Scale: 1/2500
This is the U.S.S ENTERPRISE NCC-1701-D saucer crash site diorama that I built from a 20 by 20-inch foam piece. Since I was a little kid, I've always imagined crashing my own starship like the Enterprise after watching the 1994 film Star Trek: Generations and the 2016 film Star Trek: Beyond. Since those movies came out in the past, I had the chance to build my version.
In my own Star Trek Universe, I set the story that the Enterprise was on an important mission for Starfleet Command to find and locate the lost Earth colony ship: the S.S. Lily Sloane which was carrying 5,000 people and the legendary Zefram Cochrane to the Alpha Centauri system when suddenly the ship disappeared without a trace. During the mission, Enterprise arrives at a M-class planet where they were attacked by renegade forces led by the vicious leader Zanthos of the Lucian Alliance. The crew tried to escape from Zanthos' forces but they took heavy damage from the final assault, which made them lose control of the Enterprise and fall into the atmosphere. Picard managed to separate the saucer section before the drive section exploded in the atmosphere. After that, the Enterprise saucer crash lands in a valley leaving what's left of the starship Enterprise NCC-1701-D as a flaming shipwreck on an unexplored alien planet.
I first started this diorama by building the saucer section of the Round 2 Enterprise 1701-D 1/2500 scale model. After I finished assembling and gluing the saucer, I painted it white and placed the hull/registry decals that were included in the box. Using Adobe Illustrator, I was able to print the Federation Seal logos as decals and placed them on both sides of the saucer. I wanted to see what a Federation starship would look like with the Federation seals on both sides of the saucer section. Then I started using the Dremel drill tool to create the hull damage. I even turned the port nacelle, parts of the star-drive section, plastic model shavings, and parts from unused models as the wreckage for the final detail for the saucer crash site.
I bought the foam for base at Lowes which I cut to a 20 by 20-inch size piece which was the perfect size for this project. The diorama base is completely covered with sculptamold modeling compound along with good details of the hills/mountains, lake, crash trench, fire (created by using the hot glue gun), smoke (created from using cotton and Vallejo dark slate grey pigment for the smoke color), wreckage, and small trees and bushes that I included in the base. Most of the resources that I used were from Woodland Scenics which made it easy to build the diorama. The result came out just as I imagined my in new and better Star Trek Universe.
