Book Review: 'Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293'

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©2018 Eaglemoss Ltd. Star Trek marks and logos are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. 
On September 25, 2018, nearly 50 years after the start of Star Trek: The Original Series' third and final season on the NBC television network, Hero Collector published Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293, the first book of a multi-volume encyclopedia dedicated to the various Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and other starships featured in the ever-expanding Star Trek television and movie franchise.

Edited by Ben Robinson and written by Robinson, Marcus Reily, and Matt McAllister, Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 is a lavishly illustrated 192-page hardcover dedicated to the various Starfleet vessels that have been seen in the various television series and feature films from The Original Series all the way to CBS All Access' Star Trek: Discovery. 

 Written as an in-universe reference work, Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 is a pictorial history of the ships that served in the United Federation of Planets' Starfleet and its United Earth precursor from the mid-22nd Century all the way to the death of the legendary Capt. James Tiberius Kirk in 2293. In addition, the SS Botany Bay (the 1990s-era sleeper ship on which Khan Noonien Singh and 79 of his fellow Augments were sent out into interstellar exile after the Eugenics Wars) and Earth's first warp-capable vessel, the Phoenix, are covered extensively.

This volume profiles more than 250 years worth of Starfleet ships and their Earth-operated precursors. Including Zefram Cochrane's ship, the Phoenix, which made the first faster-than-light journey in human history, through Captain Kirk's famous Enterprise up to the Enterprise-B: the ship where Kirk was lost. Plus all of the Starfleet ships from STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. 

 This in-depth reference book includes a technical overview and operational history for each ship and is illustrated with CG artwork, including VFX models made for the TV show. - Back cover blurb, Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293

Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 features vessels seen in the following television series and/or TV series:


  • Star Trek: The Original Series
  • Star Trek: Enterprise
  • Star Trek: Discovery/The Original Series (overlap)
  • Star Trek I-VI
  • Star Trek: Generations

My Take

 I've been a Star Trek fan since I saw director Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture on its first day of wide release back in December of 1979. I was 16 then, and even though I was aware that Star Trek's appeal is not solely based on the "tech" or "science fiction" aspects, I fell in love with the sleek lines of the refit-Constitution-class USS Enterprise. (The film's slow pacing and Gene Roddenberry's insistence that the movie had to have a 2001: A Space Odyssey vibe did not thrill me, but the "new and improved Enterprise drew my attention and became, bar none, my favorite Star Trek starship.)

As I grew older and wiser, I realized that Star Trek isn't about ships, weapons, or fictional technology per se, but about people. Still, almost every show or feature film in the 53-year-old franchise is set aboard starships, and even the series that is set aboard a space station (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) features different types of space-faring vessels in which our "family" of protagonists go "where no one has gone before." In fact, the various ships (especially Kirk and Picard's Enterprises) are co-stars alongside their flesh-and-blood crews.

Starships and Star Trek "tech" have long been staples of the franchise's literary spinoffs, beginning with Franz Joseph's seminal (but non-canonical) 1975 work, Star Trek: Star Fleet Technical Manual and continuing in the 1990s with Star Trek: The Next Generation: Technical Manual and The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future, which are part of the Paramount/CBS Studios canon (in no small part because they were written by people directly involved with the franchise).

Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 and the other volumes in this series are not published by Pocket Books, the traditional source of both canon and non-canon licensed Star Trek works. Rather, the series is a project created and overseen by Ben Robinson, a writer/editor who has a long track record with official Star Trek publications, including the American edition of Star Trek: The Magazine and the best-selling Star Trek Fact Files reference books.

Robinson and his two co-authors, Marcus Reily and Matt McAllister, present over 30 starships and Earth-registry vessels that have appeared onscreen in various TV shows and feature films. As denoted in the title, the main focus of Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 are ships that are actually seen (and not just mentioned) in Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: The Original Series, and the first seven Star Trek movies, including the TOS-The Next Generation bridge film, Star Trek: Generations. 

 Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 features incredibly detailed visual renderings of these ships. Most of them are done with computer graphics; even the entry on Kirk's Enterprise NCC-1701 from TOS has plan and side view illustrations created by VFX artists using CG modeling for a consistent almost three-dimensional look. However, Hero Collector, the imprint of Eaglemoss Ltd. (the company that makes and sells the best Star Trek miniatures available in the 21st Century) also adds stills from the TV shows and feature films in the ships' operational history entries.

As for whether Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 is canon: It most certainly is. The authors go out of their way to limit the entries to ships that have been seen in canonical works released either by Paramount or CBS Studios. There aren't any ships here from Star Trek: The Animated Series (a show with a canon status that is still in dispute), except for the Federation freighter design that was incorporated into the remastered version of Star Trek: The Original Series for its 40th Anniversary).

To keep the Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 consistent with material in The Star Trek Encyclopedia, Robinson, Reily, and McAllister stick to "facts" that are established in the movies and TV shows. For example, in the chapter about Kirk's second Constitution-class (refit) USS Enterprise-A, Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293 does not divulge the fate of the ship after the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a film that establishes that the NCC-1701-A was scheduled to be decommissioned upon its return to Spacedock in 2291. Other books, including the "Shatnerverse" novel The Ashes of Eden, have conjectured that the Enterprise-A was destroyed before 2293 in a classified incident near the Romulan Neutral Zone. Instead, Robinson and his co-writers just mention that Kirk and his crew disobeyed orders one last time when the captain set a course to "the first star to the right, and straight on till morning."

I like Star Trek Shipyards: Starfleet Starships 2151-2293, and I will probably buy some of the other books in the Encyclopedia of Star Trek Ships series, but not the entire set. I'm definitely getting the followup to this first volume, and I might get the books about the Klingon vessels and the Kelvin Timeline starships.

 © 2018 Eaglemoss Ltd. & CBS Studios

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