Battle Station Unboxing

Last week I was away for three days at an end-of-year sales meeting, to return to find my battle-station/rulebook pre-order had arrived...hooray! Opening the package and removing the rulebook (which I covered in the last post) left me with a box full of resin and acrylic;

Unloading the stash shows s what we have;

There's a surprising amount of laser-cut acrylic in the box, and it's not that obvious what belongs to what on first glance. Opening the baggies gives us the resin (and in the case of the Aquan station, a flight stand as well.

All the stations are two-piece resin affairs, with the exception of the Relthoza and Dindrezi, which are both three piece. There are no instructions, so assembly is a matter of studying the pieces and looking at the photos on-line. In most cases they are pretty intuitive - the Aquan one being most obvious (which is why it's next to the station in the picture). In the photo above, the Directorate acrylic is the blue piece, the Sorylians on the extreme left, Terran mid-bottom, Dindrenzi to the right below the Directorate blue pieces and the Relthoza having a very large sheet at the top.

Now you have to be very careful taking the laser-cut acrylic pieces out, and even more careful taking the cut outs from inside them. This is what I ended up with whilst trying to take out one of the centre pieces from my Relthoza parts;

So I'd recommend using a scalpel or similar, together with lots of care...the above breakage won't be that difficult to mend, but it's a pain. The Relthoza station is also the least intuitive to put together, it took 5 minutes of fiddling to work out exactly what is supposed to be going on.

Some of the stations are easy to test-fit together, the Terran, Sorylian and Dindrenzi falling into this category. Here they are;

They're a decent size, with nice detail, and finely cast with very little flash (you can see a little on the Dindrenzi station centre part above, but that's about as bad as it gets - a few seconds with a scalpel or file will see you right). Considering these are about the price of a standard cruiser each when bought all together with the rules, they represent excellent value, although (as I demonstrated) you need to be very careful in handling the acrylic.

I'll be getting these washed and primed ready for painting ASAP so I can get them onto the table!