Background

The Pallas Athena was one of the six or so extra Galaxy-class spaceframes that Starfleet had built but never assembled into complete starships. After the start of the Dominion War, however, the various components were quickly brought together and assembled into a new ship. Unlike the first batch of Galaxy class ships, the Pallas Athena lacks the (palatial) crew accommodations and other luxuries that marked her earlier sisters, like the USS Enterprise-D. Instead, she features a reduced crew complement whose primary function is combat, not scientific and diplomatic missions. Indeed, the extra volume freed up by these omissions allowed for additional shield generators and redundant systems to be installed, which explains why the Galaxy's in Sacrifice of Angels appeared to do so well, at least early on.

Pallas Athena participated in the thrust to retake Deep Space 9 (Sacrifice of Angels), and was the Galaxy-class ship seen phasering a Galor's bridge area into vapor. She was present during the attack on the Chin Toka system, suffering moderate damage at the hands of the Cardassian orbital weapons platforms. She also served as flagship of Task Force 23, tasked with probing Dominion border defenses and with conducting long range incursions into Dominion space. She was present at the final battle of the war, and survived to help initiate the brief blockade of Cardassia prior to the Dominion's surrender.

Construction Details

The USS Pallas Athena, NCC-73201, started as a stock ERTL Enterprise-D model. She was modified only with homemade decals to reflect the new name and registry number. Unfortunately, my laser printer only prints in color, so there are no red outlines to the decals. She was painted using a combination of Testor's Model Master enamels and some of the acrylic paints from the Enterprise-D Plus Pack for the aztec paneling. The lifeboats were all hand painted. A few of the aztec panels appear deliberately out of order to simulate hull area subjected to battle damage and quickly repaired, though this is hard to see this on the photographs.

For another image of the ship, click the link below:

• Front and back views.