STAR TREK TOS ERA SHIP Snap Kit

These small series ships will make a nice edition for a desktop display. Three ships come in the kit the Romulan Bird Of Prey, The Klingon Battle Cruiser and The Starship Enterprise. All three ships will need work if you want them to come out seamless and look less like a toy. The Romulan BOP has a gap when putting the two halves together that needs to be filled and sanded carefully. Also, injector pin mold marks can be seen through the plastic on the top and bottom halves that will need to be corrected. The decals for the Romulan BOP are nice but some are a little too big and the horseshoe windows for the top half of the hull are a little small and do not center properly on the ship. To fix that is easy there are two small windows at the bottom of the decal apply those separately and align them centered on the nose then place the horse show windows. The tail decal needs to be trimmed a little smaller or they will wrap over the top of the piece. The Klingon Battle Cruiser goes together easily but there is a big seam when fitting the top halves. This needs to be filled and sanded so it is not noticeable after painting. The decals are again thick. The worst of the decals to put on are the wrap around windows just above the torpedo port on the nose. These will crinkle and not sit right around the shape of the nose. A lot of micro sol and micro set were needed to give it a decent look. And, lastly, the most iconic ship in all of sci-fi history was not done justice at all. The enterprise needs the most work out of all three ships. The nacelle seam lines are very prominent and need to be removed being very careful not to ruin the roundness at the front of the nacelle. The end caps for the nacelles are a bit too large but not too noticeable. The upper and lower saucer halves do not match up perfectly and there is a lip that needs to be removed. The engineering halves are also off. When placing them together one side is higher due to the alignment of the pins. This is easily fixed by cutting the pins and aligning the halves properly. once the halves are together and you will have to place the sensor dish which lines up way too low and makes the ship look bad. To fix this problem, you can easily remove the nub that holds the sensor dish to the ship and glue the sensor dish in the proper position. If you are looking for a quick build and are not worried about the inaccuracies of the some of the ships this is a nice quick build for you. If you are looking to fix the problems building will take a little longer but you will have a nice little display of the three ships represented in this kit.

I didn't think I'd like this kit, but it was quite fun to build AMT released a similar kit in a larger scale back in the 1980s, but this kit is more detailed and surprisingly more fun to build. Caveats: very simple and no display stand

This kit is a good value, as it comes with three ships for a very good price. The ships themselves do not have many parts, and are fairly easy to build, which makes it a good kit for someone just starting out with scale model building. There are quite a few decals (especially on the 1701-A and B), so anyone looking to practice their decal application skills will also find value here. I enjoyed building the Enterprise B the most, as it is obviously bigger and more involved than the two Constitution class ships. All in all, this was a good value and a good starter set.