Tough. Little. Ship.

>"Officially, it's classified as an escort vessel. Unofficially, the Defiant's a warship. Nothing more, nothing less; to put it simply, it's overgunned and overpowered for a ship its size."

I’d wanted to build a larger USS Defiant from Star Trek for years, but I made myself one rule: I wasn’t going to do it at this scale unless I thought I could make something better than the versions already out there. That meant getting far beyond "close enough."

The Defiant is a nightmare of shallow curves, small shifts in angle, stepped armour and sections that only line up when everything is placed exactly where it should be. Move one connection by half a plate, change one wedge by a few degrees, and the whole silhouette starts to fall apart, as does structural integrity. A lot of this model had to be calculated before it could be built. Angles, offsets and attachment points were worked out so that the outer hull could follow the original schematics while still connecting to a strong internal frame.

It took repeated rebuilding to make those separate structures lock together strongly while still following the original schematics as closely as possible. The result is a model that captures not only the Defiant’s overall silhouette, but the smaller changes in curve, slope and armour profile that are so often simplified, or ignored entirely.

That same attention extends across the entire build. I’ve included every visible design, engineering and armament feature I could feasibly represent, along with the Chaffee shuttle inside the hangar and the detachable forward warhead. Note: There is no lighting included in these instructions.

Features:

• Detachable forward warhead, allowing you to recreate one of the Defiant’s most extreme last-resort weapons.
• Opening shuttlebay with the Chaffee, housed inside the underside of the ship and removable for separate display.
• Character Studdies Defiant crew, featuring Benjamin Sisko, Jadzia Dax, Worf, Kira Nerys, Miles O’Brien and Nog on their own display stand (or crewed inside the bridge)
• Rotatable display stand, so the Defiant can be preparing for warp, banking into combat or diving towards its next target.
• Reinforced internal structure, with the nacelles and angled upper hull built as separate assemblies and attached to the main body using precisely calculated connection points for both strength and accuracy.
• Highly accurate hull shaping, capturing the Defiant’s curves, armour profiles, recessed sections and subtle changes in angle as closely as possible at this scale.

Beyond that, I’ve worked hard to include every recognisable design, engineering and armament feature of the Defiant that could be represented at this scale:

• Four forward pulse-phaser cannons
• Quantum torpedo launcher
• Forward and aft torpedo launchers
• Main navigational deflector
• Ablative hull armour, with the distinctive layered plating carried across the upper and lower surfaces
• Integrated warp nacelles
• Bussard collectors
• Plasma transfer conduits
• Port and starboard impulse engines
• Plasma exhaust vents
• Upper sensor pallet
• Main bridge
• Bridge sensors
• Resupply connectors
• Forward targetting sensors
• Aft sensor arrays
• Transporter emittor pads
• Fore and aft RCS thrusters
• Escape-pod hatches
• Shield grid emitters
• Defensive shield grid emitters
• Tractor-beam emitter
• Navigation lights
• Deuterium loading ports
• Nacelle intercoolers
• Opening shuttlebay with the Chaffee shuttle
• Detachable forward warhead
• Warhead/hull interconnect

This reimagined model measures approximately:
38cm (l) x 30cm (w) x 6cm (h) off stand
37cm (l) x 30cm (w) x 21cm (h) on stand

The area's largest Greek Food Festival!

4 Appleton St, Arlington Ma

Thursday 5pm to Sunday 6pm!

A few weeks ago I added six more floating shelves to my home office but hadn’t really started the process of shuffling models to fill them up (other than bringing in a couple cars from another room and getting the Enterprise off my desk, where it had been since I built it).

This morning I get a text from home to say that one of the cats has figured out the four foot leap from my desk to the lower shelf above it. I’m sure he already passed this knowledge on to his brothers.

This piece is not the original one from the show but original from my parent’s house in the 70s.

Q is back to give Picard another headache in a little scene from my Lego Star Trek Enterprise-D set. This version of Q is based on Star Trek: The Next Generation's pilot episode, where he appears as a judge to prosecute the crew for humanity's supposed crimes. It was fun researching the available Lego parts to make him - appropriately, the the red robe comes from a CMF judge minifigure!

I may need to design a more appropriate set to display Judge Q... Watch this space! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the minifigure.

Hopefully it gives you a chuckle.

The official set is the rare example where it needed more stickers (or prints, ideally). I was determined to add the ventral phasers the Lego designers seemed to forget about. As a MOC, I’ll probably be tweaking it for years to come. Maybe with another 100 escape pods😂