Star Wars Ships silver coin series continues with the giant Imperial Star Destroyer

The New Zealand Mint’s Star Wars juggernaut continues in enexorable march to numismatic domination with the launch of the second coin in the new Star Wars Ships series. Depicting some of the incredibly iconic vessels that inhabit this huge movie universe, each coin features a blueprint image of a ship, the first having been Han Solo’s legendary Millennium Falcon.

Second time around and it’s the turn of the Empires huge behemoth, the Imperial Star Destroyer to take centre stage. The design is as before, a clean blueprint schematic, in this case showing a rear and plan view of the ship. The ship name is displayed below, as well as the annoying copyright and composition inscriptions. The obverse is the customary Ian Rank Broadley effigy of Queen Elizabeth II. Packaging is of a good quality, none of the gimmickry present in some of the mints previous output. Just a one-ounce 0.999 silver version is available, no gold for this series.

Not a series that reaches the heights of quality that have become the norm for the NZ Mint’s excellent Classic Star Wars coins, this will nevertheless have many fans, especially in the movie memorabilia market. Selling for $80.00 USD and with a 10,000 mintage, the coin is available to order today with shipping shortly. There are more of these to come, no doubt made easy by the enormous variety of iconic ships to choose from. Available from many of our sponsors, we’ll try to get hold of one for a video.

Without question one of the most iconic ships in all of science-fiction, the Imperial Star Destroyer has appeared in the Star Wars movie universe since its debut in 1977. This giant, distinctly-shaped war machine has opened many of the movies and was designed to instill fear and project the power of the Empire.

Said to be 1,600 meters (5,200 ft) long, Imperial-class Star Destroyers are armed with turbolasers, ion cannons and tractor beam projectors. Constructed by Kuat Drive Yards, the Galactic Empire operated over 25,000 of these ships at the height of its power. They carry 72 TIE fighters, numerous ground forces (including stormtroopers, 20 AT-ATs and 30 AT-STs), a prefabricated base for rapid deployment to planetary surfaces, and a variety of support craft.

Like the Victory- and Venator-class ships that precede it, this Star Destroyer is notable for its massive size and overwhelming firepower; a single Imperial-class ship is capable of overwhelming most starships or devastating a hostile planet, and its mere presence is often enough to deter rebellion. Not always fortunately, otherwise they’d be no movies…