October has been a big month for fans of the Star Trek Official Starships Collection model series, with a great deal of new announcements for new starships being readied for the ever-growing armada!
Starting off is the biggest news for the long-running model series: with the end of the subscription-level monthly releases at Issue #180 — the Star Trek: First Contact-era Borg Cube — the standalone Star Trek: Discovery subscription series is also coming to a close after its Issue #33…
…and being replaced with a new chapter of The Official Starships Collection, set to feature ships from ALL of the ongoing Star Trek Universe live-action series — Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — set to begin in April 2021.
(Model plans for Star Trek: Lower Decks are still being developed, so not yet included in this new line of ships.)
The first four Star Trek: Picard entries have been officially named, starting of course with the hero ship of the series — Cris Rios’ baby, La Sirena.
The second ship will be the “antique” Romulan Bird of Prey seen in “Absolute Candor,” which got into a scuffle around planet Vashti with La Sirena….
…followed by Seven of Nine’s Fenris Ranger vessel, which was destroyed during that orbital battle in the same episode.
The fourth ship from the Star Trek: Picard lineup will be the Inquiry-class USS Zhang He, “toughest, fastest, most powerful ship Starfleet ever put into service,” which was captained by Will Riker in the season finale, “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2.”
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The larger-scale XL Starships model series is also getting a few more additions, including one many fans of Star Trek: Voyager have been hoping for!
First up is a larger version of the Kelvin Timeline USS Enterprise from the 2009 Star Trek film, first released in a mid-scale special size back in 2014.
Following that is an XL-sized edition of the starship Voyager’s long-range custom support craft, the Borg-infused Delta Flyer! This is one that many fans have been hoping for since the XL Starships line was first announced, and we’re glad to see that the Delta Flyer will be getting the big-sized second edition.
Lastly, for those of you with $200 burning a hole in your pocket, a gold-plated special edition of the XL-sided USS Enterprise-D starship model, a convention special announced as part of the virtual New York Comic Con events earlier this month.
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Finally, there are three more additions to the various lines of Star Trek models coming down the road, starting with the tenth new ship in the Star Trek Online.
The Mogh-class Klingon Battlecruiser, according to Star Trek Online lore, was designed under a team lead by Ambassador Worf, which is why it was named for his father.
Also on the way is a Star Trek: Insurrection special edition model: the giant Son’a Collector spaceship, designed to harvest the special metaphasic radiation from the Ba’ku homeworld — before it was destroyed by the crew of the Enterprise-E at the end of the film.
Finally, the collection will get yet another set of Star Trek shuttlecraft models, adding four more to the growing line of smaller-scale support-craft releases.
The first is the Enterprise-D’s captain’s yacht Calypso, which was set into the underside of the Galaxy-class vessel’s saucer section.
The second is a docking shuttle seen in four episodes of The Next Generation, working in the service of various Federation starbases.
The third is the Spacematic shuttle owned by 23rd century tribble-trader Cyrano Jones, discussed in multiple episodes but only seen as a part of the Deep Space Station K-7 studio model built for “Trials and Tribble-ations.”
The fourth and final model is the Type 9A cargo shuttle, a design introduced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, assigned to the Enterprise-D.
Stick around for more coverage of the Official Starships Collection as the model line keeps warping into 202!