Painting the Enterprise-B

The mistakes that I learned from on the original Enterprise went a long way to helping the Excelsior, Enterprise B, turn out better. It also helps that this model is larger and includes a post on the bottom for a stand so I had some way of mounting it while painting. I took the MacGyver approach and made a base out of plywood and a decking nail.

There’s also a bit of detail painting needed on this model as well, although less actually than on the first one (means more decals). Just the neck, deflector, and impulse engine housings in a medium gray, impulse engines in red, and the shuttle bay in a light gray.

I got a little sloppy with the red, but it was easy to correct after letting it dry over night.

Boldly trying yet another new hobby.

Honestly, pretty much the last thing I needed was an additional claim on my time and money. Yet I’ve somehow found myself waist deep in plastic model kits for Star Trek ships.
It began innocently enough, a few weeks ago I saw on Twitter that StarTrek.com was having a sale. I’d been wanting to pick up a t-shirt or two and figured I’d see what else they had. When I found the models page and saw that the Enterprise E was on sale, I ordered one. The last model I put together was a General Lee when I was ten, so I’m way out of practice. The listing said no glue or paint required though and I figured it would be no problem.

Fast forward a bit and I got the model, assembled it and started looking over the decal directions. This is when I realized two things. First there was no decal for the impulse engines at the back of the saucer. Second there were an awful lot of decals. It turns out that there is some painting needed if you want the model to match the picture on the box, and I really wanted it to match.

That weekend I took my son and made a trip to the local hobby shop to look around at the paints and see if they had any cheap model kits for me to practice on. I figured I needed to work up to a Sovereign-class ship. I ended up finding the perfect thing too.

Not only was this kit inexpensive, but it had three tiny ships to practice on. Plus, neither the original Constitution nor the Excelsior are ships I especially like, so if I screwed them up badly I wouldn’t feel bad about throwing them out.

Over the last few evenings, I’ve learn quite a bit about what order to do things in, or more specifically what order not to do things in, and how to correct mistakes. Well mostly correct them.

Stupidly, I laid out my Original Series model on a shop towel and laid down the paint way too heavily. Not a good idea. I ended up with a real mess had to strip off all of the paint, breaking the nacelles, dish, and struts off in the process. I managed to get the pieces up and glued everything back together, but the nacelles are a bit crooked and I don’t see a way to fix it. Despite the issues I had, it didn’t turn out too awful and I think the detail painting I did turned out pretty well.

Wrong
Better

 

She'll break apart at warp speed.

She’s not done yet though, I still need to add the decals which will be an entirely new learning curve to tackle.

The upside of downtime.

Star Trek Online went down unexpectedly last night for a few hours. I only ran into the tail end of the outage as I was working on some Enterprise model kits, so it didn’t actually impact my playtime much, but I did realize something.

There really are a lot of people playing STO since the F2P relaunch.

Now, I pretty much already knew this because there’s been a noticeable bump in the number of ships orbiting Earth Spacedock and DS9,as well as a major increase in sector space traffic. But seeing how fast the outage thread grew last night really highlighted for me how much the playerbase has grown.

Speed matters.

Pro-tip for the next time you decide to do some Spring cleaning on your computer like I did recently. Make sure before you spend the weekend replacing your primary hard drive and reinstalling Windows and hundreds of gigabytes of games, that you are sure that the new drive is the correct speed. I mistakenly used a 2TB drive that I’d originally intended to use in my Blacx SATA dock. That’s important because I usually get 5400 RPM drives for that purpose as they generate less heat, and the speed isn’t that necessary. Unfortunately a 5400 RPM drive is noticeably slower on a Windows install, especially when launching the Skyrim Creation Kit and loading all of the required data files.

After much cursing, some drive imaging, trying a 3TB drive that couldn’t be partitioned correctly as a bootable drive, more cursing, and then reinstalling (again) on a 1.5TB drive, everything is back to the way it should be.

Taking the bad with the good.

I’ve been thinking more about last week’s post on Star Trek Online, F2P, and lock boxes. I’ve looted a few lock boxes since then and left them sitting in my cargo bay. I’m still not planning on spending money or dilithium on keys, but I’m not as bothered by having them show up as drops as I expected.

