 'headlights' on the front of the shuttle is slim to nil. But a single LED glued to the front of the interior tray, in that position, might work. I test it very roughly and imprecisely, and it seems to work, so I decide to commit to that. And if the wiring doesn't work out, it will be easy to snip off and forget about it.

As for the backlighting of the computer console, I try that out too and it looks horrible. The decals (which are excellent in and of themselves) never settled down properly onto all the tiny bumps and stubs on the console pieces - and fair enough, this is to be expected. But it looks quite bad, as AllScaleTrek pointed out in their video too. So, I decide not to draw attention to this slight embarrassment, and just go for an overhead cabin light somewhere without computer lighting. With the engine lights, maybe the headlights, and the Bussards, that should be enough.

(However, I am also now contemplating making a diorama with the shuttle, to show it landed, and therefore justify having all the flaps and panels and doors open. 😄 Not 100% sure about this idea, but I will workshop it a bit and see what happens. So if I do do a diorama, then most of the lighting will be moot, except the cabin light and the headlights). 

June 21st, 2023 - Exciting moment! All sub-assemblies are painted and ready to be glued into their final form! 😄 I have never reached this level of readiness in any of my previous kits, except perhaps for that 1:537 Enterprise. This will be fun! 

June 21st, 2023 - Console gets glued in first of all. Looking at it again, I do not regret not lighting it. It is an open piece underneath, so there would be light spill to deal with too.

After the console, the chairs go in. I am careful not to stick the whole damn thing to the mat. To the rear, you can see where the wash leaked under the masking tape and made a stain on the floor. Which, being unvarnished, is now a permanent feature. (The story will be that *someone* blocked the toilet back there, which is why a) Dr. McCoy is going mental, and b) Chekov looks so glum/secretly guilty. 😉 

June 21st, 2023 - I do the interior wall next, after carefully gluing it together. It takes some jostling, but finally all the little posts clip into place very neatly. This is a thick piece when assembled, and clearly provides a lot of structural integrity to the model. However, despite my careful gluing, so as not to glue the door shut, I am now 100% sure that the floor glue will have captured it and will keep that door closed for eternity. 😄 Oh well, something else for Scotty to do on their long journey. 😄 (By the way, the orange colour on the door is non-canon, and is my own idea about how the door should mirror those on the bridge and elsewhere on the ship. Besides, this model has enough poop and vomit shades already).

The starboard wall fits into place like a dream - no problems there, and a nice tight fit. 

June 21st, 2023 - Port side wall next. The fit is again very good, except at the very back, on that corner, where it is terrible. I will need to putty that seam or something. Or maybe just tape it very tight with black duct tape. If I don't do engine lights, light leaks will not be such a problem. 

June 21st, 2023 - Penultimate step - glue the d00ds into their seats! Uhura's seat tilted the most, so I have her relaxing in the back there, probably listening to Vulcan harp music on her earpod. 😄 Scotty is contemplating the wires in the floor, McCoy is having his fit, Sulu is just chilling in his Sulu-like way, and Kirk and Spock are having a rave up listening to Orion dance beats. Chekov, of course, contemplates his crime...

I think in retrospect I would have varied the arms a bit more. Like, not having two pointers pointing with both hands; and swapping one Sulu arm with one Chekov arm, to make them look more casual. But it's not bad I think. I can't help grinning when I look at this model -- it's been such a fun, easy build. Very satisfying to do. Have to recommend this interior kit very highly. 

June 21st, 2023 - Final final step for the interior parts kit is to glue the roof on top. They suggest not gluing it, and having it be removable, but the exterior roof is also designed to slide on and off (I think), so I'd rather have some more strength in this model by gluing the roof in. I did not glue the transparent panel into the roof part because it was a very, very snug fit and just snapped in under its own pressure. The tape is there for the glue to dry, of course, but I might just leave it on anyway. 

June 21st, 2023 - Beauty shots! Sulu and McCoy got the best faces. My teenage son who does all the figure painting gave me an honest assessment last night. Kirk looks ill; Spock looks super tired, and Uhura looks like a werewolf with massive eyebrows and huge, staring eyes. 😄 Chekov is okay, and Scotty is okay too, so I take all of this as a win. 😄 

June 21st, 2023 - Close up of the tanks, with the spare bottle on the floor. The white decal on the wall is a funny one. It actually is white, so any silver or grey that you paint behind it is basically not seen. Odd choice if you ask me. 

June 21st, 2023 - Bit of a wash on the floor grate and on the cabinets. A bit rough, but not a total disaster.

Alright then! Next I will glue an LED and some wire to the front of this thing, and then get on with building the exterior around it. The instructions for the interior kit include all the steps for the exterior model too, so you don't just fold them up at this point and put them away, but keep going all the way to the end. Nice! 

June 26th, 2023 - We're at the half-way point! With the interior finished, it's time to get cracking on the main thing. But before I do, a quick word about the timing. Today -- the day that I'm uploading these pix -- is July 15th, but I took these next few photos a few weeks ago. The reason for the big gap between updates is that first of all, my phone and my computer had an argument and wouldn't talk to each other for ages, so the natural short break I was taking between finishing the interior and starting the exterior became a long break, which then ran into a week-long holiday last week. But good news is, the phone and the PC are friends again, so here we go! 

