Star Trek Online / Tropes A to M

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Tropes N-Z

Tropes A-C

• 2-D Space:
  • While there are three dimensions, the up-down is severely restricted in scope and way smaller than the others. There also is a defined "up" in space, meaning instead of moving freely in all three, you may only move two dimensional with a little height difference. This does not have to be all bad though, since it eases orientation for players.
  • The main problem is that the ships are limited in how much they can pitch up or down (to about 75 degrees relative to the plane of the ecliptic) and are unable to execute any kind of rolling maneuvers other than banking during turns. This is likely to prevent players from getting horribly confused and turned around, but it also does make "vertical" attacks difficult to pull off; this unfortunately makes escorts, with their narrower firing arcs, a bit harder to use than they probably should be.
  • One Task Force Operation's Mission Control refers to one location as being north of another. It refers to the orientation as seen on the in-game 2D map of the area but the idea of cardinal directions makes absolutely no sense in space.
  • Played frustratingly straight in one of the task force operations, when you must protect some troop transports on their way to a planet. Hazards include enemy "radiation gateways"; these are such that the players can easily go under or over the radiation coming from them, yet the transport pilots fly straight and level, getting their ships fried unless the players disperse the gateways for them.
• Abnormal Ammo: The winter events held by Q from 2012 onward have introduced a whole line of ground weapons that use snow as ammunition for the snowball fights held therein.
• Aborted Arc: Cryptic Studios has a bad habit of leaving plot threads to just dangle unresolved.
  • The Federation-Klingon War is almost completely forgotten after the "Klingon War" and "Warzone" arcs, and every time the two sides meet after that they're engaged in Teeth-Clenched Teamwork. Cryptic finally resolved it in "Surface Tension", with mixed results. Some players were irritated about the mission glossing over the Klingons' war crimes committed in the name of expansionism and blaming the whole thing on the Undine. Other Klingon players felt the Federation made a far more worthy adversary, or at least unique one, than all the others they fought. This says much about Klingon player mentality.
  • The Gorn rebellions mentioned in the background literature barely receive lip service in-game. Mostly because it is basically irrelevant in the game and no one particularly cares. Its only influence on the game is that the Gorn are playable.
  • The Romulan Star Empire remnant under Sela is forgotten completely after "Cutting the Cord". Later unaborted in Delta Rising, although through Word of God exposition. During the in-fighting after Sela's kidnapping and the Tal Shiar's defeat on New Romulus, the RSE basically lost all political clout and was no longer recognized by any of the other powers of the Quadrant as more and more of their forces defected to the Republic. As of 2410, the Treaty of Algeron has been dissolved (ending Starfleet's ban on Cloaking Technology) and what remains of the Star Empire is a handful of hold out colonies. In Delta Rising a number of Romulan Intelligence Officers are Tal Shiar defectors who saw the writing on the wall and said Screw This, I'm Outta Here.invoked
  • The True Way really get no resolution in the Cardassian arc (yes, you captured two of their leaders, but come on, they're a terrorist organization). This gets tied off with the revamped and condensed Cardassian arc, since you make peace with the New Link which is in control of the True Way.
  • On the KDF end of things, the Fek'Ihri arc ends with a Sequel Hook (technobabble to the effect that they may not have been genuine demons from hell) that is left to dangle until Victory is Life.
  • The Terran Gambit arc was looking like this; introduced in November 2021, the next chapter didn't appear until March 2022. At very least it's a seriously delayed arc.
• Abusive Precursors:
  • Remember how Picard thought that the Iconians had a bad rep due to their frightening teleportation technology? Thanks to season 7 and the revelations about the Dewans, ''he was wrong. Very. Very. Wrong.
  • He may not have been as far off the mark as we thought. According to the Iconians themselves in a short story told from the Iconian POV, they were a peaceful people who tried to help uplift the younger ones... who repaid them with bombing their civilization so thoroughly. Turns out if that happens, you become very VERY pissed off. One might be inclined to reject this as self-serving memory though a Preserver at Lae'nas had already mentioned the Iconians were different, 'brighter' before the first war, albeit his phrasing is ambiguous.
  T'Ket: "And they repaid our generosity with destruction! The Whole was shattered. Our world lost. And I will have payment for every drop of blood that has been spilled."
  • Even more justified (not in the trope sense but the colloquial meaning) in season 11's final episode in which the player gets to visit pre invasion Iconia 200,000 years ago. Turns out the Iconians weren't as bad as their reputation, but later changed due to the events. Some are willing to get back to a peaceful life - others less so.
• Ace Custom: Your spaceship. Payload, paintjob, engines, shields, the works. The Federation ships have the largest collection of them, though. You can set it up "stock" with basic phaser/disruptor/plasma/photon/quantum weapons, or load it up with special versions of those weapons, exotic polaron or antiproton guns, and use the Reputation system to deck it out in experimental tech, including Romulan and Borg.
• Actually Four Mooks: Sensor contacts, and selections, overlap at long range. Though you can probably see visually there's more than one ship, or that if there was a single ship the size of that selection box you ought to be able to see it!
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts:
  • I have to spend twenty credits to get a drink out of the replicator? What, did my crew bring a bag lunch and never use them? For that matter, I have to pay Starfleet to have better guns mounted on my ship?
