Product Description
The Gorns are six-to-seven-foot-tall, 350-pound, cold-blooded, egg-laying, reptilian humanoids bearing a superficial resemblance to a T-Rex or Raptor. Despite the fearsome visage, they are actually quite civilized people who run one of the few democracies in the galaxy. The Federation and Gorns met in a border incident in which two hot-headed captains shot first and faced embarrassing questions later. (A Federation corporation built an unauthorized colony outside of Federation territory. The Gorns saw a few Vulcans and thought the colonists were Romulans (with which they had fought wars for over a century). Diplomats smoothed everything over and the Gorns became the most stable ally of the Federation. The Gorn legislature’s reluctance to spend money or join the Federation's war limited this alliance during some periods. (Note: The dinosaur-based names are Federation “reporting names” because few in the Federation could pronounce the Gorn names for them. Shown books on paleontology, the Gorns were reportedly honored and amused by the naming convention.)
The Gorns, like all empires, needed more dreadnoughts than they could produce. One solution was to take a light cruiser and instead of adding the standard "bubble" to convert it to a battlecruiser, they added a massive new structure which converted the ship into a dreadnought (or at least a heavy warship of equivalent size). This is a good example of how the Gorns designed ships (destroyer, heavy destroyer, light cruiser) which could quickly be converted into more powerful units (battle destroyer, medium cruiser, battlecruiser). This was not the limit of their cleverness, as the Romulans learned when this class first appeared. It was known to the Federation as the Megalosaurus-Tyrannus. The scaled panels on the outer surfaces represent efforts to reduce the electronic signature of the dreadnought cuiser+ and match it to the standard dreadnought cruiser so the enemy could not tell the difference.
The ship is available in a variety of materials. Ships are unpainted, use standard flight stands available from many sources, and, while designed for gaming, make fine display pieces.