June 26th, 2023 - That long break was still filled with me noodling over the lighting and so on, and whether to build it landed, with the gear down, or in flight. I went through several possibilities, and at some point decided to build it landed, in a diorama. (I might have mentioned this as a possibility before). So, for everyone's benefit, but mostly mine, lol, this will be the configuration:

- No Bussard lighting
- No engine light (I changed my mind about that later) 😄
- Cabin lights
- Headlights
- Gear down, rear panel open  

June 26th, 2023 - More about the diorama very soon, but for now, here are the sprues, washed. Previous picture showed all of the stuff in the box. There's a surprising amount of relatively small, fiddly parts in this kit, but most of the deep box space is taken up by the lower hull piece and the large walls and roof sprues.

This photo shows a close-up of the detailed parts sprue. The big flap is the rear floor part, then the rest of it is landing gear, nacelle parts, the door, and the little maintenance hatch guts at the rear of the shuttle. 

July 14th, 2023 - Now we catch up to the present day again, and here we see the First Glue! 😄 I love this moment, when you've done everything you can do before gluing the first parts together, and then boom! Glue! 😄 These are the nacelle struts, and because I'm doing this landed, with engines off (at least, the warp engines), then there's no need for Bussard lighting, which means no trenching or hiding wires and so on. The struts come in two halves, with the interior half gluing flush to the interior surface of the outside strut, so for wiring of nacelles, you'd need to trench the plastic and bury the wires. Not so bad really, because that would be hidden by the little L-shaped parts that will glue in here next. But still, a lot of work avoided there. One day, of course, I'd like to build a Gallileo in flight, and then we'll do the nacelles. One day. 😄 

July 16th, 2023 - I started priming everything yesterday, taking my usual over-cautious approach to masking off glueable surfaces and edges. Whilst everything was drying, I looked at all these other bits and pieces and thought "Let's get on with it." So, the landing gear is an easy kill. The engineering on the front feet is very nice -- you glue the posts, which have tabs to help them fit and stabilize them -- onto the lower half of the feet, then drop the upper halves over the struts and glue the two halves together. Very solid construction.

But, what we see here is the rear landing strut, which is a more complex subassembly. The idea is that you glue two braces onto the foot, glue the leg together, and trap a little cross-shaped piece between the two halves. You then squeeze the cross-shaped piece between the two braces, so that there is some freedom of movement for the foot. The fiddly part is trapping the cross piece between the leg halves without making a mess. Sooo, what you see here is the cross piece being held in place with a tiny bit of poster tack. Glue the leg halves together, remove the tack, et voila! 

July 16th, 2023 - Finished result. You could glue one brace on first, then assemble the leg, then poke the cross shape into the brace hole and glue the second brace on. That might be easier, and save you yoinking on an already-glued brace. 

July 16th, 2023 - Anyway, I then was looking at the instructions and thinking mainly about where I would have to mask the main floor half before priming it. Like, what else sticks to it, and where. Also, I was thinking about the fact that Mario at AllScaleTrek suggested gluing the nacelle pylons to the lower hull *before* attaching the side walls, because this creates a bit more glueable surface for the walls to attach to. And so I eventually worked out that I could attach those two triangle-like interior/exterior pieces to the rear of the floor tray already. 

July 16th, 2023 - Then, I decided to attach the rear half of the floor tray already too. This idea is backed up Interstellar Modeller's video on YouTube -- he built this kit, with the interior, back in January, and his videos on his build are truly excellent. Highly recommended. Anyway, he pointed out that sliding the cabin in first, and then attaching the rear floor tray (as in the instructions), makes it very very difficult to attach. This is because the rear tray attaches to the main tray by two slots that press down onto tabs (as you can see here). And with the cabin already in the way, it's difficult to make a nice, tight connection there.  

July 16th, 2023 - Here, I made a fun graphic! To clarify: Step 1, glue the two interior wall flaps on; Step 2, glue the rear floor tray in, *without* the two engine parts, because otherwise you can't slide the cabin in; Step 3,slide the cabin in, attach the nacelle/pylon sub-assemblies, and then build up the walls.

Now obviously, I haven't attached the nacelles yet -- all that stuff is still being painted. But that will be the next step I suppose. The engine 'balls' at the rear of the nacelle tubes, I glued together on the sprue (they come in two halves each) for priming and painting. The biggest job with the nacelles will be painting the clear Bussard collector domes at the front, which I am going to do with metallic orange, like my 1:650 TOS Enterprise. Non-canon, yes, but I like the idea that they are just smaller versions of the ones on the Enterprise. 

July 17th, 2023 - Back to work! Fortunately, another fun and unique job in a kit full of such things. This time, etching the panel lines onto the roof plate. For this, you get a paper template as part of the instruction sheet. I cut it out to the edges, then taped it flat and straight to the roof. (This procedure I got from AllScaleTrek, although I suppose it's the default method anyway). 

July 17th, 2023 - Then, I used my scribing tool (for the first time!) to make tiny dashes at each corner, as close to the actual corner as possible without being super fussy and laser accurate.  

July 17th, 2023 - You could make pin pricks in the exact corners, but I couldn't find anything at the time with which to do that. Probably a compass would do the trick (a drawing compass, obvs). 😄 After doing all of that and removing the template, here we see a plethora of tiny nicks and cuts. You have to keep calm and slowly and methodically start joining the lines up. A steel ruler or other metal edge is best, but I fudged my way through with a plastic triangle ruler. 

