Well, this is my little work of building the Defiant from Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

The Defiant-class battleship, officially an escort vessel, began development in 2366 as a small, highly powered, heavily armed warship intended to defend the United Federation of Planets against the Borg. The USS Defiant (NX-74205) was the prototype of what was to be a new Federation battle fleet. However, the ship had numerous design problems that were made apparent during its shakedown cruise. These flaws, combined with the decreased urgency of the Borg threat, caused Starfleet to table its plans for a battle fleet and put the Defiant in storage. (DS9: “The Search, Part I”)

The Defiant prototype was pulled out of storage in 2371 when the Dominion threat emerged. After several upgrades by Deep Space 9 Chief of Operations Miles O’Brien, the ship was subsequently deemed worthy of use and more ships of the class were constructed. (DS9: “The Search, Part I”, “Call to Arms”; VOY: “Message in a Bottle”).

More info on:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Defiant_class

After opening the box I just washed the sprues with soap, rinsed them very well and applied a coating of light grey primer.

And painting all the clear parts of the model

I painted all that could be painted and I started to add some leds in the inside in order to light it up. It’s particularly tricky because to assemble the two lateral nacelles you actually need to close completely the hull, so you have really minimum control and you need to proceed step by step.

For the base I just added a switch with an opening on the top and i glued inside a socket for Battery CR-24. I had to arrange a transparent plastic tube supported further by an alluminum tube because the original rod was a simple rod without any pass-trough. In the future if I will find the perfect alluminum tube probably I will replace, but for now it’s ok.

Finally I added the decals. This was really hard because they did not fit and they were very fragile. Actually few of them got destroyed directly by the water, so I had to do some repairing and I had to invent something to solve.

After a coating of glossy varnish I applied some weathering using a dark shade of blue on all the hull and dark grey in the internal section of the nacelles.

After a coating of transparent matte spray painting, the Defiant is finished.

And this is the result when lit.

Well, I would say that the leds could have been placed better but this is the best result that I got. I just put some copy paper (the transparent one that you use to copy the drawings) in order to diffuse better the light and I sanded preliminary the leds to avoid to have spots. This operation clearly can be improved.

I hope that you enjoyed this overview. Feel free to comment and/or ask for further information or to give me advices on how to improve.