First off, my apologies to everyone for me not keeping up on the posts. I've had a lot of things going on and didn't see any feedback from this post so I concentrated on the posts at the main site on Macross World (macrossworld.com) and I forgot about this post. I've got much more done since then so without further graveling...
Thank you all for the kind comments! This is a labor of love and a fun one at that! I love doing little engineering jobs like this and especially on ships. This particular design (not mine) has lots of bells and whistles on it and I'm trying to re-create as many of them on the ship as there are in the drawings.
Thank you TigerTiger, the lights you saw showing through will be painted over. My other lights have foil backing behind them, but there was no room for the side ones.
The videos are too big to post and can't be shrunk anymore so I'll ask Mayhem to post them up.
Here's build pictures in the condensed version (there's lot's from the past year). All of the internal parts of the ship will be controlled by a small wired controller. I can mess around at shows or the lakeside and not worry about impounding radios. The front half of the ship has a DB-37 connector (think old school printer cable) and so does the controller. You can see what functions they have by the labels. The unlabeled yellow buttons are for sound bites (more on that later).