New Zealand Mint debuts its first Star Trek coins with a new silver note collection

With the early launch of a new series of Star Wars silver coin notes a couple of days ago, the New Zealand Mint are clearly excited about the new format for 2018. What has surprised us however, is their first foray into Star Trek, usually the preserve of the Perth and Royal Canadian mints, with the debut of a whole new series.

Five grams of fine silver in weight and an expansive 150 x 70 mm in size, silver coin notes have plenty of space to showcase artwork. Because a thickness less than a human hair precludes any relief, it falls to colour and engraving to do the work. Captain James Tiberius Kirk is the subject of this new release and the design features the character in a couple of poses, along with an image of the ultra-iconic USS Enterprise orbiting a planet. The obverse is a banknote-style series of patterns with the effigy of Queen Elizabeth II in the centre. It’s similar, but different to the Star Wars coin.

There’s one more coin to this series than the A New Hope set – Star Trek: The Original Series running to seven issues. Again, the first coin will come with a good-looking album that will hold all seven coins, although each one is individually sealed and comes in a sleeve. As we said a couple of days ago, at $39.00 USD per coin, they’re very affordable compared to a usual one-ounce coin, and thus more attractive to the casual movie memorabilia collector. Available to order today from the NZ Mint website, or from our sponsors like Powercoin or Minted-UK. We’ve yet to see release details of the next six, but we’re going to guess on a 2018 release for them all and the subjects to be Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov. It will be interesting to see if the NZ Mint does anything else with a licence we’ve always felt a little underserved.

SPECIFICATION
DENOMINATION $1 New Zealand
COMPOSITION 0.999 silver
WEIGHT 5.0 grams
DIMENSIONS 150.00 x 70.00 mm
FINISH Brilliant uncirculated
MODIFICATIONS Colour
MINTAGE 50,000
BOX / COA Yes / On-coin