Star Trek. Like a lot of people my age (the other side of 50), I was raised on the show and then the long running reruns. Of course, you have the movies, Deep Space Nine and more. The series is as iconic. This kit represents a Romulan D’deridex class ship which appears in STTNG series which aired between 1987 and 1994. This kit was first released by AMT a number of years ago and has become scarce in the last few years, so the rerelease is welcome. And there are improvements!

The basic kit is the same with nice molding and relief. There is a round base with parts to make the kit appear in flying pose. If you see the miniatures in the series, there are two things the original kit didn’t have included. First, the warp nacelles always glowed a greenish color which varied with the power the engines were using. Second and very obvious were the myriad of lights apparent on the ship from the many portholes. This release contains glow-in-the-dark parts to give a nice green glow to the nacelles, and a large decal sheet which contains all the necessary windows. The modeler still has the option to light both areas via LED’s and fiber optics which I have seen done and is quite impressive. I wanted to add this to my collection to set next to my Klingon Bird of Prey and USS Enterprise so this was a great opportunity for an OOB build!

There are only 28 parts to the , and 8 of these are the optional glow-in-the-dark nacelle parts. I assembled the kit in sub-assemblies – top and bottom halves, front and both nacelles. I elected to go for the clear nacelle parts and paint them to my taste. Fit is tough in some areas of the nacelles but nothing a little Bondo and clamps won’t fix. I then joined the top, bottom, nacelles, and front. Fit is not good on these and I did a fair amount of trimming to get close. The tabs on the top and bottom halves which hold the nacelles were heavily trimmed. In the end, three Bondo glazing putty applications did the trick. I primed the entire model with Alclad ALC302 Primer and Microfiller. This allowed me to polish out scratches and prepare for paint.

The paint scheme is pretty simple. The kit is base-coated with RAF Ocean Grey, Model Master #2057. I masked off the forward lines of the bird design and use a 50/50 mixture of RAF “Type S”, Model Master #2049 & Russian Topside Blue, Model Master #2126. I highlighted the bird design and also the edges of the kit. This was gloss coated and it was time to decal. The decals are very flat but go on well (I used Mr. Softer to get the decals to lay flat). There are 54 separate decals representing panels, Romulan badges and mostly, lights. When installed, they look fantastic!!!!

After the decals, I did a flat coat and lightly weathered with washes and pastels. A finial flat and we are ready for the base. The base is a black half sphere with a very strong pole. You can mount the ship to the two-part swivel base or directly to the metal. The swivel is nice but it wears quickly and doesn’t hold the ship well after a short period of time, so I direct-mounted.

This kit is fun. It does take a little filling and clamping to get a good fit, but for those with basic modeling skills the addition of the decals makes it fantastic. Recommended to all fans of Sci-Fi and Star Trek.

My thanks to Round 2 to for the review sample and IPMS/USA for the chance to add it to my collection.