Trent Bennett’s USS Drexler

The U.S.S. Drexler was built and constructed at the Utopia Plantia ship yards orbiting Mars.  She was built a couple of months after the Dominion War had started.  She participated in most of the front line battles.  Like most Federation Starships  she lost crew members during the war and gained new ones.

A year prior to the Drexler being built her commanding officer newly promoted Captain Trent Raveers was given permission to build an Ambassador Class starship as he preferred those designs compared to that of the Excelsior, Galaxy, Miranda and the other starships that are currently in use.  Trent took the time to do some slight modifications to the interior blueprints of the ship most notiably for the Bridge, Engineering and, Sickbay and his personal Ready Room layouts.

Upon learning of the Dominion and knowing iminent threat of war against them Starfleet sped up on constructing the Drexler.  It had been a couple of months into the Dominion war when she was finished and launched from the ship yards.  She contains the most current weaponry and shields including secondary shields as a test bed for other Federation Starships.  Despite being on a lot of the front line battles the Drexler was also in quite a few battles along side the Defiant commanded by Captain Benjamin Sisko.  Captain Raveers and Siskos were friends in the Academy despite Sisko being a year ahead of Raveers in classes.  After the Dominion War Captain Raveers was promoted to Admiral and retained command of the Drexler.

This is the Round 2 Enterprise-C model and made to the Ambassador class refit.  I even added the extra escape pod hatches and transporter emitters on top of the saucer.  The deflector dish and bussard collectors are the DLM versions as they are a lot more accurate compared to the original kit pieces.  I positioned the refit version of the sensor dome platform  in the same way it shows on the Excelsior starships.

The decals are compromised of the original kit decals along with decals from JT Graphics that he specifically made for me.  The ship is named after the famous Doug Drexler and I was able to get his permission to make the registry number his birthday.  I of course did NOT add the the zero for the month as I felt that would have been too ridiculously long of a registry number.  The base color is Testors Light Aircraft Gray from the rattle can.  The darker gray is Medium Gray while the lighter (inner ring on saucer) is Ger RLM 63 LT. Gray all from the Testors line.  The phaser banks are painted Gun metal.  The areas between the bussard collectors and engine grills are painted Reefer Orange from the Polly Scale Railroad paint line.

I showed the finished pictures to Doug after it was done and he was very honored to have a model custom named for him.  I was very happy to make it to honor him.  This is probably my favorite build that I’ve done.

Trent Bennett