Over the next year or two, Megaminis is releasing a series of Traveller based miniatures.  They're starting off with the class Free Trader Beowulf, which for many of us old Traveller nerds was THE space ship of adventure.

Just in case you have no idea what I'm talking about, Traveller was a pen and paper Role Playing Game from the era that spawed Dungeons and Dragons.  The background and feel of Traveller is very, very close to the show Firefly, though with a little higher technology in some places, and a setting that spanned a whole galatic arm instead of one system.   Wikipedia has a nice article if you want more details.

Traveller was really a very different approach to RPGs than D&D was.  Characters didn't start off as 18 year old punks looking for trouble, but began adventuring after training themselves in one of the various "services" (Marines, Army, Merchants, etc.)  Because of this, you started off with a character that was already a "Hero" of sorts, ready to do anything, but usually completely strapped for cash. :-)

The flip side of this system was that there were no experience points or character advancement.  Because of this, Traveller was ideally suited to an "Evening Game", where people took pre-generated characters and played through a scenario.  That was always one of my favorite things about the game, but most RPGers that I know shudder at the very concept of no experience points or skill leveling.  (There were skills with levels, you just didn't level them up after generating the character.)

People who play Trav campaings ususally "advanced" their characters not through stat and skill increases, but through financial gains.  Usually, playes had to scrape enough money together to buy passage between worlds, get equipment, etc.  But after a while, successful characters could afford their own ships (or even fleets) and really fancy weapons, or whatever tone your game took.

All in all, Traveller ate up many an hour of my High School life, and now Megaminis is brining out some starship and character figures.  Details are here , but the long and short of it is, these minis are really about 20 years too late, and will only appeal to the old farts like me.  Another problem is that because Megaminis knows they don't have a large audience, the minis are quite expensive.

I don't have any use for these spaceship figures at all.  I'm not playing any RPGs right now, let alone Traveller, and small merchant ships aren't really suited to space battles.  But when they come out with the Far Trader, I'll probably still need to buy one, just because that's always been my favorite.

I may pick up some of their aliens, since I seem to be willing to collect random scifi figures in small quantities.  I keep telling myself that I'll use them to play Chain Reaction or something, and then they go into the "unpainted" box never to be seen again. :-)