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    Home Unlabelled Star Trek Online U.S.S. Conqueror fresh out of drydock following her major retrofit

    Star Trek Online U.S.S. Conqueror fresh out of drydock following her major retrofit

    February 14, 2020

    Star Trek Online U.S.S. Conqueror fresh out of drydock following her major retrofit

    U.S.S. Conqueror fresh out of drydock following her major retrofit

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 03:34 AM PST

    Beam hardpoints on Konnie Refit saucer are misaligned

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:17 AM PST

    Scotty the nacelle light is out again!

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 08:37 AM PST

    To Freedom!

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:34 AM PST

    Now that beardy Romulans are unquestionably in canon

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 04:37 AM PST

    Give me beard options on my Romulan and Liberated Borg Romulan.

    Beards plox.

    Also for Male Orions now I think of it. They already have one option so give them the full set.

    Also can you fix the weird persistent brown hue so they're the same colour as noggin hair? Curtains gotta match the drapes y'all.

    submitted by /u/BorgWerewolf
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    Flying around in my new intrepid pathfinder like:

    Posted: 13 Feb 2020 08:53 PM PST

    Come with me, And you'll be, In a world of pure imagination.

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 07:03 AM PST

    Time to overhaul the ship customizer UI

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:12 AM PST

    Request for an overhaul to the "Ship Customizer UI." I think it's long overdue for an overhaul for the graphic user interface for the ship customizer. Changing the look of my ship is one of the best parts of the game. However, the process of doing so can be frustrating. If you have a ship with a lot of options [skins, saucers, nacelles, hulls etc], the drop down tab for the options can completely block the view of the ship. It's hard to choose which ship skin material I want because I can't see the ship behind the menu tab. It's hard to differentiate between the different ship parts when selecting them because the menu blocks your view of the ship. I would suggest relocating the UI for the customizer to either the left or right sides of the screen. That way, when you click on a menu, it won't block your view of the screen.

    ​

    I would also like to recommend adding more lights around the ship to make it easier to see the changes. ESD is so dark. When changing the skin material, a lot of them look the same due to lack of lighting. And some look completely different when you fly on a map that is bright [Dyson Sphere, Badlands Battlezone, Infected: Space TFO etc].

    submitted by /u/20JK10
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    the ship missing from the legacy bundle

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:42 AM PST

    i fully believe there is only one ship that deserves to be called legendary and that is the thundercougerfalconbird it has fought countless battles in STO. even though we have only seen her true form once she deserves to be able to fly unhindered in her true form for all to see.

    submitted by /u/kilemeino
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    "Doug Dimmadome, Captain of the U.S.S. Dimmadome?" "That's right! Doug Dimmadome, Captain of the U.S.S. Dimmadome!"

    Posted: 13 Feb 2020 11:55 PM PST

    The Best Diplomat - trait from Legendary Miracle Worker Light Cruiser, is it cat1 or cat2 since wording of the trait is a bit odd

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 02:25 AM PST

    So I just found out the hard way that the name Axanar is now restricted

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 04:28 AM PST

    My Kelvin Connie was named Axanar, partially inspired by the then recent Prelude to Axanar. Since the location is part of Alpha canon, I saw no reason not to keep it around.

    Now that the Legendary Bundle is out, I wanted to switch to the Intel Konnie, renamed the previous one to free up the name for the new one (RP-wise I treat them as the same ship), then tried to rename the new one. Only to find out that the game would not allow me to do so.

    I would guess this was done at the request of CBS after everything that went down with that movie. It's not a huge deal for me but honestly, it is disappointing. Regardless of any stuff happening out of universe, Axanar is a part of Alpha Canon, even if not very significant.

    submitted by /u/UltimateSpinDash
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    Now we have a top hat, could we get this? It's long overdue I feel and It would go so well with the Thompson.

    Posted: 13 Feb 2020 02:44 PM PST

    Zen Sales not active on PS4

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:31 AM PST

    It was announced yesterday but the sales aren't live. u/ambassdorkael is this intended or was the zen sale announced in error?

    submitted by /u/Ookamimoon66
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    Really, this ship should've been in the Legendary bundle

    Posted: 13 Feb 2020 12:58 PM PST

    Mission reward rifles don’t look anything like 7s any one else noticed?

    Posted: 13 Feb 2020 11:56 PM PST

    What's J'Ula up to after losing a shipyard? I spent the night writing.

