/STG/ - Star Trek General

Look at all these hot opinions.

>been placing all my levelup points into shields / lasers
>realise that I can't just change them later
o. fuck

Blue/green LCARS is so much better than brown LCARS. A shame we didn't see much of it.

Best ship coming through.

I'm sorry user can't hear your shit opinion over the martian heat rays

youtube.com/watch?v=-reAahY1GCE

That's not an Akira

Oh boy. Yeah. You may be in trouble. You'll need 300 zen or 90k dilithium at the 300:1 ratio for a retrain token (probably less, if you convert when it's low).

It's not a completely lost cause, but it may hurt for a while.

Ferris Bueller's Half Century Off. Since apparently the Captain of the Enterprise-B was the best member of Starfleet of his era.

>I prefer TOS-UC myself. Terrible, I know.
Excelsior class best class and Redcoats are the joint best uniforms.

"Lost Era" starts from the launch of the 1701-B up to Farpoint Station. Debating whether to run my STA in this era.

An user of taste and refinement I see.

Honestly, that's a great period to run, especially if you toss out the stupid removal of the turtlenecks due to low budget issue. Then it's an early 90s feel of Starfleet going back to pure exploration with the Balkanization crisis to boot.

Incorrect. We all know it's the Enterprise class or failing that the Ambassador.

>Enterprise class
>memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Enterprise_class

Well, at least the Ambassador is alright.

The Enterprise class is the Constitution Refit as its own class of ship, not merely rebuilds of existing hulls. The FASA designation makes more sense anyway, since there's less than 10% of the original Enterprise left in the TOS movie ship.

speaking of this, what is considered the most generic build to have? I still have my retrain token.

If it makes a difference my main is a science officer.

It really depends on what you want to do at level 50. I can link you some builds, but they're not necessarily going to do much good unless you know what you want to do.

Since you're playing a science officer, you may want to go for a more balanced/science focused build (but, unfortunately, the Science Ultimate abilities got the nerf bat pretty hard, as did Exotic Particle Generators). I would take at least the first level Drain Expertise and Control Expertise abilities because they enhance your resistance to them.

Most true science builds are now difficult to pull off because the require specialized gear/traits/ships, which if you're f2p (like me) you'll have a long hard slog to get them.

I know how everyone feels about reddit, but the STO Builds community there really does know what they're doing over there.

>reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/67hq8c/season_13_skill_tree_megathread/

I wouldn't copy the Tac Ultimate build here, but most of it is solid if all you want to really do is melt things. It's optimized for Romulans though.

>reddit.com/r/stobuilds/

If you're f2p like me, look up "budget builds". Cheapo 5k-10k dps builds that'll keep you contributing in queues and keep you afloat in PvE. Bear in mind though that half of doing well in STO is knowing when to use abilities and how to position your ship. A build isn't a miracle cure.

Is the best way to level to just do the missions as they pop up? or is there a WoW-train system where you should do PvE queues?

The best way is whatever you find fun, but 90% of the queues are locked until you get to level 50. Starbase 24 used to be something you could tackle on your own if you were careful, but Cryptic squashed solo queuing because it was an "exploit".

The missions will probably be your best bet. At some point (probably around 40-50) you'll get access to the New Romulus adventure zone, so that may be more fun, but it's all ground, so it isn't my cup of tea.

I wouldn't bother with queues while leveling up here as it takes forever to find a low level group. Just keep doing missions and you should be fine. Also, make sure you're using the duty officer system as each of those missions gives a little bit of xp too.

>Is the best way to level to just do the missions as they pop up? or is there a WoW-train system where you should do PvE queues?
Once you hit 50, you can trigger the Voth Dyson Sphere. The Reputation grind gives you some very, very nice interim consoles and a set of "tank" gear to complement that Neutronium I sent you. The Dyson Ground Battlezone is a great place to fuck around and get some Marks/dilithium, although all the equipment is capped at Level 50. On the other hand, so are the enemies, so if you're low on properly-leveled gear you can just dick around and sell off the vendor trash. Plus you get to shoot a weaponized tyrannosaurus to death every half-hour or so. Antiproton weapons are the preferred toy for a lot of endgame players, and you get some halfway decent ones from the Dyson Rep.

