The 1701-A Project - Deflector Dish First look

After so many years, I got this back from Kenny (minus the instruction sheet and decals which I lost it). I still cannot believe that this model will be at least one meter when completed. My problem with this is not the painting or accurizing it, but the lighting of the model itself. Since this is a brief first glance, I will tell you what I am going to do. I will create two versions of the circuit.

The basic circuit
This circuit will just give you the normal navigation strobes and that's about it

The interactive circuit
This one is more complex than the first. It would have the lightings for the deflector dish, the photon torpedo launchers, the impulse engines and also, the warp nacelles. And you can actually press the buttons for each effect (just like a museum piece? Ha ha ha). Due to the complexity of this, it would take a very long time to complete. (unless someone pays me Rm5000.00 a month to stay home and do "serious" work like this. Bwahahahhaahha!)

Anyway, here is the box. You would not believe how big
it is. The box is just big enough to cover the biggest part
of the model, which is the Main Saucer

And here, Kristine is holding the main saucer.
Big or not? Once the model is completed, I
will have a problem on where and how to
display it. And I am thinking, coffee table.

The hole at the back is designed to house a 3mm LED.
Here, I tried using a BLUE LED. Its not that bright as
this is roughly how bright it looked as without flash,
the camera would be fooled and then set the picture
to give a false image that it is indeed very bright
when its not. Still, I think using the BLUE LED alone
would not solve the problem. Why? Because I am not
sure about the "Ring of Lights" at the edge of the dish.
I must see the DVD again. Because when its warming
up (yellow) and fully operational (blue) I hope that the
"Ring of Lights" would follow the colour as well. Sigh

At the moment, white looks good but this is not what I am
looking for. Still, I suppose, with some reflective aluminum
tape behind there, it would make the effect more promising.
Not only that, the outer dish would have to be painted white.
Worse to worse, I would need to make the hole bigger to fit
in a 5mm LED is as the light dispersion would be bigger.
Or I could just fit in a 1Watt RGB Luxeon with Lambertian
Lens which would make the thing glow, but too much.