Declaration Class Refit and Upgrade

NOTE:  You can click on most pictures to get a larger view of them.

While writing the review for the Cozmo Heavy Industries 1:2500 Declaration Class kit, I had shared that I liked the kit so much that I actually bought two more of that kit, just so I could build some variants of the ship.

The three ships displayed above are a Declaration Class, A Declaration Class Refit and an Declaration Class Upgrade.


Per Memory Alpha and Beta, "A Starliner was a manned interstellar probe developed by the United Earth Space Probe Agency of Earth during the 21st century."  These ships later served as passenger liners.

If you would like to read more official stuff on this type of ship, feel free to check out the following links:

Declaration Class Information: Memory Alpha LINK and Memory Beta LINK
          and secondary Memory Beta LINK
USS Enterprise (XCV-330) Information: Memory Alpha LINK and Memory Beta LINK

The Neutral Zone Starship Database also did a fairly nice write-up about this ship and you can read that article at THIS LINK.  And if you are not tired of reading about this type of ship, be sure to check out TrekPlace's well written article called "Spaceship Of The Rings" over at THIS LINK.

A friend of mine introduced me to this series of books called the Federation Spaceflight Chronology, which had TONS of in depth information about the Star Trek universe up through the TMP and ending around the ST3:TSFS era.  One of the neat things about Volume One was that it covered some very old style ships that were never seen on screen.  It had a very nice section on the Declaration class and the history surrounding those ships.

Declaration Class Refit Story

According to these history books, the original Declaration class suffered from stress cracks along the ring support strut during the test warp trials.  This issue was resolved by adding additional support struts.  These additional struts had the added benefit of giving the ship additional hard points to mount laser cannons to.

I decided to build this variant using one of the extra Cozmo Heavy Industries 1:2500 Declaration kits I had purchased.

 

 

 

 

DeepSpace Pat's Paint Scheme

There was a real world advantage to building these struts for the model.  As I shared in the kit review, there was a potential for ring drooping as time went on.  My thoughts are that this addition to the kit will help alleviate the possibility of this issue occurring.

I built these support struts simply using some extra sprue that I had ling around.  The laser cannons are nothing more than magazine binder pegs from my Eaglemoss Star Trek The Official Starship Collection magazine binders.

Declaration Class Upgrade Story

According to volume one, the ship known as Enterprise (XCV-330) was upgraded at Alpha Centauri in the year 2058 in order to better fight the Kzinti during the Earth-Kzin War.  According to the history of the ship, the support strut issues were rectified by this time hence the need for only one ring support again.

Since this is the more recognizable configuration of this ship, I decided to do some kitbashing and molding with sculpting putty to make this ship.

 

 

 

 

DeepSpace Pat's Paint Scheme

As I stated in my C.H.I. review, I decided to make my own rings from a thicker styrene.  Although they certainly appear more sturdy, it was a real P.I.T.A. to make them.  It is is extremely difficult to hold the bent styrene in place while the super glue sets.  In fact, I ended up making slightly thicker cross beams in order to compensate.  I then filled the cross beams in to make them look like weapons systems or sensor pods.

Shortly after her upgrade, the Enterprise had to help evacuate Alpha Centauri because they were overrun during the war.  The ship led a small fleet on the run for three years.  

I imagined that either during that run or sometime after, she may have been refit yet again and I added two additional support struts with the canon fixtures again.  The nice thing about my build is that I did not need to glue those struts on so I can actually display the ship with or without the struts attached.

 

 

Build Notes:

Parts Used: Cozmo Heavy Industries 1:2500 Scale Declaration Class Kit.  Sheet Styrene, Sculpting Putty

The first thing that needed to be changed was the command module.  I sawed off the stock one and ended up forming my own from modeling putty.

According to the history book, the drive system was also upgraded so I opted to use some Klingon drive greebles in place of the stock drive greebles.

This model was a super easy build to do.  My only struggles were with the ring assembly, and waiting on the putty to harden.  

Conclusion

If you want any advice about the original model kit, please refer back to my Cozmo Heavy Industries 1:2500 Declaration Class kit review.

As a final note, I decided to do some slight modifications to this article in February 2018 because Eaglemoss finally released thier version of the Declaration Class in thier Special Edition series and I wrote a review on that model.  You can read that review at THIS LINK.

As always, I hope you found this article useful and informative.  If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to comment below.

So for now, "Live long and prosper!!!"

Additional Links To Photos Of My Collection:

The Refit Ship     Refit WIP Pictures
The Upgrade Ship     Upgrade WIP Pictures