The Nukara (Tholian) battlezone is a lot easier once you've gotten the special environment suit from the Dyson Sphere missions, and the Tholians show up in a LOT of the new content - so the weapons from the Rep grind are broadly useful for mission play in the later episodes.

The New Dominion War missions gives get a free item that lets you call in backup troops, a J'H tac officer, a shuttle, and a set of Jem'Hadar ground equipment. The Jem'Hadar space set is.. not all that great. Mostly useful if you're hunting cloaked ships, and even then it's kinda pants.

The "Planet of Peace" Nimbus storyline gives you a space device that lets you call in a couple random pirate escorts every 15 minutes. They're not too useful in PvE queues, but they provide good diversionary targets to go with your Photonic ships and let you survive those stupid "fight a battleship and five Escorts in a trumped-up destroyer" mission waves.

The Dyson Sphere also gives you a "space" battlezone to fuck around fighting Undine. It's.. okay. The rewards aren't great and unlike the Voth Ground zone you can't solo a capture point if your friends are being retards.

The Omega Force reputation gives some mediocre gear from the drops, unfortunately, but the Omega Adapted Borg Tech set is fucking obscene - especially for something so old. The anti-borg ground weapons are kind of useful in the Delta quadrant or when you're in the Deferi battlezone, but you usually have better options.

The "Spectres" mission tree is a giant pain in the ass that mostly just gives you some TOS gear. On rare occasions they'll make it a "featured episode", in which case there's a fairly cool Epic-level drop you can snag (The Ophidian Cane), but otherwise it's there mostly to do the same thing as "Yesterday's War".

Thanks man, this is really good to know! I appreciate the help :)

>tfw physical models will never be used again.

Not quite true.

oh shit

>Players decide they want an Orion Counselor in their STA game
>I actually get to steal the idea from the USS Sparrow and put it in motion
計画通り

You must deliver storytime afterwards.

Ok, guys, here's the concept for a Star Trek game that I will never run :
I'm ignoring basically everything that happened after "Best of Both Worlds" as far as the Borg are concerned. No First Contact, no Borg Queen, no Hugh the friendly Borg, nothing. The Borg massacre the Feds at Wolf 359, threaten earth itself, are stopped, but remain a threat at large on the fringes of Federation space.
After years of seeming dormancy, the Borg mobilize again and begin tearing apart Federation colonies piece-meal. Advances in weapons technology (maybe this is post Dominion War? I haven't decided yet) mean that the Federation and its allies are holding their own, but it's clear that conventional victory, if possible at all, is going to be extremely costly.
Starfleet sends a single ship on a one-way mission to deliver a McGuffin to the heart of Borg Space, something that will hopefully cripple the Borg's shared neural network and send them back into dormancy. They've discovered a secret route through space that will skirt the edges of known Borg territory, essentially allowing the ship to penetrate into the center of Borg while hopefully remaining undetected.
The idea would be that in their travels, they encounter a group of cultures that the Borg hasn't assimilated for various reasons. Some are too primitive, others have some sort of (potentially incredibly harmful) defense that made them unpalatable, and still others weren't dominated for reasons that are mysterious and possibly sinister. We'd basically do "Planet of the Week" adventures for a couple sessions while heading towards Borg space, then a few tense sessions as they make their way to the final battle.
What do you guys think? Could it be fun, or would I be better off doing a more conventional exploration mission?

Are vehicles built for ground warfare still used in startrek?

I've read about them being in video games and that the Cardassians had over 200 of them on Bajor before their occupation hit home, but I was wondering are they really used?

And for that matter, are Carriers still a thing?

Never really saw those on screen.