  • Trade goods vary in price at different locations, but always sell for a price slightly lower than the cheapest price you can buy them for, so you can't make trade runs across the galaxy with a full load of them, only buy them for missions and research.
  • Also averted in two ways. 1: You don't have to pay a penny to get the stock weapons, shields, etc that come standard on your ship (like the phasers and photon torpedoes that the Enterprise always had; we never saw them trade up for better weapons!). 2: You will get so many loot drops throughout the game that you can sell, so that you will eventually be rolling in Energy Credits (the ingame currency) anyway and can afford the awesome upgrades.
• An Adventurer Is You:
  • Initially played straight with the three main classes of ships: Escorts are best at dealing a lot of damage fast, cruisers are best at soaking up punishment, science vessels are best at healing, buffing and debuffing. The lines start to blur a little at higher levels and with some C-store ships like the Nebula and Excelsior, and there's definitely wiggle room, but by and large each class has its strengths along the lines of the MMO Holy Trinity.
  • The cruiser, with its high hull rating can be a tank, but with engineering crew can also heal itself and a friendly's shields, making it a buffer too. The science vessel, with its strong shields can be a magic tank, and debuffer with good science personnel. The tactical vessel is a good combo of the blade-master and backstabber with good tactical officers, although an escort with the right skills and load-out is just as much capable of taking damage and dishing it out as well. The real difference between vessel types is not determined by their base stats, but the number of bridge crew and console slots for a particular field and their abilities, which like almost everything else, can be infinitely customized.
  • Further blurred by your captain's career. Since captains can fly any of the ship their abilities and traits are added on top of the ships abilities shifting them towards more damage (Tactical Captains), more survivability (Engineer captains) or more debuffing (Science captains).
  • The blurring really forces you and your fellows (especially when teamed up) to genuinely think instead of sticking to rote tank/spank/pray classes, though the trinity is perfectly serviceable, it is more like a sliding scale than written in stone.
  • Captains aren't restricted by their career when selecting from the skill trees, either, so it's not at all uncommon for a Science or Engineering captain to max out Tactical space skills. The differences are much more pronounced in ground combat, where a captain's career path determines what "kits" they can use. Science kits tend more to team buffing, healing, and debuffing the enemy; Tactical focuses on things like grenades or buffing accuracy and damage; and Engineering kits involve summoning up turrets, drones, shield generators and the like.
• Air Guitar: One of the emotes.
• Airstrike Impossible: "Delta Flight" has a small squadron of pilot escorts, a command battlecruiser, and the Player Character fly through an Asteroid Thicket to destroy a Solanae space station. Tom Paris makes a number of Mission: Impossible and Star Wars quotes to cap it off.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: The Prime Directive is still in full effect here, both the normal and the Temporal variant.
• Allegedly Free Game: Averted. See Bribing Your Way to Victory below. You can get the best ships and things in the game without ever having to spend a penny. You just have to spend more time to earn it.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The game's backstory is written out in the "Path to 2409" item device, which tells what happened between the events of Star Trek (2009) and the game. More information is also written in Star Trek Magazine such as that Data and the Enterprise-E returned to Earth, the E decommissioned and Data retiring to become a teacher.
  • A recurring fan complaint around Season 10's Iconian War. The fighting is supposedly brutal and galaxy-spanning, with the Alliance at best only winning Pyrrhic victories. Unfortunately outside of five featured episodes and a couple raids, the war seems to be taking place entirely in Cryptic's blog.
• All Your Powers Combined: There are numerous devices, both ground and space, that grants you amazing bonuses when they are connected together on one person. A handful, such as those on the Odyssey-class, Bortasqu'-class and Scimitar-class, can only be used on that certain class, but many others can be used with any.
• Alpha Strike: This is pretty much the escort's specialty; blitzing a target with massed torpedo and cannon fire to (hopefully) decimate the target before it has a chance to retaliate. Even more so for ships that can cloak, since decloaking grants a brief boost to your attack power. The Romulans are even more specialized here, with better cloaks than the Klingons and two of their unique boff traits ("Romulan Operative" and "Subterfuge") "decloak alphas".
• Alternate Continuity: Star Trek Online occupies its own continuity in a version of the Star Trek Prime Universe extrapolated from the canon that existed at the time of release, namely the first five TV series and eleven movies including the Kelvin Timeline films, and adopted Star Trek: Discovery into its continuity once that series came out. The backstory also borrows some details and plots from the Star Trek Novelverse^e.g. Riker and Troi had kids, Picard and Crusher married and had kids, the Romulans had a civil war in the 2380s, Ezri Dax commanded the USS Aventine, and Data (his mind restored in B4's body) took over as captain of the Ent-E., but discards others^e.g. The original Deep Space 9 still guards the wormhole, the two Romulan factions merged back together just in time for Hobus, the Typhon Pact never formed, the bluegills aren't augmented Trill symbiotes, and the Borg stayed away from the Alpha Quadrant until 2409., including the Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch, Star Trek: Destiny, and Star Trek: Typhon Pact in their entirety. The game also mostly ignores Star Trek: Picard, as that show wildly contradicts almost all of STO's preexisting backstory. A couple things from the show have been retconned in since the 10-year anniversary: Seven of Nine still joined the Fenris Rangers per "The Measure of Morality" (with her model redone to her Picard look from her Star Trek: Voyager look), and an event raid, "Synthwave", depicts a computer simulation of the synth attack on Mars.
