Star Trek Online at Ten Ton Hammer

Take your seats, cadets, and turn your attention to your monitors for the latest installment of Starship Basics. Starship combat is the meat and potatoes in Star Trek Online, but Cryptic is…well, cryptic…about what differentiates a good ship from a bad ship. Many aspects of starship design are hazy and not clearly defined, which is a tad irritating in that you’ll be spending a lot of time in your captain’s chair engaged in starship combat. Not to worry, cadets, as Ten Ton Hammer is here to help you with the Starship Basics guides. Make sure that you pay attention as that there’ll be a quiz after the lesson and those with scores below 75 percent will be forced to do Mugato enclosure clean up duty!

The first Starship Basics guide served as an introduction to the subject, clarifying starship stats and basic starship terminology. The second installment focused on weapons, those glorious engines of destruction that you use to vaporize your enemies. (You ever notice how the Federation says that they’re for peaceful exploration and research and that Starfleet isn’t a military organization, but their starships are armed with more firepower than the Death Star?) The third lesson in Starship Basics focused on shields and impulse engines, which work together to allow your ship to survive in combat by being maneuverable and defending against enemy damage. This session will focus on the deflector dishes and arrays that you can mount on a starship.

Deflector Dishes
Deflector dishes are a type of starship equipment that boosts various skills in deflector fields, sensors, and emitters. These items are placed in the deflector slot of your starship. The skills enhanced by deflector dishes are those used for tractor beams, scanning for cloaked enemies, jamming sensors, and using a tachyon beam to lower an enemy’s shields. There are four types of deflector dishes and each type boosts different skills. In addition, deflector dishes are rated from Mark I to Mark X (with X being the highest). The higher the rating, the more powerful the deflector dish is. The deflector array, the most basic deflector dish, also comes in a standard rating as well as Marks I-X. The standard rating is lower than a Mark I and comes with your basic starship. Always keep an eye out for upgrades. The four types of deflector dishes are:

• Deflector Array – Increases starship deflectors, starship emitters, and starship sensors skills.
• Graviton Deflector Array – Increases starship deflector dish and starship deflectors skills.
• Positron Deflector Array – Increases starship emitters and starship tractor beam skills.
• Tachyon Deflector Array – Increases starship sensor array and starship sensors skills.

What the skills mean:
The various skills can be confusing, but each skill unlocks certain abilities when a specific rank and skill level is achieved. We’ll go through each skill set one by one.

Starship Deflector Dish – This skill improves starship deflector abilities and includes abilities such as Tachyon Beam (draining an enemy’s shields) and Energy Siphon (drains enemy power levels while boosting yours).

Starship Deflectors – This skill improves starship deflector abilities and includes abilities such as Tachyon Beam (draining an enemy’s shields) and Feedback Pulse (harnesses the energy of beam attacks against you and damages the enemy).

Starship Emitters – This skill improves starship emitter abilities, which includes abilities such as Tractor Beam (slows an enemy ship and prevents them from cloaking) and Polarize Hull (provides damage resistance to beam weapons, breaks current tractor beam holds on you, and prevents tractor beam holds).

Starship Sensor Array – This skill improves the starship sensor array abilities, which includes Sensor Scan (reduces the damage resistance and stealth of enemy ships and increases your perception) and Mask Energy Signature (shields the energy output of your ship, making it easier for you to escape detection).

Starship Sensors – This skill improves the starship sensors abilities, which include Sensor Scan (reduces the damage resistance and stealth of enemy ships and increases your perception), Jam Sensors (prevents the enemy from targeting you), and Scramble Sensors (this short duration ability forces your enemy to target his allies for 14 seconds).

Starship Tractor Beam – This skill improves the starship tractor beam abilities, which include Tractor Beam (slows an enemy ship and prevents them from cloaking) and Tractor Beam Repulsors (pushes up to three enemies away from your ship).

In addition to the various types of deflector dishes, there are other modifiers that will enhance a deflector’s performance. Like other pieces of starship equipment, deflector dishes can have from one to three additional modifiers, depending upon the rarity of the equipment. These modifiers can stack together if there is multiples of a specific modifier. An example would be [Def]x2, which would equate into a +20 to the Starship Deflectors skill. The modifiers that can be found on deflector dishes are:

• Ast - +10 to Astrometrics
• Def - +10 to Starship Deflectors
• DefD - +10 to Starship Deflector Dish
• DefM - +10 to Starship Deflector Field
• EM - +10 to Starship Emitters
• HS - +10 to Starship Hazard System
• Sen - +10 to Starship Sensors
• SenA - +10 to Starship Sensor Array
• SenP - +10 to Starship Sensor Probes
• Spa - +10 to Spatial Anomaly
• ST - +10 to Photonic Theory
• TB - +10 to Starship Tractor Beam

As you can see, deflector dishes can have a significant impact upon your starship’s performance in space combat. Whether it’s siphoning energy from an enemy ship, lowering their shields, or breaking out of a tractor beam hold, your ship’s deflector dish and the abilities of your crew to use that equipment can be the difference between life and death. Various abilities can be useful to any starship, while others tend to be more useful for specific ship types. Being able to break out of an enemy’s tractor beam is vital for escorts as they depend upon speed and facing to bring their mighty weapons to bear. All in all, deflector dishes provide a refreshing variety to your ship’s arsenal of abilities. There’s the bell, so that means class is over for today. Fourth year cadets are to report to the Kobayashi Maru training facility.