I wasn’t a huge Star Trek fan growing up, but I always thought the Enterprise was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. When I first saw Star Wars, I thought the Y-Wings were inspired by the Enterprise. Maybe they were.
Unfortunately, toy models of the Enterprise were few and far between in the 70s, except for glue-together models that could only be completed by elite model-builders. This made the the Dinky Enterprise a cherished toy, even though I didn’t take very good care of it. I owned it when I was between eight and ten years old. (“Dinky” is the name of the British company that made the toy.) I never thought the scale was quite right (it isn’t), and the shuttle craft was loaded into the bottom of the ship, which of course is not where the hanger bay was located. Nevetheless, this was one of the coolest toys I owned.
You can see the shuttlecraft and hanger doors in the photograph above, which I swiped from Ebay.
The slot on the rear side of the saucer section held a coin-shaped projectile, about the size of the shuttle craft in the figure. See the figure below. Several projectiles came with the ship, and I guess they represented photon torpedoes, or phasor blasts, or whatever you could imagine. I always thought they were good for shooting cats. To launch the projectile, you rotated the “bridge” section on top of the saucer, and a spring-loaded mechanism inside the saucer would fling the coin-thingy out of a small slot at the front of the saucer. It was cool, but I quickly lost the coins, as did everyone else. I think the cat ate them.
The ship and shuttlecraft are not very rare, but the coins are. A set without the coins usually goes for $10 to $20 on Ebay. A Dinky Enterprise in mint condition, with the coins, will cost you over $100.
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I had forgotten all about the “coins”!!