I've figured out what detail I think I can get away with.  It's hard to describe and I may have to fudge later, so we just get to see how it all turns out. :)

      Today I spent four hours on the back wall of the shuttle bay.  I tried to make it look like a door that lifts upwards in multiple stages.  It was some pretty serious airbrushing.

  I started by learning how to make little, tiny lines with an airbrush.  The hull of the ship will be striped using a method very similar to what I messed with (air brushing against a card, then moving the card back step by step), but that didn't leave a clean enough line in a space about 1/4" thick. 

  I purchased some 1/8" mask from a local art store - thought I'd use that instead.  I played with the idea on the hull of the Enterprise-D, then went to work on the actual piece.

   Masking the tiny piece was easy enough, just really tedious.  The painting was done by moving the piece to the kitchen, swiping it with the airbrush, then moving back to the table and adjusting a strip of masking (the paint dries almost instantly when there's so little), then going back to the kitchen, then back to the table to adjust the masking another 1/16", etcetera.

  When all was said and done, I then applied a coating of flat finish.

Here's the finished product.  It's really hard to show the detail, even when scanned in.  It's pretty fine.

     The next steps are:

• construct the walkway into the port wall
• install the support struts
• put the two walls into place
• paint the walls
• apply gloss finish
• apply the decals
• apply flat finish
• attach the rear wall
• fill any gaps
• put some onion skin paper over the top of the whole thing for the light to shine through.

     The onion skin paper on the top of the bay may be modified so that it's not just a flat light.