D U N E
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>secret route through space
Eh, I'd rather just say the Borg are focused on the big picture and they don't see one ship flying away from their goals to be a threat. That's just my take on it though.

Was passing by this thread and your post caught my eye, that's a really cool idea and I don't even like ST.

Having an overarching theme like that is great and because it's so well focused, your players may pick up on patterns and strategies that you didn't even think of all the way. You can even claim credit for them.

I dig the Galaxy as it's a majestic creature but that Constellation looks ugly as sin. It's proportions are horrible, the nacelle placement looks like a hair clip and the saucer looks like a frying pan. Maybe the angle doesn't suit the ship but in that pic the nacelles look like they're less than half the length of the saucer alone. That's way too small.

Anyway, Nova best ship

...

This, borg not caring about irrelevant threats they could destroy at any time is pretty well established.

Thanks anons!
I'll take the advice on not bothering with a "secret route" into advisement. Frankly, it might make encountering "non-Borg" worlds within the collective really mysterious and surprising. The only downside is that I wanted to have an opportunity for some of the other classic Trek races to show up, but there might be other ships lost in Collective space that haven't been fragged yet.

You could replace "secret route" with "traveling between Hirogen relays and a lot of Z axis motion to avoid Borg patrols" and it would be totally valid. That also lets you have periodic Hirogen encounters as beef gates to keep the party vaguely on track.

The El-Aurian survived by scattering. Presumably the Borg just don't bother chasing down a few leftover ships from a species they've already assimilated the bulk of. There just wouldn't be much to gain for them. No new technology or scientific knowledge, and only a relative handful of individuals to assimilate. Better to ignore them and move on to the next planet/species. It would probably be common to find some some survivors even well within Borg space.

reposting for anons who didn't see it the first time around:

I dunno if this has been done before, but I've put together a collection of all the Star Trek ship blueprints/deck plans that I think are worth having. Since most of the plans are from Strategic Design, which doesn't exist anymore, they cannot be purchased anywhere. Each plan comes with a pdf file of all the sheets together, along with separate image files of each sheet I could find. Unfortunately not all the sheet images are of a high quality resolution. The post image is a sample of the Strategic Design Constitution Refit deck plan for deck 7. You can see the recreation center that Ilia is shown in TMP in the upper right portion of the saucer.

Plans included:

-Akira (Strategic Design)
-B'rel (Strategic Design)
-Class 2 Space Station (Strategic Design)
-Constitution (& Refit) (Strategic Design)
-Deep Space Station K Class (Mandel & Willcocks)
-Defiant (Strategic Design & some unknown source)
-Enterprise (Miller?)
-Enterprise-A (Strategic Design)
-Enterprise-D (Whitefire & Sternbach)
-Intrepid (Strategic Design)
-K'tinga (Strategic Design)
-Miranda (& Knox subtype) (Strategic Design)
-Nova (Strategic Design)
-NX-01 (Android Monkey Designs)
-Oberth (Strategic Design)
-Saber (unlicensed fanwork)
-Sovereign (Strategic Design)
-Starbase 79 (Miller)
-Steamrunner (Strategic Design)

also included are quadrant maps for the Alpha/Beta quadrant in the 22nd and 24th century, and a Gamma quadrant map.

mediafire.com/file/4fj58pab00n28fu/star_trek_blueprints.7z

What kind of games would be fun to run on an Akira? We talk about the Nova so much I can't get out of funky Dora the explorer hot bunking mode.

well this mission kind of sucked.

Combat operations, mostly. Like your favorite Wing Commander and X-Wing missions. Or your least favorite ones to troll the shit out of your players.

Well our game was centered around being basically a hazard team on a boarding shuttle supported by fighter wings, based on an Akira. And using phasers as hand grenades to solve 90% of all problems.

Does this collection include all of the ones that have been made or are there some missing? The lack of Nebula and Excelsior plans makes me sad.

