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Star trek online art director and writer reveal starship heritage bundle.

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Star Trek Online: Unparalleled Brings Back TNG’s Denise Crosby As Captain Sela

Baldur's gate 3 patch 7 makes major changes to honour mode so even beginners can try, leak hints at the return of an underrated playstation exclusive.

• Star Trek Online releases the Starship Heritage Bundle on July 25th, honoring classic Star Trek video game starships from the early 2000s.
• The bundle features playable ships from Star Trek: Armada, Star Trek: Dominion Wars , and Star Trek: Invasion with unique abilities.
• Players can expect more content from Star Trek Online , including updates from Prodigy season 2 and the latest Lower Decks season.

Star Trek Online pays homage to Star Trek 's proud video game legacy by releasing the Starship Heritage Bundle. Featuring starships from past Star Trek video games, the Starship Heritage Bundle is available for Star Trek Online players on July 25th.

Star Trek Online 's Starship Heritage Bundle tributes classic Star Trek video games from the early 2000s, including Star Trek: Armada, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars , and Star Trek: Invasion. Available for the first time ever in Star Trek Online , the Starship Heritage Bundle consists of the USS Premonition from Star Trek: Armada, the USS Achilles from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars , and the USS Typhon and Valkyrie Mk II from Star Trek: Invasion . Each starship comes playable with its unique abilities from the previous games.

Star Trek Online: Unparalleled, the new season of the hit MMORPG, returns with Star Trek: The Next Generation's Denise Crosby voicing Captain Sela.

Screen Rant had the pleasure to speak with Star Trek Online Art Director Thomas Marrone, as well as Star Trek novelist and screenwriter James Swallow , who wrote Star Trek: Invasion 25 years ago, about the Starship Heritage Bundle, designing starships for Star Trek Online , the challenges of writing Star Trek video games, whether Star Trek novels are canon and more.

Check out the launch trailer and full interview below:

Star Trek Online Introduces The Starship Heritage Bundle

Screen Rant: Star Trek Online is releasing a bundle that includes some classic Star Trek ship designs. That's pretty cool. Thomas, what can you tell us about it?

Thomas Marrone: We call it the Heritage Starship Bundle? Because it's, you know, I consider it Star Trek Online's homage to the Star Trek gaming heritage that we have. Gowing up as a kid in the 90s days of Star Trek, there was Star Trek everywhere. There was TNG, DS9, Voyager on the air. There was a Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas, which I never got to go to, sadly. And there were a lot of great Star Trek games that came out during the show. Some people call it the Activision era. But I even think before the Activision era with Interplay, there were some real gems there too, with the 20th Anniversary, and Starfleet Command, Starfleet Academy, Klingon Academy, all that stuff. Anyway, we get to the Activision era, and we have some really cool games. We've got Star Trek Armada, we've got Star Trek: Invasion. You've got Star Trek: Away Team, Star Trek: Dominion Wars, and some really cool stuff. And then, Bethesda published Star Trek Legacy a few years later. And so I just played all of them, I was a gamer, I was a huge Star Trek fan. Fast forward to now, I find myself as the art director for Star Trek Online, and I decide it's finally time that STO pays homage to these classic Trek games. So we selected three ships: the Typhon from Star Trek: Invasion, the Premonition from Star Trek: Armada, and the Achilles from Star Trek: Dominion Wars. And these are all ships, by the way, that our players have been asking for forever. There was constantly requests for these ships. We got clearance from Paramount, and they said it was okay for us to incorporate stuff from these old games as long as they were new assets, which obviously, we want to do anyway because we have a very specific, technical way of building these assets for our game. It was finally time. All the stars aligned, and I jumped on the opportunity. I'm just really, really excited for players to see these ships because not only do they look like the ships from those old games, but they all have all of the abilities that those ships had. The Typhon actually has the fortress mode from Star Trek: Invasion where it clamps down. it actually animates, and closes up and then shoots a lot of anti-aircraft flak at the enemy. It launches the Valkyrie fighters from the game. The Achilles has the doors, the dorsal, quad, and torpedo launchers, and the Premonition can actually summon an Enterprise and splits it into two ships just like in the trailer for Star Trek: Armada. So we're not just paying homage to what they look like, but players will actually get the abilities of those classic ships as well.

James, among your many works in sci-fi and Star Trek , you wrote Star Trek: Invasion . Do you have a new role in this as a writer, or are you here in terms of your previous work?

James Swallow: I'm here as a veteran of the old days of gaming, just to kind of put my stamp of approval on it, and just say, wow, how cool it is to see something that I worked on. I mean, it's 25 years since I've worked on Invasion, and it amazes me that there's still that much love for this title. I've had people regularly over the last couple of decades say to me, 'Oh, you've worked on invasion? I love that game.' So cool. And people show me fan art. And I see YouTube videos of people doing reimaginings of the ship. For me, that's really heartening, really rewarding to see people love it so much. And then to have it all come full circle. And now it appears in Star Trek Online, which is a game I play myself. To see that they're in that game getting a whole new audience, as well as this kind of audience of classic gamers coming back and, seeing these new ships, these old new ships coming back. That's just amazing for me to see that happen.

What Makes A Ship A Star Trek Ship

Most Federation starships hew to the basic model of the original USS Enterprise . There's some sort of saucer section, there are a couple of nacelles. But now there are hundreds of ship variations. Aesthetically, what's the key to a great starship design? What are the determining factors for you about what makes a ship a Star Trek ship?

Thomas Marrone: That's a really great question, and something we certainly ask ourselves every day. Ryan Church and J.J. Abrams even said when they were working on the 2009 reboot: 'You have to embrace what came before.' But also push the boundaries, try something new. I think what that means is you find the character, the underlying character. The ships are characters. What is a character in a piece of fiction? They have agency, they move the story along, and they have a personality. They affect the tone and the mood of the piece. What does it look like? Is it heroic, is it functional? Is it a workhorse? And so, I tried to start from the question of, what is the ship for? What does it do? What is its character, its job? That's one of the things I really love about the Typhon because it doesn't really look like a Star Trek ship at first blush. It's blocky, it's bulky, but once you lstart looking at it more closely, you see the classic Starfleet pinstripe, you see the nacelles. You see the bridge detail, the escape pods, and the windows. All those things come together that pull it into the universe, and it's all built around this function of being a fighter carrier and escort carrier. And I think the visual style of a Star Trek ship is pretty elastic. As long as you build in that story and character, and you understand this is what it's for, this is what it's designed to do. And then you layer in the classic details on top of that. For Starfleet ships, every little detail has a function. And so when you start to add those on top of whatever your weird shape is, like the Typhon, you see the blockiness, but then you start to see the phaser strips, the transporter emitters, and the escape pods and all that stuff. Then you're like, okay, that fits in the universe, it fits next to the Enterprise, ie, it fits next to the Miranda class, or Excelsior, because it has all of these things. But it's fulfilling this job that these other ships don't do. So I think about it a lot. I could just spend an hour talking about what makes a Star Trek ship a Star Trek ship and how brilliant the original Enterprise was. Because it has a very unique silhouette, it has very simple shapes arranged in a very distinct way. And that made it really easy to read from a distance. And that's why, the Enterprise is a huge part of Star Trek as a brand. Which is something pretty unique for a spaceship. If you see the Enterprise on something, you know that's a Star Trek thing.

Why Writing A Star Trek Video Game Is Different From A Star Trek TV Show, Movie, Or Novel

James, I imagine writing for Star Trek video games is a very different beast from writing novels or screenplays that you've also done for Star Trek. Can you tell us a little bit more about the challenges of writing a Star Trek game?

James Swallow: You're absolutely right. It's chalk and cheese. At the end of the day, it's all a story, right? It's all Star Trek. And it still draws from the same well, and you have to kind of ask the same questions about what kind of story it is and what kind of narrative you want to put out to the world. But the toolkit that you use to tell that story is completely different. So if you're writing a screenplay, it's very much upfront, and everything is right there on the screen. And all of the narrative has to be carried by the action and the dialogue that's happening in front of you. If you're writing something in prose, you get to have that internal viewpoint. You can go inside a character's head, and you can live with their thoughts for a little while. And you can see the story expressed through nonverbal cues. For a video game, it works completely differently. Because the player is the story, the player is driving the story, the player has to have agency in that narrative. You have to give them the toolkit to say, okay, we're gonna put you in this world, here's the story in front of you, but how you react to it, that's up to you. It's a completely different challenge, because you have to try and predict what the player will do, you have to try and guide them a little bit, but you have to give them that vital agency so they feel like they're part of that world. And that's what I love about it as a player and somebody involved in Star Trek games, I love the ability to be able to go right into that world and be a part of it, and just feel like I'm living a Star Trek life. Now, when I play games, that's always the thing that's in the back of my head, thinking how can I bring that experience to the player of the game? Make them feel like they're part of that world?

Star Trek Online Incorporating New Star Trek TV Show & Movie Assets

Star Trek is continuing to expand. Discovery just ended, Lower Decks is going to end . But we're getting two more seasons of Strange New Worlds . We have Starfleet Academy coming, and the Section 31 movie coming. Thomas, how nimble is Star Trek Online when it comes to reflecting new Star Trek ? And how much does the new Star Trek factor into what you do with the games?

Thomas Marrone: We try to be nimble to a point. We do have a lag time where we want to have a whole season to come out before we start incorporating things from that season. We usually wait until the season's over. For narrative content, the lead time is about six months to incorporate that stuff. For just ships and items, it can be anywhere from a few months to six months, usually, I'd say an average of six months. Ships are a little faster. A little spoiler: I would expect to see something from Prodigy season two by the end of the year. For characters or for storyline stuff, that takes a while because we already have an established arc. And so, if we decided that we wanted to incorporate something in our current running arc, then we usually have to plan that for two or three episodes down the way, which is two or three releases, which is nine-ish months. We do a release about every four months. So usually, three releases a year, and there'll be an episode in each thing. But certainly for all the cool gadgets and weapons and uniforms and stuff, we're doing our best to incorporate that stuff. We're hoping to do stuff with the most recent season of Discovery early next year. It takes a while to watch it and then make the plan and then build all those assets. But we definitely want to incorporate all that stuff as quickly as we can. But we also want to make sure that we're doing it right, that we have all the reference we need, that we've got the time we need to build it in a high-quality manner for a 3D game like STO. There's a lot that goes into that. It's not just building the model, it's also building the animations.

Are Star Trek Novels Canon?

And the subject of the Star Trek novels, James, the novels tend to be their own kind of canon, not necessarily reflected by the TV shows, but that's starting to change a little bit. Stuff in the novels has seeped into the TV canon. Can you talk a little bit about novel canon versus TV canon and how they're kind of intermingling?

James Swallow: We basically have to be led by what's on the screen. If it's on the screen, the screen Trumps what's on the page, that's always the rule. So we have to try and make sure that everything we write on the page connects as closely as possible to the ongoing continuity. For a while, we pretty much had kind of carte blanche after Star Trek: Nemesis. It was like, 'We're never going to do another show. You can do whatever you like.' And so we did. For several years, we had what we call the Lit Verse continuity, and we built on stuff. We blew up the Borg, we killed off Kathryn Janeway and then brought her back, we married Picard and Beverly Crusher, and they had a son. And we did lots and lots and lots of stuff. And then Picard came down the pipe, and we were like, okay, the clock is running out on this now. The Lit Verse is going to have to eventually be closed down. And so we found ourselves in a similar situation to our friends over in the galaxy far, far away with the Star Wars universe when their extended universe continuity was being threatened by the new movies. With Star Trek, we decided that we would end things. So that's how we created the Coda trilogy of novels. And we brought the entire universe to a conclusion in sort of epic fashion. But beyond that, we're still telling Star Trek stories. But now, the new generation of Star Trek stories hew much closer to what you're seeing on television. And that is largely due to the fact that we have Kirsten Beyer working on the shows as a producer. Kirsten was a Star Trek tie-in novel writer before she went to work on television. And she is kind of the bridge between the tie-in fiction and the TV shows. Having her there means that we have a greater degree of cross-coordination than we've ever had. In fact, in any tie-in project I've worked on, I've frequently had to do stuff where they say, 'Okay, this is on the show, you have to reflect it in the book'. It very rarely goes back the other way. But in Star Trek it has. And that is really rewarding to see these little tiny details that we put in a book pop up in the background of the TV shows.

You also have a new Strange New Worlds novel coming out called "Toward the Night." Can you talk a little bit about that?

James Swallow: Yeah, that's gonna be coming out in September. I am almost finished with that. I am so excited about getting my hands on the Strange New Worlds characters , because I've really been absolutely loving the show. I can't give away too much of the plot, but it's set in the second season of the show, and involves the crew of the Enterprise chasing down a Starfleet vessel that has been missing for 96 years. And the crew finds themselves in a very interesting dilemma. And there's some Klingon action in there as well. I'm really having a lot of fun with it and really enjoying writing the characters because they have such a different voice and different tone from other Star Trek shows. So I feel really, really lucky to be able to write a story based on that.

Who's the most fun to write?

James Swallow: That's a good question. The two characters I really like the most on Strange New Worlds are Pike and Ortegas. So, I said, okay, I want to make those two the lead characters. So I am indulging myself a little bit by writing Pike and Ortegas quite a bit in the story and having a lot of fun with them. I really wanted to kind of drill in a little bit with Ortegas and her background because she's really great. And I wanted to know more about her. So I said, 'Can I do a little bit of background and talk a little bit about her personal life and where she came from?' You're gonna see more of that stuff coming up in season three of the show. But I get an opportunity to do a little bit of that in the book, as well.

What's Next For Star Trek Online After The Starship Heritage Bundle

After the Starship Heritage Bundle drops on July 25th, what's next in the pipeline for Star Trek Online ? You just had the massive Borg multiversal story that brought back Denise Crosby as Sela . What do you have coming up next?

Thomas Marrone: That story isn't over yet. We're still going to have more chapters, not just another chapter. We're still working on that storyline. And so there's more of that coming soon. I can't really talk in too much detail about that. But certainly, I would encourage everybody to stay tuned. We've got our Twitch channel. We do streams every week. I think it's just twitch.tv/crypticstudios, with our community manager where people can come ask questions, play the game, we usually make some announcements there. But we're working hard on new stuff. Like I mentioned, we're bringing in stuff from Prodigy season two, we're bringing in a lot of stuff from the latest Lower Decks season I'm very, very excited about. And then, further afield, we've got stuff from Discovery. So there's a lot of really cool stuff coming up with STO in the back half of the year.

About Star Trek Online: Starship Heritage Bundle

Available for Star Trek Online players on July 25th, the Starship Heritage Bundle lets players captain cult-classic Star Trek video game starships from over 20 years ago and explore the intergalactic universe within Star Trek Online. As any seasoned Star Trek fan and even Star Trek newcomers know, starships are at the core of every extraordinary adventure, including embarking on exciting quests in Star Trek Online, and this bundle is yet another way to honor the beloved history of starships.

Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online Just Dropped Three New Starships — Here's How They Pulled It Off

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The Big Picture

• Star Trek Online is offering a brand-new Heritage Ship Bundle with classic references, from Star Trek: Invasion , Star Trek: Armada , and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .
• The game's complex process for bringing back original Star Trek actors involves Paramount's approval, and a keen attention to detail in likenesses.
• Star Trek Online interweaves story arcs from different Star Trek shows, challenging developers to tie everything together creatively.

While a lot of us grew up playing games like The Sims and shoehorning our favorite fictional characters into the worlds provided by that game, for the last few years, Trekkies have had their own open world game in which they can bypass all the shoehorning and put themselves right into the world of Star Trek . Star Trek Online is a MMORPG where players can explore a vast expanded world filled with new adventures that both reference the beloved canon and expand on it in ways you could never imagine.

Today, the game has launched a new bundle called the "Heritage Starship Bundle" which references classic Star Trek games like Star Trek: Invasion , Star Trek: Armada and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars . Ahead of the new bundle's launch, I sat down with Star Trek Online Art Director Thomas Marrone and beloved Star Trek writer James Swallow , who worked extensively on Invasion , to chat about what you can do with these new ships and what exactly goes into creating new additions for such a massive game. We also discussed Swallow's recent Star Trek novels, what he would write for an episode of Star Trek Online, and how Star Trek Online gets your favorite franchise stars to appear in the game. You can read our full conversation below or watch it in the player above.