• Alternate Universe: The Tie-In Novel The Needs Of The Many has a former Temporal Investigations agent remember events from the game, the Star Trek Novel 'Verse, and the J.J. Abrams movie, suggesting that any and all continuities can intersect whenever the heck they feel like it. This actually happens in the Temporal Cold War Story Arc in season 12, with episodes involving the Kelvin Timeline and ships from it becoming available in the Lobi store.
• Always a Bigger Fish: The Iconians are fond of this one. Just as you're in a fight for your life with Empress Sela, an Iconian ship shows up, snags her ship and sucks her through a Gateway.
  • It should say something that after everything we went through with the Dominion in Deep Space Nine that for the Dominion's official policy revealed by Eraun in an optional conversation is "Take what you want Mr. Iconian Sir." What the hell are the Iconians doing that made the DOMINION curl up and act like a nerd being picked on by the captain of the football team!? But funnily enough, "Sphere of Influence" reveals the Iconians have the same opinion of the Dominion.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Given the game's practically infinite character customization options, it's not uncommon to see player-characters with practically any skin and hair color you can possibly imagine, from the dull and mundane to shades that will burn your eyes from clear across the room.
• Ambadassador: S'taass, the Gorn ambassador for the Klingon Empire during the "Second Wave" mission. When DS9 is boarded by the Dominion his first reaction is to leap over the table and tear a Jem'Hadar apart with his claws! His second reaction is taking up the hobby of running up to Jem'Hadar and pummeling them to death with his bare hands and biting their throats out! Appropriate, considering his voice actor has been a vigilante fighter jock who flies a custom jet and competent versions of Cobra Commander.
  • The Player Characters can become this as well, thanks to a Diplomacy XP system capped by gaining the official status and title of Ambassador, complete with spiffy Dress Uniform.
  • Worf in Sphere of Influence.
• Anachronism Stew: Due not only to the need for multiple playable factions to have access to much of the same content, especially the Task Force Operations, but also the Timey-Wimey Ball in operation. Thus you can end up playing as a Next Generation Klingon captain, in a Discovery-era ship, as a member of a task force commanded by Gabriel Lorca, defending against an invasion by Klingons of an earlier generation.
• Ancient Astronauts: At the end of the Breen arc, a planet is found with thousands of living Preservers in stasis, with many choosing to awaken and explore the Galaxy created by the various species in the Trek verse whose worlds they seeded billions of years ago.
  • During the mission to Draconis III in "Echoes of Light" you discover an alien temple with the Starfleet logo prominently displayed, and several murals depicting TOS-era uniformed figures. You later learn they were time-displaced survivors of a Federation starbase.
• And I Must Scream: Getting assimilated by the Borg in ground missions will result in a temporary version of this, as the player will no longer be in control of their character, who will proceed to engage any nearby allies just like another drone until they're finally put out of their misery.
  • Gaius Selan gets hit with this in "Uneasy Allies", where Sela reprograms his Borg implants and forces him to help her escape Republic captivity. It's made clear that he was conscious the whole time, and unable to control his actions at all.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The Vice Admiral overcoat and Ambassador dress uniform awarded to Federation players for reaching those ranks.
  • Romulan players receive shoulder pads in lieu of pips that eventually gain a cape that becomes more elaborate with rank.
• Anti-Air: During the mission 'Cutting the Cord', the player can use their personal weapons to shoot down a Romulan Scorpion fighter craft.
  • Also the case in 'Sphere of Influence', 'A Step Between Stars', and the ground portion of the Solanae Dyson Sphere where the player shoots down airborne swarmer drones.
  • Also seen in the Task Force Operations Dranuur Beach Assault and Operation Wolf, where ground players have to shoot down shuttles.
• Anti-Debuff:
  • Various bridge officer powers, primarily from the Engineering and Science schools, act to remove debuffs from enemy attacks. One of the most commonly used is the Science space power Hazard Emitters, which clears plasma fires, radiation effects, Viral Matrix, and Borg shield neutralizers, and also regenerates HP.
  • Activating a battery or using Emergency Power to <subsystem> will reactivate a disabled subsystem.
  • Space combat has various options to reduce both enemy-inflicted and self-inflicted power drain:
    • The skill Starship Power Insulators. Investing skill points reduces shield damage from Tachyon Beam and the potency of attacks to your subsystem power levels (e.g. Energy Siphon and the Plasmonic Leech console).
    • Engineer captains have the class ability Nadion Inversion, which reduces subsystem power drain both from enemy attacks and from firing your own weapons.
    • Equipping a plasma-integrated warp core or thoron-infused singularity core (depending on whether you fly a Federation, Klingon, or lockbox starship, or a Romulan warbird) purchased from the Fleet Spire will likewise boost your resistance to power drain, as well as increasing your power regeneration rate.
• Anti-Grinding:
  • You can kill enemies again and again to level up, but you earn a lot more experience points doing the missions assigned to you.
    • Completing player-made missions used to grant a lot of experience points, too and there were a lot of them. Since they were taken down this unfortunately doesn't work anymore.
