Starships Collection's USS Kelvin, SS Botany Bay and other updates

It's a double event week for Eaglemoss' The Official Starships Collection; not only are new models on display at the San Diego Comic Con, but the fiftieth issue in the series, the original USS Enterprise, also made its debut in the UK. As ever there's plenty of other little updates to note too, so continue below for lots of starships news.

First up, we have our first look at the next special issue, the USS Kelvin, on display at the Diamond Comic Distributors booth at Comic Con. These excellent close-up images come from DJC, via TrekToy forum poster Alteran195:

Also newly revealed is the SS Botany Bay, which is coming as issue sixty. Alas I've yet to come across any close-up shots of this one, but you can see it in this image from Action Figure Insider, and in similar images posted by Action Figure Fury, and Ben Robinson. It looks like a surprisingly large model for a long and thin design.

UPDATE: Trek Toy's Alteran195 has also posted images of the SS Botany Bay now, and you can see even more images of both ships at the source.

Also newly revealed, by The Collection's manager, Ben Robinson, on Twitter, is one of the brand new Okudagrams, made by Mike Okuda to go with the new shuttlecraft models, which Ben also revealed should be available in October or November.

Other recent posts from Ben noted that The Collection will now be be continuing after issue thirty-five in Canada (after an apparent pause), and will be launching in The Netherlands in the next month or so.

Ben also posted some really cool John Eaves concept art for the Klingon Attack Ship, which is due out soon as issue fifty-three. The magazine will of course elaborate on how these concepts morphed into what we saw on screen.

Finally, Ben had a lot more to say when he talked to Some Kind of Star Trek about The Collection, to mark that fiftieth issue benchmark. In the interview he highlighted a lot of the technical issues in producing the ships, both successes and limitations from the scale, time, and budget. That included a mention that the USS Enterprise-A will be coming at some point in the early-70s. He talked about that in contrast to the very early refit USS Enterprise issue:

It was developed really early on and the paint job on that ship is incredibly complicated and the nature of the aztec is much more sophisticated than the aztecs on subsequent paintings. I was trying to be very purist about it and wanted it to look the way it did in The Motion Picture which was slightly pink. It has this lavender cast which comes off it. I was also thinking about how the ship should look. Should it look right when you put a light on it? If you don't shine a light on it? There were a lot of things I hadn't quite worked out and it was a big learning.

Speaking of learning, the less detailed finishes of the TOS ships that are finally finding their way into The Collection also provided their own challenges it seems:

The problem then is that with things such as the Klingon D-7 I want to be purist about it and there are some details on it that people may not know about and that you can't see on screen but it is a plain ship painted one colour.

The Romulan Bird-of-Prey is a very plain ship with a very big bird painted on the underside and the biggest problem was that when it first came in it looked like a toy. The decal was too bright, too colourful and we went through a lot of interesting experiments to get that to look right. You have to explain to the factory that you want some film grain in the artwork and we learned a lot from that one because it was so simple.

Ben also talked about some of the ships he hopes in include in The Collection, and lot more about how the series has developed right from the first hint of an idea, so check out the full piece on Some Kind of Star Trek.

For a listing of all the ships in the Starships Collection, including links to all my previous previews and reviews, see my index page.