Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Vintage ad: McEwan Miniatures

Thumbing through my copy of The Best of The Dragon (vol.1), I stumbled across this advertisement for McEwan Miniatures.  While some of the figures for aliens and Terran Marines seemed slightly derivative of mass media offerings, the spaceships piqued my interest.
I don't have any of these designs, and I've never seen any in person or for sale on ebay.  Did anyone ever own any of these McEwan Miniatures starships?
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6 comments:

  1. JaysonJuly 3, 2012 at 7:47 PM

    Actually, those fighters remind me of Terran Fighters from the Gil Gerard Buck Rogers and a Cylon from Galactica, a bit.

    I'm partial to the robot idly emptying the open-roof transport.

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  2. Dave S.July 9, 2012 at 12:52 AM

    I haven't got any of these, but you might want to check the Reviresco website in the web store for starships (http://www.tin-soldier.com/cgi-bin/ustorekeeper.pl). Reviresco is the operation run by John McEwan in Olympia WA. He does stuff for Starguard and I think some of those starship designs are still available.

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  3. Desert ScribeJuly 9, 2012 at 10:08 PM

    Thanks for the link, Dave. Some of those ships he has remind me of the style of the hard-to-find Star Frontiers privateers.

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  4. UnknownAugust 7, 2012 at 4:52 PM

    I do believe a few of those are "derivative" of BSG. I know tin-soldier.com had some identical looking fighters, especially their "Starhawk," though as I look through their site to post a link it seems a lot of the pages are now broken. :/

    Thanks for posting this. I'm partial to mid-nineties AD&D ads myself.

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  5. JeffFebruary 6, 2013 at 10:44 AM

    I have all of those ships. McEwan made a space combat game that included fleets of miniatures for each of the races. It wasn't much as a game, just basic rules for movement and combat, and there wasn't much to differentiate the races (I think one of them had a cloaking device, that forced you to track the ship's movements on paper). Another weird thing was that the fleets were just 1 of each type of ship, so you couldn't have 2 destroyers going up against a cruiser, for example. My family drove across country (I'm from the East Coast) and we actually stopped in McEwan's production facility and Mr. McEwan showed us where everything was made and I picked out two task forces of Terrans and Ralnai to make a small StarGuard game. I don't know that I could put my hands on them, but I'm almost sure that I kept them when I cleaned the last of my gaming stuff out of my parent's house. Nicely done models, even if the game was weak.

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  6. maxmikeJuly 13, 2014 at 11:51 AM

    I still have these ships. The old "Nekton" fighter and "Ralnai Corvette" were the perfect match for the old FASA Battlestar Galactica game, and since the old AMT BSG kit was also in scale to the maps, it allowed us to run BSG battles in 3D.

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