• Anti Poop-Socking: There are increased raid rewards for reputation marks that are put on a 24 hour cooldown once earned each day.
  • The Dyson Joint Command reputation system was an attempt at this compared to the other rep systems; it worked so well that the devs decided to overhaul the Romulan, Omega, and Nukara rep systems to match it in Season 9.
• Anti-Rage Quitting: Multiplayer raids (called Task Force Operations, or "TFOs" for short) feature a quitting penalty that bans people who leave early from queuing for another TFO for a short time. It isn't meant to kick in if something forces the player to leave, such as a game crash; but circumstances like a power blink can still fool the game into thinking you quit, and imposing the penalty.
• Apocalyptic Log: Several of the random exploration missions on dead worlds or empty stations. Examples include mind control experiments Gone Horribly Wrong, teleportation experiments Gone Horribly Wrong, and other such things Gone Horribly Wrong.
  • The 15th installment of "Tales of the War" consists of a letter from a doomed colony world annihilated by the Heralds.
• April Fools:
  • April 2017 saw the introduction of the "Artisanal Sonification System", which when enabled replaced the game's normal sound effects with people comically imitating, or even speaking, them.
  • For 2021, Cryptic announced a new mode allowing fans to virtually ''date'' one of their five favorite starships (or, as they pointed out in a footnote, one of the five they had basically picked out of a hat). Each ship had a corresponding avatar and personality profile. As Cryptic said, "Living starships with AI programmed to be hormonal teenagers. What could go wrong?"
• Arbitrary Weapon Range:
  • In space combat, 10 kilometers is the maximum range. Some ships can cross that distance in a handful of seconds. Some turret satellites and the fleet starbase in the PVE missions involving it can engage targets slightly beyond this range however.
  • The Starfleet Avenger-class battlecruiser's unique console, the Variable Auto-Targeting Armament, cannot be fired if the Avenger is within 2 kilometers of its target. Same with the Romulan Hyper-Plasma Torpedo available through the reputation system. In both cases there's a good reason: they're Area of Effect weapons, and in the case of VATA, the further from your target you fire it, the more submunitions it will have time to fire. Similar reasoning prevents the player from using the ability "Call Emergency Artillery" when too close to the target.
• Arc Number: 47 has always been an in-joke in Trek productions. STO turns it into this with a subtle and easily missed Wham Line in the Romulan Faction mission "Sleepers." Species 0047 is the Borg Designation for the Iconians. There's also the main deck on Earth Spacedock (deck 47), the Borg's Unimatrix 0047 command ships, and the default registry for the Federation's NPC Galaxy-X dreadnought is NCC-170147. And at Earth Spacedock one can drop by for a drink Club 47.
• Arc Welding: Many of the game's storylines manage to tie together plot elements from across Star Trek Canon;
  • The Iconians and their Gateway technology were introduced in the Next Generation episode "Contagion" as an extinct precursor race.They end up being the main force behind the events of the game's storyline, with the Iconians themselves being the Big Bad and Man Behind the Man for most major galactic events post-Star Trek Nemesis. Their servitor races include the Elachi (The unnamed alien raiders from the Enterprise episode "Silent Enemy", the Solanae (the Solanagen-based aliens from the TNG episode "Schisms"), the Vaadwaur (from the Voyager episode "Dragon's Teeth"), and even the neural parasites from "Conspiracy". The Tal Shiar are also allied with the Iconians, tying the destruction of Romulus from Star Trek (2009) and the Legacy of Romulus storyline into the larger Iconian conflict.
  • The Future Proof and Yesterday's War episodes also tie together the Temporal Cold War and the Xindi story arcs from Star Trek: Enterprise via time travel, and the player is present at several key events like General Vosk's escape to the alternate-1930s from "Storm Front" and the Battle of Procyon V from "Azati Prime". The player's allies during these events include Temporal Agent Daniels, a 29th century Starfleet Timeship crew, and Scotty and Chekov from The Original Series.
  • It turns out the entire Temporal Cold War was triggered by the events of "Captain's Holiday". Kal Dano, creator of the Tox Uthat, is a 26th century time traveler and the dead time pod pilot from the Enterprise episode "Future Tense". The player character is the one helping Kal evade the Tholians and Vorgons trying to steal his device, but they are too late to stop the Tholians from using it to destroy the Na'Kuhl star, triggering their Start of Darkness. The player eventually recovers the Tox Uthat and buries it on Risa in the 22nd century where Captain Picard will dig it up in 2366.
    • The Temporal Liberation Front is led by a rogue Krenim scientist named Noye, who may or may not be the mysterious "Future Guy" from Enterprise. The Front is an alliance of various time-traveling enemies from different series including the Krenim, the Vorgons, the Na'Kuhl, the Sphere Builders, and the Terran Empire led by Mirror!Leeta.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age:
  • The game continues the Klingon trend of charging right in with a bat'leth instead of staying back and shooting, and adds a couple lesser-known types of edged weapons (Vulcan lirpa, Tsunkatse falchions and Nausicaan Tegolar swords). Given a justification this time: basically everyone has a personal deflector shield that works fine against ranged weapons, but 80% of melee damage, whether from a sword, Pistol-Whipping, or Kirk-fu, goes straight through to the target's HP. This is especially useful against the Borg, who will adapt over time to energy weapons and force you to re-frequence, but against certain types of drones also leaves you open to a One-Hit Kill by assimilation.
