By Jerry Oliver

The Tiger or Dar-Wak class warship is a joint Federation and Klingon concept. The ship was designed to be a Borg cube killer, but ended up fighting the Jem'Hadar. The idea was conceived to fight the Borg in 2368 and a deal was signed later that year. Construction of the ship started shortly after the war began but work was halted to make design changes. After a year of fighting some short comings in the Federation and Klingon fleet were discovered. The wings and hull were strengthened in order to stop the Jem'Hadar from ramming through the ship. More weapons and another shield generator were added.

One to the weakest area on a Federation and Klingon ship was the Bussard collectors on the warp nacelles. Bussard collectors were eliminated and the nacelles were heavily armed. Three ships were completed for the Klingons and four for the Federation, towards the end of the war.

The seven ships fought in only one battle. It was a decoy invasion to reclaim Betazed. My model represents the Mek'leth after the battle for Betazed. The Klingons named their ships after weapons, and the Federation named their ships after large predators from across the Federation.

The Model

The model started life as three small Klingon Cruisers at 1/1400 scale for my Klingon fleet, two Birds of Prey and a Vor-cha. I designed a small class of ship that was 1/3 the size of the Vor-Cha and started construction of the three ships. After the second week I got the idea to build a bigger ship and a friend suggested that I enter it in the contest. I did some design changes and began construction. I built almost the whole model from 1/4" acrylic plexiglass. I laminated four pieces together and cut the main hull out on the bandsaw. With a little sanding the main hull was ready. Almost . . .

The wings were made from 1/4" and 3/ 32" acrylic laminated together, cut out on the bandsaw and refined on the disk sander. To get the taper on the wings, I glued one wing at a time to a large block of acrylic plexi. I set the table of the disk sander to the preferred angle and slowly sanded the taper. The wings were then joined to the hull and the bevel was made with my Dremel. The warp engines were made from ½" acrylic.

I found hardest part was the lower pod at the front. It was several pieces of acrylic laminated together. First I made sure that the part was square and cut out vertically the shape with the band saw, and sanded it smooth. The side profile was harder, I glued the pod to a large acrylic block and again used the disk sander. This took me about half an hour.

In total the main part of the ship took me 10 hours to make. (This includes the wet sanding I did to get rid of the sanding marks from the disk sander.) The detail took even longer. It was hard to find the time to work on the model, I wish I could have taken a week off from work to build it, but . . .

The bubble at the front top and at the bottom rear is a part I vac-formed from a mould that a friend made for a project at work. The arrow shaped bubble on top of the rear upper pod the mould came from a mould made by my team leader. The detail is styrene scraps that were laying around at work. Actually, the whole model was made with scraps - acrylic plexi and styrene from my job.

Image: Bow

Image: Port side

Image: Top