COLLIDER: You both have pretty prolific careers in Star Trek. I want to jump in with a classic question when I'm talking to anyone who works on Star Trek in any form: what was your first experience with the franchise, and what about that experience made you, as a fan, want to work on Star Trek?

JAMES SWALLOW: My first experience watching Star Trek was in the early to mid-eighties when The Original Series was being rerun on BBC Two here. It would come on TV just before dinner, so I would rush home from school and I could sit and watch an episode of classic Trek. That was my first experience with it. It's definitely my first fandom. It's the first time I came across something where I thought, “Wow, I really wanna consume all of this, and I want to learn more about it.” I found out about the fact that there were other people who are fans and there were fan clubs and conventions and movies and books. For me, that was great because that was kind of like a banquet for a Star Trek fan to discover that all this stuff was out there. And in the intervening years, obviously, there's been more and more of it, so the eating is good.

In terms of wanting to write about it, some of my earliest experiences of writing was writing for fanzines, writing about Star Trek and writing about the show. I kind of parlayed that eventually into being a professional magazine writer. One of the earliest jobs I had was writing for the official British Star Trek magazine, Star Trek Monthly. So, I got to parlay my nerdiness into a writing career. That opened the door to me to get into pitching for the TV show, for pitching scripts. I always wanted—beyond being a journalist because that was great and that was fun—to be a writer of Star Trek.

Often, when we would do the interviews, a lot of people would say, “Oh, it's great to do the interviews with the actors,” but I was always asking to do the interviews with the producers and the writers and the directors because I was really interested in the mechanics of how the show worked. I also was sneakily getting myself a little bit of a writer's education, as well, by talking to the writers. Off the back of that, I got the opportunity to pitch for Star Trek, and I got to sell a couple of stories for Star Trek: Voyager . That was pretty much the beginning of my professional writing career and my career as a professional Star Trek writer.

THOMAS MARRONE: Star Trek for me has always been kind of a family affair. I grew up watching it with mom and dad. Mom was a big Star Trek fan in the ‘60s when it was first airing, and to her, she saw everything that was going on in the country and the civil rights movement and all that stuff, so she identified with the message behind Star Trek. She liked the progressive discussions. Some of it was more deftly handled than others, but still, she liked that the show was a fun sci-fi show, but it also had something to say. She thought that was really cool.

When I was growing up, like James said, Star Trek was in syndication. I'm a little bit behind him, but it was exciting when Star Trek: The Next Generation came on air. I would have been less than six years old, and as I grew up, we would watch that together and that became appointment viewing for us as a family. I would get to stay up late to watch it because that was also syndicated, so it was on at, like, 10:30 at night or something. It was way too late for me as a kid, but I still got dispensation to watch it sometimes.

Then, I get into high school and this video game comes out called Homeworld , which is not a Star Trek game, but it's a 3D real-time strategy game. It was actually the first real-time strategy game where you could move units in 3D—it might have been the first real-time strategy game that actually used 3D graphics. When Homeworld came out, it was around the time that DS9 was in the throes of the Dominion War and all this cool stuff was happening. So, I got into this super new game called Homeworld , and I hooked up with these guys on forums that play Homeworld , but they're modding it, like modification—they're taking the original game and they're turning it into something else. So there's this forum where people were turning Homeworld into Star Wars, they were turning it into Babylon 5 , and Battlestar Galactica and all this stuff.

Of course, I was drawn as a big Star Trek fan watching it with my parents and, like James, I just became enamored with it and I needed everything. I read the Star Trek encyclopedia by [Denise and Michael] Okuda. I opened it up and just started reading it. Who does that? [Laughs] So I get in touch with these guys and I find that there are other people making Star Trek mods for Homeworld . And Homeworld was the perfect engine for a Star Trek video game, a strategy game, because it was all in 3D. It was a really cool space game and the graphics were state-of-the-art at the time. So I learned how to model and texture and do all the 3D art because of Homeworld . Long story short, that kind of builds the foundation for my game development career. I eventually get a job at Cryptic originally working on their websites, but then I move over to the Star Trek Online team because I'm such a big Star Trek fan. I started as an associate UI artist and then worked my way up to art director.

That's awesome. I love that Star Trek is such a collective experience that it inspires people to then create more on top of it. I think that's one of the best parts of it as a fandom. James, you worked pretty heavily on Star Trek: Invasion , and now with Star Trek Online , incorporating one of the ships from the game into this new bundle. It seems like a real full-circle moment. Can you talk a bit about your experience on the initial game and what it's been like to come back and help give it new life?

SWALLOWS: It is kind of crazy for me. This game is 20 years old. This was the first-ever Star Trek licensed title for the PlayStation 1. I'm pretty sure it was the first-ever Star Trek console game at that time and the first combat game. It was a whole load of different firsts, and for me personally, my very first experience working in the video game industry. All these years later, to see it be so popular with people, I would occasionally get emails every now and then from people saying, “Did you work on Star Trek: Invasion ? I love that game. It's a cool ship!” That was always nice to hear.

But then to see this rebirth, this reintegration of this cool concept that we had 20-odd years ago, it's so rewarding because everybody who worked on that project, all of the team at Warthog Games, were all people who were just really dedicated creatives who put 110% effort and energy into that. The idea that it still has an appeal for gamers 20 years later, it was just incredible to me, but really, really rewarding to have that happen.

I love that. Thomas, obviously James has worked heavily with Invasion , and you, as you mentioned, got your start with Homeworld , but what's your experience with the trio of games that you're drawing from for this new bundle?

MARRONE: The three ships that we’re including in the bundle are the the USS Premonition from Star Trek: Armada , the USS Typhon from Star Trek: Invasion and the USS Achilles from Star Trek: [Deep Space Nine] Dominion Wars . As a kid of that era, playing games of that era to the point where I actually got grounded and I couldn't play video games during the school week for my whole high school career [laughs], I played all these games and I love them. Before Invasion , I was a big fan of people who worked at Warthog who did Colony Wars . That was one of my very favorite PlayStation games ever. I love that game, the gameplay, and the universe. That was an original sci-fi IP that was really cool.

Star Trek: Armada , another classic, was maybe the first Star Trek RTS in the next gen Activision era. I’m a big fan of that, love playing that with friends, just getting fleets of Federation starships. Armada had great abilities where you had a ship, the steam runner, that had this big artillery blast, and you had the Akira that had this torpedo that bounced around. They did a really clever thing where they took these canonical Star Trek ships and then they did what we do on Star Trek Online , and what they did with the Typhon on Invasion , like, “It looks a certain way but how does it act? What's its power? What makes it unique and interesting?” It's crucial for an RTS that you do that. It's crucial for an MMO that you do that.

That's one of the things that's been really fun about translating all of these ships to Star Trek Online is finding the thing about that ship that is iconic. It was super easy because it's just right there in the gameplay—the Typhon is a carrier, and so it's a carrier in Star Trek Online that launches squadrons of Valkyrie fighters just like it did in Invasion . In Invasion , they have several different types of fighters, and so we brought in another type of fighter for this bundle that we pulled from Invasion . It's got this really cool fortress mode that I actually wanna show off to you in a little bit here. I'll pass it to James to have him talk about that a little bit.

They all have this identity of this cool ability that they can do, and that's stuck in fans’ minds ever since. We've had people asking for years and years, “When are you gonna put the Typhon in? When are you gonna put the Premonition in? When you're gonna put the Achilles in?” And it's been great to see people ask for that and know that we're gonna deliver. Everything that they did in those games that was exciting and special, they're gonna be able to do that stuff in Star Trek Online too. James, if you want to talk about fortress mode a little bit…

SWALLOW: The thing to pick out on Tom's point there is, one of the things about Star Trek is the ships are characters, and there's always a sort of style and a look to them that they have, a sort of elegance and grace, and they always have a presence. What Tom's talking about there with taking that style and that theme and saying, “Well, how do I translate that into something that is gameable, something that gives a player agency in the game? How do you make those things become compatible?” I love that idea.

Certainly, that's something that we did with the Typhon. As Tom says, it's this carrier-based starship, so in the early stages, we were very inspired design-wise by ships like the Battlestar Galactica or the Roger Young from Starship Troopers , but also inspired by games like Homeworld , of course, is a good example, Wing Commander was another game that was a strong, a strong influence on us, and obviously the the earlier Colony Wars games, because a lot of the design team came from that space combat game.

We took all those elements and said, “How do we filter that through a Star Trek lens? How do we still make it feel like a Star Trek concept?” So you have the cool Starfleet-looking ship. I've always felt it strongly resembles the Starfleet shuttlecraft because it's got that boxy wedge-like type look to it. So, there's a kind of design lineage that you can imagine crossing over there. You get to launch all these cool little fire ships which look like those have a design lineage that you can track back to the, if you remember in Star Trek: Insurrection , there's the cool scout ship that Data pilots, you can see that there's a design lineage between those vessels. But in its primary mode, it is a sort of heavy battle cruiser; it gets to turn into fortress mode, which is basically kind of hunkered down. It's almost like it brings in its shoulders and becomes this little hard hat-wearing spaceship that is practically indestructible and has all these cool cannons that fire out. It just plants itself in space and temporarily becomes a battlestation.

That is also a really interesting thing to see, the kind of stuff that we saw in Deep Space Nine in the battle sequences there. A lot of the ideas we were bringing into the mix were all trying to emulate stuff we'd seen on the screen, saying, “If we saw that in the TV show, can we do that, but can we give it a different spin? Can we push it a little bit further? Can we do something different with it?” A lot of that was going on when we were developing what was the core concept for the Typhon.

That's really cool. I love that you mentioned the design lineage because I feel like with Star Trek ships, and not just Federation ships but ships from any species in the franchise, you can look at a ship and almost instantly know which group it belongs to. How do you guys go about making sure that that stays consistent throughout and keeping that visual style for new ships that you create or things that you bring back?

MARRONE: There are a couple of tools you have. There's the silhouette, the classics like saucers, nacelles, inspired by the great Matt Jefferies with the original Enterprise. It's something that's so powerful that it has become part of Star Trek's branding. You see the Enterprise, and you’re like, “Oh, this is a Star Trek thing.” But not every Federation ship, in fact, the Typhon doesn't have any of that. It doesn't look like that at all. So, how do you make the Typhon look Federation? And I think the genius of what [Tarlochan Randhawa] and the artists on Invasion did was they had this new shape but then they applied all of the classic decals and the windows and the escape pods. They were very particular and careful about how they painted the ship and added the detailing to the ship so it all fits into that Star Trek Universe. That can take you really far.

You can do a lot with just making sure they're using the right colors, and you've got the Starfleet pinstripes and the Delta registry numbers, the transport emitters, all that little stuff. One of the cool things about Star Trek, it's pretty unique honestly compared to most other sci-fi franchises, is that most of that stuff on the surface of a Starfleet ship has a purpose. It's there for a reason, it does something. I can point at it, you can ask me what that's for, and I can probably give you an answer. So if you include all that stuff in your design, even if it doesn't feel like a Star Trek design initially, that helps ground it in the universe and adds that form and function that you can use to tie it all together. And I think that the stuff in Invasion does that beautifully.

I love that it's not just about looking cool, it's also about functionality and making sure that these ships work within the parameters of the game and the parameters of the Star Trek Universe.

What's in the New Star Trek Online Heritage Bundle?

From what I understand, Star Trek Online ships are pretty customizable if you're captaining them. Beyond the fortress mode, what extras and features are part of the ships in this bundle that are going to make them enticing to fans who maybe haven't played the original games?

MARRONE: The thing about the abilities these ships have is that whether or not you play the original games, they're just really cool. [Laughs] The Achilles from Star Trek: Dominion Wars , that thing has– Defiant has a what we call phaser quad cannons; it shoots four phaser cannons. Well, the Achilles has six phaser cannons that fires at once, and then the Achilles has these dorsal quantum torpedo launchers that feel like Macross.

They feel like you're launching a squadron of Macross missiles at a target. The Premonition summons the Enterprise F to help you out, but after it summons the Enterprise F, it splits it in two. It creates a temporal duplicate, and so now you've got two Enterprises at your command. Then, of course, the Typhon, we’ve talked about fortress mode. All of this stuff, the reason people remember it and the reason they want it in Star Trek Online is because it's cool on its own. Obviously, this bundle is a bit about nostalgia and celebrating these old things, but the reason that people remember them is because they are so cool. So, there’s going to be a lot of intrinsic value.

For people who are [min-maxers], one of the really interesting things about the Typhon is it's an escort carrier which is something that we used to have in the game, but then we took out. We used to use that designation for things like the Akira and some other ships, and we called them escort carriers, but then we decided that every carrier in Star Trek Online needed to have a two-hangar base. So, we renamed everything and put that aside. The old escort carriers became strike wing escorts; they only had one hangar bay, which means that if you have two hangar bays, you can launch basically four squadrons. It depends on the pet, but you can launch a lot of pets—fighters in this case.

So with the Typhon, we're bringing back that escort carrier designation, but because it has two-hanger base. It's the first carrier in the game that is also an escort, which means it can have dual cannons. It's very nimble. So, we're leaning into the lore of Invasion , too, not just in what it can do from the special power side of things, but from how it behaves and how you fly it. When you look at it, you think, “Oh, that's a big ship. It's a big carrier,” but actually, skill-wise, it's a pretty small ship. So we wanted to honor the original scaling of the ship and its purpose. So, we’ve done a lot there, too.

Then, of course, with Star Trek Online , even though none of these ships come with other variants, they can use different materials and different window options and things like that. People can still get a little bit of what we call Space Barbie as they're playing with these ships.

I love that. Beyond the ships themselves, are there any Easter eggs that fans can look forward to hunting in this new bundle that you snuck in from those original games?

MARRONE: If you buy the bundle, you're gonna get the Valor class fighter, which was a Valkyrie Mark II. There are three Valkyrie types and then there are a couple of other types of fighters. The Valor class fighter is another hangar pet that you'll get to use with the Typhon. Then another thing we're including in the bundle is a ground weapon from Elite Force , the Starfleet sniper rifle from Star Trek: Elite Force . That's actually gonna fire a big rail gun-type sniper bolt, so that's gonna be pretty exciting too.

Then there are a couple of titles that play into the fun names of these games. The titles are Hur’q Invader, Dominion Warrior, and Armada Admiral. So, for people who buy the bundle, they would get to use those titles on their characters if they choose.

That's awesome. To be honest, my favorite starship is still always going to be the Enterprise D. I love the classic giant cruise ship feeling of that ship. I know this is a little bit of an unfair question, but if you had to pick your favorite original ships from the games, and to just make it even harder, a favorite ship from the onscreen franchise, what would they be?

SWALLOW: For me, the favorite Star Trek ship, above all, has to be the Refit, the motion picture Enterprise. That's always been my favorite. I had a poster of that on my wall in the 1970s that fell down so many times I had it stuck back up with tape and stuff. I just love that show. That's my overall favorite Trek ship. But if I had to pick one specifically from Star Trek Online , I really love the Odyssey class. I just think that it is such an elegant, great piece of work, and it's emblematic of the design quality and the structure of that game.

That's really cool.

MARRONE: I glad to hear you say that. [Laughs] I'm proud of the work that we did with the Odyssey getting it into Picard . I’ve got to shoutout to Dave Blass and Brian Tatosky, the two guys who made that happen, and thanks to Terry Matalas for that awesome season in Star Trek. But as far as the Refit, that's never the wrong answer as far as the best ship in Star Trek. Sometimes I go for the original, the very first Enterprise, because there was nothing like it. It really redefined what a science fiction spaceship was. I think we take starship for granted, and we take the Enterprise for granted, but what they did with that ship was so counterintuitive to what science fiction had done before.

Gene Roddenberry didn't want any wires, he didn’t want any smoke coming out of it, he didn't want it to feel like a rocket ship or a cigar like the classic Buck Rogers or Commando Cody stuff. He wanted to avoid that altogether, so Matt Jefferies had a really tough design problem. He had a blank canvas, but also he kind of had a gun to his head in terms of, like, “It can't be like everything else that you know about science fiction. It has to be different.” That's such a tall order for an artist to to be told, “Ignore everything you know about this thing and do something else,” but we're still doing this thing, right? [Laughs] So, it was pretty incredible what he came up with, and iconic.