  • In the shuttle PVP added in the Season 8.5 update, the TOS-era Type F shuttle is considered one of the top competitors, regularly beating players flying Peregrine-class attack fighters or runabouts from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is roughly the equivalent of a World War I biplane shooting down an F-22.
  • Justified with the Xindi lockbox ships added in Season 9.5. Though they look physically identical to the ships from Star Trek: Enterprise 250 years earlier, Cryptic's blog says that the Xindi continually updated them to keep up with newer classes. No such justification is given for the equally old T'varo-class light warbird, whose T5 version is surprisingly deadly for a 250-year-old design.
  • A Kirk-era Type 2 Phaser packs more of a punch than a standard 25th Century Type 2 Phaser (and scales with the player's level), even though the 25th Century phaser is supposed to be two centuries more advanced.

• A replica of Zefram Cochrane's shotgun exemplifies both Shotguns Are Just Better and Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better. It packs a hell of a punch, dealing shield-bypassing kinetic damage with the potential to inflict Blown Across the Room. All this from a weapon design that was likely an older model when Cochrane was using it almost three hundred and fifty years prior.
• In season 11's Admiralty system, the NX-class from ENT has better stats than several 23rd and 24th century starter ships.
  • Justified in that its a replica: 25th century toys in a 22nd-century-looking box

• Arm Cannon: A standard feature for tactical and higher Borg drones, as well as some classes of Undine troops. Liberated Borg characters can buy and equip one from the Lobi store which doubles as a nanite injector in hand to hand combat, making drones that fight for you. Players can also acquire one from the Species 8472 reputation system and from the Altamid plasma weapons pack (a Kelvin-timeline weapons drop box).
• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: A starship variant of this in space combat, with the "wizard" class being the science vessel family of ships (essentially anything with a Commander Science bridge officer slot). Typically a science vessel mounts fewer weapons (usually 3 forward, 3 aft) and has a weaker hull than a cruiser or escort, though they often have better Deflector Shields. One of the better examples is the Nova-class, capable of tremendous Technobabble but with little staying power in a slugging match. It gets played with considerably, though, since the game typically lumps carriers in with science vessels, and escorts often have even weaker hull and shield values than science vessels, at least in theory (equipment and captain class can make a big performance difference for any ship).
• Artifact Title: STFs. A Fun with Acronyms title meaning "Special Task Force", they were meant to describe the Borg PVE missions and were never used again. However, it was not uncommon to see players refer to any PVE mission as an STF. By now they are all combined under the title Task Force Operation or TFO.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions:
  Starfleet NPC: Is that (Rank and Player Name), captain of the (Ship Name)?
  • If a custom title is used, that replaces the Rank when people speak to you. This can lead to some strange results, however.
  Starfleet NPC: Good day, Moist (Player Name).
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The Borg seem to ignore any mini-ships you send at them, like the Scorpion Fighters. All you have to do is run outside of combat range while they slowly but surely deal hull damage and eventually destroy them.
  • About 20 percent of the time you may feel like firing and/or tossing your navigator out the airlock, when you set a destination on the sector map, then go into your inventory menu or just go to the kitchen for a snack while you travel, you will discover that your ship has either blissfully sailed past the destination, or went the opposite direction in the first place and is now on the other side of the quadrant.
  • Likewise, during space battles, you may question your tactical officer's competence, in the form of the auto-aiming system, when it persistently stays locked on to targets which have moved well out of weapons range while ignoring nearby threats. It can be especially frustrating trying to get locked onto a closing heavy plasma torpedo or similar projectile while the aiming system refuses to change targets from the enemy ship that launched it at you, apparently regarding the ship as the main threat.
  • Ditto when your auto-aim insists on targeting the enemy's Nigh-Invulnerable dreadnought ship, leaving numerous smaller and easily-killed ships to whittle you down. Especially frustrating in scenarios where the boss ship has Plot Armor because the NPC aboard is unkillable and will simply retreat at a certain point, so you're basically wasting your fire.
  • The Son'a dreadnought in Brushfire has a mechanic where it periodically heals itself with incoming energy weapon fire; the only way to win (in less than 20 minutes or so, anyway) is to hold fire when it starts this mechanic. It's very aggravating to see your allies blasting away at it regardless, healing up the damage you've been doing.
  • During ground combat, your engineer boffs will sometimes construct a cover force field with you stuck dead in the middle of it. There's nothing to do other than wait out the duration and hope the enemy can't target the half of you that's stuck on the wrong side of the shield.
    • To add insult to injury, the boffs will not even use the shields properly but look for a way around it. Similar effects are with Tholian web shields in combat.
• Art Evolution: Many characters have been modified over the years. Of major note is Empress Sela and Ambassador Worf, both of whom were modified to resemble the actual characters once their actors (Denise Crosby and Michael Dorn, respectively) gave their permission to use their likenesses.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • Using rank as a synonym for Character Level (from Lieutenant at level 5 to Fleet Admiral at level 65) results in a lot of Outranking Your Job and means the player is frequently taking orders from people they outrank by several grades, as well as resulting in a ludicrous Marissa Picard-like situation where you apparently went from junior officer to 5-star in eighteen months.
