Plastic Fantastic: Dimestore Spaceships

More Plastic Fantastic madness, now, not in the shape of the usual strange conversion fodder, but rather these so-called 'Dimestore' Spaceships that I ordered via EBay from the USA.

Yes, rather than doing strange things to bits of plastic to turn them into something resembling Fleet Scale Sci-Fi, we have here seven separate designs of various craft that come in bulk - to whit: 144 of the blighters! I went the whole hog and bought them en masse, although I shared the cost and went halves with a fellow gamer and Blogger who could also see the potential in them.

Of course, not all the designs are immediately obvious as your standard Spaceships, but I feel they are ripe for conversion, and might do duty in a number of scales.
The major positive is that unlike previous incarnations of similar toys, these are neither made from rubber, or from a weak, bendy plastic, but rather from a good, hard styrene-like substance, so once washed with warm soapy water are ready for undercoating.

Made in China, the bulk shipper based in the US sends them out in random samplings and colours - you can't order specifics, but I received pretty much twenty or so of each craft, with a few more of a couple of designs thrown in to make up the total.

The variety can be see below, against a mat with 1cm square grids for size:

Immediate stand-outs are of course the Flying Saucer and the Horseshoe-shaped craft, whilst the Gun-ship type in the bottom left hand corner looks like it wouldn't disgrace a 6mm Aerospace environment; the remainder are somewhat more esoteric - if I was feeling critical, the ship in the upper right corner is a bit of a strange one - sort of a rocket sled with apparent seating for a pilot - although the side pylons look useful for removal and conversion.

All in all, the details are crisp and nicely moulded, plenty of greeblies and ridges apparent on the surface, and also on the underside as you see below:

As ever, not entirely sure how these will be utilised - I bought them cheap before a recent price-hike on delivery by the USPS, so was blinded by the fact that the unit cost had come down to about twelve pence a ship - and therefore didn't worry about such fancy considerations as where they might serve!

That said, I've got some ideas for some sample craft and some hopefully interesting identities that I will be working on soon - I've already undercoated a few, and found it easy to cut away any of the extraneous detailing, tails and guns to give the following:

They take paint well, and also superglue, as you will see with the addition of a circular rare-earth magnet on the base of the dart-like ship seen bottom right above.

The extraneous parts cut away easily and in one piece, so could be saved as further scratch-building material - I'm certainly looking forward to playing around with these, so watch this space for some developments soon!