The actual miniature itself, I recommend anybody, if they ever have the opportunity to go to the Air and Space Museum, to see it on display there. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous. I think people have their relationship with The Original Series Enterprise. It's muddy, it's grainy, it's blurry from the original model photography in the show, or it’s grainy from a bad transmission on your VHF signal or whatever, but you go see that thing that's been fully restored by the Smithsonian in person, and it's a work of art. It really is. It's 11 feet long, it's massive, and there's a lot more detail there than you would expect.

You don't think of The Original Series as having a lot of surface detail. And it is smooth; it's not overly agreeable like Star Wars ships but it's a gorgeous artifact of television and science fiction history, and so I often want to sing its praises. Often imitated, never duplicated.

Absolutely. I’ve also seen it in person, and it's stunning. As just a casual viewer, you wouldn't necessarily think of the model for the ship as that big, but it is. When you see it in person, it's just sort of reverent. You mentioned Star Trek: Picard , and I was going to ask what that was like getting to see some of the Star Trek Online designs come to life in the series and create this feedback loop of the series informing the games and then the games then informing the series.

MARRONE: Again, that really is all thanks to Dave Blass and his willingness to work with us, and Brian Tatosky. Dave was a production designer on Picard Seasons 2 and 3 and Brian was the VFX supervisor. Those guys had a really open mind about it.

Dave had a problem where at the end of Picard Season 1, there was a lot of fan feedback about the Starfleet fleet that showed up, and it was mostly one starship. I think a lot of people had been aching to see that era of Star Trek, like, “What's the post- Voyager era of Star Trek look like?” Picard gave the promise of that, but then I think people wanted more. They wanted a lot more than they got in Season 1 of Picard , and so Dave wanted to deliver that. He knew that just having one ship design wasn't enough. In the script for Season 2, they called for a big fleet of Starfleet ships, so he had a problem to solve, and the problem was, “I need this big fleet of ships. I don't have the money to do it all as big as I want it.”

He was looking around the internet for Star Trek ships just to get his bearings on what he could do, and he kept seeing, like, “Oh, that's a cool ship design. What's that from?” Star Trek Online . “Oh, that's a cool ship design. What's that from?” Star Trek Online . That happened a few times, and then eventually he reached out to me on Twitter and we started talking.

He brought me and then Hector Ortiz, the senior concept artist for STO, in to do a bit of iterative work on the Stargazer early on. It wasn't quite early on in the process of designing the Stargazer for Season 2, but he wanted some some things for Terry to react against, basically some alternative options. So, Hector and I did that, and that worked out pretty well. After that, he pitched the idea of using STO models to Brian Tatosky, who was originally reluctant, which I understand because real-time video game models are very differently built than models for a TV show or a movie.

But Brian, like I said, had an open mind about them, and he took a look at our stuff. Thankfully, we had been updating a lot of our models, up-resing them, because modern video cards are a lot more powerful than they were in 2010, and so our ship detail had basically quadrupled in that time. Long story short, they were good enough for them to use as background elements and extra elements in the shots and stuff.

So, we sent them some models, and we remastered a couple of them specifically for Picard to make sure that they were up to snuff. The Enterprise F I had to rebuild from scratch, basically, and I didn't even know that they were gonna use it as the Enterprise. Dave just asked, “Do you have the Enterprise F?” He didn't say what it was going to be for, and I didn't ask because I didn't want him to tell me it wasn't going to be the Enterprise. [Laughs] But I spent three weeks just nose to the grindstone, triple shifts, banging that thing out to make sure that it got done in time for them to use it, and then I didn't hear anything for a long time.

Then, the New York Comic-Con trailer comes out for Picard Season 3, and they just put the Enterprise right there in the trailer. You could see the registry number and everything. That was a moment I'll never forget. People are texting me, “Did you see it? Did you see the trailer?” And I’m like, “ Picard ’s cool, but what are you talking about?” And then it was like, “Oh, shit, it’s in there.” So that was delightful. And if my career has peaked, that's fine. I can live with that. [Laughs]

I think you have plenty more exciting places to go, especially in Star Trek.

James Swallow on Writing Expanded Novels for the Star Trek Universe

Speaking of Picard , I do have to take a little side quest here and ask: James, I know you've written a ton of expanded universe novels, many of which are still on my TBR list, but I quite literally chased down The Dark Veil on the day it came out and consumed it all in one sitting. Can you talk a bit about crafting that story to fill in the gaps for Star Trek: Picard ?

SWALLOW: What happened with that was Kirsten Beyer, who is a producer on Star Trek: Picard and Strange New Worlds and Discovery , she was originally one of my colleagues as a tie-in writer before she got kicked upstairs to work on proper Star Trek. But when she became a producer on the show, she kind of led the charge for us to try and make sure that what we were doing in the world of the tie-ins dovetails a lot more closely with what was being done on the TV show. It’s the same kind of thing that you're seeing with Tom's work turning up on the TV show—the idea that making sure all these different tie-in elements do feel like they hive more closely to the leading material.

She came to me and she said, “We want to do a novel that picks up some elements that we talked about in Picard .” The idea was we would do a story about Wolf getting to be captain of the Enterprise after Picard leaves Starfleet, and we were gonna do a story about the Rikers and talk a little bit about their son who you don't see in the show, but you hear this story about how they had a son and he died. I looked at those two elements, and I said, “Well, that's two different novels. I can't put all of that in one book. I can only do one piece of that.” I said, “The Rikers are my favorite characters on TNG,” so I said, “I'll do the Rikers’ story. I'll do the Riker on the USS Titan story.”

So, part of the brief I had was that the story had to strongly involve their son so we could learn a little bit more about that character who we never got to see on the TV show, and that was kind of the genesis of The Dark Veil . It ties into some of the plot elements that we see in Season 1 of Picard , but I was also given a lot of freedom to develop the characters and to develop the direction that story went.

So, for me, it was great. I had a fantastic time writing it, and I was really given just so much opportunity to add new stuff to that universe and build it out. With tie-ins, often the door only goes one way and you're told what you can do, and that's as far as it goes. But it seems with this newer iteration of Star Trek and these new shows, all the secret hideout shows that have been coming out, the door swings both ways now and it feels like we're generally getting to feed back into the creation of this big patchwork quilt that is the universe of Star Trek.

I love that. If you were to write an episode for Star Trek Online , what kind of story would you want to tell within the game? What characters would you use and what ships would you use? I feel like the two stories that you did for Voyager both leave a lot of room for the audience to make up their interpretation of what happened to these characters in those experiences, and I think that really lends itself to a game like this and a world that you can inhabit as a player.

SWALLOW: That that might be because I was a role-playing gamer before I was a writer. My prose writing experience definitely draws from years of being a GM and playing with a group of gamers and trying to come up with stories that go in different directions. But that's a great question. Star Trek Online has got such a massive expanded universe. There's so much going on in it. It's an embarrassment of riches, really. I'd be hard-pressed to pick, like, “Oh, I'll do a story about that,” you know?

But I really love some of the crazy expansions they've done, like the epic stuff with the mirror universe and all this stuff that's happening now with the alternate reality Borg and the time travel stories they've done. Those are so much fun. But I think if I had an opportunity, I'd try and find a little small corner of the Star Trek Online universe that hasn't been explored and maybe tell a smaller story there. That would be fun. It's a fantastic universe to be able to participate in.

Absolutely. You also have a Strange New Worlds book coming out soon. Is there anything you can tease about that before we switch back to Star Trek Online ?

SWALLOW: I just finished writing it this morning.

MARRONE: Oh, nice! Congratulations! That’s awesome.

SWALLOW: I literally finished the first draft, and was kind of like, “Oh, god,” and just had that moment. I’ve still got loads of rewrites and stuff to do, but I kind of put the end of the first chapter today. Again, that's been a really great experience to have the opportunity to do that. I'm absolutely loving Strange New Worlds . To me, it's going back to what is, at its core, essentially Star Trek—the episodic storytelling and the look and the feel and the excitement and adventure and the fun of it. All of that stuff is really, really great.

The story I'm doing is mid-Season 2. Luckily, I've been given access to a lot of the material they're doing for Season 3, so I'm seeing where the show is going and I'm getting the opportunity to put a few sneaky little hints in this. So, if you read the book, and you watch Season 3, you'll realize I'm kind of prefiguring a few of the events that are gonna happen in the third season of the show.

I was really inspired by the two characters on Strange New Worlds that I really love the most; Captain Pike and Erica Ortegas were the two characters that I just really, really warmed to. So, Toward the Night , the novel that I'm writing, they play a very, very strong role in that story. I especially wanted to dig into the background of the character of Ortegas, about where she came from and what made her who she is, and I had a lot of fun writing that. Also, Pike is such a great character too—just being able to write stuff with him just being a captain and being cool.

All the characters have got such strong voices, as well. One of the characters that I didn't realize I would enjoy writing so much was Number One, Una. She gets to do some fun stuff. She gets to have a face-off with a female Klingon commander, and they have a very sort of flinty kind of fight sequence where they're battling with each other but not in a starship combat kind of way. It's sort of like this battle of an argument that the two of them are having, and I had so much fun writing that. So, it was really fun to get my hands on those characters. I hope everybody enjoys it as much as I did writing it. It's gonna be out in March of next year.

I can't wait to read it.

How Star Trek Online Chooses Which Shows and Expanded Media to Reference In-Game

Bringing it back to Star Trek Online , when you guys are creating a new bundle and the next release to go out in the game, how do you decide which parts of this massive franchise to then integrate into the game? Is it mostly based on player requests? Is it a matter of personal preference for story arc, or a mix of both? How do you go about creating each next new thing?

MARRONE: With a game development, you have different lead times for different things. So, a ship lead time is much shorter than an episode lead time, and a lot of that has to do with the complexity of the asset that you're making or how many dependencies, like how many departments you need to contribute to something. An episode requires literally every department in the game to touch it for a long time, and it requires months of work from animators and content designers, environment artists, effects. Episodes are massive, which means they require a lot of planning.

Usually, we have a story arc planned out years in advance, like a year or two in advance. Currently we're working with a story arc created by our former creative—he's moved on to a different company—Al Rivera, who is a creative director. He worked with our former lead writer, Paul Reed, and they they came up with this Borg multiverse arc. We had a transition from the mirror arc that we just finished into this multiverse arc, which started with a really cool story with Tholians, and then bled into something bigger. If people will notice, we have these rifts in this current storyline, and visually they’re based very closely on the rift at the end of Picard Season 2.

What we love to do with Star Trek Online is, like James talked about, “What can we pull on a? A thread to expand on and really dive deep and connect different things together?” So, you had that rift show up, but you never knew who made it, what they wanted. It was very open-ended, and so we decided to clamp on to that for this story arc. I'll just leave it there because I don't wanna get too far into spoilers.

But it's always that. We wanna make sure that we find the fertile ground to tell new stories. We know that for people playing Star Trek Online , it's a Star Trek theme park—you have Voyager Land and TOS Land and Discovery Land and DS9 Land—and so we wanna make sure that with any new story that we bring into the game, we have these critical touch points, these different Star Trek shows, and we’re tying them together if we can.

So, this multiverse story arc with the Mirror Borg, we have the mirror stuff from TOS and Enterprise, but then we brought in Mirror Janeway, inspired by what IDW did with their Voyager , their mirror comics. We also brought in V’ger from Star Trek , the motion picture, in our mirror thing. They have nothing to do with each other on the surface, but we figured out a way. Then we have a mirror Wesley Crusher. It's wild and fun.

It was really fun working with Al and Paul and seeing what they would come up with. They had their big conspiracy board of, like, “And then the Mirror Traveler comes back with V’ger, and then they get Mirror V’ger, and then they have this big battle.” It's definitely Charlie Day. [Laughs] But that's one of the supreme joys of working on STO is doing that and making those connections. I think one of my favorite things that we've done is the Hur’q. The Hur’q were the featured villains in Star Trek: Invasion , which is really cool and inspired. James, were you the first people to make them Insectoid? Did that come from you?

SWALLOW: Yeah, I think so. I think Chris Graham was the guy who was the designer on that. I do remember the inspiration for them was very much army ants and beetles. That shiny carapace kind of look was definitely themindset for them. And if you look at the designs that we did in the game, they have these inverted triangular heads, like a kind of forehead, but it's all like a shiny bug carapace and a bunch of spectroid eyes on it. Pretty cool designs.

MARRONE: So, we did do our own take on it, but we started with the Invasion idea of them being Insectoid. So, the Hur’q in Star Trek Online are their own kind of Insectoid race, maybe a little more inspired by locusts and stuff. Then we did the Iconian arc. The Iconian arc was nuts because we pulled in stuff from Voyager with the Vaadwaur and then the conspiracy from TNG—those bug aliens that possessed people. You never heard about those guys again, so we tied that into an arc in STO. So many of these things that, on the surface, seem unconnected, it's really fun to bring them together and then let people experience all that. I could go on and on about it. [Laughs]

With this particular pack, did the final product come out as you envisioned it when you started or how did things evolve as you were designing this bundle?

MARRONE: One of the great things about all the new Star Trek shows is they keep forcing us to do more and more complicated stuff. We're always like, “How the heck are we gonna do that?” By the time we got to the Typhon and the Achilles and the Premonition, I think the Premonition was maybe the most challenging, getting the Enterprise to split into two copies of the Enterprise and getting the effects timing and all that. But once you do the Section 31 Dreadnought from Discovery where you have little drones peeling off, that thing was a monster.

We were scratching our heads, like, “How do we replicate this faithfully?” So, a lot of the stuff that we had to do for this bundle was actually pretty tame in comparison [laughs], even though it's super cool. It's like, “Oh, yeah, the Typhon folds up and then it does a gatling gun barrage for a while.” It was like, “Yeah, okay.” Everybody knew how to do that. We had done stuff like that before.

We have a lot of ships in the game that transform and have modes. Starting with, I think the original starship to do that in Star Trek is the Bird of Prey from Star Trek III [ The Search for Spock ], originally designed by Nilo Rodis. It has the wings that go up or down depending on what it's doing, and so we've got that in STO. Then you follow all the way through to Booker’s ship from Discovery . That was another one that was just wildly complex, but we do have it animate in the game. I think it even does the ramming thing where all the pieces fly apart and then reconfigure and then fly through.

So, these ships were actually pretty tame from what we thought, but they turned out wonderfully. I wanna call out Tobias Richter, the ship artist who did the Typhon and the Achilles. Tobias is a well known Star Trek fan who's a professional VFX artist. We've contracted with him for a very long time on Star Trek Online . He's done a lot of ships for us. It's great working with him. He's super professional, super fast, super high quality, and he really brought these ships to life.

Then the third ship, the Premonition, with Invasion , the endgame models were pretty low poly, but they still had some pretty defined textures and stuff. Then we had really good concept art that we found, and then in Invasion , there's also a really high quality CG cut scenes that we could look at, too, to kind of up-res. Creating them for Star Trek Online meant for our modern graphics card, we had a lot more detail than they had to work with on the PlayStation one, and so we up-res’d the designs. I call it kind of wiping the grease off the lens or bringing it into focus where it's still the same thing, still the same silhouette, all the details are still in the same places, you're getting a look at the the same thing but in sharper focus.

So, for the Achilles and the Typhon, that was easy to do, but the Premonition, because Star Trek: Armada was a real-time strategy game, that meant their models were super low detail because they had to have dozens of them on screen at once. Back in the year 2000, that meant your models had to be hundreds of triangles, not tens of thousands of triangles. So, the Premonition was really low detail. The concept art didn't really have a lot of information in it, so we felt like with the Premonition, we had a bit more room to push the design and interpret it in a more unique way.

For that one, I hired Eric Henry to design and model the new Premonition for us. Eric is a fantastic artist. He's super skilled at designing and modeling ships. He has a great YouTube channel where he does a lot of breakdowns of Star Wars ships, and he'll do his own custom design stuff. He's just a tremendous artist, and I love working with him, and I think the Premonition turned out wonderfully. We were working on it earlier, and we were trying to nail what we wanted to do, and I was like, “Alright, well if you took the Vesta and the Sovereign, and they had a baby, what would that look like?” So, if they're Vesta fans, and they see the Premonition, I think they'll enjoy it.

