This is one of the old McDaniel’s Models kits that was released in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The ship is classified as a drednaught, and is based on some of the original Franz Joseph designs. The ship is in scale with the original AMT TOS Enterprise kit. This is the “big gun” when it comes to Federation ships as it is 320 meters long (compared to the Enterprise at 288.6 meters). With its triple-nacelle design, it packs more firepower and a larger crew (500) than the Enterprise (430). The design first appeared in the original Star Fleet Technical Manual that was released in 1975 (which I have a copy of, including the black plastic slipcover with the gold lettering).

The kit is primarily vacuform plastic, but there are lots of resin details. The vacuform parts include the upper and lower primary hull sections, port and starboard secondary hull sections, and the warp nacelle halves (for three nacelles). Everything else on this kit is a resin detail piece, and there are a ton of them.

With all of the detail parts, this is definitely not a kit for a beginner. I’d classify this as somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced, just based on the number of detail parts.

Eight pages of assembly instructions were included, along with a fairly comprehensive decal sheet that included all of the markings and windows for the ship.

The completed kit measures about 19 inches long and 8.5 inches wide.

Original Franz Joseph design
Secondary hull section
Kit decals - sheet 1
Kit decals - sheet 2

Review by: Rich “Lonewolf” Dula

Entry created: 06/25/09