July 17th, 2023 - This is the final result, with each line scribed twice. I think this is still not enough really, so after I took the photo I went back over and did each one twice more. Note that the loopy swirl shape in the upper-right corner is discoloration or a greasy thumb print, not a huge cut. 😄

I then sorted all the parts out into piles by what colour I need to paint them, took the piles downstairs to the garage and painted everything. Actually I've been doing that all day, so by tomorrow we should be ready for more assembly, painting, and decalling as appropriate. Colours used are all Tamiya spray cans, as usual: TS-27 Matt White on the upper half; AS-7 Neutral Grey (USAAF) on the lower half and nacelles, and the last gasp of AS-10 Ocean Grey (RAF) on those nacelle end caps. Oh, and some of the old Humbrol Chrome Silver on those balls. The 'vent' detailing that goes around the nacelle just behind the Bussard collector should also be silver, but to me it looks too 'woo sci-fi', so I will paint it a lighter grey. 

July 17th, 2023 - Final bit of work was putting the engine together. I had painted the black part earlier, and in the wicked heat we're enjoying right now, it was dry enough by this evening. So! Onto the back of the two engine pieces you glue the clear part. Ultimately, this lives on the inside of the shuttle. When you glue that transparent part on, there is a tiny crack between the plastic engine part and the clear part. Into this crack I slipped a carefully cut out piece of thick baking paper, for diffusion of the engine light. In this photo, you see the clear part and the baking paper. 

July 17th, 2023 - Whilst examining the piece later, I noticed that the paper was slipping out of the gap, so I put a bead of Vallejo Acrylic Putty across the gap and bingo, here we are.

Tomorrow I will do the paint and decals on that little maintenance hatch thing in the upper-left corner there. 

July 18th, 2023 - Well, I still haven't started the detail painting yet, but that's only because I've been doing more bulk painting, finishing off the big pieces. I also re-did the silver balls after finding out the hard way that metallic paints dry slower in hot, humid weather. 😄

Here we see the nacelle end caps, which also needed a bit of a touch-up, but that's because I painted nearly everything in this kit on the sprue, which I don't usually do because then, depending on the size and shape of the piece, you inevitably have to touch up the places where you've snipped it off the sprue and filed the nub down. As happened here. 😄 Note for future Galileo builders: don't mask the flat end of these caps like I did the first time, rather, mask the smooth band around the end, which is the actual glueable surface on these bits. 😄 

July 18th, 2023 - So, with nearly everything drying under the weight of its final coats, there hasn't been a lot of gluing to do. However, with the focus on the small parts again, I made a final decision about the doors. The doors have been bothering me for a while, because while the lower flap is easy to do -- it's either up or down, so paint both sides appropriately -- the upper doors are more of a problem.

The problem is that on all of the completed models I've seen, either both doors are closed or the lower flap is down and the upper doors are... not there. 😄 In the show, they slide open, and so because I'm making mine to be landed, and part of a diorama so that you can see inside at all the cool figures, I decided to show that 'slid open' look. So, I'm going to split the doors down the middle, and wedge each one into the gap between the inner and outer hulls so that a tiny bit pokes out, making it clear that there are doors there.

Splitting them is not too difficult, because the doors are naturally scored on both sides, meaning a couple of (clumsy) swipes with my new friend, Mr. Scoring Tool, and they snap easily apart like a plastic Kit-Kat. After I took the photo I just filed down the inner edges neatly and painted the reverse in the same vomit green colour as the rest of the inside upper walls. 

July 19th, 2023 - Today's theme is 'doors and details'. 😄 First of all, I glued the lower-half door frame to the inside of the floor tray, trapping the lower door half in place.  

July 19th, 2023 - Next, the nacelles! I didn't take a picture of the paint detailing on the stripey, 'vented' part behind the Bussard collector, which I ended up doing in Vallejo Gun Metal (72.054). The Gun Metal colour is basically a metallic silver, but a much darker shade that gives it kind of a dirty, oily, more engine-like hue. I think that it goes well with the darker grey Tamiya AS-7 on the nacelle tubes.

Anyway! This photo shows how the silver balls have really long sticks that glue into those cap parts. The angle is not great on this photo because I'd already plugged the phone to the PC and the cable is a bit short, buuuut, you can see that the lower ball sticks out really far and to my eye, looks weird. So, I snipped a bit off the second ball (the top one), and it now sits a bit further into that 'pocket' there. Unfortunately, the glue had really dried on the first ball already, so I left it. It's not easily noticeable, so perhaps I'll get away with it. 😄

One more thing about those caps on the ends -- you can glue them in upside down, so watch out for that too. 

July 19th, 2023 - So the next job, after I'd attached the sparkly orange non-canon Bussard collectors and the little step plate, was to attach the nacelle tubes to the pylons. Here, a surprise. The pylon tabs and tube slots are not totally symmetrical, i.e. one tab is longer than the other. In this photo, you can see that fairly clearly. So before you go jamming gluey tabs into the wrong slots and make a mess on y our tubes, check their orientation! 😄

The inset photo shows how the interior of each tube is molded to create a nice glueable surface for the pylon tabs to grip to and be held in place. The fit is really excellent, so another big clap for the tooling on this kit. 

July 19th, 2023 - With the front landing gear, the top of the posts have a flat side, but the holes in the tubes do not. So, there is some reasonable danger of snapping them by trying to jam them in the wrong way. I shaved the post tops down a tiny bit and used a dash of Tamiya Extra Thin to secure them. Even with the shaving, they fit in nice and tight anyway, but be careful.

Once that whole nacelle thing is dry and secure, I'll gloss and do some wash detailing on the feet and vents on the tubes. 

July 19th, 2023 - Here you can see how the instructions show that the feet should be inserted with the flat side facing the outside of the tubes, i.e. the side you can see normally. Again, just be careful not to break them by forcing them in! (I didn't, thank the gods, otherwise you'd be getting 10 pictures about that too). xD 

July 19th, 2023 - More details! I forgot or maybe didn't fully realize that these two little rectangles -- which go on the rear wall under the impulse engines, -- represent an open or closed flap kind of situation, like the maintenance flap that sits next to this one. In most finished models you see the red clear part there 'closed', with light shining through it. Interestingly, both parts are clear. I chose to make mine closed too, so even though I painted and washed the inside part (the grey one on the right), it's now covered up anyway. 

