Valkeeri War Rocket Review & Assembly

This is the third Review & Tutorial for War Rocket fleets I have done.
The first two were reviews for Imperial & Zenithian fleets.

In the near future I'll do a review for the Galacteers and the Pirate fleets as well.

Unfortunately, I do not have Class III or IV ships for the Valkeeri or Galacteers.  I'd got both of the squadron sets for these (9 Class I & 3 Class II) at a good discount sale, but the higher Class rockers weren't available so I decided I'd keep these two fleets as small scout or raiding forces, and see about getting bigger ships for them sometime in the future.

The Valkeeri are a race of warrior women, an iconic image from pulp sci-fi, where ray-gun toting amazonian queens capture daring earth men only to have their tender hearted flunkies' hearts captured in return.

The Squadron set has the contents below:

Like the Zenithians the class of the rocket can be identified easily by the shape of the ship.  In this case, the rockets have one engine for each classification level. The Class III & IV (not shown) have three & four engines as you'd expect.

These are tied with the Zenithians for the easiest to assemble.  Like the Z's, the Class I & II are complete single-cast miniatures requiring no assembly of parts. All of the fleets have this for their Class I's, but the Imperial, Galacteer & Pirates do have parts to assemble for their Class II's.

Like I did with the other fleets, I brought in some of the flight pegs from GW flight stands, which are a bit taller for their large ones, to add some height variation.

Just like with the other ships, the connection hole is larger than the tab on the flight peg. This is a good thing!

 

Cut the nib off (those things are notorious for breaking anyway) and glue it in with a bit of green stuff

I did have one miscast in the Valkeeri squadron:

One of the Class I's engine didn't fill enough. 

Defects like this can happen, nicer when it doesn't, but it also wasn't too difficult to fix.

If you're handy with green stuff this isn't a very hard fix: apply a thin rope of green stuff, shape, and when dry file it smooth to be flush with the engine.  A bit troublesome is the mold line cutting across the engine.  can't get a file in there and a pain with blade slippage potential when trying to 'dig' in a hole with a knife point.  Considering the benefit and risk reward of the whole process, and the fact that the engine is going to have various 'blorps' of fire-colored paint over it, it's not much of an issue.  I've even been considering sculpting a fire blast coming out of them, a'la old colonial vypers thrusters. 

The Squadron is assembled:

Very quick and easy! 

The ships have a strong 'aquatic' look to them, to my eye, and I think they'd make great pulp mini-subs for a VSF game!

So how do they rate from me? 

Rating:

Casting: 8/10

Cleverness of Design: **

Aesthetics:  9/10

** I always include this category in ratings, but in this case it is hard to know how it might apply. This is where I evaluate how successful a kit is for how it is assembled, it's parts and flexibility of options, etc, but in this case, they are single castings and it's not an issue which applies. 

All in all, a fun fleet.  They didn't appeal to me as much as the Zenithian & Imperials,or the Pirates once those were released, but they've definitely grown on me and I have some ideas for painting.