*another* another lighted Reliant

[toejrb]

Still procrastinating on the windows, I turned to filling in the hole behind the officer's lounge photoetch. I decided to do a lounge like the one from ST:Beyond rather than the arboretum thing. So, first, a bulkhead. The vertical channel will be the entry door. The horizontal, smaller-width, channel will be behind the bar, and either shelves or monitors.

o lounge bulkhead

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I sketched out a floor plan on some styrene sheet I'd cut to size. Next, I assembled some chairs. These are just channel cut into little bits and glued back together. I was just using what was at hand, so the scale here is more like 1/144 than 1/537! Ah, well. That's about as small as I can manage.

chairs

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I used various sizes of styrene rod and punched sheet for the tables and stools. The bar is styrene rectangle topped with channel. If this were Space:1999 I could probably stop here, and not paint.

mockup of lounge

Here's the assembly taped in place. Funny how it picks up the grey! Mental note to go with very light colors when I do paint. And to be sure there's adequate lighting. I'll probably run a bunch of fiber optic through the bulkhead.

lounge in place

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[MEATLOAFr]

SHOW OFF

[Moongrim]

SHOW OFF

Well, he does have a lot to show off after all.

[toejrb]

SHOW OFF

Well, he does have a lot to show off after all.

I'm blushing!

For a harsher review, I can look to my ten-year-old. When I showed him my handiwork, the first thing out of his mouth was "It's the wrong scale." Ouch.

[MEATLOAFr]

SHOW OFF

Well, he does have a lot to show off after all.

I'm blushing!

For a harsher review, I can look to my ten-year-old. When I showed him my handiwork, the first thing out of his mouth was "It's the wrong scale." Ouch.

It's looking great, keep it up

[toejrb]

Here's the assembly taped in place. Funny how it picks up the grey! Mental note to go with very light colors when I do paint. And to be sure there's adequate lighting. I'll probably run a bunch of fiber optic through the bulkhead.

I did a rough paint job; green deck, grey bulkead, red door, white tables, black chairs, red stools with black tops, white bar top.

I'm going a for more-or-less TOS look. Who sez the Miranda refits got new lounges, just 'cuz the Constitutions did?

TOS lounge

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Here're some pics of the assembly taped in place.

exterior O lounge 1

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exterior O lounge 2

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Lighting is three white LEDs connected to a 370 ohm resistor, and shoved through holes in the bulkhead.

back of lounge bulkhead, showing lighting wiring

It's pretty tough to tell what's going on in there. I think a fair bit of the problem is that the deck is below the level of the window. It should probably be set higher. To do that, I'm basically starting from scratch, at which point my little quickie gapfiller exercise starts to look like a full-fledged project of its own.

Before starting fresh, I'm going to re-paint and see if that helps make things more visually distinct. If I ultimately decide on a complete do-over, I'll see if I can make something more in scale.

[toejrb]

Before starting fresh, I'm going to re-paint and see if that helps make things more visually distinct. If I ultimately decide on a complete do-over, I'll see if I can make something more in scale.

The re-paint is under way. Sprayed everything a satin green. Then masked in preparation for painting the seats and tables. I think this'll work out fine.

O lounge repaint in progress

[toejrb]

The re-paint is under way. Sprayed everything a satin green. Then masked in preparation for painting the seats and tables. I think this'll work out fine.

Repainted o-lounge in place. Bonus lens flare included!

Now, with lens flare!

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[toejrb]

One of the most striking things to me about the Mirandas is the red lighting coming from under the bridge. This:

red eye of doom

It's like a baleful Cyclopean eye staring angrily down at you from the screen. I want one.

Turns out that what in the pic above looks like a single light is actually three. How to simulate that? Well, three LEDs of course. But they're too big to squeeze into the required space. So we'll do this instead. Put in a bracket, mount the three LEDs to that, then put in a sort of screen with three holes on the front and both sides of the bridge.

three LEDs under bridge dome

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rat's nest of wiring under b/c decks

bridge lights!

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The strips of styrene hanging off the B decks are for the little bumps around the B deck circumference. When the glue is dry, I'll trim to size.

[Moongrim]

That is starting to come together nicely.