• Artistic License – Physics: Especially with some of the more exotic science boff skills and epic ship abilities. Creating gravity wells, rifts in the fabric of space, and plasma hurricanes among other things, within kilometers of friendly space stations or above the surface of a planet, would in the normal course of events be frowned upon. Luckily, these phenomena somehow distinguish friendly vessels from enemies and can be sailed right through if your team caused them. And then there's the Klingon battlecruiser that breathes fire in space.
• Artistic License – Space:
  • You'll be hard pressed to find any area of space outside of Earth that isn't engulfed by millions of miles of stellar gasses, dusts, and nebulae painting the backdrop, and Asteroid Thicket is in full effect here. Later maps are much better about this. Mainly because a lot of people complained. A good example is the revamped Star Trek: Deep Space Nine exterior which ditched the nebula for black space, with a hint of the purple Denorios Belt that was sometimes seen in the series and a lens flare sun representing the Bajoran star.
  • The name of the "close flyby of the Dyson Sphere's sun" map in "A Step Between Stars" is "Brown Dwarf". A brown dwarf is a star that failed to ignite at all.
  • Distances in sector space are way off. For example, Wolf 359 is a real star, located 7.8 light-years from Sol. In-game it's more like three, which is closer than Proxima Centauri should be.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: With Con Langs, no less.
  • The game borrowed bits of the worldbuilding done by Diane Duane for her Rihannsu novel series for the Romulan Republic in the Legacy of Romulus expansion. However, their grasp of Rihan is pretty poor.
    • Rihan language geeks have noted that "Mol'Rihan", the in-game Romulan translation of "New Romulus", is grammatically incorrect: they just slapped "mol'" ("new", but it's supposed to be a suffix) onto ch'Rihan (Romulus in Romulan, literally "[homeworld] of the Declared"). Among the more more accurate translations would be "ch'Rihan'mollais".
    • They also frequently try to use Romulan words for Meaningful Names, only to misuse or misspell them (e.g. getting the 'a' and the 'e' backwards when they tried to use "laehval" ["shadow"] for Sela's flagship IRW Leahval), and forgetting that, aside from reusing the names of their old colony ships from the Sundering, Duaneian Romulans don't name ships or people after abstract ideas (RRW Lleiset, meaning "freedom").^note This stems from a discussion between Ael t'Rllaillieu and Kirk in My Enemy, My Ally where he explains that the Enterprise is named for the concept of enterprise in general, rather than a particular enterprise. Ael explains that Romulans don't name ships or people after abstract concepts out of a superstition that the subject will try to take on all aspects of the name, good and bad. One way to headcanon the Lleiset is therefore to say that it specifically represents, say, the Republic's fight for freedom from the Empire.
    • In "What's Left Behind", Sela speaks a proverb in Rihan, "Tamh coupaer, hwiua idh — reach far, grasp much." The choice of words works, but they didn't conjugate any of the verbs: the correct translation is "Tamhu coupaer, hwiuau idh".
  • Their tlhIngan Hol is equally bad.
    • A particularly common mistake is forgetting that Romanized Klingonese is capitalization-sensitive (i.e. 'q' and 'Q' represent different sounds). For example, there's a ship in the backstory named the IKS Quv. They were presumably going for quv (public honor) rather than Quv (spatial coordinates).
    • The Klingon nickname for the Undine is qa'meH quv, which is said to mean "replacers of honor with dishonor" but actually translates to "(an) honorable replacement", and also neglects that Klingonese has two words for honor (batlh, "integrity and strength of character", is probably more appropriate). "One who replaces honor with dishonor" would actually go something like batlh wa' 'Iv ngaSwI' yuvtlhe' wIngaQmoHta'DI' quvHa'ghach.
• Ascended Extra: Many one-shot characters and alien species from the TV series are major players in the game's storyline.
• Ascended Fanon: invoked More accurately, Ascended Licensed-But-Non-Canon Material. The game follows the movie and television canon to the letter. Cryptic does, however, have the option of incorporating "soft canon" like the novels however they please, so they've gone ahead and thrown in a few things like the Luna-class from Star Trek: Titan and Captain Mackenzie Calhoun, and stated that the Titan novels will be part of the game's backstory as Riker's first command (except for the Destiny series where the Borg Collective gets finally destroyed). There isn't yet a comprehensive list of what has or hasn't been put in from soft canon, however.
  • The Vesta-class starships added in Season 7 are a direct reference to the Destiny novels.
    • Ezri Dax's command of the U.S.S. Aventine is also mentioned by Commander Matthias in the 2014 revamp of "First Contact Day".
  • The harness-like designs and special combat functions of many of the away team "kits" (not to mention the big screwoff disruptor-miniguns and the like) suggest that Star Trek: Elite Force may well be continuity with STO as well.
  • The mention of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers and of the U.S.S. DaVinci in a couple of non-story mission suggest that some elements of the S.C.E. novels may be canon now, as well.
  • That whole business about Andorians having four genders is almost completely taken from the books.