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 01:19 AM PST

    Matriarch J'Ula had not had a spectacular month. Such were the fortunes of war; no matter what firebrand orators like her brother or Jm'pok might say, wars were not won with honor or glory, but by exploiting such tactics, strategies and technologies that their foes could not best them.

    The Beta Lankal shipyards were aflame, but though the loss of men and materiel was great, it was but the hindmost of her forces - the oldest and last of her vessels, those which had not yet been refit with modern technologies. Their loss was substantial, but it was better to lose a fleet of vessels nearer to two than one century out-of-date, which could not have done more than tickle a modern escort with their disruptors and which would have been trivially pierced by a modern phaser in any event.

    Even so, her forces needed to get some payback; the firebrand orators knew how to excite their soldiers, and unenthusiastic soldiers were one good offer of an honorable amnesty away from being one's enemies. She was no firebrand priest like her brother, but she knew what else excited unenthusiastic soldiers - a good victory.

    She needed a target she could strike that would enthuse her soldiers. It would be trivial to find a poorly-defended Federation colony world, fire her Spore weapon at it, and let the Elachi pour through. But while Klingons might be pleased to hear of the Federation's soft-bellied, mewling civilians slaughtered in their bedrooms clutching their linens by the Elachi, that would not be a glorious victory to sing songs about - it would not be a strike against a target that would be seen as payback for the refit yards.

    She needed to destroy a Federation shipyard in turn. Or, if possible, a Romulan or even a - what were those ugly, scaly things that her soldiers were looking forward to facing hand to hand? - Jem'hadar.

    That would prove challenging, however; the Romulans in their little Republic, for all their weakness and irrelevance in numbers - they had resorted to flying their allies' vessels, those who had not defected wholesale to the Federation or the Empire - were very, very paranoid about defending what little was left that was theirs. It was absolutely certain that the Romulan shipyards, what few remained, were also amongst the most heavily-defended shipyards in the Beta Quadrant, and from what reports she had read, the Jem'hadar's shipyards were in the Gamma quadrant, which was entirely inaccessible to her as it would require slipping through the Bajoran Wormhole - which she still poorly-understood, but understood enough to know that it was a strategic chokepoint which she could not hope to penetrate - or actually getting the Mycelial Spore Drive to work right.

    And attacking a Klingon shipyard was inadvisable - if for no other reason than that her long game required her to convince more of the Houses to pledge themselves - and their holdings - to her. Weakening her eventual allies was an unwise decision - or at least, it was less militarily-preferable than striking her ultimate enemy.

    So it had to be a Federation shipyard. She tapped on the display. There was a shipyard icon in a system farther towards the former Romulan Star Empire than most; the Federation's military infrastructure was poor in those sectors. It seemed odd for them to have sited a shipyard there.

    "Explain this place to me," she commanded the strategist who was standing next to her. He snarled.

    "It is a home of a beastly little race of petaQ apes." The strategist held his hand up at about the height of his second-lowest rib. "The mewling vermin hide in the blackness of space, they keep their ships and habitats without gravity, or with nearly no gravity, such that when honorable warriors beam aboard to slaughter them they bounce about like fools and may be shot down with ease. They are so frail as to be unworthy of a warrior's death."

    J'Ula snorted. Taking advantage of a foe's failure to train in the art of war in a given environment was no dishonorable tactic at all - it was sound strategy - but she noncommittally echoed the sentiment with a grunt. "Why would the Federation put a shipyard here? It is away from their heartlands."

    "They did not. The bouncing apes themselves built the shipyards, and have been constructing new vessels, refitting old ones, apparently upon their own initiative. What kind of fool allows a vassal to construct vessels, let alone uses ones constructed by their servitors?"

    J'Ula snorted, this time in wholehearted agreement. She would almost be doing the Federation a favor by eradicating what might prove to be an rebellious thorn in their side later on. In the long term, destroying such unruly vassals - or at least crippling them - might prove to hinder her own plans, as a sudden uprising from the rear might distract the humans' military at the best possible moment for her. But she needed a victory to crow about and energize her forces.

    "And the defenses there?"

    "Substantially numerous, but antiquated. The Federation constructed a full-sized starbase in orbit of a gas giant in the system, but few of their large vessels are stationed there. It would not be a trivial victory, but it can be done."

