I've been working on the lighting system for a few days. It's been really challenging
I started out by gluing in a block of soft balsa to mount the lights, then I carefully measured the angles so the lights would disperse evenly. Then I drilled holes, glued the LEDs in, and got to work soldering. If you didn't know, LED's have almost no resistance, so you almost always have to add resistors to your circuit. By the way, I used this online circuit builder to help me design the wiring diagram: http://led.linear1.org/led.wiz
Carefully-measured angles
Soldering work
All lights functioning
Then, I cut away a strip of the plastic material from the lid of a clearcoat rattlecan, and glued it into the engine area. I was thinking I was almost done, so I tested the light system and I was discouraged to find the lights were not producing an even glow, but rather points of light.
Carefully measured, then sliced with razor
Points of light
So I started experimenting....
I first tried moving the lights around to adjust the focal length. Moving them toward the nose helped quite a bit. I also tried shining the lights through a multitude of different materials and stacks thereof. In the end, I cut another strip off the rattlecan lid and glued it in behind the other. This worked great, and I think the two are acting like a lens to refract the light out of focus.
Look closely, and you'll see two strips of clear plastic glued in.
The end result is much better. I will add a few more lights to the array, but I think I'm on the downhill side of this challenging part on my build. I still have a light leakage problem to address (see the last photo). I've read that a lot of the starship modelers solve this by using aluminum foil to block the light.
Much more even light dispersal
Light leakage