How Star Trek Online Brings in Your Favorite Stars From the Franchise

That's really cool. I just want to say how amazing this game is and just what a huge achievement it is in general having this massive world that Trekkies can create themselves into. Then just to experience these stories firsthand is really, really special. I know your specialty is ships, but you also do a little bit of character design. Several actors from the franchise have come and done voice work for STO, so what's the process of getting those people back? Do you know who you can get in advance and then craft the story around that or is it the other way around?

MARRONE: So, I came up as a UI artist and became a ship artist. Now I'm the art director, so I oversee the whole art team on STO, so I can speak to that a little bit. I was never a character artist, although I do work closely with them as art director. It always starts with a story. We have a story outline, and these are the people we want to bring in, and then we have to get that list approved by Paramount. They say, “Oh, this person is gonna be used by this show, so you probably should stay away just in case they do something that doesn't jive with what you wanna do.”

And that's happened a few times where we'll pitch somebody to them, like Wesley was in Picard Season 2. Originally, our mirror arc with Wesley, it was gonna be Prime Wesley and there was only gonna be one Wesley anywhere. It was going to turn out to be that he had been corrupted somehow as Traveler and was gonna be running that.

I have vague memories of what the original plan was. I think it was Prime Beverly, or something. Maybe it was always a Mirror Wesley, but it was gonna be Prime Beverly because we hired Gates McFadden to come back and be Beverly, but because of what was going on with Picard Season 3, they didn't want us to use Beverly at all. So we were like, “Well, can we do Mirror Beverly?” And they were like, “Yeah, that's fine.”

So it ended up working better, actually, because there was more connection between Mirror Beverly and Mirror Wesley, obviously, and we got to tell a really cool story about Wesley. It was really truncated, but we got flashbacks to Wesley growing up and discovering he has Traveler powers, but what does that mean in an environment like the Terran Empire where everybody is out for themselves. He probably would have ended up dissected in a lab. I know Paul, our writer at the time, drew a lot from the IDW comics and what they were doing with their TNG mirror universe stuff.

So, we push that past Paramount. If they agree, then we go to the actors and we say, “Hey, are you interested in working with us?” We get everything signed and we'll start just doing their likenesses. That process, depending on how we do it, that can take five or six weeks internally or several months if we’re working with our [Extent] partners to nail down those likenesses. It's very, very challenging. I don't know if I should say this, but a lot of attractive people look the same [laughs], and so you have to find the very, very minute details that bring their specific look and personality into them, and it's really hard to just like intuit that stuff as an artist.

As an artist, you don't understand how a minute little tweak, how much difference that can make in the difference between a generic handsome man and Captain Kirk, right? There's a lot of really, really subtle stuff going on in likenesses. So, that's something I've been involved in as art director, in remaking a few likenesses, and it's always probably one of the most challenging things about the job is trying to nail down what makes a person register as that person. How do we do that in the game engine with the technology limitations that we have? And how do we do it within a time box of a few weeks, a couple of months? It's a lot of iteration back and forth, “Try moving this. Try changing that.”

I think that's something that people who aren't game developers don't understand, and I think anybody who's creative knows this, is that if you see something really cool– And I do this, I know. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my favorite video games, and then I play that game like, “Wow, the people who did this are geniuses.” And they are, but I think people forget that, yes, they're geniuses, they're skilled, they're very smart, but they spent years iterating to get where they are.

There are mountains and mountains of unused, discarded work, where it's like, well, maybe [this character] looks like this. Maybe she has dreadlocks. No, we're not gonna have her have dreadlocks.” So they have to remodel her hair. It's just like that. For anything that's good, or almost anything—I’m sure there are Mozarts and people like that out there—it's on a throne of skulls of discarded work. It's like bad drafts. [Laughs]

SWALLOW: I always think, like, when you watch an action movie, you never see the scene where the guy falls off the bike or drops his gun. You only ever see the good take, right? You only ever see the best of what could be done.

MARRONE: James, which episodes did you do?

SWALLOW: I did the original story premises for two episodes, one from Season 4 and one from Season 6. The first one was called “One,” which is the story about the Voyagers going through a radioactive nebula and everybody's in suspended animation, and Seven of Nine has to pilot the ship on her own because she's the only one who can survive, and starts to go crazy halfway through. That’s a little homage to The Shining on Voyager , basically. Voyager is the Overlook Hotel—that's the pitch that I did for that one.

The other one is “Memorial.” That's a story where the crew start having flashbacks to being in this battle that they were never in and they don't understand why. Turns out what it is is it’s a war memorial that's broadcasting this event.

MARRONE: I remember that one. That was a really cool sci-fi story. I love both those episodes, but that one I thought was really fascinating.

It’s so thought-provoking, the concept of making people understand your trauma by having them live through it.

MARRONE: Right, but also the morality of forcing it on them too. [Laughs]

SWALLOW: The idea of that is that the device is malfunctioning. Normally, you would have the terms and conditions at the beginning of it. So everybody's being forced to experience this thing, and that's why at the end of the story, they say, “Well, should we turn it off?” And they say, “No, no, no, it's too important for that. We'll fix it so that it works correctly.”

Just to end on a fun question, if you’re captaining a starship, what’s on your bridge playlist?

MARRONE: So for me, it would probably be like, you know that yo yo ma violin piece or Master and Commander . That would be there probably. Or the Hunt for Red October soundtrack, you know anything.

SWALLOW: For me, it would be, Scorpions Rock You Like a Hurricane.

The new Star Trek Online Heritage Ship bundle is available to purchase in game now.

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[Top 15] Star Trek Online Best Ships (From Early Till Late Game)

With an eye towards value and power, this list will give you all you need to know to hit the late game in Star Trek Online! Thanks to changes made to the game, you can stay with the same ship after the tutorial all the way to the end game so you can fly your favorite ship from day one! This list has been made with a broad audience in mind, from newbie to grizzled veteran, so everyone can learn something new! The top 15 ships in Star Trek Online also include ships that will let you pilot the same starships as Captain Picard, Captain Sisko, and Captain Janeway so let’s make it so.

15. Romulan Legacy Elite Starter Pack - T6 Malem-Class Light Warbird

Relive the Balance of Terror!

How to get the Malem Class: (Only available for Romulan characters) 2,000 Zen ($20.00) in the C-Store

Number 15 on our list is actually one of the Elite Starter Packs, which gives you access to a unique bridge officer, a uniform, and a discounted T6 starship! This option is best for those inclined towards pointy ears and cloak and dagger, as it’s affordable, gives you a great torpedo ship, and a borg bridge officer.

Thanks to the Singularity warp core mechanics, which give you five additional powers to use and an experimental weapon slot, the Malem is very good as a torpedo ship. Thanks to the power of reputation-based torpedoes such as the Neutronic and Biomolecular, you can quickly build an affordable ship that can handle any content. 

Battlecloak allows you to enter and exit combat at will, which is powerful for players who are looking to maximize their ambush bonuses! Despite recent nerfs, covert operative bridge officer traits still stack their bonuses high enough to get this ship on the top 15 list. Torpedoes themselves are easier to get into now as well, making it a good starter ship.

Are you a fan of the Balance of Terror from The Original Series? Then this ship is for you! The Malem comes with the classic skin line for free, so the Malem is an excellent entry point for Romulan characters. Thanks to the changes to the game, the ship will level up with you, unlocking additional weapon and console slots as well as increasing the hull amount. Another bonus is that anyone can use Romulan ships, no matter the faction, so if you like the look or like the sound of zipping around the battlefield, this is the ship for you!

• Level 65: Hull 40500 (scaling)
• 4 fore and 3 aft weapon slots plus 1 experimental weapon slot
• Shield Modifier 0.9
• Hull Modifier 0.9
• Turn Rate 18
• 3 Tactical, 3 Engineering, 4 Science console slots
• Unique Console: Warhead Module Plasma (part of the Stealth Fighter Set)
• Commander Tactical, Ensign Tactical, Lieutenant Engineering, Lt. Commander Science, Lt. Commander Universal-Pilot

What makes the T6 Malem great

• Low-cost entry-level ship that progresses with you! At only $20 for the starter pack, it’s effectively a $10 sale for a normal T6 ship.
• Romulan ships have Singularity Warp Cores. These warp cores give you five distinct powers which augment the ship’s abilities.
• Battle Cloak lets you move in and out of combat easily. Are you taking more hits than you can handle? Pull out the old Romulan “run away!” and cloak up! It can also be used to give you powerful ambush bonuses when built for.
• Pilot specialized seating. It isn’t a fully specialized ship, like others on this list, but for an entry-level ship it does the job well enough. Pilot seating gives you added flexibility, with great bridge officer powers like Attack Pattern Lambda which gives you a chance to confuse enemies!
• Cross-faction, meaning anyone can use it from any of the factions.
• An easy way to get a powerful starship trait that works well with any other cannon build.

How To Get the T6 Malem

• The easiest method by far is to purchase the Romulan Legacy Starter Pack for $20.00.
• If you don’t want the other goodies and don’t mind spending another $10.00, you can buy the Malem directly from the C-Store for $30.00.

14. Klingon Defense Force Elite Starter Pack - Kor-Class Bird of Prey

Fight on, Dahar Master!

How to get the Kor Class: (Only available for KDF characters) 2,000 Zen ($20.00) in the C-Store

Number 14 on our list is another one of the Elite Starter Packs, which gives you access to a unique borg bridge officer, a uniform, and a discounted T6 starship! Like the Romulan Starter Pack, this is another great option for those who prefer to raise the d’k tahg in victory!

The Kor, unlike its Romulan counterpart, comes with a standard set of equipment, so no fancy powers. But what sets this ship apart is the much more flexible universal seating. Like all Birds of Prey in Star Trek Online, the Kor has full universal bridge officer seats. This means that you can slot in any power that you want, from a torpedo build to cannons to even turning it into a mini-tank.

The Kor comes equipped with the Withering Barrage starship trait, which extends the duration of Cannon: Scatter Volley. This is a key trait for those who use cannons, as it is one of the few ways to actually keep the buff going. It also comes with raider flanking, meaning that if you attack the enemy from behind, you’ll do bonus damage. In addition to all these goodies, it also has an Enhanced Battle Cloak, giving you the same bonuses that the Romulan Malem has.

Its universal console is the Warhead Module-Quantum, which functions very similarly to the Romulan console. It’s part of the Stealth Fighter Set, which is an average set in terms of usefulness and also comes with the Induction Coils, which greatly increase your ship's power settings for 15 seconds.

Pretty handy, right?

If you want to follow in the footsteps of the Dahar Master himself and face an armada of Jem’hadar, then this is the bird of prey you definitely need to check out!

• Level 65: Hull 37125(scaling)
• 4 fore and 2 aft weapon slots plus 1 experimental weapon slot
• Shield Modifier 0.825
• Hull Modifier 0.8
• Turn Rate 23
• 4 Tactical, 3 Engineering, 3 Science console slots
• Unique Console: Warhead Module Quantum
• Commander Universal, Lt. Commander Universal, Lt. Commander Universal-Pilot, Lieutenant Universal

What makes the T6 Kor great

• Cheap entry level ship that levels with you! At only $20 for the starter pack, it’s effectively a $10 sale for a normal T6 ship.
• The Kor has extreme flexibility for a ship, letting you essentially make any build you want.
• It has access to a ton of four skins for free upon purchase of this pack, giving you a lot of costume options to customize your ship.

How To Get the T6 Kor

• The easiest method by far is to purchase the Klingon Defense Force Starter Pack for $20.00.
• If you don’t want the other goodies and don’t mind spending another $10.00, you can buy the Kor directly from the C-Store for $30.00.

13. Federation Elite Starter Pack - T6 Reliant-Class Advanced Light Cruiser

Beware of any nearby Mutura Nebula!

How to get the Reliant Class: (Only available for Starfleet characters) 2,000 Zen ($20.00) in the C-Store

Number 13 on our list is yet another one of the Elite Starter Packs, which gives you access to a unique borg bridge officer, a uniform, and a discounted T6 starship! Like the first two, this is another great option for those who prefer to boldly go where no one has gone before!

Unlike the Malem and the Kor, the Reliant is a cruiser, which makes it significantly more durable than either of the raiders. Based on the venerable Miranda frame, the Reliant acts as an excellent entry-level ship for new players who want to get into tanking, or old players looking for something classic-looking. A great bonus for this ship is the sheer number of customization options. Nine total, by far the most in the entire game. Players have made versions through customization that look like whole new starship classes themselves.

Its starship trait is Evasion Specialist, which is unfortunately nowhere near as valuable as Withering Barrage, as shields are generally seen as being not worth the effort. When a Borg Sphere is slapping drain shields on you, there’s not a whole lot that this trait can do for you.

That said, it is still very durable, has reasonable flexibility, and can run a typical Aux2Bat build—a method of cooldown reduction that works best on ships with a lot of engineering bridge officer positions. The addition of all the cruiser commands, such as Weapon System Efficiency and Attract Fire, gives it further benefits here.

The console it comes with, Potential Energy Entanglement, is a reasonable choice for those just starting out with tanking. It has a clickable power which reduces enemy damage output by 80% in a cone in front of you while also increasing your flight speed and turn rate for 20 seconds.

Plus, who doesn’t want to reenact The Battle of the Mutara Nebula?

Whether it be giving Khan his second chance at revenge or creating a unique design with all the many quality parts, the Reliant is as reliable as its name suggests for either new or veteran players.

• Level 65: Hull 51750 (scaling)
• 4 fore and 4 aft weapon slots
• Shield Modifier 1.1
• Hull Modifier 1.1
• Turn Rate 11
• 3 Tactical, 4 Engineering, 3 Science console slots
• Unique Console: Potential Energy Entanglement
• Lt. Commander Tactical, Commander Engineering, Ensign Engineering, Lieutenant Science, Lt. Commander Universal-Pilot

What makes the T6 Reliant great

• The Reliant is an excellent starter tank for the price tag, giving you durability, speed, and decent firepower. 
• Pilot specialized seating.  Unlike the Kor and Malem, the Reliant struggles to take full advantage of it due to the tanking nature of the ship.
• It has access to six skins for free upon purchase of this pack, giving you a lot of costume options to customize your ship. With all the ships, it has a total of nine unique skins to customize with!

How To Get the T6 Reliant

• The easiest method by far is to purchase the Federation Elite Starter Pack for $20.00.
• If you don’t want the other goodies and don’t mind spending another $10.00, you can buy the Reliant directly from the C-Store for $30.00.

12. Vanguard Support Carrier

Victory comes with lots of fighter support!

How to get the Vanguard Support Carrier: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Number 12 is finally something that isn’t a Starter Pack! The Vanguard Carrier is part of the Support Carrier bundle, which includes a direct duplicate for each of the factions. The Federation, Klingon and Romulan Support Carriers have the same stats and come with their own versions of the unique support pets. These ships are fantastic for players who want that “fleet command” style of play, where they deploy an armada of ships to attack enemies or repair allies.

Carriers hold a unique position in Star Trek Online where the ship itself is not the center of combat power. Rather, the pets do the lion's share of the damage. The pets that come with the Vanguard are reasonable entry levels for Carrier gameplay, being the Jem’Hadar Support Frigates and the Jem’Hadar Fighter Squadron. The key things here are the squadron level pets, as these do higher damage than their single fighter counterparts. The Support Frigates will use Transfer Shield Strength 1 (or higher, depending on the rarity of the pets) on you, giving you added defensive buffs. What sets the Vanguard apart from the other Support Carriers, however, is the Wingmen.

All Jem’Hadar Vanguard starships in Star Trek Online come with a pair of Jem’Hadar Wingmen. These two ships each have three clickable abilities: the Polaron Strafing Maneuver (damage), the Structural Reinforcement Maneuver (hull healing), and the Divergent Shielding Maneuver (shield healing). This gives you a built-in ship feature that none of the other carriers can compete against, making the Vanguard the best choice.

The starship trait is Relaunch and Repair, which gives you a reduction on captain ability cooldowns and 25% health regeneration to self and pets in space every time you launch a carrier pet. This only applies to launched pets, so clickable console pets don’t count. For a “free” trait, this isn’t terrible, but it isn’t amazing either. 