    J'Ula nodded. She needed a victory to raise morale - the easier the better, as she couldn't afford to lose many ships in the process; but it couldn't be too easy or it wouldn't be seen as glorious. Fortunately, she had The Weapon - tearing a rift to the strange realm of the xenophobic Elachi. They were no allies of hers, of course, but they would attack anything that they detected, and seemed unable to ascertain that it was her doing that caused the rifts. She could use them, and she would if she had to.

    "Set course," she said, tapping the symbol on her display. "We will raze these shipyards. The blood of our fallen cries out for vengeance, they shall have it!"

    Rear Admiral Hanks sighed as he walked at a measured pace past the enormous oil painting hanging in the great corridor. It was a painting of an ancient Federation vessel - U.S.S. Fram NX-14 - approaching a cloudy, uninhabitable planetoid.

    He was privately disgusted by the painting, because it commemorated something that, as a career Starfleet officer with an impeccable track record of upholding the Federation's virtues, he abominated; a colossal Prime Directive violation. The next painting he passed on the way towards his office was of the vessel after its crash-landing on the moon; too broken to salvage, its crew mostly dead on impact and the remainder dying of their injuries shortly afterwards, beyond the ability of the inhabitants of the system who had come to rescue them to assist. The fractured vessel was surrounded by oblong, blocky vessels, primitive things with only advanced rocket thrusters for propulsion, which had landed to see if they could render assistance.

    The next painting was of the same ship, in similar condition, but now the few vessels which had landed had become an entire city, an enormous, domed city built on an uninhabitable, toxic carbon slushball - the city had grown out of the research park which had grown out of the salvage effort that landed around Fram.

    The captain of that ship should have ordered it scuttled when it became clear it was going down. He hadn't, and a race of near-militant paranoids had reverse-engineered its technologies, and its histories. Now they were Federation members, fast-tracked because thirty years ago their technology was largely based on early Federation technology, their Warp signatures read on everyone's sensors as belonging to Starfleet, and they had met a Starfleet vessel whilst responding to a distress signal.

    In his opinion, they had no business in the Federation, and the only reason they had been granted membership was because the alternative was to allow them to go on pretending they belonged whilst being unanswerable to the Federation council. But the Federation could hardly stop them from building what they saw fit to build in their own system, and these people were damnably clever engineers.

    "Admiral." One of the local staff passed him, pausing in her - as much as the word could be applied to them - stride and restraining herself from saluting. She wasn't wearing the Starfleet uniform, but more and more of them were starting to do so. The local militia's uniform was based, at least aesthetically, on the 250-year-old Starfleet uniform the crew of Fram had been equipped with, and he seethed that he couldn't order them to change their uniforms. They were giving the Federation a bad name.

    "Commander," he acknowledged her, without any overt blip in his outward appearance to betray his inner turmoil. R.Admiral Marcus Hanks was nothing if not a diplomat. "Anything to report?"

    "No operational issues, sir. The General's on the warpath and waiting in your office. She's in a tizzy about the recent threat assessments and wants to run more system-defense drills."

    "Understood. Thank you, Commander." That damn General Alsidis y'708. He snorted (inwardly) when he considered the locals' naming conventions. The General of the Ily'os System Militia had, of course, followed the (majority) local custom of changing her surname to match her habitat of residence. "I'll see the General presently."

    He continued along the path to his office, carefully moving at a measured pace in Starbase 708's two-thirds Earth-normal gravity. It was a compromise that suited very few; the Ily'osian dextrid usually lived in .17 or lower, and most of the Starfleet personnel had grown up in .9 or higher. Thankfully the cabins all had variable gravitational controls.

    "Admiral." A Bajoran Lt. Commander approached him, wearing the orange stripe of Operations, bearing a PADD. "Systems readiness reports from last night's drills."

    "Drills? What drills," Hanks asked, sharply, taking the PADD and scowling. He knew before the Lt. Commander even opened his mouth - the top item was a report on Starbase 708's 'Experimental' weapon system. "Nevermind. General y'708 ordered drills while I was asleep."

    "Yes sir. She ordered a full diagnostic of all systems and ran an incursion simulation."

    Hanks resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Who was it this time? Iconians? Voth? Vaadwaur?"

    "The Borg, sir."

    Hanks didn't need to fake the shudder. The Borg were one of the few things he genuinely feared - an enemy that would not negotiate. Anything else, anyone else, he was sure that there was a better way, and he deployed the way Starfleet had become faster to charge phaser banks in the last decade. Starfleet was not a military organization. "And the result?"

