It already started out badly, because I did not realize in the beginning that these first pieces were supposed to be the transparent ones and the gray ones did not come in the size I was looking for.
So I spend a good hour of organizing the pieces by size before I realized that the graphic showed them somewhat transparent. If I had written that document, I would have spelled it out explicitly.
But then we moved along nicely for a while with some minor hiccups because of failing to understand the instruction or fat fingers:
And then of course a tiny piece fell under the couch and disappeared:
But we move along:
And of course when the instruction says to build it a certain way, you should do it otherwise it looks awkward:
We fix it and move along:
We're running out of parts soon:
Only a few more parts to go, it can't be that hard, right? Right??
I
hated that part! The front was three major plates connected to the main body on hinges, two per part. You had the top and the two sides. and they were connected to each other by the flimsiest of connection and also you had no leverage point where you could actually apply pressure to push them together. And it had to be be exact to the micron (to use an appropriate Battlestar unit here). Within the blue brackets are the hinges holding the plates to the back of the ship. In the green bracket there is an L-shaped part that is connected by 2x2 pins to the top plate. And the red bracket is the singular(!) pin that connects the side plate to the top plate and by the time you were supposed to connect these, the model already looked like it looks here, no way to get any kind of pressure from behind the pin. But pushing from the outside only caused all the tiny parts to fall to the inside. It took me almost an hour and basically un-build the entire front part again to get this fixed.
Also by that time I realized that I lost one of the tiny parts or maybe there were one too few in the set (the former more likely to be honest). But it was the singular piece that held a cover plate in place. Luckily I had spare parts from previous builds and even though it was totally the wrong color, luckily it disappears beneath the cover:
And a few times the instruction got lazy and it was more like a puzzle. Like how do you get these pieces in this supposed shape? Well, like this:
to be continued...