Earth Alliance Omega Class Destroyer

I started my project by cathering pictures, images and charts of the Omega from the web. I also did some preliminary planning about the size and measures of the model. After some thinking I decided that the model would be 1 meter long. So the details would be large enough for me to build and for others to see.

Next step was to make some scale desings to the paper. These were made by measuring widths from the images and scaling them to fit my model's scale. Now afterwards I must admit that this is the part of the project which I should have done much more carefully. If you have good designs the actual building process is much more easier.

The material was a bit of a problem first. I tried to get my hands on a proper plastic but because that failed I used mostly balsa wood. In fact I think that the balsa was the best solution for me. Balsa is easy to cut, shape and sand. Other materials used were wood, plastic-, copper- and brass tubes and all kind of bits and pieces which I managed to found.

The model itself was made in 5 different sections. The bow, the neck, the rotating section, the aft and the engines. I started the building from the bow section and proceeded section by section to the engines. The basic support structures (box shapes) were build from 2mm balsa sheets. These "boxes" were then filled with details which were mostly made from thicker balsa. Other material were also used. For examble toothpicks were very handy when I was doing the details to rotating section. For pipe and tube details I used the plastic from my old commercial kit poxes. The frames where the parts of the commercial kits are attached are great source of plastic tubes.

The most hard and time consuming parts were the gun turrets and engines. Both gave me headache until I managed to solve the broblems. The gun barrels are copper tubes which I happened to found from the local hardware store. I don't even remember where those tubes are originally used. The gun pods are carved and sanded from the balsa. This was quite a hard task to do. (And I had to do 14 of them!!!) The engines were the other "nuisance". Finally I decided to do them from balsa and plastic tube (20 mm diameter), which can also be found from the local hardware stores. The "blue" parts of the engines are made from this tube and the "red" parts are from balsa. The engines have also so many details on them that this part of building took some time.

The model is painted with the simple light grey color except the engines and some minor details which have dark red or blue color. I tried to apply the "metal paneling" design but didn't manage to do so. I have never been a good model painter and I was not satisfied about the "paneling" so I decided to do without it. I used both brush and airbrush when painting. Earth Alliance logos and ship's name tablets were made by printing them to a transparency sheet and cutting them with a hobby knife.

As said before this project took me 2,5 years to complete and I managed to finish it just before the largest model show here in Finland. So the model was displayed in the Helsinki Model Expo 2003. I didn't participated to any contents but I think that the model was some sort of eye opener. What comes to myself, I am more than satisfied to the overall look of my Omega Class Destroyer.

UPDATE! I was never fully satisfied about the ligh gray color which I used with Omega, so as I finished the Hyperion model I repainted the Omega also. The paint used was a darker gray and the result was in my opinion better. Both Hyperion and Omega were also displayed in the Kuopio Scale Model Show 2005 and the Omega took the second place in the "visitors favorite" voting.