    "Disastrous if a Cube enters the system with only standard weapons and the system militia responding. Total assimilation. It gets a little better if any big Starfleet vessels are also in range. If we add the -"

    "Enough." Hanks said. He didn't need the Lt. Commander to say it. "I get the idea. I'll see to the General. Dismissed, Lieutenant."

    The Bajoran snapped stiffly to attention and departed. Hanks didn't like that - it wasn't formally required from Starfleet officers above the rank of Lieutenant, but the infectious militarism of the locals was starting to get to his officers. Even he was finding himself standing unconsciously at parade rest.

    He passed through 708's Ops room towards his office. The floorplan was the same as that of Ops at Earth Spacedock - 708 was a starbase of the Spacedock class, after all - but the actual systems were very different, as the locals had been the fitting crew. LCARS consoles in row after row in the lower section, facing either the window - which instead of being clear had full master systems displays readouts projected on it at all times, with an active holo-pane that would be the communications viewscreen if he took a call on the operations floor. Below him, instead of a conference room and a personnel evaluation room were two war rooms, full of Intelligence types and tactical analysts and enginering officers running nonstop readiness reviews and fleet status updates.

    It genuinely disturbed Admiral Hanks that he probably had a better and faster access to full reviews of Starfleet's - hell, the Alliance's - military readiness than Admiral Quinn did. He compared his situation to that of Ben Sisko when he had taken command of Deep Space Nine - he had an obnoxious, militant local forced upon him as second in command, and she had broad latitude to order both Starfleet personnel and her own minions to conduct reviews and drills.

    Inwardly he counted down the days until his next leave, when he could make this whole mess and these militant yahoos someone else's problem. He couldn't wait to go home; he could almost taste his daughter's sweet potato pie. She was very, very nearly the baker his mother was, and he longed for the hot sun and the reassuring gravity of Alabama's countryside. He took one look out at the Ops. Rows and rows of officers, Starfleet and Ily'os's local Dextrid, talking in hushed tones with their neighbors. From his vantage point he saw that no fewer than four consoles with work-groups of three officers were monitoring fleet reports, and four of them were monitoring sensor posts. There was a security office just off the Ops room, and glancing inside he saw a four-man squad of security officers - Starfleet all - monitoring the station's internal security system. All of them had phaser rifles mounted on top of their consoles and were wearing personal gravity belts that would let them run about as if they were in their native gravities. There was a fifth standing watch in the corner of the wall dividing his office and the Ops room, with a phaser pulsewave slung on his shoulder, where anyone who ran into Ops wouldn't see him and run past him, and present their back to him.

    As if that wasn't enough, he knew that the (multiply-redundant) life support systems were over-secured with an over-deployment of officers, MACOs or local Marines all, with orders to stun first, switch to kill settings if stun didn't immediately resolve the situation, and leave others to ask the questions.

    And that was a step up from the conventional local attitude, which was to shoot to kill at the first intrusion upon life support. Hanks shook his head. He wanted sweet-potato pie and home worse than he did when he woke up, and he walked into his office, mastering his unsettled attitude.

    "General."

    "Admiral." Alsidis y'708 stood. She was considerably shorter than him, wearing a dark, dark, almost-black navy-blue uniform patterned on the Starfleet uniform of the 2170s, festooned with zippered pockets. It was turtle-necked, with a thick collar around her shoulders that he knew would deploy an inflated helmet at a moment's notice, with a full light enviroseal and air for an hour. Her pockets bulged with devices and gadgets and things he doubted she had needed more than once in the last year, such as the pistol on her hip. It was a modern compression phaser pistol, he knew, stuffed into the chassis of a 250-year-old phase pistol. "Slept well?"

    The short, willowy creature would appear elfin, with her high, pointed ears, if not for the hardened nature of her ridged forhead and heavy, protective brows, and if she weren't so damn militant in bearing and mannerisms. Her hair was cut to a centimeter save for a ponytail that he had only seen let down once, and which she wore in a tight bun at the back of her head most of the time; she looked like a melange of tropical and subtropical fruits, with skin he likened to mangoes dotted with banana. She was even of an age with him, but they had most definitely not hit it off in any sense.

    "Well enough." He pressed the button on the transparent wall which caused the door to descend from above. "Care to explain this?" He held up the PADD containing the reports.

    "That's a Personal Access Data Device, sir," the short hermaphrodite deadpanned. "Federation and non-Federation citizens use them or similar devices to read, write, and issue commands to computerized systems every day."

