Seriously Disrespecting These Ships

Today is the second of a three part series on Star Trek Attack Wing. See yesterday’s entry here.

Yesterday I talked about how I have organized the cards for my extensive Star Trek Attack Wing collection. As I said, I don’t know how many ships I have. It’s between 300 and 400.

There’s more to your collection than just the cards, of course. And like card filing methods, there are numerous methods for storing the rest of your gear. I’m going to talk about ships, bases and movement dials.

And I can pretty much guarantee no one stores their stuff like I do.

Why? Because I’m a huge fan of the Ziploc(r) bag method. Everything goes in a Ziploc bag.

Each faction gets their own bag o’ships.

Just like I did with cards, I purged many of ships. Each bag has at most 4 versions of a single ship. I had to decide if I really needed 15 Ferengi Marauders. No. Instead I put four in the bag and the other 11 go off to my friend who resells STAW equipment.

There are a few ships that are too big for the bags, of course. The Borg cubes and the space station go on a shelf in my living room.

The orange box to the right has Vulcan, Species and Borg ships. Those are the ones that tend to break easily, or are just bulky.

I know that some people pack their ships in foam. Or, they at least put each ship in a separate compartment in their travel case. I’ve been asked why I store mine in plastic bags? Don’t they sometimes break?

Yes, they do. And in that case, I remember that they are plastic ships. A little airplane glue and they are good as new. As I said, I’m a player, not a collector.

There are many people who spend hours repainting their ships and buy elaborate display cases to show them off. I think those people are awesome. Seriously, if it gives you joy to customize your STAW fleet, that’s fantastic. For me, they are plastic ships for a game.

If you think I abuse the ships, you’re going to hate what I do with the bases. I use metal rings and loop all the bases for a particular faction onto a ring. And, of course, I have to link rings to each other for the larger factions.

The bases do tend to get beat up a little, since the rings all go back into a gallon Ziploc(r) bag. I haven’t yet purged my bases. Probably because as big as they are, they are still manageable.

Movement dials get a similar treatment. They are divided by faction into Ziploc(r) bags. I also had to purge these. I have dozens of Klingon b’rels for example, I will probably never need more than 4 movement dials.

And, as always at the end of the day, everything fits back into a single bin.

The downside of my methods are not huge. First, it would be nearly impossible for me to reassemble original expansion sets. With the amount of purging I’ve done, I absolutely could not reassemble the ships and the rest back into original expansion sets. But, since I never intend to sell my collection, I’m not too worried.

And as I mentioned, my ships tend to break occasionally. They are in a separate plastic container and that helps.

One of my favorite aspects of my collection is the look of horror on some players’ faces when they see my plastic bag strategy.

I have one more post to add to this. This is my collection, but when I’m getting ready to play, I literally have a shoebox that I use for my playing kit. Again, more slimmed down sets and lots of plastic bags. Look for it next week.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

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