>Cops theme plays over Valkyries and security officers pulling over freighters
>Bajoran doesn't like the federation and goes full sovereign citizen
>Farengi gets arrested for attempting to bribe security officers
>Boarding party has to wait in the airlock while another team brings over the Tricoder because the captain of a frighter didn't give them permission to search his hold.
>Have to intervene in a Klingon fight on the bridge between the captain and her XO, who are also lovers.

I'm feeling it now.

Our game involve an Akira-class called the USS Murakumo (thought due to later timeline stuff it’s called an Akira-II and is supposed to be a refit), and we actually still do regular exploration and science junk like the Galaxy-class with less random civilians onboard using Multirole Explorer package.
It’s just that if necessary we can seriously fuck a fella up with photon salvos and quantum torpedoes if we gotta and our ship packs a bit more bang then the Enterprise-D did.

>holo-novels 'r' us
>funny shapes

Fighting space pirates!

Being the space coast guard seems to be part of Starfleet's role. Dealing with criminal ships might be something that "tactical" vessels like Akiras get assigned to do in peace time.

>well this mission kind of sucked.
Yes. A lot. It's also a PvE queue. It's a lot easier if you buy a runabout or fighter, but then that's kind of the point.

I have a bunch of stuff in the external drive. Will poke through it tomorrow, but sex and/or sleep is about to happen and I don't really want to blow either one.

ZEBESIAN space pirates.
>tuuuuuuuuuubes

Curious, but why is the Imperial Starfleet in STO trying to invade the prime universe when they haven't even defeated the Alliance yet?

>are Carriers still a thing?
The fighters we see in the Dominion War were small warp capable starships in their own right. They didn't need a carrier.

what are the drop rates on these boxes? I got 28 of the fuckers already.
Should I open them? I'm so weak to loot boxes man, CS:GO has trained me to accept the jew

>Are vehicles built for ground warfare still used in startrek?

I was on /k/ yesterday in a thread about the replacement for the humvee. Apparently ground vehicles are obsolete now. Shuttles have VTOL capability and could probably do everything a tank, APC, humvee and a black hawk could do.

>And for that matter, are Carriers still a thing?

Star Trek Invasion had a carrier and some neato fighters. DS9 had perigines

I don't know.

Don't shuttles lead to predictability in that the enemy always expects you to come via shuttle?

Depends, probably - Do the enemy have the ever generic 'dampening fields'? if yes, use an old fashioned engine for suprise memes.

As far as I know proper deck plans of the Nebula & Excelsior were unfortunately never made. All you get are the MSDs.

>DS9 had perigines
It's notable that those weren't designed to be fighters. They were civilian courier ships that were re-purposed (originally by the Maquis) for a combat role.

I've always assumed that the Defiant/B'rel BoP/Jem'Hadar Attack Ship size range is about as small as effective combat ships get. Since we rarely see anything smaller fielded in battle except when there's just nothing bigger available. The major exception being the Peregrines, but that could have been a desperation move. Just strapping weapons onto anything with a warp core.

>unlike the Voth Ground zone you can't solo a capture point if your friends are being retards.
Huh? The klink and romulan are ezpz to solo, even if you don't have a cloaked ship, and the fed points are just a bunch of sit around and wait, and are easier if you have fewer other players, since mob sizes and spawn rates are dependent on the number of players in the area.

In that Episode where Jake and Bashir work at a field hospital, one of the dying ground troopers talks about his platoon making it out safely on a "hopper". Maybe that's a sort of troop transport.

Because Leeta is a crazy bitch

what i never understood about star trek is why don't they just remake their dead with the transporters from the last saved state. i know a couple of days or sometimes hours could fall off but whatever.

not to mention how much safer would the dark matter cloning travel technology be and technology there looks like baby tier compared to star trek.