    The privacy shield would have engaged even before the doors finished closing. Hanks knew that y'708 wouldn't have snarked at him like that and undercut him audibly within earshot of their subordinates. He also knew that if he lost his temper and upbraided her for it, even inaudibly, everyone outside would be able to see. He simply rocked back on his heels, snorting and tipping his head to concede the point in their near-constant verbal dueling. "Funny, General." He didn't reproach her or even demand clarification; she might snark at him, but he knew she was nothing if not professional when it came to duty.

    "I ran system-readiness exercises when I came on-shift during the early morning shift," the General continued without further prompting. "Simulated Borg incursion. As predicted, it was a clusterfuck with only conventional systems and militia vessels. The best we managed to do was scuttle Starbase 708 before it could be Assimilated. Better than Starbase 82 managed," she noted. "Even when we went off-script and tried to use the Particle Fountain to rip up the cube, it only inflicted about 25% hull damage before they Adapted. Cyclical phaser modulation remained effective, but it's the Borg - a Cube has plenty of power and shield generation to spare."

    Hanks didn't really want to hear it. The Borg appearing were a nightmare scenario. He nodded. "And with Starfleet support?"

    "We ran the sim again with Enterprise, Challenger and Scott responding. Three of the largest Explorers turned the tide, especially with militia vessels flying support, but we still took heavy losses before the Borg were repulsed - and we had to order five habitats with twenty-five million civilians between them destroyed by bombardment because the Cube had already beamed assimilation teams aboard and had begun assimilation."

    Hanks snarled openly. "We will not -"

    "We do what we have to," General y'708 cut him off. "Nobody can risk the Borg assimilating a habitat that's five times the mass of a Cube. What would you have done?"

    "Contained the situation, called in specialists, begun counter-assimilation proceedures."

    "In a habitat environment your MACOs don't train for, full of assimilated civilians? They still haven't pushed the Borg off Defera, and last I checked, they couldn't turn a planet into a warship. It wouldn't take the Borg long to turn a spingrav cylinder hab into something approximating a dreadnought."

    "Evacuation, then," Hanks said, shaking his head angrily.

    "Not feasible," the General said. "Twenty-five million people. Sure, of course we had Enterprise, Scott and Challenger and everything we had in the vicinity beam off everyone they could from the areas of the habitat that were confirmed free of Assimilation, but there just was not time to organize a full evacuation. They were stuffed to the pressure hull, but we still only got about thirty-five thousand. We have to have a faster and more decisive response."

    Hanks shook his head, sighing heavily in exasperation, while y'708 stood in front of him, glaring at him. He wanted to glare at her - some days it seemed like she was almost eager to perpetrate a massacre. It was only a simulation, but, thumbing through it, it sickened his stomach to imagine the enormous Galaxy-class U.S.S. Challenger loading her photon torpedo tubes and firing on a civilian habitat, let alone one of such scale that it dwarfed his starbase. He knew Captain LaForge - he couldn't imagine any situation in which LaForge would follow such an order.

    Then he saw the appendix to the second report - there was a scenario play-out where, indeed, LaForge did refuse the order to fire - where all three Starfleet vessels on-scene did. The militia vessels did so, but the point-defenses on the habitats were able to shoot down the incoming torpedoes before the locals could concentrate enough to get through, and the militia ships' directed-energy firepower wasn't enough overcome their shields before the Borg augmented them. That turned into the same nightmare scenario that the first scenario ended in - the three habitats became Borg dreadnoughts, and proceeded to assimilate the system.

    Admiral Hanks shook his head. It was a nightmare scenario - a paranoid's nightmare, concocted to justify a shoot-first mentality. It had no place in the Federation. It turned his stomach that one of his own Starfleet Intelligence officers had signed off on the second scenario beta-ending as being accurate and justifying the alpha-ending wherein the three massive Explorers blew twenty-five million civilians to space debris.

    He made a mental note to kill that Lieutenant's career before she could bend the ear of some maniac like Burgess. "You really like to push things, General."

    "I think you refuse to push the button when it's necessary," she shot back. "Did you even look at the third scenario?"

    Hanks sighed, and barely avoided rolling his eyes. It was before 10:00 hours and he already wanted some privacy. He bought himself some time and walked behind his desk, sitting down and setting the PADD down, facedown. "I am not authorizing the use of that, that, that... Gadget. Nor am I going to order Vortex to fly without her right commander aboard."

