Mini-Review
ENTERPRISE NX-01 & ROMULAN WARBIRD
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(Enterprise NX-01 and the Romulan Warbird from Eaglemoss)
This is the third installment of my reviews of models from the "Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection" line from UK collectibles house Eaglemoss. This review will cover the fourth and fifth installments in the series: The titular Enterprise (NX-01) from the series Star Trek: Enterprise, and the Romulan D'deridex-class warbird (featured in TNG/DS9/VOY).
My previous reviews included:
As before, I'm not going to cover the high-gloss "magazine" that came with each ship. They contain lots of cool pictures and background information on the design and filming of the models, etc.--but nothing that any Trekkie hasn't already read on Ex Astris Scientia or Memory-Alpha.Also as before, there's an excellent gentleman on YouTube who goes by the name "IrishTrekkie" who has done really thorough video reviews for the models in this series. If you'd like video, a little more detail and coverage of the aforementioned magazines, he's your guy.
"IrishTrekkie" video review of issue 4 (Enterpise NX-01)But now for my own mini-reviews and photographs...
"IrishTrekkie" video review of issue 5 (Romulan Warbird)
Enterprise (NX-01)
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Issue 4 of the subscription is the experimental vessel that (retroactively) started it all: The NX-class starship Enterprise from the television series of the same name.
Now, it's no secret that I wasn't ENT's biggest fan. But those criticisms can wait until I re-watch the series as part of the "All the Star Trek" blog.
The ship itself--while somewhat derivative--is perfectly fine. It doesn't rank among my favorite starship designs by a long shot, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it.
So setting aside my dislike of the series on which it appeared and my lukewarm feelings about the ship's design itself, how's the model? That's what's important.
I'm happy--and somewhat surprised--to report that the model is absolutely fantastic.
It has a really incredible amount of detail. This shouldn't be a surprise, since they're working with a much smaller vessel so they don't have to cram as much detail into the same physical space on the model (unlike the larger Enterprise-D or Romulan Warbird models). But even with that advantage, they did a wonderful job with the details and overall paint job on this model. It's easily the best of the series so far (although the Klingon Bird-of-Prey is a close second).
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(Enteprise ventral)
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(Enterprise dorsal)
As you can see, every little detail--from the "aztec" pattern of the hull plating to the RCS thrusters, the docking ports, the shuttpod doors, etc.--it all looks fantastic. I was very, very impressed.
The overall quality of the model is also very, very high. Now again--it's a fairly simple model of a fairly simple ship. There aren't a lot of bits and pieces to be malformed or warped in the manufacture process. But still, even considering that they've done a really fine job.
A lot of that build quality can be attributed to the best thing about this model after its crazy-good level of detail: It's almost entirely die cast metal. Only the warp nacelles are made of plastic. Even the pylons from the hull to the nacelles are sturdy, fairly-thick die cast metal.
I really don't have any complaints about this model whatsoever. And believe me, you know I wouldn't be shy if there was something about it that I didn't like. It almost makes me wish they'd come up with a better television show for this ship :P
Romulan Warbird
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Our fifth issue is another ship in my top five, the immense and menacing Romulan D'deridex-class warbird, first seen on TNG and also appearing heavily on DS9 and even in a couple of VOY episodes.
The D'deridex is a gigantic ship. To scale, it's more than twice as long as the Galaxy class (1353m vs. 642m, respectively)--although it was frequently filmed in TNG to appear to be roughly equivalent in size to the Enterprise-D. Obviously they had to work with that scale for the model...so although the model itself is actually ever-so-slightly smaller than the Enterprise-D model, they've had to cram in almost twice as much surface detail.
One would expect that this would render Eaglemoss' version of the warbird a flat, vaguely-painted mess. Happily, it doesn't do any such thing. While there's not a great deal of paneling and whatnot, there is a satisfyingly large number of yellow windows added to the model to give it a sense of scale.
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(fore and aft views show a multitude of tiny, yellow windows)
As for the paint job itself, it's not bad. There's only so much you can do with a Klingon or Romulan ship; how many shades of green do you have? But this paint job is well done, and includes some of the "weathering" effects seen on the Klingon Bird-of-Prey. They give you the sense of a warship that's been in space a while, perhaps silently plying the space along the Federation-Romulan Neutral Zone for years with watchful and suspicious Romulan eyes on their sensors at all times--just waiting for a Starfleet attack :)
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(ventral view shows some of the "weathering" in the paint job)
Fit and finish is pretty good on this model. Where the upper and lower hulls join at the nacelles, the seams are a bit large and obvious...but that's not really any big deal on a model this small (and this inexpensive).
(Seams where the nacelles join the null? Not great, but not a deal-breaker.)
Finally, we'll talk briefly about one of my most important criteria for one of these models: Plastic vs. die cast.
As you can see, the upper half of the hull and the forward-facing section of the command module are all metal. The underside of the hull and neck, the "inner" portion of the command module and the nacelles are all plastic. That seems like a lot of plastic, but it's about the 50/50 ration that I've come to expect. It's all pretty solid, and the plastic bits are well made--so while it's not as impressive as the Klingon Bird-of-Prey or the NX-01's much greater metal-to-plastic ratios, it's not bad.
Overall, the Romulan Warbird is a good model and a solid entry into the series. I would've loved for it to be bigger, but there's only so much you can do and still have it fit in the same packaging, shipping containers, etc. as the rest of the models in the series. If I had one real complaint, it'd be the stand. The ship mounts at the rear (see my first image up above) like the Bird-of-Prey. But where the BoP's connectors fit into a little slot at the back, the arm that holds the warbird just kind of hooks over the back of the bottom portion of the hull. It'll stay on there, but it's easily the most wobbly of the ships so far. I anticipate having to put it back on its stand pretty frequently. Still, if that's the biggest complaint you've got about a model then you're doing okay.
These models were both pretty great. It looks like Issues 6 and 7 are the USS Voyager and the Klingon
K't'inga class. I'm a big fan of one of these designs and not so much the other, but as I've learned with the Enterprise NX-01...sometimes a design I'm not all that excited about still makes for a really great model.
Lastly, here's a quick shot of the entire "family" so far:
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P.S.: As always, the images in this blog post have been kept fairly small so it doesn't take forever to load. If you'd like to see relatively high-resolution photographs (including one or two that didn't get included in this review), I've got them all up on my webhost.
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