Thursday 13 May 2021

Eaglemoss returning to the Kelvin timeline for more Starfleet ships

Exciting news starship fans, starship model makers Eaglemoss are at last tapping into one of the few remaining pockets of Starfleet starship designs they've not yet made models of, the Kelvin timeline background fleet! Newly listed on the UK Eaglemoss webshop (currently in waitlist mode ahead of pre-orders going live some time this month) is the USS Armstrong. The design is similar to the Miranda class, with the addition of a secondary hull below the saucer. 


This is being released in the bonus model series - Which Eaglemoss now use to release additional models in the classic Starships Collection run, alongside non-canon and concept art designs that previously filled the bonus line - So is the same size as the original Eaglemoss starships series, rather than the larger specials size that all previous Kelvin ships have been released in (apart from a smaller shuttle set that is). In my view a welcome development, as apart from the Narada and the Enterprise-A, all the remaining Kelvin ships, while certainly desirable, really don't seem significant enough to warrant the larger size. Check out more the Armstrong below:








The Armstrong-type is one of three starship designs that featured prominently alongside the Enterprise when we saw the fleet in The Future Begins and Into Darkness. Eaglemoss haven't made any sort of announcement that the rest of the fleet are coming, but surely that's an inevitably if they're doing one?

The most prominent designs alongside the Armstrong include the Mayflower type, which is similar, but with a full circle saucer, no secondary hull, and no roll-bar. And the Newton type, the most distinctive of the bunch, with a semi-circle saucer, and two secondary hulls which hang below the two nacelles. There's also a red version of the Armstrong-type (will be interesting to see if Eaglemoss ever opt to do a variant). 



In the Star Trek: The Art of the Film(ad) book there's a neat diagram that shows off this part of the fleet - Note the Mayflower here is shown with a roll-bar, which the on-screen versions don't have.


The Designing Starships: The Kelvin Timeline(ad) book does show the final form of the Mayflower, alongside a dark-hulled variant.



But these three classes aren't the entire fleet. There are a several more ships we've never got a good look at. Look closely at the starbase below, and note in addition to those three classes and the Enterprise, there are a number of smaller saucer-and-nacelle type designs docked at the base. Could Eaglemoss finally give us a clear look at these too?



The Designing Starships book highlights one other design prominently, the single-nacelled Excelsior. Although this doesn't quite seem to fit any of those little blurs.


From a concepts page in the same book we can also see several other potential configurations. Did any of these become the tiny designs we can just make out at the starbase?


Star Trek Beyond went gave us more ships too! Seen very fleetingly in the background of the Enterprise-A construction time-lapse is a USS Salcombe:


There are some four-nacelled ships that operate inside Yorktown too. The sound design suggests these are ship-versions of police cars.



Oh and of course there's one more minor Starfleet ship, the USS Enterprise-A itself. This one I certainly would like at the specials size!



The USS Armstrong will be taking pre-orders soon on the UK webshop, and no doubt will be listed shortly in the US(ad) too. Hopefully the rest of the Kelvin timeline fleet will be following in the coming months.

For more Eaglemoss updates, check back through my Eaglemoss tag, for starships coverage in general see my ships or model ships tags, and for more from the Kelvin timeline, see my Kelvin tag.

Thank you to TrekCore's ever useful screencap library for most of the screencaps above.


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4 comments:

Henrik said...

I don’t know. The Kelvin Timeline ships never had the amount of love and detail that those of TNG, DS9 and VOY had. These models just look dirty and grungy. No windows that give a feeling for proportions, not many labels, no hatches etc.. just grey. I won’t buy them.

Dwight Williams said...

And I wonder about the starbase itself...

Anonymous said...

Not bad for the scale but Euuugh! The flashing and loss of detail on that roll-bar is atrocious. That's not a £20.00 quality item, that's £5.00 standard. Wrong process for the job there. Needed to be injection moulded plastic to retain the detail. It's a weird one to try and reintroduce the 2009 subjects too. It's the least interesting of the bunch and the one that breaks the old cannon most. I was interested until I looked closer at the promo-shots and saw that horrible edge to the roll-bar; made all the worse thanks to the shiny paint that highlights every wonky edge. If I do get one, I'm disassembling it, filing the rollbar back into shape and repainting it.

Anonymous said...

The casting of the roll bar is terrible. If its' going to be a shiny finish (that draws attention to edges) you can't have a thing piece dicast like that. It's too chunky, it's lost all the detail (it's not even symmetrical) and it just drags the quality of the whole sculpt down to the £5.00 Hotwheels pocket car standard; way below the £20 asking price.

I actually think that the sculpt is not too bad but on this occasion the paint effects draw attention to the flaws. Injection boded plastic for that rollbar would have been batter. I might still get it but I'd have to repaint it and, in the process of breaking it down to do that, possibly try and get rid of some of that rollbar thickness, optically if not practically.

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