    It infuriated him that they'd found that, that ship in the gas giant below - it made a mockery of the Temporal Prime Directive, a fully-completed Narendra-class vessel, suspended in a gas giant when the design was still on the drawing board, uncovered, pulled up, and used to rush the class into production - and full of questionably-legal temporally-displaced technologies. He couldn't actually prevent Admiral O'Shea and Janeway from having allowed the local wonder-girl from taking official command (the way the records on Vortex indicated she had,) but thankfully - in his opinion - the local shipyards kept hauling in older Starfleet hulls and using S.C.E. rapid-refit techniques to reconstruct their guts to modern vessel standards. They kept issuing the first of those ships to Captain Bala for shakedowns, which meant she wasn't often on the bridge of Vortex, and without the captain aboard, he could keep that ship and its dangerous technologies on lockdown in 708 - locked down and crewed only with Starfleet officers.

    She hadn't been included in any of the wargames, he noted with satisfaction. They'd been run as if the ship didn't exist.

    "The third scenario clearly shows a decisive intervention when we -"

    "Enough, General." Hanks reached the end of his patience, and the diplomat's voice went away. He hadn't had to issue Real Orders with his Commander Voice for a long time before he'd come to 708, but he still had it. She snapped to attention. "Part of the deal for getting this starbase built here was that that weapon system was placed under the command of Starfleet and Starfleet alone - the commanding officer of Starbase 708 has sole authority to authorize release. Your input will be taken into consideration," he said truthfully - he considered her a trigger-happy militant primitive, too culturally unenlightened to be trusted with an exotic weapon of mass destruction. There was a reason the Federation had banned the technology she wanted to deploy. "Are there any other matters we need to discuss," he asked, harshly.

    "Yes, sir," she said. He could see seething anger in her eyes, and he wondered if she was finally going to cross a line he could use to have her removed. Almost hoped. "We've had thirty personnel requests for transfer out on medical grounds; the CMO approved them. They're waiting for your rubberstamp. Engineering has improved particle fountain efficiency by -"

    Hanks tuned out and paid half-attention to the ordinary business of running a Starbase, nodding in agreement with all of her points. He hated, but respected, her ability to accept that the Conversation Was Over and shift to other business even when it was painfully obvious the matter was burning within her. She was if nothing else a consummately professional officer, a good leader and a diligent subordinate both.

    Admiral Hanks was shaken from his reverie by the sudden shift of the lighting to a brighter yellow and the bleeping, medium-pitched alarm of a Yellow Alert. His first instinct was to imagine that this was a move by General Alsidis to try and make him look unready, but he saw surprise in her eyes as much as in his a moment before the voice of the station's Chief of the Watch echoed from unseen speakers. "This is Chief Nomura. This is not a drill: all hands condition yellow. All hands, this is not a drill: set condition yellow. Reserve crews to standby posts. All vessels in spacedock are ordered to begin powering your reactors and prepare for action; all crews are ordered to return your ships. This is not a drill: all hands yellow alert."

    Hanks felt a flash of fear and annoyance both run through him. Nomura was Starfleet, serious and taciturn, but he didn't like the man; any man who practiced kenjutsu regularly with swords he had made out of the most modern materials available to be as sharp and resilient as humanly possible was someone whose attitude he didn't like. The fact that Nomura had probably survived the Klingon-Federation war because of his skill with a blade didn't really change that in Hanks' estimation; such martial readiness had no place in an organization of explorers. He stood and strode from his desk through the doors. Nomura was standing at the console to his right on the front of the balcony, a severe-looking man in middle age, wholly bald. Sometimes Hanks worried that Nomura had some kind of repressed delusions of being a samurai, and only hoped that Nomura recognized him as his daimyo in such moments.

    The fact that Nomura and Alsidis got along fantastically annoyed him, too. "Report, Chief."

    Nomura didn't look up, his attention focused on a large holographic display in front of him. "Admiral, we've been having intermittent anomalous sensor contacts throughout the outer system all morning. Intel's classified it as having a disturbingly high probability of a cloaked vessel probing the system."

    "Disturbingly high, Chief," the high-pitched local General asked.

    "It just passed thirty percent. The anomaly stopped two hours ago, and we got a ping inside the system defense perimeter. I.M.S. Mithin launched probes at Warp 1, 3, and 5, and went to red alert."

    Hanks snorted. "And you went to yellow alert because of an anomaly?"

