"Not-Star Trek" Federation Fleet (Irregular miniatures)

Introduction

As many of my loyal readers will already know from my Full Thrust battle reports, I have a moderate collection of "not-Star Trek" spaceships.  My "not-Federation" fleet comes mostly from the old but still useful Irregular Miniatures "Imperials" range.  Since the Irregular website doesn't provide many details about their spaceship models, I thought it would be worthwhile to document my collection here!

The Catalogue

Irregular Miniatures' "New Spaceship Range" contains a number of useful fleets for Star Trek gamers.  They produce the "not-Federation" (Imperial), "not-Orion" (Dysonian) and "not-Hydran?" (Confederation) fleets and also make a couple of quite similar Raiders that can stand in for Klingons.  However, the listings are buried and hard to find in their online catalogue.  From the main website, you need to choose the "6mm" on the bottom bar (cunningly drawn in red on a purple background to make it difficult to see).  The spaceships are about 80% of the way down the "Science Fiction and Space Ships" page, almost added as an afterthought.  Note that you can go straight to the "Science Fiction &c" page, but this is an inner frame and you won't have any of the site's navigation links.

For my purposes today, here's a short extract from the Irregular Miniatures catalogue:

IMPERIAL FLEET

DYE1	Corvette (Police Ship), Sheriff Class
DYE2	Frigate, Perry Class
DYE3	Destroyer, Oberon Class
DYE4	Light Cruiser, Natori Class
DYE5	Heavy Cruiser (uses drive units from Carrier Model), County Class
DYE6	Battlecruiser, Gorshkov Class
DYE7	Dreadnought (Battlecruiser model with 3rd engine), Mushashi Class
DYE8	Light Carrier (Light Cruiser with 2 hanger bay modules), Hosho Class
DYE9	Heavy Carrier, Nimitz Class
DYE10	Tug, Kitakami Class
DYE11	Revised Perry Class Frigate

Full Thrust Adaptations

When collecting my Federation and other ships, I didn't want to design a whole fleet from first principles, possibly with house rules for invented technology.  Instead, I felt that the existing Full Thrust rules pretty much covered everything I would need (OK, I'm still looking for ideas for the Tholian Web, but that's another matter...).
So, I looked through the various existing collections of ships for something on which to base the Federation fleet.  I chose the NAC designs because of the doctrine given in Fleet Book 1.  Roughly speaking, NAC ships are "multi-role, decently protected with screens and reasonably fast".  Sounds pretty much like the Star Trek Federation to me!  However, rather than make a straight copy of the NAC designs, I've swapped a few systems here and there.  Primarily this was needed to replace missiles with torpedos.

Irregular's Ships

In the table below are pictures of almost all of Irregular's "Imperial" fleet, along with the Ship System Display that I use for that class. My apologies for the quality of some of the photographs; there are 2 reasons why they aren't as clear as I would like:

1. I painted most of this fleet a long time ago, before I'd evolved any more elaborate detailing techniques.  Consequently, many of the ships are a fairly plain flat white in colour.
2. My camera (or maybe it's me?) has difficulty in getting the contrast right when photographing while models against a black background.  So many of the images lack definition that is present in the real-life models.

Irregular Designation	Picture	Full Thrust SSD
DYE1 - Police Corvette
DYE2 - Frigate, Perry Class
DYE3 - Destroyer, Oberon Class
DYE4 - Light Cruiser, Natori Class
DYE5 - Heavy Cruiser (uses drive units from Carrier Model), County Class
DYE6 - Battlecruiser, Gorshkov Class
DYE7 - Dreadnought (Battlecruiser model with 3rd engine), Mushashi Class
DYE10 - Tug, Kitakami Class	Note: I'm not certain that this is indeed the DYE10 model, but it's definitely from Irregular's Imperial range [update: this is confirmed as the correct model for DYE10 by trynda1701, see comments below]
DYE11 - Revised Perry Class Frigate

Other Ships

Those of you who've been paying attention will notice that I haven't any models with the DYE8 or DYE9 codes.  This is because DYE8 is almost the same as DYE4 and because I didn't much like the DYE9 heavy carrier's large angled flight deck.  The fleet pack I bought (many years ago) did contain 1 of each ship.  However, I dropped the hangar bays from the light carrier to end up with my second light cruiser and I rebuilt the heavy carrier completely.  So, here are some extra ships in my Federation fleet; these are not simple Irregular models:

Description	Picture	Full Thrust SSD
DYE9 - Heavy Carrier, Nimitz Class heavily converted and rebuilt
Shapeways "Bellerophon"-class cruiser (a very recent addition to the fleet)