Equipped with a Command specialization Lt. Commander slot, the Carrier can function as a really incredible torpedo platform when combined with the pets. If using squadrons in both hangars and the Wingmen offensively, you can direct a withering amount of firepower at a target or entire area of space if you have the right traits and powers equipped. Some players have managed to get so much damage squeezed onto these ships that they effectively delete Borg Cubes.

The console it comes with, High-Energy Communications Network, is a buff/debuff console centered around pets. It is okay, but is better replaced by far superior consoles like D.O.M.I.N.O. (from the Bajoran Interceptor) and others.

Victory is life! ...especially when you’ve got an entire fleet at your back!

• Level 65: Hull 56250 (scaling)
• 3 fore and 3 aft weapon slots
• Shield Modifier 1.25
• Hull Modifier 1.3
• Turn Rate 5
• Unique Console: High-Energy Communications Network
• 2 Hangar Bays
• Lt. Commander Tactical, Lt. Commander Engineering, Commander Science, Lt. Commander Universal-Command

What makes the T6 Vanguard Support Carrier great

• Best Support Carrier in the group, with a strong Wingmen feature that increases damage and healing.
• Ship that is extremely durable and excels at centering fleet formations during Task Force Operations.
• When pushed to its limits, it can produce huge damage through its pets. 
• Can function as a Science Carrier, giving you options like Gravity Well or DoT damage builds to augment the pet firepower.

How To Get the T6 Vanguard Support Carrier

• The easiest method is to purchase it directly for $30.00 in the C-Store.
• If you like the Carriers and want the rest to complete the faction set, there is the Cross Faction Support Carrier Bundle for 10,000 Zen($100.00). 

11. Multi-Mission Reconnaissance Vessel

For when the Vesta gets the Besta love.

How to get the Multi-Mission Reconnaissance Explorer: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Number 11 is similar to the Carriers in the sense that all of the factions have identical setups, with the exception of the Romulan version that has a battle cloak. The Recon Explorer remains the best ship for entry-level science builds, thanks to its powerful bridge officer seating and the ever-important Temporal specialization.

Temporal specialization is the best spec for builds that rely on DoTs, as it has complimentary bonuses thanks to the passives and secondary deflector. While the Recon Explorer doesn’t have a fully committed Temporal specialization, it’s enough to make the ship worthy of this list.

Science ships like the Recon Explorer don’t rely on their weapons like most ships do, and instead use bridge officer powers to do massive area damage to targets. A well-equipped science ship is capable of obliterating an entire map of enemies with the push of a button. Most of these techniques involve a power called "Gravity Well" which pulls targets in, then couples that with Temporal specialization powers like Channeled Deconstruction and Entropic Cascade.

Like all science ships, it possesses Subsystem Targeting, which is a nice little bonus alongside Sensor Analysis and a Hangar Bay. The thing that makes the Recon Explorer worthy of the list is the tactical bridge officer slots, giving it the ability to run a science-torpedo build. These types of builds are absolutely devastating, throwing out gravity wells and torpedo spreads.

The starship trait is Heavy Tachyon Mine which will deploy a Heavy Mine that does heavy shield penetrating damage and leaves a temporary trail of shield damaging radiation. As starship traits go, it’s not remotely viable for the late game, but can be fun in the early game. 

The console it comes with, the Radiation Bombardment Matrix, is a buff/debuff console that reduces damage resistance and flight speed. It isn’t useful for science builds, as it doesn’t give the same level of bonuses or utility as other consoles, like the Plasma Storm console.

For anyone who happens to enjoy the Star Trek: Destiny novels, the Recon Explorer line of ships does come with the Vesta costumes, letting you customize the vessel to look like the U.S.S. Aventine. It does cost additional money, however, to unlock the skin as it is not free.

• Level 65: Hull 42750 (scaling)
• Shield Modifier 0.95
• Hull Modifier 1.4
• Turn Rate 12
• 4 Tactical, 2 Engineering, 5 Science console slots
• Unique Console: Radiation Bombardment Launcher
• Secondary Deflector
• 1 Hangar Bay
• Lt. Commander Tactical, Lieutenant Engineering, Commander Science, Lt. Commander Universal-Temporal Operative, Ensign Universal

What makes the T6 Multi-Mission Reconnaissance Explorer great

• A tough science ship with a high turn rate and tactical focus.This lets you build a science-torpedo ship, which is one of the most powerful in the game.
• Affordable entry-level ship while still being effective in the late game. Can compete with higher-cost ships.
• One of the most customizable ships, competing against the likes of the Reliant.

 How To Get the T6 Multi-Mission Reconnaissance Explorer

• If you like the Recon Explorer and want the rest to complete the faction set, there is the Cross Faction Multi-Mission Explorers Bundle for 12,000 Zen ($120.00) or the T6 Starfleet Multi-Mission Explorers Bundle for 6,000 Zen ($60.00).

10. Narendra Support Cruiser

The Probertise that could have been.

How to get the Narendra Support Cruiser: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Number 10 is our first full-specialization ship on the list, and our first traditional cruiser! Unlike the Reliant, which is a small and zippy ship, the Support Cruiser fits the lumbering behemoth vibe. The Support Cruiser is also available for the KDF, though it does not come in Dominion or Romulan flavors.

The Support Cruiser is unique in being the only of the Cruiser class ships with full Temporal seating. This means it gets the powers typically reserved for temporal science ships, such as Offensive Coordination (a speed buff), Defensive Coordination (a healing buff), and a Support Configuration (exotic damage buff). 

This means that you can actually turn the Narendra into a respectable science platform. Between the built-in Commander/Temporal-Operative seating and the Lt. Commander Science, you can double up on Gravity Wells, Entropic Cascades, and torpedoes. The weakness of the ship when built this way is that it lacks the necessary Lt. Commander Tactical bridge officer to maximize this power.

Unlike science ships, the Narendra comes with full cruiser commands.

The starship trait is "History Will Remember," which is finally a trait that’s generally always worth slotting until you’re able to afford the lock box or premium ships. This starship trait gives you a scaling buff depending on enemies defeated, which increases your resilience. It grants 30% All Damage, 30% Hull Regen, 30% Maximum Hull, and 30% Threat Generation (when the threatening stance is active) at maximum stacks.

This is a powerful trait that has a lot of utility for any ship on this list.

The console it comes with, Temporal Trajectory Shifter, is a single target console that "steals" time, increasing Firing Speed by 50%, Ability Cooldown by 20%, and Defense Rating by 50 while stealing 33.3% Firing Speed, 1% Ability Cooldown per second, and -50 Defense Rating from the target.

The Narendra is based on Andrew Probert's original concept sketches for the U.S.S. Enterprise D, eventually being turned into the Ambassador class. All fans of this classic design will have to pick this ship up!

• Level 65: Hull 60750(scaling)
• Shield Modifier 1.0
• Hull Modifier 1.35
• Turn Rate 7
• Unique Console: Borrowed Time
• Molecular Deconstruction Beam
• Lieutenant Tactical, Ensign Tactical, Commander Engineering/Temporal-Operative, Lt. Commander Science, and Lt. Commander Universal

What makes the T6 Narendra Support Cruiser great

• A unique cruiser that combines tankiness and science powers.
• The high hull modifier combined with the starship trait makes it one of the tankier starships on this list.
• Full Temporal specialization adds additional options when in combat when used together with Cruiser Commands.

How To Get the T6 Narendra Support Cruiser

• If you like the Narendra and want the KDF version as well, the Cross Faction Support Cruiser Bundle for 4,000 Zen/$40.00 is available.

9. Arbiter Battlecruiser

The Defiant: now in nacelle form!

How to get the Arbiter Battlecruiser: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Number 9 is a classic in Star Trek Online. The Arbiter (and the Avenger before it) have long been the #1 pick for most people when it comes to recommending a ship for newer players. Being one of the very few Federation starships that can equip a cloaking device console and a battlecruiser makes it ideal in a DPS-heavy environment! There is a KDF variant in the Mogh that comes with a cloaking device.

The Arbiter pulls from the older days of Star Trek Online when "battlecruisers" were Klingon only, giving them high-hitting and high-durability ships compared to Starfleet's usually "just durable". Nowadays, it’s obsolete next to the other ships on this list, but it still gets a top 15 spot due to a few factors.

Battlecruisers come with most of the normal Cruiser Commands, with the exception of Attract Fire. As these are not designed as tanks, they do not get the tanking bonus ability of a typical cruiser. Instead, the Arbiter can do what only escorts used to be able to! It can equip dual heavy cannons. Thanks to this, and the five forward weapon slots (another thing that used to be unique), the Arbiter is capable of dishing out high levels of DPS, even to this day.

With the Intelligence specialization, the Arbiter is able to fit the coveted Override Subsystem Safety bridge officer power, giving the ship a tremendous boost to power levels, which in turn increases its firepower.

The starship trait is the Emergency Weapon Cycle, also known as the most common starship trait in the game. It’s used on every energy weapon build and even on most tank builds simply because it’s so good. The trait increases the Firing Cycle Haste by 20% and reduces Weapon Power Cost by 50% for 30 seconds every time you use Emergency Power to Weapons, which a majority of non-science builds have.

For a first-time ship buyer, you can’t go wrong with the Arbiter.

The console it comes with, Ablative Hazard Shielding, passively increases your Shield Resistance and Shield Regeneration. The activable gives your ship Secondary Shields, which act similar to Temp HP. It then gives you another shield when the Ablative Hazard Shielding buff ends. It’s useful against non-Borg or other enemies that don’t have shield-stripping powers.

Among the first of the Cryptic-made designs in the new T6 lineup, this is a classic ship that includes the Avenger skin for free on purchase!

• Level 65: Hull 56250(scaling)
• 5 fore and 3 aft weapon slots
• Hull Modifier 1.25
• Turn Rate 9
• 4 Tactical, 5 Engineering, 1 Science console slots
• Unique Console: Ablative Hazard Shielding
• Can Equip Dual Heavy Cannons
• Can Equip Cloaking Device Console
• Lt. Commander Tactical-Intelligence, Ensign Tactical, Commander Engineering, Lieutenant Science, Lt. Commander Universal

What makes the T6 Arbiter Battlecruiser great

• It has the perfect weapon setup of 5 forward and 3 aft weapon slots, ideal for maximal energy weapon damage.
• One of the best starship traits in the game for direct energy weapon builds.
• It is naturally tanky for a battlecruiser, letting you throw more energy into doing damage instead of survival.
• It's an excellent newbie ship that’s easy to learn and modify to suit your needs.

How To Get the T6 Arbiter Battlecruiser

• If you like the Arbiter and want the KDF version as well, the Cross Faction Battlecruiser Bundle for 6,000 Zen/$60.00 is available.

8. Alita Heavy Strike Wing Escort

For when the normal Akira just isn't enough.

How to get the Alita Class Heavy Strike Wing Escort: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Number 8 is the venerable Alita Class, which has recently been changed into what’s called a "Strike Wing Escort". This means it has a hangar bay in addition to the normal weapons loadout and abilities of the Escort subclass of ships.

It might seem odd to place this ship above the Arbiter, but I’ll explain my reasoning here. The Alita is similar in many ways to its offensive profile, though it comes with the Experimental Weapon Slot and the Hangar Bay, giving it just a bit more flexibility in terms of what it can do. Anyone who has played the game will probably be thinking, "Well, not that much!" 

Aha, but then, we have Superior Area Denial. For those who don’t know, this starship trait is an extremely powerful buff to fighters that gives them Cannon Rapid Fire and Beam: Fire at Will and reduces their damage resistance rating by -30, which is the same as slapping Attack Pattern: Beta 1 on them. This means that if you equip a fighter squadron on the Alita and have this trait, you could be seeing as much as a 15% DPS increase just from that Hangar Bay alone!

This isn’t newbie-friendly, however, as the trait is difficult to get. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to have the traits to make this ship good! Instead, you can easily focus on pure energy weapon damage and get great results, comparable to ships later on in this list.

Strike Wing Escorts are relatively new to Star Trek Online and aren’t nearly as popular as their Flight Deck Cruiser big brothers.

With the Pilot specialization, the Alita is able to equip things like Attack Pattern: Lamba, however because of the seating being shared with engineering, people tend to not use the Pilot skills in favor of the needed engineering bridge officer slots. 

The starship trait is Coordinated Assault, which is the opposite of Superior Area Denial. Your pets' Beam: Overload and Cannon: Rapid Fire abilities deal a lot of single-target damage. It isn’t as good as Superior Area Denial, since Star Trek Online isn’t structured around huge boss battles, but it’s still useful for Carriers or people who use pets.

The console it comes with, Destabilized Tachyon Emitters, is unfortunately terrible and should be replaced by any number of better consoles like the Assimilated Module or similar.

Star Trek: First Contact debuted the original Akira class, which has long been a fan favorite, and now thanks to the Alita, players can enjoy the ship with all the power and grace of the original movie.

• Level 65: Hull 48000(scaling)
• 4 fore and 3 aft weapon slots
• Shield Modifier 1.06
• Turn Rate 15
• 5 Tactical, 3 Engineering, 2 Science console slots
• Unique Console: Destabilized Tachyon Burst
• Commander Tactical, Lieutenant Tactical, Lt. Commander Engineering-Pilot, Lieutenant Science, Lieutenant Universal

  What makes the T6 Alita Heavy Strike Wing Escort great

• Heavy firepower, with some builds pushing past half a million DPS.
• It comes with an excellent Carrier trait that is useful for single target damage.
• Some flexibility with the bridge officer seating lets you switch up builds.
• This ship has six skins available, giving it many customization options for players.

How To Get the T6 Alita Heavy Strike Wing Escort

• If you like the skins and want all the versions as well, the Akira Bundle for 6,000 Zen/$60.00 is available.

7. Terran Cygnus Battlecruiser

Big D has been upgraded, Terran style!

How to get the Terran Cygnus-Class Battlecruiser: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Number 7 is the Terran version of the Galaxy Class, the Cygnus. The Cygnus is a far better version than the Andromeda. The Cygnus fits the general profile of top-end Star Trek Online ships—it has a lot of forward guns; it has full specialization seating; and it has bridge officer flexibility. It isn’t quite enough to get it into the top 5, though, and I’ll explain why.

The Cygnus has the unique position of being the only full-time temporal specialization battlecruiser with five forward weapon slots. The other available option, the Paladin, only has four, making it a worse version of the Cygnus. The Cynus also has huge hull values, making it far easier to tank with.

This unusual arrangement is usually glossed over by players since the Cygnus doesn’t have the full Commander science bridge officer seating that would be needed to turn it into a science damage boat. Instead, most players use the Commander engineering bridge officer seat for all their engineering powers and turn the Lt. Commander Universal into another tactical item or into science.

Still, the added feature benefits of being a full temporal specialization ship are quite handy, sharing the same benefits as the Narendra. It lacks the same capacity to function as a "light" science ship due to the limitations of its seating, but it makes up for that more than enough by having sheer firepower through traditional means.

With the five front weapons, it can output the same damage as the Arbiter while being significantly tankier and having the bonus features of the Temporal specialization and the Lieutenant Tactical Command, which gives you access to Concentrate Firepower II. By using this power, and switching your Lt. Commander Universal to Science for a Gravity Well, you can pump out a huge amount of torpedo damage onto a target group of helpless enemies.

Or you can go the traditional directed energy weapon route and let the beams do the lion's share of damage!

With the full Temporal specialization and split Command specialization, you have a lot of options for what you want to do with this ship. The Temporal and Command abilities can be used for tanking or DPS; the choice is yours!

The starship trait is Controlled Aggression, which really wants to make this ship use science powers as it buffs Control Expertise every time you use a Temporal Operative power or a Universal Console clickable. The buff is pretty good too, as it scales based on the control expertise you already have. However, I wouldn’t necessarily put it on the Cygnus, unless I really wanted to try out a science build using the Galaxy skin for flavor.

It’s better suited for a pure science ship, as we’ll see later in the list.

The console it comes with, Destabilized Dimensional Rip, is a weird one! It gives phaser, radiation, and exotic particle generator buffs, which seems to want to encourage a hybrid directed energy/science power build. The clickable creates a rift in front of you that "banishes" enemies and causes radiation damage while the rift itself expands, swallowing up more enemies. The clickable is pretty handy if you are tanking and things are getting spicy.

The Cygnus comes with all of the Galaxy Class skins, letting you fly around in Jean Luc Picard’s Enterprise D, but for those adventurous of spirit, it also has additional costumes that can be used to customize your ship!

