Let's talk about ships, man

Is the Soup too obscure for a title gag?

Starships are a big part of Star Trek, at least for me. Some of my favorite episode's involved showing lots of ships. My favorite ships would have to be the Romulan warbirds. Something about them just looked very cool. In a recent Ten Ton Hammer interview, we got some tidbits about ships in STO.

As a kind of general overview, there are over a dozen different classifications or configurations are what we call them, of ships within the game.

This probably means the Federation and Klingons each get 6 or 7 ships, possibly more at the start. At first that seems low, but as we will see, each ship can be customized both cosmetically and functionally.

Now, based on all of the other aspects of the ship that aren’t cosmetic; what weapons you’ve slotted, what systems you have on board, how your deflector dish is configured, what bridge officers you have on your bridge – that really, really narrows down what role you’re going to end up playing, what powers you end up having and really what sort of subclass you have.

Ah yes, the Deflector Dish... the Swiss Army knife of the stars. I'm glad to see it used in the game, as it was very important in many Star Trek episodes. It is starting to seem that will will have a lot of different options to make our ships different from everyone else. It should be noted that we will still be able to identify what the primary purpose of the ship is based on its look.

So if you get a more escort class ship, you’ve got more tactical guys, you’ve got more pew-pew. If you’ve got a science ship you probably have more seats for science officers on the bridge, and so the science guys can actually bring their really cool skills to the ship.

Each ship class has a certain number of seats for certain types of bridge officers. This seems like what will really define the roles of the ship. Skills are mentioned a few times throughout the article. So it is starting to seem like your bridge officers are skill based and those must be learned and worked on.

STO is taking a mild stance on ship destruction. You will not lose your ship, but there will be a durability cost. This is probably a good way to go. As much as I love Eve, sometimes I don't want to worry about risking my ship.

I’m not going to say that you can take the very first ship that you’ll have in the game and use that all the way until you’re an admiral, but you can actually pull it along much further after you’ve opened up other ships.

This is actually very important to me. One of the nice things about Eve is that even though you can pilot a better ship doesn't mean you should. In many traditional MMO's, once you get a new skill/weapon your old version was obsolete. Being able to choose when to move up to the new ship is a nice feature.

One item on my personal wishlist is to be able to collect and unlock ships. For example, by doing some Ferengi missions, I'd like to unlock their ships. It may not make sense for me to be able to fly them in the normal game, but we do have a Holodeck. Seems like a good way to let players fly those Romulan ships or Borg cubes.

Posted in: Ships,Soup,STO