Joe Brown’s USS Horizon

From 1998

The Daedalus-class USS Horizon in roughly 1/500 scale.

Concerning the scratch-build’s construction:

References used: my tapes of DS9 which showed the display model in Captain Sisco’s office on his credenza; The Art of Star Trek, Pg. 6–the photo of Greg Jein’s model to be used as mentioned above in DS9; the Matt Jefferies sketches on the same page of The Art of Star Trek. Also used was the first edition of the Star Trek Chronology, the pictures of the same model (different name captions) on pages 25-26.

Construction Details: I had decided to see if a “shoestring” model could be built, and started looking at available scrap and junk plastic and parts in my work area. The warp nacelles were two squirrel-damaged house finch bird feeders, and they determined the overall size of the model.

My wife and I both order vitamins; two large vitamin C bottles provided me with the secondary, or engineering hull. I found suitable acrylic scrap to serve as warp nacelle pylons, and five 35mm film spool cores make up the neck. If you are not familiar with these, 35mm film spool cores can be obtained from many movie theatres. These cores at the center of the trailers that are sent to the theatres. Many, heck most theatres just throw them away–if you ask them politely for these, or ask them to please save them for you, you can probably get them for free.

The primary hull is a simple 4 inch styrofoam sphere, which I paid close to dirt for at a craft store. I trimmed off a flat area for the top, and coated the entire sphere with acrylic spackle, sanding it smooth. Adding the trimmed off end of a paintball gun ammo tube (I used to play paintball) for the actual bridge completed the assembly of the primary hull.

I have an old (real old) Mattel Vac-U-Former, and I experimented with various kitty toys around the house until I found a sphere (a Hi-bounce ball) that was the right size; I used it as the mold for the front of the warp engines, and turned out two of them in short order. Trimmed from the sheet of distorted styrene, I wound up with two half-spheres just the right size for the front of the warp engines. Two straight pins were pushed through the centers of the spheres with their heads clipped off, for the older “spike” look. (They don’t show on the jpeg-I’m not sure why not.)

I joined all the components of the ship together with a 2 part epoxy. It’s called PC-7. It’s messy to work with, and takes at least 12 hours, if not 24 to completely harden, and it’s expensive as binary epoxies go–but I think it is great stuff!
Painting was likewise kept simple–I primed the whole ship, very lightly sanded it after the primer dried, and then laid a mesh screen filter over sections of the ship and sprayed through the mesh with flat white. After letting that coat dry, I “misted” the entire ship with gray. The windows are all magic marker, done through a stencil. The striping was from commercial pin striping, and red and yellow were applied because that’s what I had in the work area.
Is the model perfect? Nope–but it is pretty good looking. I hope that this shows that you can do models without lots of money or exotic materials–it just takes scrap, and time and a little ingenuity. Give it a try!

Joe Brown