July 19th, 2023 - You can see that here -- the rear wall is the big piece on the left. Next to that, the 2-part rear landing gear in metallic gold with a black wash to bring it down a bit (not very successfully, but okay). Next to that, the vomit doors with windows glued in. (I had to snip and file them down a bit because of course they're one piece). Then, excitingly, the maintenance hatch and the flap covered in circuit boards. My painting of the hatch interior is okay. Not great, but better than it looks in this pic. People will see it and be intrigued for the 10 seconds they spend looking at it, and that's fine with me. This was the first decalling of the project too, and the decals were nice and juicy and thick and colourful, as the modern PL decals are. The tiny stripey decals on the cables and pipes were difficult to make sit down, but I think that once the Micro Sol has done its job and I've glossed them again, we'll be okay. 

July 20th, 2023 - Big step forwards today. I was thinking about the electronics again. Now that everything is painted and I've done a few dry fits, I have a much, much clearer idea of how to wire and light this thing up. Long story short, I decided to build up the front and side walls before gluing in the wires and lights and so on. And that means putting the nacelles and pylons on first!

The way I did this to try and ensure maximum straightness -- which let's face it, is compromised by putting the pylons on *before* the walls go up -- is to glue it upside down. This worked perfectly: big fat book or something equally thick; end of the floor tray hangs over the edge; glue the pylon flaps, glue the edge of the tray for extra security, and then gently lift and slide the pylons in.

If it sounds easy, it was. However, there was one slight hitch... 

July 20th, 2023 - This is a story about not paying attention to the instructions and making assumptions about how easy a step will be. 😄

Sooo, take a look at those 4 L-shaped pieces, and notice how two of them have 2 holes on the short end, and two of them have 3 holes on the short end. You see? I didn't. 😄 When I did the first dry fit, something was obviously wrong, because the rear part of the pylon would not sit flush to the slots in the lower wall of the floor tray. I immediately detected that the L-shaped piece at the back was sticking out too far. I couldn't see why at first, but yeah, then I worked it out. Let's see the problem IRL! 

July 20th, 2023 - Here we have the correct configuration (fortunately!) on one side -- 2 holes at the back, 3 holes at the front. Like this, the excellent tooling means that the ends of the L-shapes, as thin as they are, provide the perfect little supports to help the pylons remain level. 

July 20th, 2023 - In contrast, we see on the 'incorrect' side my confused attempt to fix the problem by snipping off the protruding L-shape part. In the end, I had to clip back to what you see, and also scalpel off the glued remnants of the join, on the flat part of the pylon. The tooling is, again, very tight and clean, and even that little remnant buggered up the alignment. But, that's a simple fix and everything is nice and smooth and fits properly now. This is, incidentally, why I decided to glue this thing together upside down. 😄 

July 20th, 2023 - Finally, some happier news! I glossed over the decals on the inspection panel this morning, and then this evening finally glued all that stuff together. I mean, the slow motion of this whole rear wall was kind of blowing my mind. 6 pieces total, light blocking, lots of detail painting, plus decalling which ofc requires two layers of gloss... Anyway, you can just see a little blob of poster tack holding the flap in place while it dries. Perhaps I will get to the wiring and LEDs tomorrow, or maybe Saturday.  

July 22nd, 2023 - Today's episode is all about electricity! In other words, I got all the wiring sorted out. Well, 99% done, because I still need to bundle everything together and make my 'main trunk'. But let's begin at the beginning. With the pylons now firmly glued to the floor tray, yesterday I put a big toot of Citadel Black primer around those front headlights, and then today I glued the clear parts in. 

July 22nd, 2023 - Then I wired up some LED tape for the headlights. My LED tape comes with 3 LEDs in each section -- 1 at each end, and then a third LED closer to one of the ends than the other. In other words, the LEDs are not evenly spaced out, which is really annoying when you only need one or two. My solution, pictured here, was to cut out one section and then cover up one of the two nearby LEDs (to the right of the little circuit block: heat-shrink tube, as usual; black magic marker on top; another heat-shrink tube, and then a blast of the Citadel Black primer. Lo and behold, it bloody worked! The third LED is totally blocked out. 

July 22nd, 2023 - I then marked with a pencil where this thing needs to go, checked that it was in the right place using the built-in sticky tape (as pictured), and then hot-glued the lights in place.  

July 22nd, 2023 - Everything fits nicely, and the LED blocks line up pretty well with one light in each pair. 

July 22nd, 2023 - I dry fit everything together so that I could plan where to route the wires. I had first thought about going up along the starboard wall and maybe joining them to the roof lights in series, but it really is super tight in there. The only realistic option (and probably the best option anyway), is down, under the floor. The little box that holds the the exposed wiring in the floor provides a good measure of your free space here, and even with hot glue, there is plenty of room to route the wires over to that cut-out corner. 

July 22nd, 2023 - Whilst I was doing all of that, I discovered an interesting thing. Step 10 in the instructions has you glue the walls to the floor tray, the door in the port wall, and those two big triangular pieces at the back. Two pegs on the inside rear of each wall should fit into two holes on the inside of the triangle pieces. Buuuuuut, with the triangle pieces already glued in, slotting the wall pieces *down* into pegs/holes and tiny slotted parts makes it very difficult to get those pairs of pegs and holes together without forcing the triangle pieces quite a lot, which felt dangerous to me. Sooo, I cut the bottom of those hole pieces off (as in the photo inset).

