EMvTW 42: USS Pasteur NCC-58525 (Olympic class)

NOTE:  You can click on most pictures to get a larger view of them.

Rewrites: June 2016 & November 2018

After I moved the Deepspace Pat home front, money got a little tight so I canceled my Eaglemoss subscription.  Fast forward a few months later, and things are going good, so last month, I ordered a batch of ships to catch myself up with where I would have been with the collection.  Quite frankly, I did not pay that much more getting the ships on eBay than I would have through the subscription.  So, I figured, "what the heck" and decided to push ahead with the collection and go further than I would have been in the collection, had I simply started the subscription back up.  And thus, I have another 7 ships to talk about this month.  I'm rather excited about this batch of ships because I actually have other manufacturers versions to compare them to, which is the whole reason I started writing these articles.

The first of this new group of articles will be the Olympic Class, which we all know as the USS Pasteur (NCC-58525) as was seen in the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the episode titled, "All Good Things".

My collection consists of an Eaglemoss, a Furuta and a MicroMachine version.


Per Memory Alpha and Beta, "The Olympic-class hospital ship was a class of starship in service with Starfleet during the late 24th century."  They go on to say this about the USS Pasteur, "The USS Pasteur (NCC-58925) was operated by Starfleet Medical. The Pasteur was constructed by the Skywalker Division at the Marin County Starfleet Yards.  In an unknown, future timeframe, this medical ship was commanded by Captain Beverly Picard. The ship was destroyed by two Klingon attack cruisers after the Pasteur crossed the Klingon border to scan the Devron system for a temporal anomaly. "

If you would like to read more official stuff on this type of ship, feel free to check out the following links:

Olympic Class Information: Memory Alpha LINK and Memory Beta LINK
USS Pasteur (NCC-58525) Information: Memory Alpha LINK and Memory Beta LINK

This is one of the ships that MicroMachine had done back in the day when Galoob was producing the Star Trek line.  All in all, they did a fairly good job for how small the model was.

 

Since my articles are supposed to focus on larger scale models, we will just move along.

Eaglemoss vs. Furuta

I write this particular series of articles to give a good side-by-side comparison of the various pre-built and pre-painted small scale starships available to a collector.  I found that there was a serious lack of material showing what they looked like next to each other thus not giving me a good informed choice on what to buy.  I decided to start providing this information myself since I ended up buying the different manufacturer renditions of the same ship.

So now I present to you what I like to call "the gravy shot", a series of pictures I wished I had seen long ago, and the main reason I started this blog.

Eaglemoss vs. Furuta vs. MicroMachine

I have to tell you, it is a royal P.I.T.A. to try to photograph all three ships simultaneously while they rest upright.  I eventually gave up that quest.  Normally, I don't compare the MicroMachine model in these pictures, but I felt it was important to give you a better sense of the sizes.

The Eaglemoss ship dwarfs the other two models.  It is just huge!  The Furuta model comes from thier Volume 3 series and is much smaller than thier older ships of the line.  In fact, it is not much bigger than the MicroMachine model.

Eaglemoss

 

 

 

 

This is one of those ships that very few manufacturers have tried to produce in a pre-built, pre-painted small scale model.  And up until Eaglemoss had a go at it, the only other attempts were tiny and didn't give you anything really special to look at.

Like Eaglemoss' attempt at making the larger version of the Oberth Class, making a larger version of this ship has served Eaglemoss well and allowed them to really show off the details of this ship.  You can check out my review of the Oberth class starships at THIS LINK.

The sculpted and molded details in both the plastic and metal sections of the model are great and give that extra bit that makes the ship really stand out.

They show off all sorts of tiny details like the plethora of windows and escape pods.

The paint job alone is superb!  Well... Almost.  The painted on details, especially when it comes to all of those windows and escape pod hatches are spot on and all in alignment.

My only complaints as far as painting is in regards to the very crooked line on one side of the primary hull.

