Review: FanHome's Enterprise-F

Bigger. Better?

The latest from FanHome’s Starships Collection got delivered yesterday. I’ll admit, I didn’t have much interest in this one. Not being a player of Star Trek Online, I didn’t know anything about this particular ship. Its appearance in the third season of Picard was my first exposure to the Odyssey-class Enterprise-F.

The packaging continues to be much better than the old Eaglemoss stuff: colorful and eye-catching, and this model is their first XL edition. To indicate this, the box has raised embossing for the Star Trek name. The packing is the typical styrofoam set up of the Eaglemoss models. The booklet on the design of the craft and its appearances is tucked in the box, following the lead of what Eaglemoss was doing with the later releases, rather than the large format from the older ships. (I prefer the smaller booklet.)

This shipment included two free extras for the subscribers: a raktejino mug and a master systems display of USS Titan-A. The display is tucked between two thick slabs of plexiglass, and it’s tiny — about the same size as the booklet (it’s in the cardboard box under the booklet in the picture). The mug is small — an 8 oz., I think, and yes — Colombia is misspelled. But since it’s free stuff, I don’t really care.

Enterprise herself is gorgeous. I’ll admit — I’m not a fan of this design. It’s squarely in the “negative space” period of design, with ships having open space in places that, frankly, don’t make much sense. In this case, the Enterprise has two thin “necks” holding the saucer section to the secondary hull. The nacelles look better than the Akira-era and the Picard-era nacelles, though; I like ‘em. The ship is supposed to be huge — 1600m stem to stern, with an embarked Aquarius-class runabout tucked where the aft shuttlebay usually is.

Despite all these niggles, the model is gorgeous, with only a few points that collector have been noting. The impulse drives are not painted red on the nacelles nor the saucer. The Aquarius is painted dark, with minimal detailing. Outside of that, they’ve done a good job with the window placement and decals. I particularly like the UFP seal above the name of the ship. This seems appropriate as in-canon, these are massive diplomatic-focused vessels.

Like Stargazer, seeing the vessel in person is a different experience than on the screen. I wasn’t particularly impressed with Stargazer when it showed in season two of Picard, but the model won me over. I still hate the negative space fascination John Eaves has, but “the F” is much more attractive when you can rotate it and appreciate it from various angles.

FanHome’s off to a great start, in my opinion, with this collection. So is this Enterprise worth it? It you’re a completist, it you like your starships “looking all Sovereign-y”, as Mariner Beckett put it, if you like the STO ships — yes. If you’re not a fan of the newer Trek, it might not appeal at $90ish. I’ll admit, this is one that will probably get shelved and sold later, unlike Titan and Stargazer. I’m hoping for a focus on Strange New Worlds ships — I’d like to see the new Gorn craft, or maybe a TOS-styled Miranda.

With four months of deliveries under the belt, I figure it’s time to address a few things outside the quality of the models. There’s quite a few folks that are grousing about the shipping of the models. (But that’s what the internet is for, yes?) The third shipment, in particular, looked to have been kludged up for a lot of the subscribers — however, I would point out that coincided with the holiday mailing rush and a fairly impressive set of storms through the center of the country.

Here in the States, shipping is being handled by OSM (One Stop Mailing) — a pretty big concern in shipping, it seems. They’re doing the pass off to the post service for the final delivery, but it looks like they handle pickup from FanHome in the US. Normally, a bulk service like this aggregates as many shipments as it can, which is probably why we see a lag time from pickup to when the packages seem to start moving through the system. That said, my shipments have been coming in a consistent four days after the estimated delivery dates (between the 12th and 17th of the month) on the FanHome website. There’s usually a hold up on the package tracking between Kansas City and the next stop, Glendale Heights in Illinois. Partly, this might be OSM aggregating packages, but I suspect that there’s some kind of update issue — USPS is notoriously bad at allowing you to track packages in its system, and KC is one of the more problematic postal hubs in the country — so I think the lag between KC and the next step is more a sorting and tracking issue than the shipments just sitting somewhere. But I could also be full of $h!t.