Out of interest, the box shape and the diagonal line on the wall pieces are for fitting the engine part and helping align the sloping rear engine wall. 

July 22nd, 2023 - Here's a pic of the sides, front, and roof all nestled loosely together, taken while I was investigating my wiring options. Pretty nice eh? 😄 I'm already feeling that classic Spocky vibe. 😄 

July 22nd, 2023 - Okay, next wiring job -- the cabin lights. I started off with one section of three LEDs roughly in the middle (between the big pencil lines), but it really was not enough to spread the light evenly through the cabin, and it left the equipment room at the back really dark. So, I measured it out a bit and used a longer strip, bending the wires out toward what will be that cut-out corner. (You can also see where the hot glue jumped out in a huge blob close to the wires). 😄 

July 22nd, 2023 - Cabin lights on! My diffusion strategy with the thick baking paper is not great compared to the nice lattice-work effect in the show (which I've seen other modellers achieve with embroidery canvas), but then again, the light is diffused, sooo. eh. I like it. (This is a "warm" LED light btw). 

July 22nd, 2023 - Third and final bit of wiring - the impulse engine. Because of that cut-out corner, you ideally need to have one LED cube kind of hanging off the edge there, so that the light spreads evenly. Now, I've seen people take a lot more care with the lights and their alignment here, hiding the cubes behind the slats in the grille, but, ehhhh, time doesn't grow on trees and I find that setting up for wiring requires quite a bit of prep, you need ventilation and at least three things to plug in -- soldering iron, hot air gun, and hot glue gun. So, I decided to do everything I could in one go. Anyway, I have one last thing to do, which should help with the diffusion a bit, and that is to paint the impulse engine clear part. The baking paper trapped inside will do most of the diffusion, but this close to the LEDs and you can still see the cube shapes. So, tomorrow I'll paint that clear part. I wanted to do it purple for some reason, but after some consideration, I'm going to paint more of a fiery orange, as in the CGI remaster of the TOS episodes. 

July 22nd, 2023 - The pencil-lined square at the bottom of the photo shows the space available from that cut-out corner, into which I Dremeled a good-sized hole. The plan is that I will bundle the three sets of wires together (headlights, cabin, and engine), join them to the main line and run that down and out through that hole. The line will then be buried in the plaster base of the diorama, and I'll run it out to a corner of the base, to the switch. 

July 22nd, 2023 - This is the little wiring pocket here. The only thing I'm not sure about is how to secure the model to the base, so that it doesn't swing around loose and put strain on the trunk solder. I do have one idea, about using a short piece of small pipe, but we'll have to see how it goes.

Finally today, I used almost the last of my TS-13 gloss to coat the sides, front, doors, and rear wall. Next thing will be some detailing and washes, plus decals. Next week I get paid, fingers crossed, at which point I can buy some more gloss to cover all that up. Then I think assemble, and matt coat once built. And theeeen -- diorama! 

July 23rd, 2023 - What's a nice, relaxing, chill thing to do on a Sunday? Messing around with decals, of course! But before that, a couple of final updates on the gluing and painting front. First of all, I finally stuck the window glass into the front wall. A bit tricky, I thought, because the slightest bit of bleed and your window will get smudgy and weird. Fortunately, I escaped this fate by lining the inside frame with Tamiya Extra Thin, pressing in the window part, and then just gently touching some more Thin on the reverse and letting induction carry it around the frame. Phew! 

July 23rd, 2023 - Second thing -- I painted the engine colour on last night, using a can of Tamiya TS-98 Pure Orange that I had left over from my Revell Enterprise. Yes, I did forget/get confused/goof up and not paint the inside of the engine grill black, but perhaps this gives it some depth? Let's pretend. 😄 

July 23rd, 2023 - Okay, decals! These are modern Polar Lights decals, printed by the Italians, so they're thick, juicy, colourful, slide right off the paper, and are generally a delight to work with. No breakages in this one either.

I also decided just to go with "Galileo", and not get into the whole slicing and splicing thing with the numbers and pennants. I almost went with "Einstein", which is the shuttle that Decker flew into the mouth of the Doomsday Machine. But, since I have my Revell Enterprise named as Constellation, I wanted to keep some variety.

I had to eyeball the spacing and alignment a bit here, because I'm decalling without the aid of the pylons to help line things up, but I think it's not bad overall. Compared to the box art, my pennant is a little too far forward, but not by much. 

July 23rd, 2023 - After doing the starboard side, I kept it handy for doing the port side too. That required a bit of cutting and guesstimation to snip out the door stripe. 

July 23rd, 2023 - Here are the doors. Most of that damage will be covered up, hopefully, when I jam the doors into their open position in the hull. 

July 23rd, 2023 - The front. Adding these rather distinctive, 'giant' decals really brings the old-school Trek feeling up several notches too. The design of the shuttle is so distinctive and so very evocative of the whole TOS aesthetic. This kit is just a delight to work on. It feels very much like you're making a genuine piece of art, in the more conventional sense. idk. 😄 

July 23rd, 2023 - At the back, I cheated and put the little "Equipment Hatch" decal above the hole, rather than hiding it on the flap. Later in the whole decalling process, a surprise waited for me too. The reason why that central rectangle is red is not because it is a light or anything, but rather because it has a red decal on it. 😄 It has a tiny label on it that says "Analyzer Controls". So, I applied that one too. 

July 23rd, 2023 - Port side of the lower hull there are a couple of small decals too. One says "Push" by the lower door half, and the other is the large red rectangle tucked away between the nacelle pylons. 