• Level 65: Hull 68625(scaling)
• Shield Modifier 1.525
• Turn Rate 6
• 3 Tactical, 5 Engineering, 3 Science console slots
• Unique Console: Destabilized Dimensional Rift
• Lieutenant Tactical-Command, Lieutenant Tactical, Commander Engineering-Temporal Operative, Lieutenant Science, Lt. Commander Universal

What makes the T6 Cygnus Battlecruiser great

• Flexible firepower options, ranging from directed energy weapons to torpedos to some science (if building that way).
• This is a highly durable tanking ship, able to sit there and soak up a ton of damage.
• Full specialization means it can take advantage of the Temporal Operative features, adding even more flexibility.
• Universal seating means you can go for more damage or more tanking or more science, depending on your needs.

How To Get the T6 Cygnus Battlecruiser Battlecruiser

• If you like the Terran line of ships, there is a bundle available, the 12th Anniversary Terran Bundle, for 17,500 Zen ($175.00).

6. Suliban Flight Deck Assault Carrier

Enterprise has a thing or two to say about how annoying these can be!

How to get the Suliban Flight Deck Assault Carrier: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Number 6 is finally here, and what do we have? The Suliban Assault Carrier! The Sublian FDAC (what a mouthful) is probably the best entry for anyone looking to get into the higher firepower carriers. Outside of gamble box ships, the Suliban is the most effective at the role. Between the 5 forward and 3 aft weapon layouts and the 2 hangar bays, the ship also has a Battle Cloak, giving you basically the best of all worlds in a single package.

The only thing that could make this ship even better, pushing it into the top 3, would be if it had full specialization seating. Alas, we do not obtain perfection with this ship and instead have to settle for "really dang good." Still, it does come with unique pets that do a fair amount of damage.

FDAC type ships are hyper-geared towards energy weapon builds or torpedo builds, and this is because they have a Commander bridge officer seating in their Lt. Commander Tactical slot. This gives them Concentrate Firepower III, massively increasing torpedo damage potential. However, you don’t have to do this and can instead slap dual beam banks on it and beat the Arbiter, Cygnus, and Alita in damage thanks to the presence of two Hangar Bays.

If you remember from our Number 12 spot, the Vanguard Carrier, squadrons make a huge difference in damage, so if you can get those on this ship, you’ll be able to handily destroy anything you come across. An added bonus is having a Battle Cloak, which gives you ambush bonuses when you decloak on targets. Combine it with pets and a big alpha strike, and you’ll tear through anything unfortunate enough to look at you funny.

This class of ship is widely considered among the best outside of specialized science builds, as it can do insanely huge DPS and tank heavy hits at the same time. With the Universal bridge officer seating, you can increase your tankiness or throw it all into offense, really amplifying just what you can do with this. It also comes with two cruiser commands, the Shield Frequency Modulation and the Attract Fire command.

The starship trait is the Majority-Minority, which buffs you based on the number of allies versus enemies that are around you. The trait puts a damper on the otherwise incredible stuff this ship brings you, as it's fairly terrible and should be replaced with better traits like the Arbiter’s.

The console it comes with, the Universal-I.F.F. Manipulator, gives you a 10% critical severity bonus to weapons and a 50% bonus reduction to engineering bridge officer cooldowns. The clickable is an AOE conflation combined with a targeted "force retarget". Basically, it will make your targeted enemy fire on its friends, which then causes it to taunt all its nearby friends for six seconds. As far as tanking stuff goes, this is a hard pass.

The Suliban FDAC only has one skin, but if you’re a fan of Archer’s adventures in Star Trek: Enterprise, this will surely bring back memories of the long road!

• Level 65: Hull 58500(scaling)
• Shield Modifier 1.3
• Hull Modifier 1.0
• 3 Tactical, 5 Engineering, 2 Science console slots
• Unique Console: I.F.F. Manipulator
• Romulan Battle Cloak
• Lt. Commander Tactical-Command, Lieutenant Tactical, Commander Engineering, Ensign Science, Lt. Commander Universal

What makes the T6 Suliban Flight Deck Assault Carrier great

• They are among the best ships in the game in terms of Flight Deck Carriers outside of the gamble box ships.
• You have a battle cloak, five forward weapon slots, and two hangar slots for pets, giving you excellent forward firepower.
• It lends itself well to torpedo builds or dual beam builds thanks to Concentrate Firepower 3 being available.
• It has a Lt. Commander universal bridge officer slot, giving you more flexibility. 

How To Get the T6 Suliban Flight Deck Assault Carrier

• If you like the FDAC line of ships, there is a bundle available, the Cross Faction Flight Deck Assault Carrier Bundle for 6,000 Zen/$60.00.

5. Titan Science Destroyer

It's another Enterprise!!

How to get the Titan Science Destroyer: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Finally, the top 5! And who better than Another Enterprise to take fifth place?The Titan represents the only non-gamble-box T6 Science Destroyer available to players. Science Destroyers have a special feature that lets them switch between two different attack modes: Tactical Mode and Science Mode.

The Tactical Mode switches the ship from a typical science vessel into a Destroyer class starship, giving it a Commander tactical and experimental weapon, +2 turn rate, 10% speed, and 10 interia. This makes it a very effective destroyer type ship with excellent control powers through the Lt. Commander Science and Lt. Commander Universal.

While in Science Mode, the ship switches to a Commander Science Bridge officer, who grants it Secondary Deflectors and the standard Sensor Analysis and Subsystem Targeting. This disables the experimental weapon, however, so keep that in mind. Science mode is your standard "space magic" end-game science vessel that can throw out high DPS through Gravity Wells combined with other temporal powers granted by the Lt. Commander Universal-Temporal Operative seat.

The ship has a 4 forward and 3 aft weapon layout, which is unusual for a science vessel. Even in Science Mode, it still retains the 4 forward weapons, making it extremely effective as a science-torpedo build. In fact, barring the later Trailblazer, which is a recent addition to the game, the Titan is the best science torpedo boat out there that isn't a gamble box.

It is only because of the Trailblazers' full specialization seating that the Titan doesn’t make it higher on the list of science ships.

The starship trait is It’s Another Enterprise! When you activate a Fleet Support ability, it will summon the faction's flagship onto the battlefield for 90 seconds. On face value, this sounds terrible. However, if you are trying to build an "Armada" type carrier, this trait is hilariously effective, giving you an added 30k DPS on average.

The console it comes with, Opening Salvo, is an excellent clickable console that does different things depending on what mode you use. In Science Mode, the torpedoes will knock subsystems offline for X number of seconds, with X depending on your control expertise. In Tactical Mode, it fires off a continuing spread of photon torpedoes, which don’t do a lot of damage if the targets have shields, but they can work well together with shield draining or control abilities.

Fans of the Star Trek: Titan novels know this is a must-have and anyone who enjoys the Lower Decks will jump for joy like Boimler at the sight of this beauty warping into the battlefield!

• Level 65: Hull 49500(scaling)
• Shield Modifier 1.325
• Turn Rate 13
• 4 Tactical, 2 Engineering, 4 Science console slots
• Unique Console: Opening Salvo
• Experimental Weapon
• Tactical Mode and Science Mode
• Lt. Commander Tactical, Ensign Tactical, Lieutenant Engineering, Commander Science (Commander Tactical when in Tactical Mode), Lt. Commander Universal-Temporal Operative

What makes the T6 Titan Science Destroyer great

• It is unique among the ships on this list for its ability to switch between Destroyer and Science vessel roles. That added flexibility means you can easily adapt the ship to any mission profile.
• Excellent forward firepower when in Destroyer mode, comparable to the Arbiter with the Experimental Weapon slot (and depending on what Experimental Weapon you use).
• A console is useful when combined with torpedoes to mass disable enemy ships caught in a Gravity Well.
• It comes with multiple skins that you can use to customize your ship even further.

How To Get the T6 Titan Science Destroyer

4. Clarke Multi Mission Command Cruiser

Compact, has a hangar, full command ship status, what more could a dad ask for?

How to get the Clarke Multi-Mission Command Cruiser: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

At number four, we have the Clarke Multi-Mission Command Cruiser! Bringing it all the way back to our earlier list, this ship is from the same family of craft as the Reliant. However, it is far superior to its earlier brother in that it is a full-specializing ship, has better overall stats, better bridge officer seating, and a hangar bay.

The Clarke takes everything that the Reliant does and simply makes it way better. It’s the first of the new type of Multi-Mission Command Cruisers and serves a new role as a fleet anchor during task force operations. It comes with a Lt. Commander Universal station in addition to the Commander Engineering-Command specialization, letting you throw out the potent command abilities.

The Command specialization gives you a building buff that, once at 100%, will let you activate one of three powerful group-wide buffs. These are Turn the Tide (a huge damage resistance and regeneration buff), Against All Odds (a huge damage and weapon power cost reduction bonus), and Battle Preparation (instant recharge of all bridge officer powers). This gauge charges every time someone on your team uses an ability.

Despite being such a tiny ship (it’s just a little bigger than the Defiant), it has good punch and team utility. With the Hangar Bay and the balanced cruiser loadout, it can handle all task force operations in the game. The new Multi-Mission Cruisers do not come with all the typical cruiser commands, but they do come with the crucial Weapon System Efficiency command for energy DPS builds, which will reduce your power draw when firing weapons.

The starship trait, Greater Than The Sum, works off of command bridge officer abilities and Emergency Power to Auxiliary to grant yourself and nearby allies scaling +2-20 power levels and restores scaling maximum hull and maximum shields. Not terrible, but better suited for a supporting role, which this ship does well at.

The console it comes with, Genesis Seed, is unusual for a Cruiser. It increases Drain Expertise and Radiation Damage, neither of which is something a cruiser will typically use (barring perhaps the Cygnus and Nerandra). The clickable is alright; it does scaling damage to up to 10 enemies and explodes after 30 seconds. Useless for anyone who isn’t using a Control build.

If you enjoyed the Reliant or any of the Miranda variants and wanted to take it to the next level, this is the ship for you!

• Turn Rate 9.5
• Unique Console: Genesis Seed
• Lieutenant Tactical, Commander Engineering-Command, Ensign Engineering, Lt. Commander Science, Lt. Commander Universal

What makes the T6 Clarke Multi-Mission Command Cruiser great

• The latest and greatest in new classes of ships, it’s a command specialization cruiser with a hangar bay! This makes it outright better than any of the normal command specialization cruisers in a DPS role.
• Lt. Commander Universal gives you added flexibility in how you set up your ship, though most will double up on the tactical station to maximize firepower.
• The ship comes with the same skin selection as the Reliant, letting you customize the vessel to your heart's content with 9 total skins.

How To Get the T6 Clarke Multi-Mission Command Cruiser

• It also comes in the New Genesis Bundle for 7,500 zen/$75.00.

3. Gagarin Miracle Worker Battlecruiser

The OG "yes, buy this."

How to get the Gagarin Miracle Worker Battlecruiser: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

At Number 3, we have the arguable replacement for the venerable Arbiter as the "go-to newbie ship". The Gagarin It has the coveted 5 forward and 3 aft weapon layout, the even more coveted full specialization Miracle Worker bridge officer seating, and a universal console slot which will let you put any console there.

The Gagarin has been out for some time now, and many players have turned it into a beast of a ship that still retains a high level of DPS and durability. It has also been able to keep up with later releases of dual specialization ships or even some of the gamble box ships.

The Miracle Worker specialization gives the ship access to Innovation Effects: Instinctive Rerouting (Bonus to All Subsystem Power), Containment Layering (Temporary Hull based on Max Hull), Heisenberg Decoupling (Secondary Shields based on Max Shields), Plasma Conduit Purge (Self-Targeted AOE Plasma Damage-over-Time), Ingenious Solutions (Bonus to Recharge Speeds for Bridge Officer and Captain Abilities), Barclay Maneuver (Photonic

As you can see, these are excellent little bonuses, and the best part is that you can activate them at will so long as you input the right combination of bridge officer abilities. The combo works like this: Tactical, Engineering, or Science will pop up in a three-icon sequence. Just use the powers in the sequence provided to activate the innovation that the RNG has given you!

All Miracle Worker ships are amazing for energy weapon builds, as the native Miracle Worker bridge officer powers dramatically boost the damage output of beams and cannons. Powers like Narrow Sensor Bands, Energy Weapons: Exceeded Rated Limits, and Mixed Armaments Synergy can give you monstrous DPS very quickly. Timing it right can result in powerful burst cycles capable of obliterating anything in your path.

As a battlecruiser, it can equip a cloaking device console, which can be interesting if you’re trying to sneak around. It also comes with Weapon System Efficiency (we like this one), Shield Frequency Modulation, and Strategic Maneuvering.

The starship trait, Entwined Tactical Matrices, is one of the better traits out there for ships that have limited tactical bridge officer slots. It applies to Fire at Will 1 and Scattery Volley 1 when you use a Torpedo Spread. However, when you use Fire at Will 1 or Scatter Volley 1, it will apply Torpedo Spread 1 instead. So, by using any one of those powers, you get the effect of two. Handy huh?

The console it comes with, the Refracting Energy Shunt, gives you passive power transfer levels (good) and engineering readiness (also good). Its actual clickable ability, however, is underwhelming at best, providing a narrow arc-scale proton damage attack that will at best chip the paint on the enemy ship.

Based on the Discovery ship of the same name, the Gagarin comes with the original Shepard class skin, letting you relive those final moments of the namesake ship and change history!

• Hull Modifier 0.95
• Turn Rate 7.5
• 3 Tactical, 5 Engineering, 2 Science, 1 Universal console slots
• Unique Console: Refracting Energy Shunt
• Innovation Effects
• Cyclical Quantum Slipstream Drive (faster Sector Space travel)
• Lt. Commander Tactical, Lieutenant Tactical-Miracle Worker, Commander Engineering-Miracle Worker, Ensign Science, Lt. Commander Universal

What makes the T6 Gagarin Miracle Worker Battlecruiser great

• A highly affordable ship that can reach top-end DPS with pretty minimal effort. Despite the nerfs to Miracle Worker, it still stands as the best specialization to have.
• A truly excellent directed energy weapons platform, you would be hard pressed to find anything wrong with this ship.
• The Universal console slot gives you added options compared to regular starships.
• Innovation mechanics can be very powerful if you know how to use them.

How To Get the T6 Gagarin Miracle Worker Battlecruiser

• It also comes in the Discovery Operations Pack for 12,000 zen ($120.00).

2. Terran Trailblazer Science Warship

The new "yes, buy this." Now with more guns!

How to get the Terran Trailblazer Science Warship: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

Here we are! Star Trek Online's top two ships!It was a close call between them, and really, depending on how you play the game, #1 and #2 can be easily switched out for you. For the average player, though, I’m sticking with this decision to put the Trailblazer as our Number 2 winner. This thing is nasty-it comes with 4 forward weapons, 3 aft weapons, a secondary deflector, full command specialization, and a built-in Agony Phaser Lance!

It’s basically the Galaxy-X in science ship form! The only thing it’s missing is a hangar bay, at which point it would be entirely interchangeable with our #1, the Lexington, for any role. As it is, this ship is hilariously overtuned. The ship even comes with split specialization in the form of both Miracle Worker and Command Specialization, though its Miracle Worker only makes it up to Lt. rather than something beefier like Lt. Commander.

Still, it’s hard to look at this thing and not want to run away in terror at the potential of it. Which is the point, given it's a Terran ship!

With the now familiar Lt. Commander Universal, you can turn this thing into a dedicated sci-torp build, a regular torpedo build, a directed energy weapon build, a pure science build, or even a hybrid directed energy weapon-science build! Compared to the rest of the ships on this list, it easily surpasses the vast majority given all these options.

The full command specialization gives us the regular goodies you’d expect to see from ships like the Clarke while also letting you squeeze in Narrow Sensor Bands and Mixed Armaments Synergy thanks to the Lieutenant Miracle Worker. On top of that, if you build with phaser damage in mind, you can turn the Phaser Lance into a nice built-in burst damage option. This thing can do it all!

It can even cloak, thanks to changes to the Cloaking Device Console. So we have a souped up Terran version of Voyager that can blow up the bad guys in a dozen different ways, cloak, and scream across the battlefield at crazy speeds. Yep, sounds Terran alright.