Judging by the number of messages I’m seeing in game announcing when someone wins a Galor, there are a lot of players spending money or dilithium on keys. I’m sure that having lock boxes as drops and keys in the store generates more sales than just having the boxes in the store. A player might not think to buy a box from the store, but if their in the game and loot a lock box then they’re more likely to purchase a key.

I’m still not a fan of the practice but there are a lot of people in game having fun with it. Besides, the more money that Cryptic and Perfect World makes, the more they can reinvest in the game. More money means more content designers creating story missions, more programmers adding features to the game engine, and more systems designers working on new game features.

Meet the new EP, same as the old EP.

Some interesting news today from Cryptic, Daniel Stahl is back as the Executive Producer of Star Trek Online.

I was wondering if he was going to take up his old position. He returned to Cryptic from Zynga in December after only two months away, but not to his original position. I assumed either Dan wanted to do something different or Cryptic had some candidates in mind for EP and they didn’t want to cancel interviews in mid-stream.

Whatever the reason, Dan is back, and now I’m wondering what will change. Are we going to see the Engineering Reports and Ask Cryptics return? I really hope so, although maybe the Engineering Reports probably need to have a blinking neon disclaimer added that its contents are not promises. I always understood that, but I work in the software industry and understand that plans change.

I’m also curious to see if and how much of D’Angelo’s style of producing rubs off on Dan.

One thing I don’t see changing is Cryptic’s approach to F2P. I read quite a few forum comments from people who seem to be expecting the direction of the game to revert to what it was months ago, and I don’t think that’s likely to happen. I really doubt it’s even an option for Dan to pursue. Regardless of the change in Captains, I expect to see more lotteries and special but rare ships in the coming months.

Kindgoms of Ambivalence

At least for now, I’ve decided to pass on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

In a rare case where comments from friends are echoing official reviews, the game seems to have a pretty forgettable story. That was the part that made Reckoning a questionable purchase. Then, while watching the Destructoid video review, I heard two words that sealed it’s fate: boss fights. I had two words of my own when I head that: no thanks.

Sorry, but I immediately had Deus Ex: Human Revolution flashbacks when I heard that. Also, just to prove that there’s other games where boss fights ruin things, I’ve never finished Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising because the boss at the very end is ridiculously difficult.

I would definitely be more tempted if I didn’t have Skyrim sitting on my computer waiting for my return, not to mention the fact that Bethesda just released the Creation Kit for the game, but for now I’m going to pass. Besides, I’m sure it will show up on one of Steam’s ludicrously cheap sales.

The cost of business?

Cryptic’s announced another round of lottery boxes for Star Trek Online. I was mildly interested in them as I was reading through the Dev Diary, until I got to the part at the end where I read you need a key from the C-store in order to open them.

Blarg.

I really don’t like this. For starters, I’m not a gambler. I don’t like going to casinos or race tracks or buying scratch offs.

Beyond the gambling aspect, I prefer to have the store ties in games as minimal as possible, since I’m a subscriber. I can develop selective blindness so I can ignore the C-store and D-store buttons on the UI, they’re much more subtle than the gold bordered boxes Turbine uses in Lord of the Rings Online. But I really don’t like the idea of getting a lockbox as a loot drop from regular play and then having to go to the store to get a key to open it. Suddenly there’s something that is coming into my inventory which is directly pushing me towards the C-store. That’s okay for non-subscribers, after all Cryptic needs to make money both to stay in business and to reinvest in the game, but not for a subscriber.

Before F2P, C-store items were always nice optional things to have, and I spent money on quite a few uniforms, bridge packs, and ships. But as far as I can remember, there was never an item or mission that I came across in the game that directed me to go make a purchase, I always had to go to the store to seek it out.

So, depending on what the market looks like, I’ll either be discarding any lockboxes I get or putting them on the Exchange (too bad there’s no way to sell them for dilithium). Despite this lockbox stuff, I’m still completely excited for the start of The 2800 Feature Episode Series 4 this weekend. It’s like Star Trek is back on television!