Federation Reinforcements review - proof reading, opinions?

Ben2

Mongoose
The Mongoose minis are still getting stick on Warseer and TMP, so I said I'd write a review up to post with lots of pictures to prove that the issues have been sorted and people can order with confidence. However I need constructive criticism on this review. I'm also scrupulously honest about any problems I found, how I solved them and how long it took. However I really like these models, and I'll also be adding a starfleet plog to warseer today or tomorrow. I'll also need someone to post it on TMP for me, and take the flak for that. I've included lots of close up pictures so people can get a good look at the minis.

Squadron box 7 - Federation reinforcements

I picked up squadron box #7, Federation reinforcements, at the Game Expo in Birmingham.

It contains five Federation ships, a Federation Class Dreadnought, a Kirov Class Battlecruiser, a Chicago class New Heavy cruiser, a Kearsarge class New Light Cruiser and an Ortega class War Destroyer. In ACTA: Star Fleet this totals 1025 points, enough for a small fleet and if a blister of say, 2 battle frigates was added, or a Manta Ray Class Fast Cruiser, enough for a tournament fleet of 1250 points.

The Star Fleet background diverges from the standard Star Trek background being based on the Original Series and the Animated Series - which is captain Kirk era. As a wargame it has a large scale conflict between the Federation, and its allies, and the Klingons, Romulans and the Klingon ally, the Lyrans. As a large conflict unfolded, called the General War (eventually engulfing 8 empires/races), races designed cruisers and destroyers to be built quickly and removed much of the scientific and exploration equipment (the Federation cruiser having absolute tons of labs, for example). The Klingon D5 and D5W are lovely ships, and I'll add them to my plog soon done in my Klingon green scheme. This box provides the Federation New Heavy Cruiser, New Light Cruiser and War Destroyer.

The ships come in ziploc bags inside a small box with a picture of painted and assembled ships on the front, with five bases. It retails for £30.
Dreadnought pieces
Dreadnought.jpg

Battlecruiser pieces
BCpieces.jpg

New Heavy Cruiser pieces
NCApieces.jpg

New Light Cruiser pieces
NCLpieces.jpg

War Destroyer pieces
DWpieces2.jpg

I've decided to do a pretty in depth review. I'll go over each model in turn, giving descriptions and pictures of it assembled.

Kearsarge Class New Light Cruiser

This is a three part kit, consisting of the saucer/hull and two engines. As you can see from the picture, the saucer panels are deep enough that undercoating and a couple of layers of paint will not obliterate them.

On the saucer there was a thin moulding line on the rim of the saucer and a small moulding lug just offset from the centreline, also on the rim of the saucer. A little quick knife work and a few passes with the emery board and that was cleaned up. On the engines there was a couple of spill tabs, a thin mould line around each piece, and the front of the warp nacelle needed the cylinder coming out of the nacelle tip to be flattened off at the bottom. At the other end, a little knife and emery work required to round off the nacelle exhaust/whatever it is.

Taking my time with this and writing the write up so far took me twenty minutes, so this is not a time consuming process for someone with reasonable modelling experience. It's not suitable for small kids if you are using craft knives, but you could do all the clean up by snipping or twisting off the spill tags and then using an emery board. If you're doing this with kids, and they're too young for you to teach knife safety to, then you can take the emery board option.

Assembling the model is dead easy. On each engine there are two little nubbins, one offset from the other, which fit two corresponding dips in the rear of the saucer with the sort of precision you get from computer designed and prototyped models. Dry fit it just to check. I put two tiny dots of liquid green stuff and a reasonable sized portion of super glue then press the two pieces together until the green stuff is holding the superglue until they both set. I generally leave models I've glued together for a little while and do something else so it is solid when I glue the next piece in.

As you can see from the assembled model the nacelles are closer together than most Federation ships and aren't on pylons set away from the hull. This gives the model a more predatory, sleeker and aggresive feel. The constitution is a pretty ship, but the war cruisers/destroyers are warships and plain about it.

You can clean and assemble this ship in ten minutes if you were quick about it, though I took my time because I wanted to get it perfect.
NCLassembled.jpg

Ortega Class War Destroyer

This is a four piece model. Cleaning up the saucer there were two small moulding lugs either side of the front of the saucer, a faint mould line just under the top edge of the saucer going round and a little bit of flash around the engine block. I trimmed the lugs and flash down with the modelling knife, and neatened it up with an emery board.