The starship trait, Weaponized Exotic Particles, gives you a bonus to your Exotic Particle Generators when you use any of the firing buffs, such as Fire at Will, Torpedo Spread, or Mine Dispersal. This isn’t actually a bad trait for this particular ship, as it is so incredibly flexible.

The console it comes with, Decentralized Immunity, increases critical severity by 12%, shield capacity by 15%, and its clickable summons an "Immunity Drone." This drone makes you totally immune to all damage for up to ten seconds, though it can be destroyed by enemy fire. This is an amazing tanking console since a majority of the NPCs don’t target pets very well. I highly suggest using this if you tank at all.

The Voyager episode "Living Witness" gave us our first taste of Warship Voyager. The Terrans, however, are the ones to perfect it. If you want a beast of a ship that can rip through anything and everything that Star Trek Online throws at you, this is the pinnacle outside of gamble box ships, and even then, it’s comparable.

• Level 65: Hull 51750(scaling)
• Hull Modifier 1.15
• Unique Console: Decentralized Immunity
• Inspiration Mechanic
• Agony Phaser Lance
• Sensor Analysis
• Subsystem Targeting
• Lt. Commander Tactical, Lieutenant Tactical-Miracle Worker, Ensign Engineering, Commander Science-Command, Lt. Commander Universal

What makes the T6 Trailblazer great

• There is a ridiculous amount of firepower that can be gained through energy weapons, torpedos, science abilities, or a combination of these.
• A built-in Agony Phaser Lance (a miniature Galaxy-X!) combined with Sensor Analysis and Subsystem Targeting.
• An Inspiration Mechanic that gives you all the benefits of a cruiser, while being a science ship.
• Ideal destroyer weapon layout, despite not being a destroyer.
• Almost cruiser-level hull values with very high shield values.
• Excellent tactical and science console layout.
• Amazing console for tanking.

How To Get the T6 Trailblazer

• It also comes in the 12th Anniversary Terran Bundle for 17,500 zen/$175.00.

1. Terran Lexington Dreadnought Cruiser

For all your flagship needs; now comes with Nebula mission pod and phaser lance! Deathgliders not included.

How to get the Terran Lexington Dreadnought Cruiser: 3,000 Zen ($30.00) in the C-Store

And finally, at long last, we have our big winner: the Terran Lexington Dreadnought Cruiser. This will probably be a bit of a controversial choice over the Trailblazer, but I chose it because there tends to be more players flying around in cruisers compared to science ships, and as a "newbie" ship, it’s pretty much impossible to get this thing wrong. The only thing that sucks about this ship is the 4 forward and 4 aft weapon layout.

If it had 5/3, it would literally be perfect. However, we’ll deal with the near-perfection of the cruiser class instead! Coming in with a built-in Agony Phaser Lance, Hangar Bay, Cruiser Commands, and full Miracle Worker specialization, this ship takes the Gagarin and amps it up to 11. Despite the 4/4 layout, it still does monstrous damage with some extremely high parses that I’ve seen in this exact ship.

Not even the legendary, everyday Terran version!If that doesn’t say "most impressive," I don’t know what does!

In addition, it has a split specialization with Intelligence, giving you access to Override Subsystem Safeties II, which is incredibly powerful when combined with Miracle Worker bridge officer powers. Throw in Narrow Sensor Bands and the rest and you’ve got a burst cycle very few things can survive for long.

Much of what makes the Gagarin so good applies to the Lexington, but with the added bonus of the Hangar Bay and Phaser Lance. While neither is particularly noteworthy, they are additional DPS sources and count in my assessment of the Number 1 spot. To add insult to injury, the vastly larger Lexington is actually 0.5 times faster at turning than the Gagarin, tossing a little bit of straw to break the camel's back in terms of just how good this thing is.

Not to beat a dead horse, but this is just a flat out better Galaxy-X. For those wondering why I didn’t include the Legendary Galaxy-X on this list, this ship is why. It’s better priced, has better stats, and has the far superior Miracle Worker full specialization. It’s just better. Sorry, Gal-X fans.

In typical Terran fashion, they took a concept and just added more guns to it until they ran out of room.

As before, it has a Lt. Commander Universal to just throw down in any direction you need to while also packing a Lt. Commander Tactical. It's not even a split station, it’s a pure full tactical, which is great for a ship like this. Unlike the Trailblazer, you can’t quite omni-everything in it, but it’s still an excellent ship in every respect. The only difference between this ship and the Trailblazer is purely in its role.

This was designed as an energy weapon cruiser, whereas the Trailblazer was built as an energy weapon/torpedo science ship. It can’t squeeze on a good torpedo build, but that’s alright. It more than makes up for it in withering damage output.

The starship trait, Dimensional Modulation, gives you +3–30% bonus weapon damage for 10 seconds whenever you use a Miracle Worker bridge officer power or Directed Energy Modulation that scales with nearby foes. This is insanely good when you are outnumbered! While the conditions cannot be controlled (making it suboptimal in situations where you are not outnumbered), it is still extremely powerful when combined with all of the other ships' abilities.

The console it comes with, Multi-Directional Artillery Barrage, is perhaps the only other possible disappointment. While the 20% bonus to projectile damage and 7.5% bonus to healing capacity are alright, the torpedoes themselves do minuscule damage. Even the 25% bonus damage doesn’t justify slotting it with a two-minute recharge. Unless you are doing a theme build or attempting something whacky with bonus damage values, I would not slot this.

Star Trek Online’s flagship class in the Odyssey line has an outstanding ship that easily eclipses the majority of the ships on this list. The Lexington is the current pinnacle of non-promo cruisers, with a little bit of everything and a whole lotta phasers ready to vaporize. It’s all the more fitting for those who wish to replay some of Star Trek Online’s history, living in the moments of the Enterprise F when it first came to us in the Mission: The Odyssey Class at the helm of a truly mighty vessel.

• Level 65: Hull 61875(scaling)
• Shield Modifier 1.15
• Hull Modifier 1.375
• Turn Rate 8
• 4 Tactical, 5 Engineering, 2 Science, 1 Universal console slots
• Unique Console: Multi-Directional Artillery Barrage
• Innovation Mechanic
• Quantum Slipstream Drive (faster Sector Travel)
• Lt. Commander Tactical, Lieutenant Tactical-Intelligence, Commander Engineering-Miracle Worker, Ensign Science, Lt. Commander Universal

What makes the T6 Terran Lexington Dreadnought Cruiser great

• Like the Trailblazer, ridiculous amounts of firepower can be gained through energy weapons.
• Agony Phaser Lance (a miniature Galaxy-X!) and a Hangar Bay were built in.
• You use the Innovation Mechanic that gives you bonuses based on the powers you use.
• It has huge natural hull values, making it among the tankiest in the game for its price tag.
• Excellent tactical layout, with full capacity to take advantage of its Miracle Worker and Intelligence Bridge Officer abilities.

How To Get the T6 Terran Lexington Dreadnought Cruiser

And there we have it! These are the top 15 best ships for players in Star Trek Online! This represents a budget-friendly list, so players don’t have to worry about trying to gamble to get one of those impossibly difficult uber-end-game ships. You can pilot any of the classic vessels from the shows to great effect! One of the wonderful things about Star Trek Online is that you can make any ship work; it just takes a bit of elbow grease.

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SDCC’s Pop-Up Activations Bring Apes, Pizza, Pirates, and More

San Diego Comic-Con officially starts today, but io9 has already checked out some of the activations popping up to entertain fans. We visited Paramount+’s Lodge , Adult Swim’s “Pirate Parrrty,” and “Enter the Forbidden Zone: The Planet of the Apes Experience.” Here’s just some of what we spotted!

First up, you can see a couple of glimpses of Paramount+’s Lodge, a ski lodge riff stuffed with stations themed around different Paramount projects, including a custom Star Trek t-shirt stand and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza parlor. (It was also jammed with fans; this is a popular one!) It’s located at Happy Does, 340 Fifth Ave in San Diego; if reservations are available you can snag them here .

Then, the Adult Swim “Pirate Parrrty” is an outdoor attraction (look for it on the green space behind the convention center, on Fifth Avenue Landing and Convention Way—you can’t miss it) filled with games (alas, the Mr. Nimbus Dunk Tank was not yet up and running) and slightly harrowing “rides” (the Rick and Morty Cthulhu Battle involves climbing a rope ladder into a monster’s… mouth?).

There’s also a big stage that will be sharing first-look screenings and more throughout the con; go here to learn more.

And, finally, “Enter the Forbidden Zone: The Planet of the Apes Experience” is located within the San Diego Wine and Culinary Center (just across the street from the convention center, at 200 W. Harbor Drive), and it’s got a range of props, costumes, and other mementos from the long-running sci-fi series, including a few from the 1968 original and its 1970 sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes .

The exhibit leans more heavily on the recent films, especially this year’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes , but Tim Burton’s 2001 entry also has a presence. At the press preview, we also got to meet a Harris’s hawk, similar to those used to help create the CG birds of prey that appear in the 2024 movie.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel , Star Wars , and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV , and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who .

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Elevate your wardrobe with the Star Trek: The Original Series Delta Embroidered Polo Shirt. Perfect for fans who want to combine sophistication with their love for Star Trek , this polo shirt features the iconic Starfleet Delta, elegantly embroidered for a timeless look.

Product Details:

• Made of: 65% polyester, 35% cotton pique
• Relaxed fit that runs large
• Side vents for breathability

Ordering Information

• Return Policy: We will gladly accept returns for any reason within 30 days of receipt of delivery.
• Shipping: Ship times are estimates of time in transit after your product leaves the fulfillment center. Some items in your order may ship separately to arrive faster.
• Availability: Ships internationally to most countries around the world.
• Shipping Policy: For more information, see our Shipping Policy .

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Photo Appears to Capture Path of Bullet Used in Assassination Attempt

Michael Harrigan, a retired F.B.I. special agent, said the image captured by Doug Mills, a New York Times photographer, seems to show a bullet streaking past former President Donald J. Trump.

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By John Ismay

Reporting from Washington

• Published July 14, 2024 Updated July 15, 2024

Follow the latest news on the Trump assassination attempt .

In documenting the Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday afternoon that turned into an attempt on a former president’s life, Doug Mills, a veteran New York Times photographer, appeared to capture the image of a bullet streaking past former President Donald J. Trump’s head.

That is the assessment of Michael Harrigan, a retired F.B.I. special agent who spent 22 years in the bureau.

“It absolutely could be showing the displacement of air due to a projectile,” Mr. Harrigan said in an interview on Saturday night after reviewing the high-resolution images that Mr. Mills filed from the rally. “The angle seems a bit low to have passed through his ear, but not impossible if the gunman fired multiple rounds.”

Simple ballistic math showed that capturing a bullet as Mr. Mills likely did in a photo was possible, Mr. Harrigan said.

Mr. Mills was using a Sony digital camera capable of capturing images at up to 30 frames per second. He took these photos with a shutter speed of 1/8,000th of a second — extremely fast by industry standards.

The other factor is the speed of the bullet from the firearm. On Saturday law enforcement authorities recovered an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle at the scene from a deceased white man they believe was the gunman.

“If the gunman was firing an AR-15-style rifle, the .223-caliber or 5.56-millimeter bullets they use travel at roughly 3,200 feet per second when they leave the weapon’s muzzle,’’ Mr. Harrigan said. “And with a 1/8,000th of a second shutter speed, this would allow the bullet to travel approximately four-tenths of a foot while the shutter is open.”

“Most cameras used to capture images of bullets in flight are using extremely high speed specialty cameras not normally utilized for regular photography, so catching a bullet on a side trajectory as seen in that photo would be a one in a million shot and nearly impossible to catch even if one knew the bullet was coming,” he said.

In Mr. Harrigan’s last assignment, he led the bureau’s firearms training unit and currently works as a consultant in the firearms industry.

“Given the circumstances, if that’s not showing the bullet’s path through the air, I don’t know what else it would be,” he said.

John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy. More about John Ismay

Our Coverage of the Trump Rally Shooting

The Investigation : F.B.I. officials told Congress that the 20-year-old gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump used his cellphone and other devices to search for images of Trump and President Biden .

Congress Forms Task Force : The top Republican and Democrat in the House have struck a deal to form a bipartisan task force  to lead congressional investigations into the attempted assassination.

Security Blind Spots : Even as investigators continue to examine what happened at the Trump rally, it is already clear that there were multiple missed opportunities to stop the gunman  before the situation turned deadly.

The Gunman : In interviews, former classmates of the suspect described him as intelligent but solitary , someone who tried to avoid teasing by fellow students.

Secret Service Director : Kimberly Cheatle  returned in 2022 to lead the agency she had served for nearly 30 years. Before her resignation, she faced grueling questions from lawmakers  about the adequacy of her agency’s preparation .

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Zhukovsky International Airport, formerly known as Ramenskoye Airport or Zhukovsky Airfield - international airport, located in Moscow Oblast, Russia 36 km southeast of central Moscow, in the town of Zhukovsky, a few kilometers southeast of the old Bykovo Airport. After its reconstruction in 2014–2016, Zhukovsky International Airport was officially opened on 30 May 2016. The declared capacity of the new airport was 4 million passengers per year.

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Playable starship

Federation Ship Requisitions Screen on PC

Playable Starships in Star Trek Online are as much a part of a player's avatar as their Captain .

Players are granted ships by their faction as they progress in rank . At each new rank between Level 10 and Level 40 , players are given a free starship token for the respective tier . The last token they get, at Level 61 , is for a Tier 5 ship which can be made Tier 5-U .

The abilities and stats of a starship are determined by the starship's tier, type, the equipment loadout, traits , bridge officers and power system management .

• 2.3 Bridge Officer Stations
• 2.4 Subsystems
• 2.5 Starship Mastery
• 3.1 Tiers 1-4
• 4.1 Summary
• 4.2 Detailed table
• 4.3 Type notes
• 5.1 Free starships
• 5.2 Dilithium and Zen
• 5.3 Fleet Credits
• 5.4 Lock and Promotional Boxes
• 5.6 Exchange
• 6.1 Material Types
• 6.2 Visual Slots
• 8 External links

Starship control UI on PC

The operation of a starship covers various key mechanics. Notably, the innate stats of your starship, your subsystem power allocation and your loadout.

The following basic stats outline the innate combat strength of a starship:

• Hull: This is the overall health of your starship, and refers to the actual body of the ship itself. Once the shields have been drained from a certain area, any damage to that area results in damage to the hull. Most shields have a "Bleedthrough" percentage, which is the amount of damage from any enemy's weapons that cause damage to the hull instead of the shields.
• Fore/Rear/Right/Left Shields: These are the first line of defense for your starship. Shields are energy barriers placed around your ship to repel enemy fire and take the brunt of the damage initially. Once your shields are down around a certain area, any damage there will directly affect the Hull. Shields also have a "Bleedthrough" rating; if the Bleedthrough rate is 10%, then 100 Phaser Damage to your shields will result in 10 Phaser Damage directly to your Hull.
• Crit Chance: This is the chance that each shot you take has of critically damaging the target. The modifier for Crit Chance is [CrtH].
• Crit Severity: This is the amount of damage that a Crit shot does. If the Crit Chance is 5% and Crit Severity is 75%, then you have a 5% chance, with each shot, of doing 175% total damage to the enemy vessel. The modifier for Crit Severity is [CrtD]. It should be noted that this damage bonus applies at the same time as other bonuses, which may lead to you not seeing the full increase noted.
• Inertia: This is a number that determines how sluggish your ship is to respond, for example, while turning. The lower your Inertia rating, the slower your ship is while turning. Cruisers , for example, have low Inertia ratings, which make for low turn rates, and low maneuverability. Escorts on the other hand, have high Inertia ratings, making for high turn rates and maneuverability. Science Vessels typically fall somewhere in the middle.
• Resist: Your starship has a number of resistance types, which indicates how resistant it is to certain types of damage (e.g. Physical, Kinetic, Phaser, Tetryon).

The following stats were removed in 2015:

• Crew Complement: This is the maximum number of crewmembers (non-Bridge Officers) that can serve aboard your vessel. Your Crew count affects hull and subsystem repair rate, as well as the effectiveness of boarding parties, the engineering team and crew-based skills your captain may have. Certain types of damage will temporarily injure Crew. Your current Crew count is indicated by a row of white figures below your Shields/Hull UI (injured crew are yellow-orange, disabled crew are grey).
• Crew Recovery Rate: This is the number of Crew that will recover per second.
• Alive Crew: This is the number of Crew members that are currently alive.

An example starship loadout screen

Similar to Bridge Officer stations, different ships have varying room for special modifications that can be added to the ship to increase its effectiveness. Similar to slotted gems in other games, mods provide small passive bonuses that affect game play and can be interchanged at will.

The differentiation isn't just between the Escort/Cruiser/Science categories; each individual configuration offers disparate settings for players to choose between.

• Fore Weapons - These weapons fire from the front, usually within a certain arc width. For example, 45°-arc fore weapons fire in a 45-degree cone area in front of your ship. All Ship Weapons other than mines can be placed here. Turrets were originally excluded, but are now allowed to be placed in the fore weapons slots.
• Deflector - Ship Deflector Dishes can be inserted here.
• Secondary Deflector - Most Science vessels (those that have both Sensor Analysis and Subsystem Targeting) can install a Secondary Deflector ; other ship types do not have this slot.
• Shields - Ship Shields go here.
• Warp Core - a Warp Core (on Federation or Klingon Ships) or Singularity Core (on Warbirds) goes here.
• Impulse - Any one of a number of Impulse Engines can go here.
• Aft Weapons - These weapons fire from the aft, or rear, of your starship. Any weapon other than cannons and dual beam banks can be placed here.
• Experimental Weapons - Experimental Weapons are available to Tier 5-6 Raiders and those with a Tactical Commander seat, 7 weapons, and 1 or fewer Hangar Bays.
• Devices - Any Ship Devices can be inserted here. To use them, drag them to your shortcut bar while in space.
• Engineering Consoles - Engineering Consoles go here.
• Science Consoles - Science Consoles go here.
• Tactical Consoles - Tactical Consoles go here.
• Hangar Bay - Hangar pets go here.

Tier 5, Tier 6 and many Zen Store Tier 1-4 ships come with a unique Universal Console (which can be put in any console slot). These consoles can sometimes be used on any ship, or often only ships of the same type. Typically, consoles from similar ships have synergies granting bonuses when the player slots them together.

Bridge Officer Stations

Bridge officers assigned to stations

All starships have a number of bridge officer stations permitting each officer to use 1 to 4 of their abilities. The higher tier starships offer more seats with higher ranking abilities than lower tier starships. The starship has access to the space traits of any bridge officer who is slotted, regardless of how many slots they have.

Tier 1-5 starships have seats classified as Engineering, Science, Tactical and Universal; the latter being a seat that can sit an officer of any of the main three careers . Tier 6 starships have access to specializations : namely that some seats on each ship will be combined of one of the four main options listed above and a specialization such as Intelligence Officer and Miracle Worker. An Engineer/Intelligence Bridge Officer Seat can seat an Engineer, but if that officer has been trained in the Intelligence specialization then they may use Intelligence powers in place of some or all of their standard Engineering powers.

Subsystems for a starship are split into four sections: Weapons, Engines, Shields and Auxiliary. These subsystems share an overall basic amount of 200 subsystem power that all starships have, and increasing the power level of one subsystem will reduce it in another. Players are able to use presets to quickly reconfigure the ships power levels to focus on specific areas or balance power between more than one subsystem, even whilst in combat.

The highest a player can manually set any of their subsystems is 100. The lowest a player can set these systems is 15. The exception to this rule is running at Full Impulse which will lower all systems except engines to 5.

Starship Mastery

The Mastery progress bar for a Science Vessel

Each Tier 5-U or Tier 6 starship has its own "levels", called Mastery. Starship Mastery progresses as a character earns skill points while using a specific ship in combat (end-of-mission rewards do not apply). Levels 1 through 4 each unlock a passive bonus which is only active while flying that specific ship. The bonuses are specific for each ship type, e.g., Science Vessels , Warbirds , Birds-of-Prey . Tier 6 non-fleet ships also have a 5th mastery level which unlocks a Starship Trait . Different ships unlock different traits, of which 4 to 5 can be used at any one time by the player, regardless of the ship they are flying.

A Tier 4 Tactical Escort Refit

A ship's capabilities are largely defined by its tier, which determines the number of bridge officer stations, the rank of those stations, the number of console slots, and other factors. Except for Tier 6, that can be played from tutorial through to endgame, specific tiers are intended to be played at a particular rank and cease to become competitive beyond it.

A T5 Fleet Negh'Var Heavy Battle Cruiser , which can be upgraded to T5-U.

A Flambard Science Dreadnought Warbird (T6) from the Zen Store

The current highest tier in the game, Tier 6 ships are a moderate improvement over Tier 5 starships, featuring additional console slots, bridge officer abilities, and scaling hull strength. They also come with a unique ship costume, a unique Universal Console , and can be played from level 1 (with its capabilities scaling up as the player increases in rank).

Compared to a Tier 5-U version of the same hull, the Tier 6 version will have the same hull strength and other hull-related stats, and console slots, but one more bridge officer ability, one or more bridge officer specialization seatings, and a Starship Trait as its fifth Starship Mastery level. Like T5-U ships, T6 ships can be upgraded to T6-X with an [ Experimental Ship Upgrade Token ] , which grants them the same additional benefits.

Each faction has unique types of ships that favor different styles of gameplay. Generally, there is one type of ship for each type of career, but a player character can captain any type of vessel, regardless of their career choice. Below is a list of each type of ship, and their (endgame) capabilities, though there are a few ships that don't follow this template exactly. A ship's type also dictates its Starship Mastery package . Many ship designs come in different versions. While their outward appearance might be mostly identical, they may vary substantially in combat strength according to their Tier.

• Cruisers have a Commander Engineering Bridge Officer slot, access to Cruiser Commands , and are generally more durable and less maneuverable than other types of ship. Endgame Cruisers can equip eight weapons, most often evenly distributed between Fore and Aft.
• Escorts and Raptors have a Commander Tactical Bridge Officer slot, the ability to use Dual Cannons , and are generally more fragile but the most maneuverable vessels available to you. Endgame Escorts can equip seven weapons, more Fore than Aft, and can also equip an Experimental Weapon .
• Science Vessels have a Commander Science Bridge Officer slot, the ability to equip a Secondary Deflector , and access to Sensor Analysis and some built-in Subsystem Targeting abilities to help provide support. Endgame Science Vessels can equip six weapons, most often evenly distributed between Fore and Aft.
• Carriers are exclusively available at the endgame level, and have two hangar bays from which they may launch fighters, shuttles, runabouts or even frigates to combat their enemies. These large and slow vessels can come in Engineering, Tactical or Science Varieties, which determine their Commander Bridge Officer slot and weapon hardpoints.
• Dreadnoughts are also exclusively available at the endgame level, and have a hangar bay (or two). Like Carriers, they tend to be larger and slower and come in different varieties; see below for specific examples.
• Warbirds They equip Singularity Cores instead of matter-antimatter warp cores, and all have access to Singularity Core abilities . All warbirds may equip dual cannons.

While there are are many varieties of the above classes available at the endgame, there are also several variations on these basic ship classifications, some available more early on:

• Battle Cruisers , which lose the ability to Attract Fire and often a device slot in exchange for the ability to equip Dual Cannons.
• Dreadnought Cruisers , which have both a hangar bay and the ability to equip Dual Cannons, but again only two Cruiser Commands.
• Flight Deck Carriers , Cruiser-Carrier hybrids with two hangar bays, but only two Cruiser Commands.
• Heavy Dreadnought Cruisers , a variant of Dreadnought Cruisers with a second hangar bay, bringing them up to Carrier-tier capabilities.
• Frigate , an Engineering-focused variant of the Raider.
• Strike Wing Escorts and Flight Deck Raptors , which are enhanced with a hangar bay.
• Destroyers , which are more durable and gain an extra device slot in exchange for the loss of some maneuverability.
• Warships , a subset of Destroyers which exchange the Experimental Weapon slot for an eighth standard weapon.
• Juggernauts also have eight standard weapons, and are even more bulky and durable while sacrificing much maneuverability.
• Raiders , which exchange a weapon—bringing them down to six—for Raider Flanking , the ability to deal more damage to enemies along their rear shield facing. They also have mostly (or all) Universal Bridge Officer seating, allowing extreme flexibility. Raiders are maneuverable but fragile vessels that require experienced pilots to be effective.
• Multi-Mission Science Vessels , which are enhanced with a hangar bay.
• Science Dreadnoughts , larger vessels with a hangar bay comparable to Dreadnought Cruisers, but with a Science focus.
• Science Spearheads , which are effectively Science Dreadnoughts without the hangar bay.
• Scout Ships , a Science-focused variant of the Raider.
• Tactical Carrier Warbirds , which also have a hangar bay.
• Engineering Warbirds , also known as Warbird Battle Cruisers , have an Engineering commander bridge officer.
• A Heavy Dreadnought Warbird , the Valkis , has two hangar bays.
• Explorer Warbirds , which also have a hangar bay.
• Science Carrier Warbirds , which have two hangar bays.

Ships can be broadly categorized by their Commander seating, and how many hangar slots they have.

Detailed table

• Power bonuses vary considerably. For a given type of ship, every single member may have a different power configuration, such as with Warships and Multi-Mission Science Explorers. There are too many to enumerate here. See individual ship type pages and ship pages to compare them.

• Federation Raiders are known as "Light Escorts", such as the T6 Shran Light Pilot Escort and its fleet variant .

Anomalous bridge officer or console layouts:

• Some starships with a Commander Engineering bridge officer seat have 5 Tactical console slots despite this normally being restricted to starships with a Commander Tactical seat.
• Likewise, some starships with a Commander Tactical bridge officer seat have 5 Engineering console slots despite this normally being restricted to starships with a Commander Engineering seat. This includes the Jem'Hadar Dreadnought Carrier when upgraded to T5-U.
• The T6 Flambard Science Dreadnought Warbird and its T5 version have 5 Science console slots despite having a Commander Tactical bridge officer.
• The T6 Khlinae Tal Shiar Adapted Battlecruiser and Tholian Jorogumo Carrier have a Commander Universal seating, but the usual stats of their class, including their Starship Mastery package. The same is true of their now-retired T5 versions. The Tholian Carriers' Admiralty cards are Engineering rather than Science, also.
• Jem'Hadar Light Battlecruiser
• Kelvin Einstein Heavy Destroyer
• Kelvin D7 Heavy Destroyer
• La Sirena Heavy Raider
• Mirror Constitution Warship
• United Earth Defense Force Vessel

Exceptions and unique cases:

• Starfleet Tutorial Starships may equip dual cannons despite being Cruisers, though they lack the corresponding cruiser commands . This is likely to simplify the initial experience.
• The T1 Oberth -class Light Science Vessel does not possess the built-in Subsystem Targeting abilities possessed by other Science Vessels.
• Some T6 pure Science Vessels have the ability to equip dual cannons, which most others lack:
• The T6 Eclipse Intel Cruiser and its fleet variant are Battlecruisers , despite their names.
• The T6 Hur'q Vedcrid Hive Dreadnought Carrier has all the characteristics of a Dreadnought Carrier except its Commander bridge officer seat is Engineering instead of Tacical
• The T6 Sphere Builder Edoulg Science Vessel is a Multi-Mission Science Vessel rather than a standard Science Vessel.
• The T5 Fek'Ihri Kar'Fi Battle Carrier and Gok'tad Carrier have 7 weapon slots, one more than other Science Carriers.
• The T5 Patrol Escort Refit has a fourth rear weapon slot with a fused weapon in lieu of an Experimental Weapon slot.
• The T6 Science Star Cruiser , Gorkon Science Battlecruiser and Tal Shiar Khlinae Adapted Battlecruiser possess the Sensor Analysis ability innately despite not being Science Vessels, but have neither subsystem targeting nor a secondary deflector.
• Likewise, the T6 Ketha Recon Raptor and its Fleet variant are Raptors, but with the Starship Mastery package of a Destroyer.
• Likewise, the T5 and T6 variants of the Guramba Siege Destroyer gain a hangar bay and loses a device slot compared to other Destroyers.
• The Federation and Klingon Empire T6 Command Battlecruisers (eg. Concorde Command Battlecruiser ) have the cruiser commands, device slots, weapon layout and ability to equip dual cannons of Flight Deck Carriers , but only a single hangar bay and the Starship Mastery package of a Battlecruiser. Thus, they could be considered a separate hybrid "Flight Deck Battlecruiser" type.

Purchasing Starships

Starships can be purchased with a number of different currencies, and several ships can be obtained for free. Extra ship and Dry Dock slots can be bought in the Zen Store. A single character can have a maximum of 50 ships but many more dry dock slots are obtainable.

Free starships

The Kobali Samsar Cruiser was originally an event giveaway, and is now available via the Phoenix Prize Pack.

Characters are assigned a tier 1 ship to command after completing the tutorial mission. At levels 20, 30 and 40 (players gain one rank for every ten character levels) players receive a token for a free ship of successively increasing tier, up to Tier 5.

At Tier 5 and 6, further free ships can still be found during special events , such as the summer Lohlunat Festival and Q's Winter Wonderland . Some may also be part of special giveaways.

Dilithium and Zen

Additional ships cost Dilithium or Zen from the shipyard or Zen Store. Tier 5 and 6 ships become available from level 50. Tier 5 ships can sometimes be upgraded to Tier 5U. These special upgradable T5 ships can then be upgraded using an upgrade token purchased with Zen from the Zen Store.

Fleet Credits

Fleet ships require Fleet Credits and Fleet Ship Modules; these are available for cash from the Zen Store or for EC on the Exchange. Active subscribers who have received the 600 day Veteran Reward , including all lifetime subscribers, receive a 'VA Token' that allows them to purchase a single RA/BG or VA/LG ship for free.

Lock and Promotional Boxes

Lock Boxes , Promotion! - Research & Development Packs and Phoenix Prize Packs all contain a chance to win a free starship. However it is important to understand the low chances of success when buying these packs and keys with Zen or Dilithium.

The NX Escort Refit from the Lobi store

Many ships mentioned above which are no bind-on-pickup can be found on the Exchange for varying prices in Energy Credits.

Customization

Ship Customization Screen

They are highly customizable, both cosmetically and functionally. Visiting shipyards will allow players to change all aspects of their ships. Each ship tier includes multiple classes of ships. Players can choose different parts (saucer, hull, nacelles etc.) of each class making a custom model, or stick with a set design. Along with the model the player can also adjust the color, windows, decals, registry number and prefix, which gives the player a custom feel to his/her ship.

Each time a player acquires a new ship they are allowed to edit aspects of the ship once for free. Each subsequent change will cost Energy Credits, depending on the change made. This includes exterior appearance, bridge and corridors.

To make changes to their ship, players must visit a shipyard. There are multiple shipyards in-game and they are found at all the major hubs such as Qo'noS for the Klingon Defense Force and the Earth Spacedock for Starfleet . A common list of items that can be edited on a ship are:

For certain starships, if the character owns a different version of a similar starship then they can use parts of both when customizing a ship. For example, if the player owned the Scimitar Dreadnought Warbird (T5) and the Shamshir Operations Dreadnought Warbird (T6) , then they could use some or all of the parts from the Scimitar in customizing the look of the Shamshir.

Material Types

Materials were usually designated "Ship Name" or "Type <number>". In addition to a ship's default material options, other materials could become available when the player gets access to other, specific ships. For example, the Epoch -class Aeon material became available to the commanding officer of a Wells -class ship if they owned both vessels.

Visual Slots

Visuals from the Assimilated Borg Technology set while equipped

Certain starship equipment, such as shields or impulse engines, can alter the appearance of a starship. Aside from equipping them in the usual slots, they can also be put into visual slots to override any visuals from the standard equipment. Alternatively, the visuals of slotted equipment can be disabled from the right click menu of that equipment.

• Space combat
• Admiralty System

External links

• Fleffle's Sortable/Filterable T6 Ship List spreadsheet
• Season 6 Dev Blog #16
• r/sto: Borticus on calculating Level 65 ship Hull Capacity (June 02, 2018)
• https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Material_(hull)
• 1 Ancient Obelisk Technology Set
• 2 Playable starship