First comment

Thanks to Stevens once again for providing yet another superlative Trumpeter kit for IPMS to review. The best we can do for appreciation is to buy kits they offer; and this one is worth every dime! I’ll go on record as saying this was the best Trumpeter kit I’ve built.

On the porch

“Hey, that’s a big box”. It’s also a heavy box. Postman is rolling around on the lawn in pain kind of heavy. I go out and do a clean-and-jerk lift…. And it’s off to the workbench!

This being the second Kinetic kit I’ve had the pleasure to build and review, I have found several similarities in the offerings. First, the instructions could use some tweaking, in that I found some misnumbered parts. It would be of major benefit to the builder to keep his reference material close at hand. Secondly, during construction I encountered what I felt was a major fit issue with the wing to fuselage joints. My kit required completing the attachment in 4 steps with cyano acrylic and accelerator to close gaps in the wing roots (interestingly, I have since had an opportunity to read other build reviews of this subject and their experience didn’t seem as pronounced as mine. Maybe it was something I did wrong.) In any event, these two issues are the only negatives to an otherwise exceptionally nice kit. Third and last, this kit, like the F84F from Kinetic, suffers with extremely fat trailing edges, so get out the wood rasp.

Background

It’s hard for some of us to believe it’s been nearly a half-century since Star Trek’s debut in 1964. Over the decades, the Starship U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701, has arguably become the most recognizable, esteemed, and influential vessel in intergalactic travel -- so influential that even the first NASA Space Shuttle bore her name as the result of a massive write-in campaign from Star Trek fans in the mid-1970’s.

Her incarnations have been many, starting with the original “made for TV” Constitution-Class NCC-1701 in 1964, “refitted” in 1979 for Star Trek the Motion Picture, carbon-copied as NCC-1701-A in a sequel, then finally being outright up-classed in the form of the Excelsior-Class NCC-1701-B in Star Trek - Generations in 1994. Other Starfleet vessels bearing the Enterprise moniker have followed, and proceeded, but the “Refit” version from the 1980’s movies is the subject this offering under the Polar Lights brand from Round2 Models.