I have been a huge fan of Star Trek for as long as I can remember with fond childhood memories of watching the original series on TV, and then the excitement when the crew were brought back for Star Trek The Movie (which I was a bit disappointed with) but was followed by the exceptional The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home. Many more films followed and we were introduced to new Enterprises with new crews captained by Picard and Archer. More recently I have been following the career of Captain Janeway leading her crew on a long voyage home and have discovered the rich variety of Star Trek novels and audio books.
As well as being a Star Trek fan, I have of course also been a gamer, enjoying all branches of gaming including board games, role playing games and miniatures gaming. Star Trek has of course always featured in this. I think that I was in the 6th form when Star Fleet Battles was released, and I was a huge fan. Back then there was not a Star Trek role playing or miniatures games, so we had to improvise and some of our early games of Traveller had a Star Trek landing party flavour to them. As the years have passed we have been well served, and I have collected and played many other Star Trek games including Federation Commander, Prime Directive RPG and Star Trek Attack Wing.
Above all I love the visual appeal of 28mm miniatures for gaming. Over the last year I have been running a Star Trek role playing game using Star Trek Adventures (STA). To play the STA RPG you do not need any miniatures or terrain, but as I am a 28mm miniatures gamer I wanted to collect, paint and use miniatures that resembled our characters species and the division in which they served. We will take a look at them and some of the adversaries they have met in a future blog. The ship that they call home is the USS Cousteau. It is a Galaxy Class Cruiser (so I’m not planning to model all of it!), but I am determined to model some of the key locations, starting with the bridge.
The model that I have for the bridge is from a 3D printed design from a company called LV-427. It comes in 10 main pieces, which I have printed on my FDM printer (an Ender 5) using PLA (a type of plastic made from corn starch). The section in the photographs is my colour test. I’ve tried a few schemes out and I am now settling on blue for the floor, off white for the walls, Runic Grey for the bottom half of consoles and black for the top halves. The bridge model, very conveniently, has slots where images can be inserted for computer displays. The images have been photographed from some of my Role Playing sourcebooks, reduced to the correct size, printed and laminated.
The crew figures are all from the Sally 4th Landing Party range. These are available as packs of 28mm star ship crew equipped with either hand energy weapons (inspired by Type 2 Phasers), energy rifles (inspired by Type 3 Phasers), hand held scanners (inspired by Tricorders), empty handed or carrying bags, cases or equipment. There are a huge variety of species available and heads and arms can also be purchased separately for conversions.
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