The Franz Joseph Starfleet Star Fleet Technical Manual

Once upon a time...

Back in 1975 when this book hit the shelves, the growing Star Trek fandom snapped it up. In it we found a number of new (or at least new-ish) starship designs. Today they have a cut'n'paste look to them, but perhaps no worse than the designs slapped together for some of TNG's or DS9's big-fleet space battles. And they've been somewhat canonized by appearing on bridge monitor displays in Trek movies.

Recently these appeared in kit form by PNT - Paul Newitt of Starfleet Assembly Manual fame - to match the Polar Lights 1/1000 TOS Enterprise kit. Well, I took him up on the Dreadnought, but for the Destroyer, Scout, and Transport, scratch'n'bash work using the SFTM schematics as guides will suffice.

Dreadnought | Destroyer and Scout | Transport

2/15/2011 - The whole fleet of Enterprises and the Franz Joseph projects, primed. Now we can play Starfleet Battles!

3/1/2011 - The whole lot is in the paint shop now. The first colors on the models are...

1. Black/gray - a mix of 2:1 Euro 1 gray and flat black. This went on warp nacelle grids, deflector cowls, Bussard rings, and impulse engines.

2. Gull gray - this went into the nacelle grid inset areas (after masking off the grids), nacelle aft details, neck leading edge, and primary hull keelside triangle panels.

3. Gull gray / magnesium, about a 1:1 mix, for the detail panel on nacelle undersides aft of the Bussard dome.

I wanted two different Bussard dome styles - one for the unlit pilot-style & I.S.S. spiked domes, another for the lit series production domes.

4. dark metallic red - a mix of Metallizer gunmetal and Tamiya transparent red thinned with Metallizer thinner, for the spiked domes. The spikes are Metallizer brass.

5. metallic orange - a mix of Metallizer brass and Tamiya transparent red thinned with Metallizer thinner, for the production-style domes. I'm also using this for the Franz Joseph design models.

After airbrushing the colors on I let it dry, then sprayed gloss acrylic over the domes. I attached the domes to the nacelles with liquid cement.

6. As noted elsewhere, the deflector dishes are a 1:1 mix of copper and leather.