Star Trek Online Ship Terminology Guide

Star Trek Online Ship Terminology Guide by Suricata

Consoles

There are 3 types of consoles in the game, these are Science, Tactical and Engineering. Each console effects different stats of your ship. Each of the 3 ship lines usually favors a specific slot type, thus a science ship will have more science console slots, an Escort will have more tactical console slots. When you look at a console, right clicking it with show a menu, if you click ‘info’ a window will pop up giving you examples of what skills the console stat effects. It is a very good idea to check exactly what your console effects, ideally you want consoles that complement your bridge officer skills. As a rule of thumb, consoles of the same type to not stack stats in a linear fashion.

Just to clear up some mis information, consoles do NOT have ranks, items you can equip on your ship are tied to your rank. Thus:-

Ensign / Leutenant = MK I & MK II
Leutenant Commander = MK III and MK IV
Commander = MK V and MK VI
Captain = MK VII and MK VIII
Admiral = MK IX and MK X

This is linked to your charactors rank, not the ship.

Consoles do NOT define what Bridge Offciers you can use, they are simply there as slots for devices to improve your ships stats for skills in those branches.

Bridge Officers

Each ship has Bridge officer slots, they are usually tied to a branch (science, tactical & engineering),however, some ships, like the Klingon Bird of Prey have neutral slots, meaning any branch bridge officer can occupy that station. As well as having branch slots, a ships Bridge officer stations are also rank restricted. This means that a Bridge officer will only be able to use the skills the station rank allows. The following ranks equate to how many skills a BO may use:-

Ensign = 1 Skill
Lieutenant = 2 Skills
Lieutenant Commander = 3 Skills
Commander = 4 skills

So, when you look at a ship on the chart, you will notice there is a rank underneath the bridge officer icon, this indicates the rank of the station the Bridge officer can take. It is worth noting that higher ranked bridge officer skills are more powerful, so you should take this into account when training your bridge officers, it may even mean you will want to retrain some skills as you level up your bridge officers, For example, I use High Yield Torpedo’s on my tactical officer, every time I rank up my Tactical Bridge Officer, I teach her the next rank of High Yield Torpedo’s and replace the old rank with another skill.

When using the chart, you want to look at what bridge officer stations a ship has, you should then look though the lists of bridge officer skills in the game and see which ones you would like to have. I’d recommend looking at Zeroth’s Bridge Officer thread. Once you have your list of desired skills, see which ship has the bridge officer slots to accommodate the skills you want.

Weapon Placements

Each ship has a number of forward and aft weapon placements, when looking at a ships weapon placements you need to consider your play style, since different weapons require different play styles. Cannons for example have a very small firing arc, however, they do very good damage, they can only be used by escorts or Klingon chips (excluding the carrier). Since they have such a small firing arc, they are best used on agile ships that can keep the target in the arc. As a weapons firing arc increases, its damage decreases, so you need to decide on how much damage you want to trade off for you firing arcs. My personal preference is beam array’s for broadsides. although many people prefer dual banks for powerful frontal strikes. It is also worth noting that energy weapons do less damage the further away you are from your target. There are a few types of beams/cannons in the game, they all do similar damage, however, different beams have different secondary side effects (the % chance changes with the lvl of the ietms):-

Phasers – % chance to disable a random subsystem
Disruptors – % chance lowers enemies damage resistance
Plasma Beams – % chance to apply plasma DoT
Tetryon Beams – % chance to do more damage to shields
Poleron Beams – % chance to reduce enemy subsystem ratings by 25
Anti-Proton – Bonus crit damage

Torpedos are more fun, since they share a 3 second global cooldown, so you can only fire one launcher at a time, you can however, have multiple torpedo tubes, you just have to be aware that they will stagger in thier firing, idealy, you don’t want more tubes than the cooldown allows, for example, Photons have a 6 second cooldown, thus with a 3 second global cooldown, you don’t want to equip more than 2 facing the same direction, as a 3rd one would be ready to fire when the first one has finished its cooldown, ideally, if you are going with a torpedo build, you need enough torpedos to cover the cooldown from when the first one fires, I’ve included the number required for max rate of fire. Torpedos also have different side effects like beam weapons

Photon (6 second cooldown, max rate 2) – High DPS
Quantum (8 second Cooldown, max rate 3) – High Alpha damage
Plasma (8 second cooldown, max rate 3) – Medium Damage, Chance to add a Plasma DoT to the target
Chroniton (10 second cooldown, max rate 4) – Medium Damage, Slows enemy down
Transphasic (10 second cooldown, max rate 4) – Low Damage, Higher % of the damage penetrates shields though. Kills enemy crew
TriCobalt (30 second global cooldown, max rate 1) – Massive damage, short disable effect

When looking at what ship class you want, weapon slots are not really as important, unless you like using cannons or other weapons with small, higher power firing arcs, in which case you will want to look at ships with more frontal weapon slots (like escorts)

Device Slots

These are for consumables (and pet shuttles!). Most ships have more than enough device slots, since most consumables activate a 5 minute shared cool down. So when you look at choosing a future ship, the number of device slots should not really be a deciding factor.

Turn Rate

This is basically how fast the ship can turn. The larger the ship, the slower its rate of turn. This can have quite an effect on your play style, more so if you use weapons with small firing arcs. If you prefer using weapons that have small firing arcs, then you are best looking at getting a smaller ship with a higher turn rate.

What item should I use?

This is mostly releveant to consoles and deflectors, when you see an item ingame that says +technobable stat and think ‘what the hell is that for?’, you can right click the item and then click info on the drop down menu, in that info window it will give examples of the skills that stat increases the effectiveness of. This is ‘very’ handy to know, since alot of people fly around with deflectors that have no effect on thier science offcier skills, or have science consoles increasing a stat that they have no skill using. Below is a list of the science stats along with the skills they benfit (taken from the skills thread in the science forums Skills/Power Overview:-

Astrometrics – Charged Particle Burst
Deflectors – Science Team, Tachyon Beam, Transfer Shield Strength, Energy Siphon
Deflector Dish – Tachyon Beam, Photonic Shock wave, Energy Siphon
Deflector Field – Science Team, Feedback Pulse, Transfer Shield Strength
Emitters – Tractor Beam, Photonic Shock wave, Hazard Emitters, Photonic Officer
Hazard System – Polarize hull, Hazard Emitters
Photonic Theory – Photonic Shock wave
Sensors – Viral Matrix, Charged Particle Burst
Sensors Array – Jam Targeting Sensors
Sensor Probes – Viral Matrix, Scramble Sensors
Spatial Anomaly – Gravity Well, Tykens Rift
Starship Emitters – Polarize hull
Starship Sensors – Jam Targeting Sensors, Scramble Sensors
Theory – Photonic Officer
Tractor Beam – Tractor Beam, Tractor Beam repulser