July 23rd, 2023 - You get four versions of that on the decal sheet. Lower-right is the screen-accurate decal. I think that lower-left is a larger, deliberately more readable version of that. Top left, I'm not sure, but the one that I used (top right) lists the initials of all the people who worked with Garry Kerr on the fabulous restoration of the full-size studio model. This is well documented in many places, and over on the Cult TV Man site blog, there is a detailed history of the process with a full explanation of these decals/signs. 

July 23rd, 2023 - Finally, the nacelle pennants. Even here, there is something interesting to note. With the foot plate down, you need decal 7a, which has the cut-out shape to fit around the slot. Decal 7 for when the foot plate is up. Then, decal 6 for the starboard nacelle, *but* there is another nacelle 7 too, and the slope of the ends of the pennants slopes the wrong way. 😄 I didn't notice this until I almost had it on, but swerved away at the last second. 😄 The box guide is not clear about this really, so, yeah, watch out for that. 😄 

July 24th, 2023 - Okay, so, back to the wiring. At this point there are three sets of wires coming together in that corner pocket. The long wires in the foreground are the main trunk that I plan to bury in the plaster of the diorama base. The power socket I'll drill into the side of the frame of the base (I'm using an IKEA picture frame), and I'll set the switch into a rock or something. Or maybe just not have a switch. We'll see. 

July 24th, 2023 - Here we can see how the cabin lights are on extra long wires, so that the roof can be comfortably slid into place on top. Although, as it turns out, that won't really be a problem... 

July 24th, 2023 - With everything wired and tested, it's to build up the hull! I'm going to leave the interior in place and mount the walls around it. First of all, I glued on the starboard wall. having that pylon in place really paid off here. Next, for the port side wall, I had to shave down the frame around the interior of the door. Even though there is a good-sized gap into which you can slide the doors, the precise tooling of this kit means that even the slightest bulge will cause the four walls not to fit precisely. And that's a fact that we will soon discover.... 😄 

July 24th, 2023 - Anyway, there are various little bits and bobs inside that wall nearby the door frame that all need to be sliced off and filed down. Eventually though, we get to this point. I decided to actually just snip those doors in half again, to cut down on potential bulging. Even though one half I cut a bit *too* thin, it all turned out really well -- see the next photo! 

July 24th, 2023 - Doors - open! 

July 25th, 2023 - All walls are up! The first sign of trouble comes on the port, door side, which refuses to meet the front wall perfectly, as the starboard side does. It's not terrible, but it is noticeable. (So maybe it is terrible? Hmm). 😄 Anyway, with lots of careful gluing and taping down of the glued seams, everything eventually settles fairly well. Most importantly, it's secure.  

July 25th, 2023 - In this photo, we see two things. The fit of the right side of the engine to the hull wall is perfect, just as it should be. But on the left, because of the very slight door bulge, there is quite a gap. However, it doesn't matter too much because the rear wall piece is SO jammed in there, SO tight, it was a real problem getting that thing in. Forget glue, I just needed to jam the bugger into place. The only collateral damage though, is a tiny scratch on the inside of that triangle piece. And if I recall correctly, even Mario at AllScaleTrek had this problem.

So anyway, the second thing to see it the roof, and the predictable gap caused by the LED strip. This too, is solved with a thick strip of glue at the back and some crocodile clips to clamp it together over night.

The good news is that I had almost no light leaks! The only leaks were around that left-side engine-wall gap. What I did at the front and back was just lay down some Vallejo Acrylic Putty, which is as white as the white paint on the hull, so that worked out well. In fact, I also put beads of putty along the pylon/main hull join. In the show, it is not smooth, and it's still not smooth here, but it looks less noticeable now anyway. 

July 25th, 2023 - Okay, final piece of gluing! I touched up the leg last night with a bit of metallic silver on the piston part of the leg (and then cleaned the brush on the foot plate). 

July 25th, 2023 - Actually, there was one more bit of gluing that I had to do: when I picked the shuttle up to take it downstairs to spray it with the the Tamiya TS-80 matt varnish, I touched the open flap at the back and broke it off. *rolls eyes* I glued it back on and sprayed the whole thing, and now, here we are! 

July 25th, 2023 - At this angle, you can't see that they're making 'finger guns' 😄 

July 25th, 2023 - You can probably detect that I've dirtied it all up a tiny bit. I guess this is my trademark, bring Star Wars levels of dirt to the usually pristine Star Trek universe. 😄 

July 25th, 2023 - See how that flap hangs down? Another little piece of non-canonicity (albeit unintended)! 😄

Okay, I'll prepare the IKEA diorama base over the next few days, and then on the weekend actually make it with the plaster and the paint and all the crap I'm going to stick to it. I consider this kit to be built now, but the only thing that remains is to make a rather elaborate stand. 😄  

July 30th, 2023 - One week later... 😄 So, rather surprisingly my wife has taken over the garage, where I usually paint and would do other messy things, like mixing up glue and paint and plaster and dirt to make a diorama! She's got her own project going on, so this last week I've been aiming to get in there, but no such luck. But this weekend I realized I can at least get on with preparing the base.

This is the gist of the thing right here: an upside-down IKEA picture frame, filled with plaster and paint and so on.  

July 30th, 2023 - I took out the thick cardboard front frame, and the glossy paper sheet with the barcode. I chose this frame because it's proper metal, and looks nice and smart. It's not that thick, but it has a nice kind of beveled edge with a step shape. Anyway, the next thing to do was think about the power connection. I had thought about putting a switch in, hiding it under a bush or something, but the plug wouldn't be so easy to hide.  