The engines sprue consists of two top engines and a bottom engine.The two top engines, as you can see from the picture, have a quite thick connection to the sprue. I clipped them off, then used the clippers to reduce as much of the connecting material without taking too much and making it hard for me to round them off. A minute with the emery board on each, and the warp nacelles had nice rounded fronts. There was a thin mould line on each engine and a tiny piece of flash at the end (which I'm going to have to call the exhaust, sorry if I'm wrong and causing tears of anger to roll down a hardened fans face).

The bottom engine was the most problematic. This is attached to a small but thick pylon with two nubbins that match two dimples in an inset box in the bottom of the saucer. This is about 1mm too wide on either side to slot into the box. I used the craft knife to trim the bottom 1-2mm of the pylon so that it sat neatly in the inset and the nubbins and dimples lined up and neatened it with the emery board.
DWenginetrimmed.jpg

Before assembly I dry fitted the pieces to confirm they all fit. I started with the bottom engine, and used a couple of half pin head sized pieces of green stuff and superglue to attach it, as seen here.
DWbottomengine.jpg

For the two top engines there are nubbins and dimples. If you want a ship you can play hackey sack with you can do a small drill and pin here to make sure the join is absolutely solid. I used a pin head amount of liquid green stuff that I put between the nubbins, and then a small blob of superglue on each nubbin. On the top left engine one of the nubbins was slightly too big, so a little trimming with the craft knife and it fit together perfectly. Press the pieces together until they hold on their own.
DW.jpg


Chicago Class New Heavy cruiser

In the background this is an enlarged Kearsarge Class designed as a heavy combat unit. It gains a small secondary hull and extra warp engine, making it a four piece kit. For those who love painting the windows on their ACTA ships, there are a fair few on the secondary hull.

On the saucer, again two small moulding lugs at the front and a faint mould line around the rim of the saucer. On the engines the warp nacelles need rounding off at the front and the exhaust, and the mould lines scraped or filed off and a couple of pieces of flash removed.

Dry fitting the pieces together, there was a little infill in the holes where the main engines joined the saucer. I took a pin vice drill and a 2mm drill bit and drilled these out, but as this took about a minute it didn’t bother me. However, with my drill out I remembered how butter fingered some of the people I game with are, and pinned the two larger engines to the saucer. To avoid issues I placed the pin in the small nubbin on one side and the large nubbin on the other. While thinking of models previously dropped or knocked over, I pulled the engines off the NCL (which did take a bit of force) and pinned those as well.
The smaller underslung engine was glued into place with a couple of tiny blobs of liquid greenstuff to help seal it.
The model didn’t take long to build, and apart from drilling out the holes for the nubbins there were no issues with the casting. As I pinned the model anyway it made very little difference to me.
NCA.jpg

Kirov Class Battlecruiser
In the Star Fleet background this is as big as a cruiser hull gets. The Kirov mounts the same number of photons as a cruiser, but two additional forward phaser-1s and 2 phaser-1 in turrets in the rear hull (Turret fire arc in ACTA means a 360 degree range of fire). This means a battlecruiser that centrelines an enemy ship hit’s it with 10 phaser-1s. The Kirov class has 4 drone racks. These can be used offensively or defensively. Used defensively it makes the Kirov virtually immune to drone attack. However on the New Jersey class two drones are replaced with photons (though you can fire a maximum of four a turn, but it does mean you can throw two photons in a long range snipe as you close and reload all tubes after you’ve completed your alpha strike, or swap them for two plasma torpedoes, which give you four dice of plasma (great for eating shields or causing devastating critical on a ship with it’s shields depleted, unless your opponent uses their phasers to shoot the torpedoes instead of shooting you).
Battlecruisers are the complete package in SFB and ACTA: Star Fleet. They can squash any enemy cruiser, provide good command abilities, and while not as sturdy as a dreadnought, can take a lot more punishment than a cruiser.
Cleaning up the model there were a couple of small moulding lugs on the saucer and some tags on the engines, engineering hull and deflector dish. Cutters and an emery board dealt with this, and a craft knife and the emery board again dealt with a little flash and the mould lines. There was some infilling on the hole for the deflector dish, but as it took me longer to change the drill bit in my pin vice drill to the 2mm bit than it did for me to drill it out I don’t regard it as a major issue.