    "I ordered condition yellow because an affiliated vessel within system gravipause set condition red," Nomura said. He cited a Starfleet regulation and Hanks tuned him out - he was correct, of course, by the letter of the regs, but the Dextrids went to Red Alert at the drop of a hat. He burned to order a return to condition green - he had the authority - but he didn't want another diplomatic brouhaha about Starfleet being unwilling to protect its citizens.

    The bridge of the thirteenth Ily'os Militia Ship Mithin looked both remarkably similar to, and remarkably different from, that of a mainline Starfleet vessel. Any Starfleet officer should have been able to sit at any post and begin performing duties - by now, some twenty years after Ily'os had joined the Federation, the old control systems had all been gutted and modern LCARS installed, the crews all trained and retrained.

    The bulkhead plating was considerably darker, the floor was bare metal, and the gravitational pull was a mere .17 - which was still a crushing .169 above what some of her crew had grown up in, and they had had to adjust - making it more of a suggestion. There were consoles and chairs hanging literally from the ceiling, whose crew had simply leapt up to climb into. Everyone was strapped in, and two Marines with phaser carbines over their backs were in the process of handing phaser pistols to the bridge crew. The captain's command chair was centered half-way up a pillar in the middle of the room, where she could see the viewscreen between the upper and lower crew. Her prehensile feet twitched in her glovelike boots - she was in middle-life and when she had first learned her trade, there were controls for an officer's hands and feet. Now there were not, and the inefficiency of it itched sometimes. Still, she saw the need for it - at any time they might have to host a Starfleet officer educated somewhere like Earth, or Andor, or Bajor, someone whose feet couldn't usefully grasp and manipulate controls.

    A hard object slapped her in the lower calf and she glanced down. One of the Marines was holding a pistol beside her right leg. She grasped it carefully, by the barrel, with her left foot. "Thank you, Sergeant," she said, lifting it and taking it with her right hand - checking that the power pack was loaded and the safety was on - then thrusting it into her holster.

    "Yes sir," the Marine said, sharply, moving on to hand her X.O.'s weapon to her. She glanced up at the MSD readout on the ring of display consoles about a head above her own head; Mithin was a sleek little vessel. She was old, but had been refit. She had the look of a vessel that was hopelessly, woefully out-of-date, looking for all the galaxy like one of the Earth Starfleet's first Warp-5 vessels. Looks in this case were very deceptive, but it helped that the ship had a passive sensor signature that matched her antiquated lines, even when they were running hot - until she actually started firing weapons or her shields flared with impacts, she'd look like easy prey for so much as a runabout.

    The red lights of the alert condition grimly lined her LCARS consoles, and she looked up at the sensor officer to her upper left. "Sensors, what have we got?"

    "Probe-5 is past the projected anomaly location. Probe-3 is drawing up. Probe-1 is still between us. Probes initiating auto-maneuver... Triangulation beginning, full sweep on all bands."

    The captain's lips tightened and she patted the turtleneck collar at her throat, ensuring it was nice and tight. If weapons started firing, everyone's helmets would seal automatically. It wasn't pleasant, but it was better than suddenly choking - and it meant that they could simply vacate any compartments aboard without fear for the crew. Well, with less fear than letting them choke on smoke or worse, anyway.

    Tense minutes passed. "What are we dealing with," she asked, mostly rhetorically.

    "Unknown," the sensor officer said. "Our probes have registered some hinky readings, but I cannot definitively say it's a cloaked vessel."

    "Could it be a temporal anomaly? Spatial distortion? A transwarp conduit aperture slithering around?"

    "Unknown, sir," the sensor officer said, looking over her shoulder and back at her. "What do you think I am, a Starfleet Academy graduate?" She paused a beat, then laughed.

    The captain snorted. She wanted to censure the young officer, but knew better. Everyone was tense, and self-deprecating humor was a largely harmless valve - and in any event, she knew damn well that her sensor operator may not have attended Starfleet Academy, but she did take every academic and practical course at Starbase 708 and Fram Polytechnic Institute. There was no faulting her practical capability, SFA attendee or not. "Speculate, Ensign."

    After a moment of shaking her head, the sensor officer sighed. "Best guess is cloaked vessel, and... Sizable. If we had a sensor array the size of the whole ship, I could probably tell you; if we had an array of specialized gravimetric sensors to... Captain, permission to modify twelve probes into a gravimetric sensor net."

    They had twelve probes left. They'd had fifteen. That would leave them with zero - but probes were cheap enough resource-wise, and could be recovered. She made a snap decision to trust the energetic young officer. "Make it so."

