I am one of those weird anomalies in sci-fi.
I am both an avid Star Wars fan, as well as a Trekkie.
I grew up watching Star Trek TOS with my mom every Sunday morning, as she sipped her morning coffee from bed, I would come crawl in and watch the adventures of James T. Kirk and his cohorts.
Making their way through the galaxy to planets unknown, kicking alien ass, and wooing all the humanoid women he could.
When I was a teen, I feel in love with Star Trek all over again with The Next Generation. Following the exploits of Captain Picard and the gang, racing home from school to watch the reruns of my favorite episodes on Fox.
So it is of great surprise that I have dozens of Star Wars sets, but nothing til now of Star Trek.
Truth be told, it is a franchise that has seen a lot of toys and action figures, but up until a year ago had not had a single building toy.
Maybe because it has always come second to Star Wars, due to marketing, or fan base, who knows, it just has never been milked dry as Bantha like Star Wars has.
So it is not small surprise I had to run out and grab the Enterprise as soon as I saw it.
Now the odd thing is, it has been sitting here for almost 2 years now, waiting to be assembled finally.
I never had much room for it, as it is a huge ship, but to show my Star Trek pride, decided it should reside in my office downtown.
Now I have been out of the legitimate set racket for so long, I forgot what it is like to buy a retail version of something.
All my Chinese block-offs come in a super tightly packed box, taped up so tight you almost need a saw to get into them.
So when I opened up the Enterprise it was a real treat.
Full box art:
And a fancy place for the manual even
What it did lack however was a numbering system
As this set clocked in over 3000 pieces, I had not choice but to do a rudimentary sorting job.
Once that was out of the way, I got onto the build which was surprisingly good for Mega Bloks.
My experience in the past has been mixed.
While the finished products tend to look nice, their clutch and build usually sucks.
That is NOT the case here.
The clutch on Mega now is almost too good.
My hands were red and raw by the time I finished.
The core of the ship is very solid, but it has to be, there is a lot of weight it needs to bear.
The center is all one solid piece, and thankfully it is, as the set is a whopping 16lbs, most of which is contained in the saucer and engines.
The main body design did something I have never seen before, they used a pile of bricks to make a temporary stand for the ship while being assembled, so it would not keep tipping over.
So it is build in very tight and no glue was needed to make things hold.
The engines sit on top of the solid posts, and are held in by gravity alone. They have slots in them that are well reinforced and show little worry of breaking
The neck of the ship is designed to slot into the saucer once complete.
This is a clever design and works well to balance the weight of the saucer and keep it all solid. There is very little bend or movement in the ship when assembled.
There are however a few snags in the design.
Sliding the neck of the saucer through the main base of the ship was horrible.
There is zero room for variance here, so if the bricks are even 1/100 of a mm too out of alignment, it will not slide though. I almost had to put it in a vice to compact it to slide it though
Once it is in there though, there is zero chance it will be coming out unless completely disassembled.
The second challenge was the saucer.
The vast majority was straight forward, until you reach the command deck.
It is assembled separately, then put on in one chuck at the end.
But again, the uber clutch comes back to bite you in the ass.
You almost need a rubber mallet to hammer it on. By hands were in so much pain by the end of the build from pressing this together.
And lastly, again we have a slotting issue.
The saucer fits nice and snug on the long neck, which again, offers zero room of error. it slid in about 75% of the way with ease, then once it was getting towards the end, bound down on bricks that were slightly out of alignment.
This took a good 15 mins of playing with it to make it fit.
BUT Once together, she is a beautiful ship.
Unlike most Lego designs, it looks like a model.
Very little scream it is a building block, with lots of smooth surfaces and fancy finishes.
The engines even light up when pressed
If you are a trekkie like I am, you owe it to yourself to check this set out.
The can still be had for about $100 (they were 299 new when they came out), so snap it up before it is gone, because much like Lego, once they are retired the price goes through the roof.
A 10.10 for finished product, and a 7.5 for the actual frustration of the build.
The Compulsive Canadian Gamer 