The other spot that could have used a little more detail was the impulse engine.  Although they chose to mold one into the ship, it is lacking a little color.  Perhaps a couple clear red plastics would have been nice here.

I really had a hard time making out the join lines for the seams on this ship.  If you look hard enough, you can spot some along the back of the engineering hull.

I also felt that they did a good job with the clear plastic parts on the ship as well, highlighting the ram scoops.  They might have improved a tiny bit by using blue in the actual nacelles, or as I pointed out earlier, some red for the impulse engines.

Whenever I do a comparative of Starfleet vessels, I like to hyper-focus on the deflector assemblies of those models as I feel that a manufacturer's attention to this small area of a ship gives you insight into just how meticulous they are when creating thier model.

Up until I received my Eaglemoss ship and magazine, I never realized that the deflector array was actually a strip around the bottom portion of the primary hull.  Eaglemoss does a good job of profiling this part of the ship in both molding and paint, although, it might have been better to use a blue paint instead.

Furuta

 

 

 

 

I'm going to admit that, yes, I do copy and paste this next bit every time I review a Furuta model, but I feel that it is important for my first time readers to understand this part about Furuta....

Furuta is a Japanese company that produced a series of gashapon toys.  Gashapon toys are meant to be nothing more than cheap little $1 to $5 bubble gum machine prizes.  I like to remind my readers of this fact so that they can take any critical reviews I may make in the spirit it is given.  I am in no way expecting these toys to be on the level of a Hallmark, Eaglemoss or Hot wheels toy.  I found a neat video about these types of toys and you can check that out at THIS LINK.

Unfortunately, Furuta produced the Pastuer during it's Volume 3 era and quite frankly, I was disappointed with most of thier models at this point in time.  I guess that Furuta needed to cut down on cost of production because they seriously scaled back the size of thier volume 3 ships.  In some cases, the model was no bigger than a MicroMachine toy of the same vessel.

Don't get me wrong, it was a nice little model at the time considering you couldn't get one anywhere else.

The molded details were well done and they at least showed off the many windows on the ship.

Paint was a bit lacking.  I would even go as far as to say that the model was plain.  This was especially true when it came to those windows, but in reality, it would have been a royal bear to try to paint all of them at that size.

They at least made the deflector strip on thier model, but the size of the ship pretty much made it impossible to paint it.

The work on the nacelles was rather impressive.

I don't hate the model as it filled a gap in my collection until Eaglemoss came along with thier rendition of the ship.

Conclusion

And now, let us do a quick check on eBay to get some prices of the ships I've shared with you.  I will continue with the tradition of rounding up the most inexpensive Buy-It-Now prices (with shipping included in that price) from eBay at the time of this article's (re)writing (November 2018).

Eaglemoss = $30

Furuta = $10

MicroMachine = $8

NOTE: Prices were researched last on November 29th, 2018.  As of the writing of this article, you can also currently order the Eaglemoss model right from the company themselves for around $23 (shipping unknown).

We now come to the part of my article where I like to give you my opinion of which ship gives you the "best bang for the buck", which is my rough way of telling you which one is the best one to get, for the best price.  To put this in a nutshell, when I write these, I am trying to give my opinion of which model is the best for the least cost. 

Normally, I would factor price into my recommendations for these articles, BUT.... let's face it, why would you NOT want to pay twice (or three times, depending on your source) as much more than the Furuta model, to get the awesome looking Eaglemoss model?  Quite frankly, you are getting way more than twice as much in ship.  The larger size that Eaglemoss went with, afforded them with the ability to endow this model with tons of details.  And even though there were a couple of tiny painting issues, it still was far better looking than the Furuta choice.

You won't go wrong with choosing the Eaglemoss model and adding this ship to your fleet.

As always, I hope you found this article useful and informative.  If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to comment below.

So for now, "Live long and prosper!!!"



Additional Links To Photos Of My Collection:

Eaglemoss     Furuta   
MicroMachine     Comparative Shots

Other Reviewers Take On The Eaglemoss Model:
Some Kind Of Star Trek
Star Trek Starship Collection