The USS Monarch is one of the finest ships I've ever built. She is the flagship of my 1/1400 scale fleet and was my first planned project from its incarnation on paper to the pictures you see before you.

I always wanted to build a Sovereign type dreadnought but I didnt want it to just be an Enterprise E with a 3rd nacelle. So I came up with the idea of advanced sensor pallets. I originally wanted them to be sunken in the hull like the sensor things on the Interpid class, but it required a lot of sawing with materials I didn't have. Little greeblie pieces were cut from mostly the darth vader tie fighter that I'd never use. I had a lot of fun with the sensors and I even made them match each other port and starboard. Thank you Star Wars for your many greeblies ....

On to the third nacelle... OH THE THIRD NACELLE! My first, and hopefully not last, experiment with working with resin. I had an extra Ertl Enterprise E but why bother ruining a perfectly good model? So I got some resin and silicone moulding materials from Micro Mark and away with the casting... Let me tell you this... it was a mess but with going through many many many castings, I finally got a copy of the nacelle that didnt have a HUGE hole in it or wasnt half missing. The pylon is also a copy of the Ent-e's pylon but I cut it down a bit because it looked a bit goofy sticking WAY out like that. The pylon only took 1 attempt to get right.

I also got rid of the aft shuttlebay. I replaced it with a docking port and a llittle scout ship. I thought of this ship as one of the Federation's first steps back to long range exploration after the Dominion War. I've always wanted to incorperate a small detatchable craft to one of my models and this whole project was an excellent opportunity. The "saucer" is made from half of the top half of the captain's yacht on the 1/1400 Enterprise D model. It's thickened with sheet styrene. The nacelles are from the captain's yacht of the Enterprise E from Insurrection put out by playmates. The scout originally had a little tunnel like docking arm but it kept breaking off and was just a hassle and made it look uglier so I just got rid of it.

Image: Stern

Image: Warp nacelles

Image: Starboard side

Image: Gaia

Image: Gaia docked