USS Titan |
| By George Ramirez |
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The USS Titan was the second ship of her class. She was assigned in 2266 to Vanguard station under the command of Capt. Richard J. Blackwood, and arrived shortly after the near destruction of the USS Sagittarius. She served Starbase 47 and all the colonies of the Taurus sector with distinction for the next six years until reassigned to Starbase 129 near the Orion boarder. By 2297, Titan and her two remaining sister ships were refitted to civilian use, renamed and placed on loan to research institutions or sold to private interests. The last ship, the civilian research ship SS Mistral NCC-87453 was decommissioned in 2328 and donated to the Federation Starfleet Museum of Space and Science, Earth, Sol system. It is now docked on display in her original livery as the USS Titan. This is my second attempt at a kitbashing. I challenged myself to see if I could construct a starship from nothing but what I had available. I got the idea of the USS Titan after reading the book Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind. I fell in love with the cover illustration of the USS Sagittarius. So I though "What if they had a larger more powerful type scout ship to take on the Klingons if they had to?" For years I'd had the pieces of two AMT/Ertl USS Enterprise and the spare warp engines of the Polar Lights 1/1000 scale Enterprise in my junk box. It had to be larger than the USS Sagittarius but not larger than the Constitution class mentioned in the series. I started by modifying the secondary hull in a way that would foreshadow engineering designs to come. |
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I removed the forward portion by cutting at an angle to give it a more raked look and sealed it with sheet styrene. I then I covered the secondary hull with sheet styrene to create a flat deck. For the engineering hump, I used half of a center fuel tank from a jet fighter and I filed grooves on it to permit me to use the larger scale pylons of the Ertl kit.
The Titan would have a very low silhouette so I decided to attach the bridge directly to the secondary hull. I cut out the bridge of the Ertl kit, filed the bottom so it would be level with the secondary hull and glued a shaped piece of styrene to it. I hung the bridge out over the forward end of the engineering hull to act more like the primary hull. I then used a shaped piece of styrene tubing and the tip of one of the old warp Bussard collectors to make a sensor probe for the port side of the primary hull. As for the warp engines were fairly straightforward and I just followed the kit instructions on those. The ends of the pylons were filed at an angle and the engines glued on. The hull markings were a major problem. I scoured my decal folder and decided on using the decals from the original Ertl kit, after market decal sheet and the Polar Lights sheet. My intention was to show that the kit was the same scale as the Ertl Enterprise. | |
