By David Windham

The Ship:

The Sharlin Class Cruiser is the most powerful ship of the Minbari Federation. Armed with a multitude of neutron cannons, very powerful sensors and stealth technology, these ships were all but invulnerable against the forces of the Earth Allaince during the Earth-Minbari War. Only one victory was scored against one of these ships through the cleverness of Capt. John Sheridan and the use of nuclear weapons. Others were destroyed but usually in a last ditch suicide ramming.

The Model:

This is the Minbari Cruiser kit from Temporal Rift. It's a vacuform kit which was a new experience for me and not one I think I'll jump back into quickly. I put most of it together months ago and can't remember a lot of deatils (probably put them from my mind). It consists of over 50 vacuformed parts, a bunch of resin 'gun tips', and some wood dowels. The dowels I replaced with styene tubing. There weren't enough gun tips included with the kit so I cast my own out of resin.

So, after lots and lots of trimming, puttying, sanding and filing, I had the hull, wings, and fins completed. Most of these were filled with expanding insulation foam. Be very careful with said foam as it really does expand as I found out when my hull almost exploded. I used Tamiya acrylics for painting. The blue was a mixture of sky blue and white. Then I airbrushed the stripes in purple and then again in a darker purple mixture but the formula escapes me. For the windows I just cut strips of .25x2mm styrene and glued them on.

Image: Another port side view

Image: Front