Klingons on the starboard bow!

Courtesy of a kind friend over in South Korea (that's the Korea that isn't the one where the mad tyrant died a few days ago, if you were wondering) I have received some of the delightful new Mongoose Star Trek models (specifically, the Federation and Klingon squadron sets - he also bought me the rules - huzzah!). They tend to come in several parts (Fig.01), for which reason my favourite is the tiny wee one part Klingon ship! They tend to have a bit of flash, but not so much as to worry me. The metal round things you can see (Fig.01) are the deflector dishes. Needless to say, I had to get out Enterprise first, and assemble her. She's a fair sized model, as you can see (Fig.02). After I'd trimmed the flash back I assembled her with some superglue gel, as I find I get longer for my fingers to escape being fused to things. I'm not painting my hand green and pretending to be Apollo!

The model goes together easily (Fig.03), as did all but one of the other Federation ships, the three-nacelled Dreadnought, which had some crazy three-pronged system for gluing the hull and third nacelle to opposite sides of the saucer section. After I gave up trying to make that work and just cut off the third prong, mind you, all was well. There was a little damage to the rear of the light cruiser (top right of Fig.04), which I plan to model as battle damage. At the foot of that pic (Fig.04) you can see the frigate model, which is adorable, and reminiscent of the Reliant (the ship Kahn nabs in film #2). You can see her assembled to the right in the next picture (Fig.05). On the left is the battlecruiser, which is visually a slightly larger Enterprise style model. You can see her in the top left of Fig.06, and may note that her warp nacelles are horizontal rather than angled. The Dreadnought is in the bottom left, and you can already see that none of these ships looks exactly the same.

Figs.08 and 08 show the squadron together, and make clear that there is no way you are going to get these ships confused. They all share a similar aesthetic, although if you're raising your hand to say, "Uh, Pete, there's one without a saucer, dude." then I agree. It's an earlier style of design, I deduce from the rulebook. The only real work I had to do was on the Klingon dreadnought. I will have a full pictoral rundown of the undercoated/painted Klingon ships next time, but for now it's just the flagship. There were minor problems with every model, but I am not so mad as to expect perfection of resin! Everything fit together, and the problems are all small and easy to repair or ignore. It's a sign of how slight the other problems were that this is the only model I had to do any real repair work on.

The dreadnought's warp nacelles (as with all Klingon models) attach separately to the edges of the wings, and there was a slight but obvious gap. I probably would not have worried too much about this (it's probably going to be obvious on my other Klingon ships in the coming photos), but for the fact that the hull-neck connection was all kinds of gone to heck. Well, I couldn't just trim and glue, as I'd done in every previous instance. The connection point on the hull had got a bit crushed or had come out of the mould a bit funny. I only have a basic knowledge of this sort of thing, and it is - let me reassure you - all you need. I used my pin-vice to drill a hole in the opposing parts of hull and neck, then superglued a piece of staple to mate the parts together. Then I got a bit of Greenstuff modelling putty, mixed it up and used it to cover over the holes. Since I had the GS out, I covered up the gaps on the wings, and fixed the air-bubbled bit of detail aft of the bridge. I smoothed stuff down with a modelling tool until everything was nice and flush and that was it. Bob's your uncle!

In all, a lovely set of kits, and some gorgeous models. Klingons next, and then I shall try to get in a game with my brother. The rulebook is very nice, too. The first half is regular nice paper, and includes the rules and background material, and the latter half is glossy paper, and includes ship details and so on. But I am getting ahead of myself. Enjoy the pictures!