Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 10

Continuing onwards, ever onwards, from Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 9

Or you could start at the beginning (It’s a very good place to start) with Part 1!

8:34 am GMT, Day 9

After finishing up, and getting a little annoyed by, a round of exploration quests, it’s time to rejoin the main plotline with “The Kuvah’Magh”.

Miral Paris is the child of my 3rd least favourite Voyager character, Tom Paris, and my 3rd most favourite Voyager character, B’Elanna Torres. Though as we’re talking about Voyager, that’s not necessarily saying much.

Conceived in the Delta Quadrant but born on Earth, her bizarre genome, being 3/4s Human, and 1/4 Klingon, gave her immunity to a fatal Klingon disease called Nehret, and allowed the Doctor to create a cure. Anyhows, looks like we’re going to meet her!

9:11 am GMT, Day 9

Arriving at Regulus IV, we see Orion ships clustering around a communications satellite. They’re using it to jam all subspace transmissions from the surface. This speaks of foul deeds, and I shall put a stop to it!

With the Orions disposed of, we can now communicate with the surface, where all is not well. Lieutenant Paris reports that Orion and Klingon forces are attacking the embassy. No doubt they serve forces within the Klingon Empire who do not desire peace with the Federation.

Time to gather my away team, and prepare to put a end to this infamy!

We beam down and are greeted by Lieutenant Miral Paris. She seems a bit jumpy.

It seems that Klingon forces and their Orion lackeys are trying to disrupt the peace conference, and have planted explosives around the facility! We must make haste!

Oh, looks like she’s coming with us. That’s handy, what with her being some sort of god and all.

9:49 am GMT, Day 9

We quickly find the first spatial charge, defeat it’s defenders, and disarm it. From here, we can see the embassy building itself, under heavy assault as Federation and enemy NPCs battle it out. We go over to lend a hand.

This turns out to be something of a mistake. The enemies (and good guys) respawn rapidly, and it is hard to persuade my squad, and especially Lieutenant Paris to leav the area, as they prefer to stay and fight. The enemies also grant no skillpoints or loot, and staying here isn’t going to achieve anything, so I finally manage to drag everybody away and get back to looking for spatial charges.

Miral has zero shields and health, but keeps on fighting. These quarter-Klingons are made of tough stuff. She doesn’t seem to regenerate like we do, so I heal her up just for appearances sake.

Looks like the server went down while I was writing that last paragraph. Can’t get back in just now.

CrypticOps just posted:

Currently, the Star Trek Online Server is down. We are aware of this issue and are currently working to bring the server back online as soon as possible. ETA on bringing the server back up is 50 minutes. Please keep an eye on this page for updates, and notification when Star Trek Online is available again. Thank you, The Star Trek Online Team

1:18 pm GMT, Day 9

And now we’re back on the field of play. I reappear in Sector Space, but have a button offering me the opportunity to carry on with my mission. I’ll have to redo the progress I made in the ground part, but at least I can skip the space combat against the Orions at the communications array.

When we finish deactivating all the bombs, Miral Paris tells me that the Klingon leader has taken hostages within the Embassy itself, and it awaiting a worthy foe. Apparently that’s me.

We soundly drub the Klingons in the Embassy, but more are arriving in orbit. Back to the USS Madrigal!

In space we are contacted by the Klingon ambassador, who sort of apologises for the whole business, and says that General B’Vat is at the bottom of it all and about to arrive. We shall fight him together!

A few Birds of Prey appear, and by the time I finish destroying them all the Ambassador is nowhere to be seen. I hope he didn’t get destroyed. I *thought* they were all shooting me! Nevermind. The missions in STO are so linear that I doubt it’ll make a difference to anything whether he’s dead or not.

General B’Vat arrives in his warship. Not best pleased with my pesky interference, he moves into attack position. Then I explode him lots.

B’Vat shakes his fist angrily, says we’ll meet again, and departs. You don’t actually see him shake his fist at you, but it was that sort of text screen. Could I have found my first arch-nemesis?

And with that “The Kuvag’Magh” is complete. I quite enjoyed that, especially the ground-based part. Heading back to Sol to do some selling. they could really do with putting a space station in Regulus Sector Block.

4:03 pm GMT, Day 9

Next up, “War is Good for Business”. I hope it involves the Ferengi. They’ve been my favourite race since DS9.

The Science Ship “ShiKahr” is experiencing intermittent power failures in the Celes system. I’m to go and render assistance.

Their engines are out of action, hampering their ability to check out anomalies in the local asteroids. I’m going to take some of their scientists onboard and go do some anomaly scanning.

The asteroids in question this time are huge ones on opposing sides of the map. The major problem is that they lie within nebula, making full impulse speed impossible. It is a slow slow journey between them. There is a single raider fighter buzzing about. Not sure what he’s up to, but I doubt it’s alone.

The final asteroid seems to be doubling as a base for the Orion Raiders. I blast my way through them and scan the last anomaly. With that done, I’m asked to warp to Starbase 114 with my data.

We arrive at Starbase 114 without incident, and I beam the scientists over. While I’m here, the commander of the Starbase asks me to investigate a mysterious theft. Three containers of highly explosive kemocite have been stolen, and it is vital they be located! I agree to beam over to their cargo bay in my deerstalker.

Captain Cleveland informs me that a Ferengi was hanging around hear the cargo bays. Could he be responsible? Poor Ferengi. Everybody always assumes it’s them. I won’t give in to such prejudices, and will approach the investigation with an open mind!

Our scans of the cargo bays find a variety of interesting clues, but nothing that points to the identity of the thief. Sure, it could have been a Ferengi Codebreaking device that was used to break in, but anyone could have gotten their hands on one of them! We return to our ship to scan the nearby cargo ships for kemocite. Which one could it be?

As soon as we start scanning he does a runner, and shoots off into the distance, but we’re in hot pursuit!

He cleverly heads into a nearby nebula, causing me to lose full impulse, and he gains further on us. From the murk of the nebula emerge Nausicaan vessels. Perhaps the little scoundrel has paid them to block any pursuit, or perhaps he’s working for them. Either way, I have to get through them.

That was a tough fight, made harder by getting hit by the bug that stops you being able to fire your torpedos. In a lull in the fight, I swapped my torpedo launcher out for a phaser turret, a low powered phaser with 360 degree field of fire.

With the Nausicaans out of the way I move in on the Ferengi ship, only to find out he’s beamed down to an asteroid base nearby. He’s not getting away that easily. Five to beam down!

One interesting apect of ground combat is that most ranged weapons have two sorts of attack. One is a regular zap, but the other, which can be AOE, a stun, or just a nasty superzap, is on a longer timer and is either an “Expose” or “Exploit” attack. Expose attacks have a chance of putting an enemy into an exposed state. If you then use an Exploit attack on them, it’s pretty awesome. You do massive damage, and likely as not manage to vaporise them, as sometimes happened in the TV show.

I carry a phaser rifle with an exploit attack, and have kitted out most of my crew with Expose attack weapons. I have a fair bit of fun vaporising Nausicaans as we move through the base to find that pesky Ferengi!

And here he is! He’s larger than I expected, but we finally manage to beat him down enough for me to slip a tag onto him, and beam him to justice.

And that is the end of “War is Good for Business”. Can it be? My last two plot adventures have had surviving bad guys at the end of them. Mayhap we shall meet again, Mok and B’Vat!

Another quite entertaining mission. The plotted ones are fairly decent, though they still suffer from being too much about combat.

5:24 am GMT, Day 10

The major patch we’ve been waiting for has arrived!

Let us proceed in an orderly fashion to Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 11 – Patch Edition!

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