Review: S.S. Eleos XII

FanHome gives us another design from the 3rd season of Picard.

I’ll admit, I had zero interest in this model, nor in the one that followed this month, the villain vessel from the third season of Picard. That said, it’s a pretty cool design for a light cargo/personnel transport that looks to fit between runabout and starship. Like a lot of the latest design, the sense of scaling is weird, and going by the windows on the model, and the official length of 119m long, there should be five decks. S.S. Eleos XII is a Phoenix-class transport named after Zephram Cochrane’s first warp speed, according to the production notes, and was designed for fast response, mid-range missions. In the show, it apparently could be piloted by a single person, essentially.

The model is nicely done with a fair amount of detail, especially in the light gold/bronze pattering in the blue hull. (This is one of the styling bits I have liked from Discovery on forward — some color to the hulls.) The stand is good, but you’ll have to give her a bit of a nudge to seat it firmly. So far, the FanHome stands seem to be better at holding together than my experience with the normal size Eaglemoss stuff, though their angle of attack is more shallow; if there’s vibration near where they are displayed, it could fall off. (So far, that hasn’t happened to any of mine.)

It comes with a small pamphlet on the ship, its design for the show. The quality of models and paint, so far, has been on par or better than Eaglemoss — in my opinion — but where FanHome has really shined is the packaging: the graphic design of the boxes and pamphlets is much more eye-catching than the older Eaglemoss magazines, and is very pleasant to look at and read through.

The more I look at this one the more it has grown on me, which has been the case for all of the Picard era ships (especially Stargazer.)

A shot of the underside. The design aesthetic has a nice callback to the NX-01 from Enterprise and the tucked in nacelles evoke Defiant from DS9 and Shran from Discovery. It’s got a lot that makes her seem sharply different from Starfleet designs, but it still has the Federation styling cues to it.

So, is it worth it? If this period of ships is your thing, if you just like the look, or you’re a completionist — yes. The models are larger in “standard” format than the Eaglemoss stuff was for about the same price, new. I didn’t think I’d hold on to this one, but who knows?