They drop like hot cakes. You'll end up deleting some or selling in stacks on the exchange for a small hemony of ec.
Look up the percentage chance of winning various prises out of them. The STO wiki has all the stats up.
I got the 20-keychain when it was available and opened a bunch of infinity lockboxes. I was looking to get a Keldon. Ended up with a bunch of weapons I didn't use, a mirror universe Luna, a Hirogen cruiser and about 350 lobi. Sold most of what I got on the exchange. In my opinion, the lockboxes aren't worth it because you can get basically anything you want off of the exchange for a set price, rather than a very improbable dice roll.

Ships in Trek seem to be especially vulnerable to attacks from multiple vectors. While a single fighter would be pretty worthless against a bigger ship, a wing of them, even with their light armaments and small torp capacity, would be able to take out much bigger targets. This is the entire reasoning behind the Prometheus - already very formidable in one piece (and able to do all other duties of a ship of its size), but splits into three Defiants, attacking from three angles, and reks pretty much everything.
And even a single one would probably be able to take on anything short of a dedicated warship of a similar tech level space empire. Remember, runabouts were considered sufficient to do a lot of stuff by themselves in an exploratory way - going off into the unknown, studying stuff, and even possibly coming into contact with hostiles. The slapped-together junkers the Maquis were able to come up with were more than a match for runabouts, and enough to cause real trouble for the Cardassians, as long as the Cardies weren't willing to commit fully to real military force.

Also in a TNG episode they discover how to reverse aging with the transporters. They have the fountain of youth right there, but don't do anything with it since if they did reuse tech of the week the Federation would win forever.

They are common drops. Don't open the regular ones, wait until the Infinity boxes drop (or just buy infinity boxes from the exchange). Also, wait for a key sale. They happen pretty often.
It's just Leeta, who is trying to use it as a power play to become Empress.

>Ships in Trek seem to be especially vulnerable to attacks from multiple vectors. While a single fighter would be pretty worthless against a bigger ship, a wing of them, even with their light armaments and small torp capacity, would be able to take out much bigger targets.
If that's true, why do we hardly ever see fighters used? Maybe Starfleet would avoid them because they're not suppose to be a military, but what about everyone else? If swarms of small ships were effective, you'd think the Klingons would love letting individual warriors pilot fighters in battle. But we never see a Klingon vessel smaller than a bird-of-prey. And 24th century Romulans seem to be committed to the idea that bigger is better.

They are still betterish than the R&D luck box they have once every blue moon.

Seriously, wasnt the drop chance of T6 Connie something like 1% or less?

There weren't all that many fleet engagements shown where they would have been useful?
The feds used pew-pew fighters when they tried to take back DS9.

We see "Klingon" fighters in Discovery. You know, some time in between what's-his-name the unforgettable and ensign water bear heeding the call of his home world.

this discovery is weird as fuck. they made the klingons look really stupid. but at least they are more alien.

I hate to mention a TNG movie, but Nemesis had Scorpions.

The long charge up times on beams coupled with some ECMs could make fighters pretty difficult for a large ship to hit.

shouldn't be hard to hit with light speed weaponry in a sublight dogfight usually depicted in star trek.

My headcanon is that ECM and ECCM is constantly on, going on automatically in the background (so it's never mentioned), which is why ships constantly miss their shots, even with guided, homing torpedoes.
Also, the fights happen at 10k-100k km ranges generally speaking, and the visuals of ships being right on top of each other are just TV conventions.

the fuck are infinity boxes and how often are the key sales, every few months or so and how much do they go on sale for?
Do you get a free dock / ship slot if you unlock a ship from a box?

Absolutely this. Given how we know that being close to a ship when it's war core breaches is crazy dangerous, having a battle at point blank range just seems suicidally stupid.

Alright, so you deploy 12 fighters, each carrying torpedoes under their wings. Target ship manages to take 4 out while they approach. That's 32 torpedoes.

That's gotta hurt. Pilots get transported out and they fabricate new ships for them in like half an hour.

