Construction is slow until Friday, but I did manage to put together the first plated hull pieces and one bonus part:

Here is a picture of the same part from the bottom:

On the original model there is a gaping hole in the front of the ship which I am not to fond of:

It looks like they just gave up or left ten pages out of the instruction manual. Out of the entire model, this is the one part that takes away from the "realism." I decided to fix this by adding two sections of my own with some black parts I had laying around. I'm attaching one section to the bottom hull and another to the top. I left enough parts poking out that I can still attach some cable parts if I want later. Here is how the modified bottom section looks before and after: