Star Trek Online: Ships, Crew & Bridge Officers

More and more details are revealed about one of the most exciting MMO games due sometime next year (hopefully), Star Trek Online. Beta applications have started some time ago however the NDA is still up so there’s not too much information yet available, so I’ll tease you with this short overview of ships, their crew and roles of bridge officers.

Ship Categories

Escort ships

Escort ships are heavily armed and very maneuverable and fast. They pack more firepower than most other ships and can load cannons. Their cons are their lack of science, medical or engineering skills. If you’re a decent Star Trek fan, you’ll probably remember the Defiant from DS9: who wouldn’t want to ride one?

Science ships

Science ships have more advanced deflectors, targeting systems, sensors and better auxiliary power. Science ships also have the ability to detect cloaked ships. Their primary role is support with their buffs and debuffs, and battle control. Clearly they don’t have as much firepower as ships in the other two categories but are more than capable of completing missions on their own.

Cruiser ships

Cruisers are the biggest vessels, with most crew and a big badass warp core which provides a lot more energy than other ships and in turn makes a lot of other systems more effective, such as engineering or the ship’s repair rate. Cruisers also boast massive cargo holds which enable them to quickly resupply space stations or planets. Additionally, they have more weapon slots than escort or science ships. Their biggest disadvantage is lower maneuverability, however they have more than enough pros to combat that.

Crew

The role of your ship’s crew is to repair damaged subsystems or hull damage, fight against boarding parties, joining boarding parties (which, if successful, damage an opponent’s subsystems), and so on. They can be injured and killed in battle, and later on replaced at starbases. You can have anywhere from fifty to a thousand crew members, depending on the size and type of your ship. I should note they are NPC characters and can not be directly controlled with, you simply assign tasks which they perform.

Bridge Officers

Players can assign bridge officers to their stations who perform various duties. You can assign them to Science, Tactical or Engineering stations, and depending on your ship you can have more or less of those stations. The stations are ranked much as bridge officers: Ensign, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander and Commander. A certain Bridge Officer can only access skills that correspond to the rank of the station at which he’s positioned. For example if an Engineering Officer is a Commander but stationed at a Lieutenant Commander’s station on a ship, he’d only have access to his Ensign, Lieutenant and Lieutenant Commander skills.

Bridge officers furthermore enable you to customize your ship and they have a huge impact on the gameplay.