    The sensors officer nodded, and began to climb down, when Tactical belted out "Evade, evade, evade!"

    The helmsman responded without input from the captain, and the commanding officer watched the viewscreen as matters rapidly escaped her control; the starscape visible through the viewscreen shifted rapidly as the vessel rotated twenty degrees to bring her more powerful, ventral saucer thrusters to bear, moving hopefully-unpredictably, the engines kicking hard to full power. The sensor officer hung from both arms on the handles on her console as the harsh combat maneuver exceeded the inertial dampeners - a spread of nasty green bolts flashed out under the ship, clearing the space they had just been in.

    She glanced up at the tactical readout, since there was a slim young woman hanging on for dear life between her and the main viewer, all helmets automatically engaging. The sheer size of the contact she was facing made her lime skin go the shade of a starfruit as the color drained. "Contact, dreadnought-class. Configuration... She's cloaked again!"

    "Romulan? Klingon?"

    "No sir, I - think," the tactical officer reported. "Sensors? What's her power source?"

    The young Dextrid hanging on let out a howl of exertion and heaved herself bodily against the force of acceleration, getting her foot into a hand-hold and into her console, fingers running rapidly across it. "Matter-Antimatter," she reported. "I didn't get a good look, but she's not Romulan. She was in our impulse wash when she decloaked."

    Continues in this comment thread

    Dextrids were invented by u/GynoidGearhead. I fell in love with the race and made a character, and then an entire star system for her to be from. You can read more about the places and cultures modern Dextrids are from here if you so desire; be warned, very, very unpolished and WIP.

    submitted by /u/ShadowDragon8685
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    T1 Miranda vs the Forces of EVIL!!!

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 06:07 AM PST

    I can confirm that Transcranial Sensor Link from the Legendary Sovereign gives shield pen skill, not percentage.

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 08:03 AM PST

    And I am very sad to report this news as well. This trait is definitely trash tier.

    submitted by /u/sto_guy
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    So I was showing my friend the Dyson Battle Zones last night. This is how he spawned in, and remained for 5 minutes.

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 07:45 AM PST

    All the pictures of the Kelvin Connie Refit failed to show the best part of the ship. Those impulse engines......

    Posted: 13 Feb 2020 06:12 PM PST

    Favorite ZEN Store Purchases?

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 05:00 AM PST

    With all this talk about the value vs enjoyment factor brought on by the Legendary Bundle, it got me thinking about items I have purchased that absolutely, 100% have enhanced my enjoyment of the game.

    For me those are:

    • All Good Things Uniform - I don't know why exactly, but I've been quite taken with this uniform ever since seeing it on Admiral Janeway in the Voyager finale. My main Captain and crew wear a variant of their uniform.

    • Starfleet Academy Uniform - I really like the Odyssey family of uniforms, but have also always disliked the split pant leg from TNG. These pants not having that AND having the piping on the side is the perfect accent.

    • Scott Class Miracle Worker Ship - I had flown other C-Store ships before including the Andromeda and the Phantom but had never quite found the right fit. I have (for the most part) not flown another T6 since. Maybe it's just the much higher threshold for exploding but I can say without a doubt this is the ship I have no regrets about purchasing.

    What items from the C-Store have you personally gained the most enjoyment from?

    submitted by /u/TheSnackist
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    Meh. I don't understand why I use ships that I don't necessarily like.

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 01:52 AM PST

    Since I play this game (several years), I wonder if I am the only one to feel this:

    Do you ever feel compelled to use a more optimized ship than the one you find beautiful just for efficiency? For example, I'm in love with my Sheshar but I know I do more DPS with a bunch of other ships. I don't know why but I always end up forcing myself to use other vessels than the ones I just find beautiful. However, it's not as if the PVE content asks to having a lot of DPS.

    I just feel like I'm playing badly if I didn't try to have the most optimized build on the most optimized ship.

    submitted by /u/inanmb
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    Funny thing happened when I logged in today...

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 08:12 AM PST

    Well, at the character select screen. For a few seconds it showed my boffs actually standing up, in the "poses" I had selected for them in the tailor. After a few seconds it switched to the "some standing some squatting and holding various tricoders" thing that we normally see, but it looked so much better before! Can we please just have our boffs stand the way that we have chosen for them to look instead of in these weird forced positions?

    submitted by /u/JackSparrowJive
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    So I guess this is basically a lie then

    Posted: 14 Feb 2020 09:10 AM PST
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