July 30th, 2023 - And then I thought, eh, why bother with the switch. I don't even know why I added switches to my earlier, lit models, other than out of some primitive, monkey instinct. 😄 So then, cut a hole in the side of the frame, slide in the DC socket and that's all I need.

Well, the shape of the edge of the frame, like a little step, made it quite difficult to drill. With my DC plugs, I need an 11 mm hole, but it was a struggle just to get to 10 mm, working my way up from 2 mm, to 4, to 6, to 8, to 10. But by cutting out a piece of the wood, and shaving down the plastic around the 'tube' of the socket, I managed to make the thing fit below the top of the frame, so that it can be buried in plaster.

(After I cut the plastic away, I panicked and added some yellow electrical tape to the thing). 😄 

July 31st, 2023 - With the plug resting in place, I hot-glued all around the edges. Bear in mind that I still have the plastic 'glass' under the wood too, as an extra protection against plaster leaks, and for extra stability and so on. I reckon that the hot glue will help create a seam to protect against leaks, and maybe stop the whole thing jiggling and cracking the plaster. I don't know, maybe unnecessary, but to be honest the hot glue gun is my favourite tool in the modelling box, so I'm not going to pass up a chance to use it! 😄  

July 31st, 2023 - There's the plug, glued in. You can see where my drilling caused a little damage up top there.I'll do something about that at some point. 

July 31st, 2023 - In case you were wondering about that blue thing sticking up, here it is - a rawlplug* (wall plug), glued into the exact spot where the hole in the shuttle floor is. This is my attempt to loosely secure the shuttle to the diorama, so that it's not swinging around tugging on the wires. I used this instead of a nail or a screw, because I thought plastic would be safer than metal in that little corner full of wires.

* Named after John Joseph Rawlings, who is credited as having invented the wall plug. He named the product Rawlplug in reference to the first syllable of his name. 

July 31st, 2023 - To make that fit, I carefully Dremeled out the hole in the shuttlebay a bit more. We now have a safe, snug fit. 

August 1st, 2023 - My gods, we're in August! May 30th to August 1st - two months on the dot, but minus 2-3 weeks of inactivity. So, like, 5-6 weeks continuous work to build the figures, interior, exterior, lighting, and a diorama base? Huh.

Eh, anyway, so, today I plopped the shuttle carefully onto its rawlplug, positioned it nicely, and then drew a crime scene outline around it. 😄 Now I know that all that space inside the outline will be relatively unseen, so I can leave it mostly flat and not too detailed. 

August 1st, 2023 - Alright then, so. I spent a little time today watching more diorama-making videos, looking specifically for people making bases from plaster. Everyone talks about "plaster of Paris", which I remember from my youth but haven't seen marketed as such since then. So, here is my super-cheap acrylic paint in a bowl of normal, everyday builder's plaster, like you'd... you know... build a house with. From my experience doing house repairs and using builder's plaster for various things, I can tell you that it's best to try and maintain a 2/3 plaster to 1/3 water ratio, because it's easier to add a bit more water than to keep dumping in more plaster and making the mix too too thick. The paint I just squeezed out in big blobs until it mixed nicely with the plaster.

The important thing to understand is, I was in a bit of a rush for this leg of the trip. I still can't get into the garage, so I set this up on the sofa upstairs in my 'office' -- it's an old sofa, but still, my wife would kill me if she saw me doing this. So I had to move pretty quickly, and not only because builders' plaster sets faster than a whippet with a warp drive. 😄 

August 1st, 2023 - This is the whole of the first bowl. Because I wasn't mixing a lot of material, it took only a minute of stirring to get this nice, evenly coloured mixture. I made about 3 bowls total before the paint ran out. I had yellow paint too, so the second and third bowls were more of an amber colour.

At some point, however, I remembered that I needed to connect and bury the wires! I had planned for that already, of course, but in the heat of the moment -- crouched over the thing and orangey plaster going everywhere, the threat of the missus finding me in my messy nest -- I almost forgot. So, I laid a towel down next to the frame, sat the shuttle upon it, and tested the connection.

Well, I would have tested the connection, but I'd already started burying the plug in orange plaster... 😄 

August 1st, 2023 - A cotton ear bud and a bbq skewer, plus a lot of of silent cursing and some mild panic later, and I had cleaned out the plug holes and established that everything still worked! Hooray! 😄

After taking this photo I cut the wires short, attached them to the DC plug, and then blobbed some hot glue (yay!) onto the connection to protect it from being buried in plaster. Which was the next thing I did. 😄

Of course, cutting the wires and burying them meant putting the shuttle into position and basically working around it. Somewhat inconvenient, and even though I had thought about this already, I had to just go with it. Time pressure! 😄 (You really don't want to be doing all this under time pressure). The better approach though, would be to wire the plug, then join the wires from the model and the plug, so that you can work on the entire base without worrying about dirtying the model. (Although...). Even so, one thing I tried to do is to make sure the three landing pads looked like they're more *in* the ground than *on* the ground. 

August 1st, 2023 - I had pressed in some red-coloured wood chips around the front edge of the base to break things up visually. These chips come in a big bag from the garden centre, and you're supposed to scatter them on flower beds to help protect against frost and slugs and so on. I don't really have space to do embankments or pools or anything, but sticking some organic-looking crap into the plaster helps break things up a bit.

Here you can see a pack of 'flowers' that I bought, surprisingly cheaply I thought, for about 4-5 USD/GBP/EUR. So the next thing that I did was to mix up some smaller bark chips in some water and the last drops of paint, clumped them around the place, and then tweezered out the flowers one by one and added about 60% of them to the diorama.
 

