By Jeffrey Griffin - images & text © 2008

Scale: 1/2500 - right at 5.75"/ 14.61cm long

Parts: 4 resin, which includes main saucer/hull, weapons pod/pylon assembly and two (2) nacelles (no base)

Instructions: One page, full color sheet. Used primarily as a decal instruction sheet, but gives a good idea of where all parts need to go, as well as a basic paint guide .

Decals: One full-color sheet for U.S.S. Centaur, NCC-42043. Decal sheet includes full hull aztec pattern and colored markings, to include the pylons and nacelles.

Molding Quality: 10 - pretty darned crisp, with exactly two air bubbles, only some minor mold seams that were easily removed on my review sample

Detail: 9 - Nicely detailed

Accuracy: 9 - Looks Dead On from the Reference Material found online at Ex Astris Scientia

MSRP: $30.00 USD (~$30.29 CAN/ € 19.50 EUR) available from Federation Models

Overall Rating: 10 - Very nice kit that needs very little cleanup work

Gizmotron Models has given us an ever larger number of great Star Trek related kits and decal sheets over the last couple of years. All of them have been of excellent quality and this Centaur-class 1/2500 scale kit is to the standard of excellence that we've come to expect.

The Centaur-class starship first appeared in the late '90's in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. We've not seen even a single example of this design since that episode, "A Time To Stand". I was never a big fan of the design for some reason, but had slowly grown to like it as time wore on - if only because it was different than most of the other Star Fleet designs we've seen over the years. It's still an ugly "Frankenship" in my mind, though.

Image: Decals

Image: Instructions

However, other fans of Star Trek have wanted a kit of this particularly design - there's at least one in 1/1400 scale of which I'm aware - and now 1/2500 scale fans finally have a complete kit for their collections - no kitbashing necessary.

What I Got

The kit comes packaged in a ziploc bag with the decal sheet and instruction sheet and a nice label at the top of the outer ziploc bag. The model parts themselves are packaged separately from the instruction and decal sheet. You get a total of four resin cast pieces: one each primary hull, wepaons pod/warp nacelle pylon assembly, and two warp nacelles. A one-page , full color instruction sheet is included. The resin appears to be the standard gray resin that we've come to expect from Gizmotron the last two or so years. The resin pieces have only a touch of flash. While some seam lines are apparent, they're easy to take care of with a bit of Xacto and sand paper.

Detail is crisp and clean and consists of mostly raised surfaces on the exterior of the hull. The are no docking ports, windows, deflector grids or phaser "bumps", but the detail parts on the upper and lower hull that can't be duplicated with decals are present, as are the photorp emitters and raised detail on the nacelles. The shuttlebay area in front of the bridge is present and looks to-scale, as are the impulse engine domes. The lower sensor array and impulse engine vents are recessed areas.

As with all other Gizmotron kits, however, this lack of surface detail on the model is no big deal, as it comes complete with decals to represent everything that's physically missing - detail that would likely look out of scale if not represented by decals. The deflector grid, aztec paneling, pylon vents, shuttlebay doors, phaser emitters and impulse engine details are all crisply printed laser jet quality. Looking at them, you can tell that Gizmotron did their homework.

Assembly and Finish

I've only done a dry-fitting t after cleaning the pieces with some some Comet Cleaner, rinsed the parts, then cleaned again with scrubbing bubbles to make sure that any mold release was well and truly gone from the models surface. Just a bit of sanding was required to remove mold seams and there were just two airbubbles present on my sample - both will be easy to fill. The dry-fit assembly was straight foward with the parts fitting very easily and requiring no additional work to get them all to fit. I've used "Super Glue Gel" (Duro brand) to adhese the parts of my other Gizmotron Models kits together and imagine that there will be no problem w/this kit, either.

Conclusions

I'm very happy to own this and look forward to completing it for my collection, at some point in the future. My TNG/DS9/VOY-Era Star Fleet will be that much more complete now. If you're a fan of canon Star Trek ships, as I am, this is definitely one to get! Considering some similarly sized kits cost more than twice this, you almost can't afford not to purchase this one.