AND I'm back!!! After a 6 month hiatus brought on by some financial constraints, I've managed to save up some money and makes some purchases.
This will be a relatively short review as only Eaglemoss has produced this model in a pre-built and pre-painted format of this size. This is the second of the "captain's yachts" to be covered by Eaglemoss, the first one being The Cousteau of the USS Enterprise E. You can read that review at THIS LINK.
This is a first for Eaglemoss in that it is a ship that has never actually appeared on screen. Actually, that's not entirely accurate as we did catch glimpses of it whenever we saw the underside views of Voyager's saucer section.
Eaglemoss did briefly talk about this ship in thier magazine for thier rendition of Voyager. (You can read my review of that model at THIS LINK).
With the addition of this model, we now have a total of five ships that are all tied directly to Voyager herself.
So let's briefly talk about the ship itself... An Aeroshuttle (also known as Aerowing shuttle) was the term given to the ventrally docking subordinate craft of Intrepid-class starships. The craft was designed for atmospheric operations, and short-term missions as a support vessel. You can read a lot more information about the actual ship at these Memory Alpha and Memory Beta links.
And now that we got that out of the way, let us focus on Eaglemoss' model.
As I looked closely at the model, the first thing that came to mind was in regards to the joins and seams. They were not executed well for this model and you can clearly tell that the top metal piece was stuck to the bottom plastic piece.
The sculpted and molded details are very abundant on this model, both on the top as well as the bottom. The model does suffer from the Eaglemoss curse of its metal parts have a more softer and rounded look to the molded details while the bottom plastic parts are nice a crisp and edgy.
The paint job on the model is well done... for the most part. There is a lot of color detail to the top side of an otherwise plain white vessel. The paint job on the warp core was a nice touch. I was impressed with the paint job on the bottom of the ship too as it didn't make it boring looking.
My complaint about the paint came from my looking at the back of the model. I am guessing that the red squares on the back are impulse engines, however, the magazine doesn't identify these parts, so your guess is as good as mine. Judging by the test video from Foundation Imaging of the Aeroshuttle launch, I'm probably right though.
Those red squares are rather blotchy on my model and my rear windows are a tad mussed up as well.
As with most Starfleet vessels, Eaglemoss made sure to include some clear plastics on the model. They did a nice job with the clear plastics on the nacelle parts of the wings
See what I mean about those join lines?
It's been so long since I wrote one of these reviews, that I almost forgot this next part...
Traditionally, whenever I review a Starfleet ship, I like to hyper-focus on the deflector dish as it usually gives me a good idea of the level of attention to details that a manufacturer puts into thier models. Let's face it, this is a very important part of the ship and should be accurately represented.
Unfortunately, the deflector dish is on the top side of the model, which means that the details are a bit softened and don't look all that clear. And the yellow paint is off center which just makes the whole thing look blotchy.
Don't get me wrong, it's a nice model and a model of a ship that we never got to see at that. It's just not Eaglemoss' best work. At the time of the writing of the article, you can get these models on eBay for around $27 (shipping included). But the uniqueness of the ship and the fact that it is still a relatively well done model, makes it worth the investment. This is even more so if you already have the other USS Voyager models.
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
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