Ba'kash Patrol Fleet & Cruiser Group Unboxing

Courtesy of Mr Fawcett, we are now in possession of a rather nice Ba'kash patrol fleet and cruiser group (natural allies for my Relthoza), so I thought I should return the courtesy by showcasing the products here. First up, the Patrol fleet. As with the other unboxings I've done on here, and all of Spartan's releases over the past year, it follows the standard format of a glossy card sleeve over a sturdy corrugated box. The box art of the Studio models is pretty nice;

On the rear of the box is the usual little bit of fluff, plus overhead renders of the Battle Carrier, destroyers, frigates and SRS tokens.

Opening the box and taking out the contents, we get the usual three card token sheets, a set of the new TAC cards, flight stands, a bag of SRS tokens & arms, and the actual models themselves in bubble-wrap bags.

Delving deeper into the models themselves, we have the Battle Carrier and its six arms plus flight peg attachment (just the one, which was surprising given the size of it), the two destroyers with their single arms and flight peg attachments, and the the five single-piece frigates. We also have the four SRS tokens to round out the set - essential for the Battle Carrier

The Cruiser group follows a similar pattern, just in the smaller size box;

Inside this we find a familiar set of bags containing flight stands, parts and main hulls;

Opening these out we can get all the components for three cruisers - or heavy cruisers;

That's a LOT of arms!

Taking a closer look at the models, starting with the Battle Carrier, we can see just how big they are. Taking a standard Chironex cruiser, you can see just what a brute the Karrak is;

The Destroyer is ;

As you might be able to tell from the picture of the Cruisers above, some of the heavy cruiser arms weren't straight;

Fortunately these "bendy ends" are easily fixed. A cup of boiling water, immerse the part for 15 seconds or so;

Then take out, carefully bend back to straightness and cool. I do this in the kitchen so I can have a cold tap running next to the hot water, then I can bend back into shape and plunge straight under the stream so the part fixes immediately.

There we have the arm, now pretty much straight - certainly without the very pronounced bend it had previously. I only saw this on about 30% of the heavy cruiser arms (and only on the thin end parts), not on the standard arms - these are thick enough, with strengthening "ribs" not to have this problem.

Moving on from the cruisers, the frigates have certainly put on a LOT of weight since the original versions - here they are with the trusty Chironex for comparison;

Given the warping of some of the heavy cruiser arms, I can understand this, and the old frigates were always rather anaemic looking. Personally I'd have preferred a happy medium somewhere between the two, but hey, I'm not complaining!

So overall the Ba'kash are looking good, and continue the quality and themes of recent SG releases. The ships don't have open and closed options anymore, but then these were always a little bewildering previously as there was no MAR to differentiate them in game, and the heavy metal pieces did make constructing them (and keeping them that way) problematic to say the least - a little less flexibility is a small price to pay IMO for the new resin models.