"This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone..."

Not long after Dungeons and Dragons, in 1977 or so, came Traveller, a science-fiction role-playing game from Game Designers' Workshop, substituting adventuring across the stars for the D&D dungeon crawl. In time, over multiple editions and several publishers, it grew from a simple set of generic rules to detail the Third Imperium and its neighbours over thousands of years, and despite the occaisional nasty internal contradiction (never mind how this 1977ish world doesn't match the real universe) I remain fond of it.
Of course, I haven't played the game, or any of its wargaming spin-offs, for years. But this doesn't stop me buying the odd book and, this time, a starship miniature: a Beowulf class Free Trader, the sort of cheap and rugged transport Han Solo or Mal Reynolds might fly.
There have been Traveller miniatures before, even Free Traders, but this is a new model in (annoyingly) a new scale from Mega Miniatures. Mine came from Noble Knight Games, Mega don't sell direct, retaining a touching (and, I suspect, ultimately doomed) faith in the ability of the gaming distributors and stores to get their product out.
The master model is nice, casting is okay but slightly pitted in places and there is a slight miscast at the top of one of the fuel skimming intakes that will want puttying. And it's not particularly cheap at $USD11.99. But the Beowulf goes back to the original Traveller boxed set, with it's distress message "This is Free Trader Beowulf.." in white letters on the black box, and I wanted one...