Kedorian shipyards report massive problems

So my first fleet are the mighty Kedorians. These are the flying citadel looking ships. I think they look amazing. I bought both box sets and have started to put together the alliance fleet box.

First up was the frigates. Now these are single piece pewter models..so should be really fast. But they have a ton of flash on them...and all on the inside of the ring. Took me about 30 minutes to clean up all four. Two of them had bad peg slots on them, but shouldn't stop a peg from being glued in...or more likely a magnet.

Next up though, is the carrier. It has two main resin pieces (top and bottom), four pewter panels, four plastic struts, and two resin dome pieces. So I start by cleaning the panels, and gluing them to the top resin piece. Everything is lining up great, and securing very nicely. Once I get all four done, it is looking good.

So then I go to attach the bottom resin piece, which should fit into the brackets of the panels. Should being the operative word here.

Unfortunately, it doesn't fit. It doesn't fit anywhere close. For some reason, the bottom section of the ship is too large!! WTF???

So I start shaving down the resin around the whole model to get it to fit in. Not an easy task, nor exactly a safe one. It gets a little better, but there is simply no way to get it inside one of the panels. So I pry off the panel (thankfully without damaging either piece, and am able to get the two halves together...but when I slide in the last panel, due to the mis-fit, it sticks out a bit. Well, not much I can do about it. I fiddle with it a bit more and finally get it all glued together. Thank god that is over.

Now I move on to the dome. Now please keep in mind, there are no instructions in the box. There are no diagrams or labels of the pieces. I am simply figuring this all out as I go.

So I finally figure out that there are two pieces to the dome, and I get them put together in what I think will work. Then I pop out the struts and see that they have to go on the dome first, otherwise you can't get the dome in them later. Also, the holes in the main body for the struts are larger than required, so alignment will be tricky.

So I'm thinking that if I attach them to the dome first, then it should just fall into the slots on the main base just fine. Well that went horribly wrong as well. Gluing the struts to the dome securely is a bit tricky because again, the slots are larger than the struts. But I eyeball it the best I can to have them light up properly and attach flat to the dome.

But then when I move the whole dome set over the main body, you can't even get two struts into the holes designed for them. Trying to remove the struts from the dome results in breakage. It really is unreal. Maybe my battleship will just stay in its box. If it is anything at all like the carrier, I'm going to have an aneurism trying to put it together.

By the way, this model also has four long thin pewter spines that are supposed to hang down from the bottom of the model. Yeah, like those aren't going to break five minutes after assembly. I think I'll skip mine.