  • The Rihannsu novels, which fleshed out the Romulan culture, seem to have been incorporated completely, as well, with Romulan missions making multiple references to what was depicted therein.
  • Some of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch novels are canon, too; certainly the book about Garak (written by Andrew J Robinson no less), as the past religion of Cardassia is in the game. However, it seems the entire series hasn't been incorporated whole-cloth, as The Sisko doesn't seem to have returned yet, among other things. They may be saving that one for an in-game event.
  • Admiral Leonard James Akaar used to show up in one mission during the Romulan arc. Said mission was one of the casualties when the arc was revamped, however, and there is no indication it or Admiral Akaar will reappear in some other form.
    • He still shows up in the cross-faction meeting place for lifetime subscribers, the Anenigma Nebula, which is itself functions just like the "Captains' Table" from that set of novels.
  • Elements of the epic Diane Duane novel Spock's World show up in a Diplomacy mission on Vulcan.
  • The Romulan farming colony on Virinat is from the Star Trek Novel 'Verse.
  • And now, STO itself has become Ascended Fanon, with several ships from STO appearing in Star Trek: Picard!
• Ascended Glitch: A programming mistake made the T5 Ambassador-class available to Federation-allied Romulan PCs during a giveaway. Cryptic let it slide. A similar error later made the T6 Luna-class available to all factions.
• Ascended Meme: During the two-year anniversary event, you could ask Q Junior where Captain Sulu was.^explanation Memetic Mutation from the constant requests from new players how to find him, due to poor wording of the mission directions. He would complain about your use of an ancient meme.
  • During the fifth anniversary event, Q Junior would occasionally comment in a pop-up while in the Deep Space 9 space map, "Is Kurland here?"^explanation Memetic Mutation from DS9 CO James Kurland's voiced lines in "Boldly They Rode".
    • Again referenced in the final mission of the Iconian War arc, when he gets into trouble: "Kurland here... (static)" You get to save him.
    • Appears yet again in the mission "Scylla and Charybdis," during a Tzenkethi (then Hur'q) attack that severely damages Deep Space 9.
• Asteroid Miners: Players can now strap on their EVA suit and mine for in-game currency on, yep, an asteroid.
• Asteroid Thicket: Usually as a planet's rings or a debris field. At least in the early missions, though, it's just a bunch of rocks floating in the middle of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever. Worse, the thickets tend to exist just around the mission area. Meaning that if you're not surrounded by asteroids you're likely far from where you should be. Less of a problem with later missions.
• A-Team Firing: Dual pistols, miniguns, and assault rifles have a spray-and-pray special ability which, fittingly, has a chance to cause Expose. The primary fire is actually very accurate.
  • Also the case with the Cannon: Scatter Volley ability which modifies your ship's cannons and turrets to fire a huge burst in the general direction of the primary target; it's good for firing on a group of enemies or incoming missiles, but even then not all of the shots will hit a target. Beams: Fire at Will works more or less the same way, just for your beam weapons.
  • Players will occasionally have instances where they will miss their target repeatedly in space combat due either to low accuracy skill modifiers, bad luck in the game engine's random hit/miss generator, or a combination thereof. Tends to happen most often with small, fast-moving targets such as fighters & shuttles.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • Invoked, as basic offensive tactics are to batter down one shield facing with energy weapons and then finish with torpedoes to the exposed hull, though this blurs considerably in the metagame.
  • The battle against the Doomsday Device requires you to launch Hargh'Peng torpedoes right down its throat. By the way, that's also where it shoots back from.
  • Also the case with the Borg transwarp gates in the Infected & Khitomer space TFOs; the gate cannot be damaged until the nanite generators and transformers (in that order, mind you) on either side of it are destroyed. Or until you are very good and know what to do.
  • Attacks to the sides or from behind in ground combat deal additional "flanking" damage in addition to the normal damage inflicted (applies to both players and NPC's, so beware).
  • Some of the passive abilities unlocked at tier 3 of the intelligence officer specialization make attacks from the enemy's rear even more devastating, and allow for flanking damage in space combat (which originally could be done only by 'raider'-type ships like the Klingon Bird of Prey and Breen Plesh Brek) regardless of what kind of ship the player is flying.
  • Tzenkethi ships are weakest when attacked from the front and strongest from the rear (which is enough to basically negate flanking bonuses). There's a mission reward shield that offers the same benefits to player ships.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The Voth ground forces includes a massive, Tyrannosaurus-like dinosaur as one of the bosses. God help anyone foolish enough to attempt to take it on alone.
  • The 2012 winter event added a giant snowman as the boss for the snowman attacks that took place there (although that is possible to solo).
• Attack Pattern Alpha: Alpha and its variants appear as buff skills that provide an edge in battle. Alpha is a powerful damage and Critical Hit buff exclusive to Tactical Captains, Beta is a Damage-Increasing Debuff, Delta can be used on allies to boost their defenses and decrease the defenses of all enemies that attack them, Omega is an all-round damage/defense/movement boost, Lambda reduces enemy accuracy or even confuses them and is exclusive to Pilot-specialist Bridge Officers, Gamma is similar to Omega but gained from a console... and then there's Attack Pattern Tuvok, which is Omega on steroids.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Ten of Ten, a Liberated-Borg Caitian duty officer who is obtained through a critical success from the Support B'Tran Cluster Colonization Efforts assignment.