On the warp nacelles at the front there was a little pitting on one and an almost invisible amount on the other. These would probably have been filled by paint when the model is painted, but as I’m making these models for display and demo games and I’m putting extra effort in to make sure if I take pictures of them they suck because of my poor photography skills, I filled them in with very small amounts of liquid greenstuff. I put these to one side to dry before I made sure any excess greenstuff was removed.
While that was drying I tidied up the deflector dish and attached it to the engineering hull (again, green stuff and superglue). I dry fitted the saucer and engineering hull. While this isn’t necessary again my mind flashed back to the time someone’s Bloodthirster got knocked off a table at the club. I decided to put a small pin in the ‘neck’ of the ship as well the two nubbins and groove that the impulse engines sat in. I placed it between the impulse engines and the hole closest to them on the saucer, where it was thickest. I then dry fitted the engines. The booms for the warp nacelles have tabs that slot into the engineering hull, giving a solid join. One of these holes was a little shallowing, and a minutes drill work was required to deepen it so the boom was flush with the hull.
BCassembly.jpg

A little green stuff and super glue, and the engines were attached to the engineering hull. I then added green stuff and superglue to the nubbins and pin on the neck of the engineering hull and attached the saucer, holding it in place until it had set.
The battlecruiser was harder to assemble than the new series ships, and the lessons learnt between the design of the first wave of Federation ships (dreadnought, battlecruiser, heavy cruiser, strike cruiser, fast cruiser, old light cruiser, battle frigate, frigate and police ship) and the second wave (new heavy cruiser, new light cruiser, war destroyer, new fast cruiser) and obvious and have made a significant difference to the ease of assembly.
BCassembled.jpg

Federation Class Dreadnought

The flagships of the Federation fleet, dreadnoughts pack massive firepower onto a tough hull, able to bring 10 phaser-1s and 6 photons to bear on a target they have centrelined.
I already have a dreadnought from my fleet box. I’ll assemble a second one for colossal fleet battles, but all subsequent dreadnoughts I get from squadron boxes I’ll swap for other ships or sell on.
There are two small moulding tags on the saucer and one on the shuttlebay on the engineering hull. Each of the warp engines had a small amount of pitting in the nacelle, and I fixed this before moving on to clean up the engineering hull and saucer. Again it was a quick job, and I left it to dry in the sun.
Dreadnoughtassembly.jpg

The hole for the deflector dish was a little too shallow. A few twists with the 2mm drill bit and it was fine. There was a little flash on the spine of the engineering hull and a little on the bottom. Underneath it required more delicacy to get rid of, as a number of small details run along the bottom of the hull. With the engineering hull cleared up, I cleaned up the deflector dish and attach it.
Due to the weight of the model, and worries about damage due to rough handling, I opted to pin the engineering hull to the saucer and the saucer warp engine by putting two pins the the two nubbins on the engineering hull that contact the saucer warp engine. The two warp engines that connect to the engineering hull have nubbin/hole arrangements to make the join more secure. A bit of judicious filing was required to make sure the engines fit snugly, and then they were glued into place.

Verdict

Here’s a picture of the completed squadron box. I found the new ships much easier to build than the dreadnought and battlecruiser, but nothing stretched my modelling skills in any way, and I’m an adequate modeller at best.
Squadron7.jpg

For £30 this is a complete fleet, and adding the Manta Ray class fast cruiser brings it up to tournament points level. I’ve played a few games of ACTA: Star Fleet now and have enjoyed it, and now I’ve got a Federation fleet as well.

I would recommend the set for people into space wargames or people into Star Trek. The rules do give a very Original Series feel to it. It’s an alternative to Squadron box #1, and the ships are easier to put together (you also get more points of ships in this set). It is almost an exact points match for the Klingon squadron box, which comes in at 1010 points. I’ve painted a big chunk of my Klingon fleet, and these beauties will be next on my painting table.
 
My only negative comment is one of those "tears of anger" nitpicks. :wink: Its actually the "KearsaRge class", the ACTA:SF book unfortunately has a typo. That hardly counts though, this is a great review and the pictures are quite illustrative of what you get and pretty well focused. Far better than my attempts at photographing minis!
 
OK, I've completed the review and redone the DW picture as I didn't like it.

It's not actually taken me three days to assemble these minis, I keep dozing off or thinking about something else.
 
Read it again now that its finished. I can find no complaint, I didn't think the old DW pic was that blurry but the new pictures are definitely superior.
 
I'd be tempted to leave out some of the stuff about the specific capabilities of the ships in the game. If you are writing a model review then it could be a bit cluttered especially if people are totally unfamiliar with the system.

Otherwise cool!

Geoff
 
Trimmed the battlecruiser description down a lot and posted it on warseer. Hopefully the people slating the models will no longer be in a position to do so with pics of them to hand.
 
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