Star Trek: Starships Model/Magazine Subscription

I know that feeling. Unfortunately, it was often short-lived once I realize a nacelle or pylon popped off in transit, and I once again think to myself, "Where's the goddam KrazyGlue?"

 

Ouch! Perhaps Gorilla Glue could rebrand itself for Trek modelers into Mugato Glue.

I splurged on the Pegasus. During transit (I guess) the canoe underneath the saucer hadn't been glued properly and came off. Sealing that hull breach was easy. Sometimes I look at the model and think, "Gee. I'd rather this was the Grissom." I toy with the notion of spraying canned foam all over the ship to make it look like it was embedded in an asteroid, thereby giving it more credence. But that would just look awful on the shelf.

As an aside to the above, how does the crew get from the saucer section to the primary hull below? Through the warp pylons???!!!

 

That has been the age-old question of the Oberths since their first arrival in the form of the Grissom (I, too, wonder why they didn't name the model that, but water under the bridge). There's a section on this topic at Ex Astris. To quote:

More details and photographic evidence on the subject can be found there.

I'm thinking it's just a massive sensor pod. It is a science vessel; makes sense they would have a dedicated array of sensors for deep scans of planets, stars, nebulae and other celestial phenomena.

 

The Grissom model is not one of my favorite designs, primarily because it was so overused in TNG when they didn’t want to spend the money on a new filming model (and I hate calling it the ‘Oberth’ class because that moniker was originally supposed to be for a different design entirely.) But I also feel that if they were going to use the model, that they could at least have modded it to have different secondary hulls. Perhaps build a larger underslung hull for science laboratories, or a cargo module for when the script called for a supply ship. They could have just stuck them over the original pod so as to not harm the original model (like what they did to turn the Miranda class into the Soyuz class.)

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/356699232962845217/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/70157706719805824/

 

I should imagine the Oberth-class ships would be instantly targeted by Federation adversaries who automatically assume it's one big espionage vessel. Amazing one survived into Riker's time.

 

You think in such three-dimensional terms!

 

Styrofoam squeak is like nails on a chalkboard to me. I can’t begin to explain how much I hate it.

 

Me too.

 

Give it up. That iPad's dead. It ain't coming back.

 

Got the FC Borg Cube, the final issue, for 25 + shipping

 

My big take away from the Eaglemoss line is confirmation from Ben Robinson that the Picard line of ships did not sell well enough to make a profit. In my opinion, this is because the design work on that show in seasons 1 and 2 was terrible and, again, in my opinion, the same applies to DSC, where we saw the deep discounts on that line of ships (excepting the hero ship of Discovery herself).

I bet that the SNW line would have sold much better.

 

Yeah, he specifically calls out the PIC background Romulan ships as potentially being unprofitable and needing to pick which ships they made rather than producing everything CBS sent them. The glut of Klingon ships from DIS probably didn’t help.

I think if they’d kept at the original cheaper, smaller scale they would have sold fine. But they went with larger models, presumably to increase their margins to offset the licence cost for the new shows. That’s just my speculation though.

 

They should have taken note of the poor performance of the S1 DSC "Klingon" ships that nobody gave a toss about. They literally had every one of them planned up until they killed that part of the line with the final ridiculous Chargh-class that looked more like the pistols the evil bronze robots used in The Black Hole than something out of Trek, much less the Klingon Empire. While the background Romulan ships arguably looked cooler than that, they were nothing more than filler between the ships people really did want (Fed designs, mostly). Only extreme Klingon- or Romulan-philes and the odd Collectors'-OCD asshole such as myself would pay for such things (begrudgingly).

 

The Battlestars have arrived

 

I had similar thoughts (maybe in one of the other threads, lol). If the Disco/Picard ships were just an extension of the original "two small ships per month" subscription, people probably wouldn't have minded getting the weird Klingon and Section 31 ships as they would have been offset by also getting another ship from an earlier series or one of the Disco Federation ships. At least half of the original collection was weird crap I didn't care about or barely remembered and I didn't complain (I mean honestly, who really wanted all of those Excelsior concept models as part of the main line.)

With regard to increasing the sizes vs margins. As I also mentioned previously, I think they went big with the Discovery ships because Discovery herself was too long and skinny to really work at the original collection size. In a previous life, a company I worked for imported goods from China, our biggest cost was actually the shipping. Going larger would mean fewer units per shipping container, so I wouldn't be surprised if the margins were actually worse for the bigger ships because of that.

And as you also mentioned in another thread, we shouldn't just be blaming failure on their Trek stuff. Towards the end, Eaglemoss had a lot of licenses, most of which were for pretty niche fanbases that weren't really known for having hardcore ship collectors. Even shows where people were likely to collect ships, like BSG, was probably a decade late, as it had completely fallen off the radar by the time the collection was released. Not to mention, the last couple of orders I had they threw in a free Marvel figurine, which leads me to believe those things weren't selling at all.

 

Yeah that's a fair point about Discovery.

My thinking with margins was that the XLs were selling typically for about 4x more than a standard ship, but I doubt they cost 4x more to produce and ship. But I could be wrong!

Come to think of it the DIS line wasn't quite that expensive, were they about £20 each?

 

In the US the Disco ships were $45 via subscription and $55 in the store, which is approximately £37/£45 using today's exchange rates. The original collection were $20 (£16). So the revenue is maybe 2-3x more on ships that take up 4-6x as much space shipping them from China (thinking about how big the newer collection boxes are compared to the original ones).

Doing those conversions also reminded me, before Brexit, Eaglemoss was probably doing better on the foreign currency exchange rates - not to mention increases in other taxes/tariffs that probably hammered them.

 

From my perspective - here in New Zealand - consistently the most expensive to buy and have shipped from most overseas stores, have been both Disco and Picard starships (XL scaling definitely also at play here).

 

Hello to you too