The Making of the Enterprise-E
First of all, I bought the 1998 Hallmark ornament, which happened to be the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E (the ornament is 15.5 cm long)...
Then I drew actual size scale plans of the ornament and measured everything I could possibly think would be useful...I then decided that a good size for the final model would be ten times the size of the ornament, which would end up about five feet long...
Now, on to the actual construction...I had a free supply of foam packing blocks from computer shipping boxes from work, so I used that as much as possible for the interior construction. I had learned from my model of the 1701-D that using corrugated cardboard for interior construction for papier-mache doesn't work too well, since it gets soggy with the wet paper layers on top...
I carved the styrofoam into the correct shapes as best I could. When the styrofoam wasn't appropriate, I used foamcore board to construct the large flat portions of the model. I even used an empty dishwashing soap bottle as the inside curve of the deflector dish!
To get the shape of the hull as smooth as possible, I tried to mimic the construction of an actual seagoing ship, by building ribs out of strips of styrofoam, then cutting thin planks of the same styrofoam for the actual hull. I also had designed the saucer section to be separate for easier transportation, since I had to take this in my car all the way from San Jose to Sacramento.
My roommate thought this picture looked like the ship had crashed, since all the "debris" forms a "crater" around the ship...hee, hee...! But here you can see a nacelle attached, as well as how much of a mess I made during this project...
Unfortunately I only had time for one or two layers of papier-mache on top of all my construction, so under close scrutiny you can see the hull could be much smoother, but you probably can't tell in the finished pictures...