Unless you are fighting Jem'Hadar then the fight is really that close range as they are actively trying to ram your ship.

youtube.com/watch?v=Jdk2ujnkrBk

Also I have feeling that the reason why they used Galaxy in this fight was to be somewhat dicks about how TNG was overshadowing DS9 at the time. DS9 often took similar potshots at the TNG and Voyager during their run.

also helps to show the threat scale
>Galaxy is known as THE flag ship, the most advanced.
>nuked by the new player on the stage
WORF'D

Yes I am aware that was their official reason to use a Galaxy, but knowing how much DS9 crew allways seemed to have bit something against towards other ST series, especially towards TNG it feels that the other reason was "Wohoo we are now free of TNG have at it!" as this was about the time TNG finished as TV show.

Consider the butthurt it seemed to cause in DS9 staff when Defiant was used in First Contact and got it ass kicked by the Borg and had to be saved by Ent-E.

Has anyone got that image of that vulcan captain at three stages of her life?

>torpedoes
yes this is it, fighters should deploy torpedoes launch them from extreme range and get the fuck out before the enemy ship detects them or fires at them.

only sane way to use fighters in space.

But muh 24th century Topgun

well you can go into dogfight with other fighters sure why not, it's stupid tho, take them out from thousands of kilometers with energy weapons is more reasonable. but don't get them in range of warships energy weapons (which is around 1 light sec, 300k kilometers)

maybe a fighter is mobile or nimble enough to dodge missiles/torpedoes fired at them. if not then they are pretty damn useless.

one tactic i could see used is shaking missiles with micro jumps. translating to hyper after firing your salvo where a missile can't translate on it's own or track you there and also using it to flank the enemy and gtfo.

>well you can go into dogfight with other fighters sure why not, it's stupid tho,

I can't hear you over the sound of Ace Combat Zero's OST.

The other way it could work is the visual size of the ships.

Something 20 meters across is going to be harder to resolve at a distance of 300k kilometers than something thats 700 meters.

Also, sensors might not operate one the visual spectrum, most these days don't, and your tiny antimatter reactor and fusion drive is a lot harder to detect compared to the eight deck high behemoth.

In order to detect and target fighters at that range might be nigh impossible as they just get absorbed into the background radiation.

in this regard i think fighters should be low endurance dual hyper drive vessels carrying crapton of torpedoes and only defensive energy armament.

the way it would work is they make a short jump into the flank of the enemy and after firing immediately jump out. from their detection and being targeted and fired on they should have 5-6 seconds. not nearly enough to cycle a single drive, but they can use their second drive to jump immediately reducing their exposure greatly.

and even tho a larger ship could chase them down in hyper easily which one of the dozen fighters it should go after and it's drive cycle rate is very fucking bad it's probably a losing proposition to try to swat them one by one. especially in a battle with other warships where it is counted on.

>Something 20 meters across is going to be harder to resolve at a distance of 300k kilometers than something that's 700 meters.
that's true enough altho this doesn't seem to be a problem in star trek universe or other such universes. the drives energy signature gives you away and high resolution optics pick you up almost immediately.

>hyper drive

they do have some sort of ftl i'm not sure on the exact terminology in star trek. the point is they exit normal space and usually have to charge the drives to do so right? call it hyper n-space translation or whatever the fuck you want.

ehhe they actually call it sub-space and warp drive. yeah sure that's not a "hyper drive" at all okay then.

This might seem elitist to an outsider but they reference it every 15 seconds in the show. If you don't know what the FTL in Star Trek is called off the top of your head you really shouldn't be opining on it.

Seriously, go watch it. We even have some nice pictographs which show you which ones are the good ones somewhere.

Visual data is really hard for a computer to make sense of, and practically impossible for a human to detect something that small that far away. It's other emissions should be fairly easy to minimize, I mean the F-22 raptor isn't actually invisible but the way it's BVR and stealth operate it may as well be.

Hyper Drives in Sci-Fi are in general understood to operate through other dimensions, Warp Drives (Star Trek isn't the only one) work by folding space-time, rather than leaving the universe altogether.