August 1st, 2023 - Here you go - a blurry photo of a dodgy diorama. 😄 After this, I sprinkled some powdered pine bark and a bit of sawdust around, to make the detail go from large (garden chips), to medium (bark fragments), to small (powdered bark and sawdust). This approximates the hierarchy of organic junk that you might see in the real world. 

August 1st, 2023 - This is the final result today. Now that the most messy part of the job has FINALLY been done, and I am still alive and not blasted into scrap by Mrs. Trek Modeler, I will try and do a little brush work detailing on some rocks and things, to make them stand out a bit (everything got kind of mushed together and monotone looking I think). And also, finally, cover the whole thing with a water+PVA glue mixture to seal everything in. Then I'll peel the tape off from around the frame, clean up, and we shall seee, what we shall seee... 

August 2nd, 2023 - Actually, the whole glue and sealing thing is pretty messy too, but in quite a fun way. 😄 So, I went to my local big DIY store (Castorama), to their garden department, and for the equivalent of 2-3 USD/GBP/EUR I bought a small, 1/2 litre spray bottle. Then I got an old bowl from the kitchen and I squeezed a pretty big blob of wood glue (PVA glue) into the bottom. I didn't take a picture, but I estimate that there was about 250 ml in there, because I filled my new spray bottle up, and it has 1/2 litre markings on the side, and I ended up adding about 250 ml of that water.

Also, you can't really see it in this photo because of my crazy phone light that burns with the intensity of a thousand suns. but I did go around and detail lots of rocks and things with Vallejo Carmine Red (70.908), which I had originally bought to do the red shirts on the figures. It's a really groovy shade of red, but not great for TOS uniforms. Maybe better for the 40k and fantasy peeps.

(One thing that just occurred to me is that I have ended up making an orangey diorama, not unlike the landscape in the box art. This is totally unintentional. In fact, I had wanted to go shades of pink and purple for a *really* alien look, but somehow ended up, perhaps subconsciously, imitating the box. Oh well.). 😄 

August 2nd, 2023 - So my goop ended up being about a 50/50 ratio, which various internet experts indicate is a good mixture. I would have added some isopropyl alcohol too, which apparently speeds up the water evaporation and general drying speed of the mixture, but couldn't find the bottle I'm sure that I imagined that I have. Anyway, it made a nice white, liquidy fluid, which I then sprayed all over the base - after first testing the beam! Like a hand phaser, you can adjust from a wide beam to a narrow jet, which feels like it would be great at knocking things loose from a diorama.

The other thing that I did before spraying, which you can see in this photo and the last, is to wrap my precious baby up in tin foil like a Christmas turkey, to protect it. The Internet also recommends spraying your base with matt varnish to remove the shine of the PVA glue, such as the Tamiya TS-80 that I habitually use, so I will do that too once all this gloop has dried down. 

August 3rd, 2023 - With the goop dry and a layer of TS-80 covering the whole affair, the only thing left to do was break out the bottle of evil hybrid nail polish remover and gently clean up the picture frame. I used my thumb nail and the back of the Exacto knife to just clear off some overhanging stuff, and then ran a soaked ear bud all along the length of the edges. 

August 3rd, 2023 - This is it! No more work! I'm calling time on this project. That's 65 days total, minus a week or two, for interior build, lighting, exterior build, and diorama. The reason I'm thinking so much about how long it took is simply that my initial assumption was that it wouldn't take long at all, because you're building a box inside a box. 😄 But with the figures, the lighting, and then the eventual inclusion of the diorama, it took a lot longer. In fact, I can break it down even more...  

August 3rd, 2023 - This is what I call the "Career mode" tab in my modelling Excel sheet. 😄 So, we can see that it took me the same amount of time to build this whole Galileo kit as it did to build my Refit Enterprise. Yes, there were breaks here and there in all of these builds, but end to end, one project at a time, this is it. 😄

Okay, I'm preparing some beauty shots now, with which to end the album. Be back in a bit with them. 🙂 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - I think I figured out a good way of setting things up for these 'beauty shots', by laying a blanket over the kitchen table and four chairs.  

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - I think that the diorama turned out okay, especially for a first time. I would do lots of things differently next time, of course, but this was a really fun experience never the less. 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - Having said that, every time I look at this thing I get the urge for pizza. 😄 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - I had thought about doing some yellow accents too, because overall the base kind of sucks the light out of the room, but then I thought about it and I decided that it would look too busy then, like, a doughnut covered in sprinkles. 😄 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - Kitchen lights on, you can see inside. 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - Kitchen lights off, you can't, but you do get more contrast on the headlight beams, which is nice. 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - Without making a sliding roof, most of the figures are kind of lost in there, but perhaps that's for the best considering how well I painted their faces. 😄 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - Dipping down a bit, you can see how well that baking paper diffuses the light, which is not too bad really, for just one piece of baking paper. Doesn't have that nice patterned effect though. 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - I like how the engines turned out. The flap is hanging right down, after I clumsily broke it off earlier. But still, it makes access to the interior panel a bit easier. 

August 3rd, 2023 - Final beauty shots - My non-canon orange Bussard collectors. 😄 Another score for that awesome Tamiya TS-92 Metallic Orange.

Welp, that's all of it. Overall, this was definitely the most fun I've had so far, and a real challenge with the figure painting and the diorama building. This is an excellent, superb kit, and I will definitely do another one one day, without all the lighting and the craziness, or maybe with lighting and no interior more likely. Until then, live long and prosper, scalemates!