  "My time in the Collective honed me. I am more focused on ... hey, that light is blinking!"
  • The fact that Ten of Ten is a Caitian makes it even funnier to anyone who's ever driven a cat insane with a laser pointer.
• Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: Who says you can't wear a Tux in the 25th Century? This also extends to anyone who wears the various older uniforms of Starfleet.
  • Played with with the introduction of future uniforms. Obviously anachronistic, presumably awesome in your eyes if you decide to use them — and exactly the opposite of old-fashioned.
  • Partially averted as of late, with the standardization of the Odyssey uniform; you can still wear whatever you want, but now all crew, new officers, and NPCs will wear the same uniforms rather than some combination of the old Sierra/Antares uniforms.
• Awesome, yet Impractical: Antiproton Weaponry. The strongest energy weaponry type in the game, it comes with a natural [CrtlD] tag, meaning it gives 20% extra Critical Damage. However, for the longest time, AP weaponry were only purchasable through the Dilithium store or in Fleet Stores, meaning both were prohibitively expensive^note The Dilithium store sold them for about 20,000 Dil while the Advanced Type in Fleet Stores were 20,000 Fleet Marks and 8,000 Dil, but Fleet Stores had a limit on how many items were available to be purchased to obtain. It wasn't until the Feature Episode "Sphere of Influence" when AP weaponry became widely available, even if its modifier was [Acc]x2
  • Later on, Antiproton weapons became the go-to kind though, since their raw damage is unmatched and acquisition became less of an issue.
  • Tricobalt torpedoes. They're the strongest of the Torpedo types, cause an AOE damage to those around it and can disable ships and push them. However, they have an ungodly reload time (30 seconds) compared to the other types (6-10 seconds) and can be targeted and destroyed, which is very bad for PVP. The only way to mitigate this problem is if you have DOFFs who have a chance to knock down your Torpedo's cooldown timer.
  • The double experience points bonuses the game sometimes gives out. It warps you too fast through the game and if you've just started, then you've missed out on a lot. This used to be especially painful for the KDF and Romulans as, unlike the Federation, they had to reach a certain mission to obtain their new ship and by that time, they'd hit Level 20, meaning that scaling enemies were way beyond their capabilities.
  • Most Hybrid/Special space weaponry. With the exception of Dominion Polaron, Plasma/Disruptor, Piercing Tetryon, Caustic Plasma^note All mission-based weaponry, Protonic Polaron, Romulan Plasma, and Refracting Tetryon^note All Reputation-based weaponry, they're all Lockbox-obtainable weapons. However, the box set they come in never specifies what you're gonna get, thus it's a gamble to even check and it's very possible that you'd end up with a ground weapon instead. As well, good luck trying to get them on the Exchange, as they're usually very expensive.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The Iconian War. The Player Character retrieves an Iconian MacGuffin via Time Travel and gives it to the Iconians, who just up and leave. The Alliance calls it a victory, but really it's at best an incomplete ceasefire: not only do the Iconians refuse to do anything about the billions of innocent people they murdered or made homeless, they don't even bother to keep their Ax-Crazy sister T'Ket from continuing the war on her own.
  • Downplayed Trope: The Alliance does achieve their stated goal at the outset of the war, and the Iconians don't — but this is only because the Alliance's goal was 'survive as peoples without surrendering to Iconian servitude' while the Iconians wanted servitude or extermination prior to getting the MacGuffin, so the Alliance victory is something of a technicality to the billions of victims.
• Badass Cape: One of the clothing options for veteran and Honor Guard KDF players, as well as Romulan players upon reaching the Admiralty ranks.
• Badass Crew: Whoo, boy, this trope is there in spades. Depending on your starting faction, you're either the survivors of Klingon attacks (plus Borg attacks for the 25th Century Starfleet faction), a group of KDF members who go off for glory or survivors of Tal Shiar attacks. As you play the game, your list of who can join you grows as characters from both sides of the alignment spectrum joins you!
• Badass Longcoat: By the time you reach Level 50 (the level cap prior to Delta Rising), you are very badass indeed. And what is your reward for all this badassery? A knee-length Vice Admiral's overcoat.
  • With the Uniform updates of Season 9.5, the VA overcoat is outdated. But there are three special longcoats 200 day and lifetime subs gets - the Odyssey Long Jacket, the Bortasqu' Long Jacket and the Romulan Admiral's coat.
  • The senior Vaadwaur ground troops (Tech Officers and Overseers) rock these as well.
• Badass Long Robe: The content update "Common Ground" added off duty outfits for the players to wear, including a selection of robes.
  • NPC Klingon Captains & Dahar Masters will also sport these.
  • Fleet embassies that have reached a certain level can unlock these for members.
• Bad Boss: Mirror!Admiral Quinn in Operation Wolf has no hesitation about firing on his own troops with his runabout's phasers (anti-ship weapons). He will likely kill many times the number of his own troops as he does player characters with them.
• Bad Present / Bad Future: Just as the episode it is a sequel to, technically Temporal Ambassador is the present from the perspective of your character, but in all other respects fits Bad Future better — up to and including being the result of someone from the past ending up in the future.
• Bald of Evil:
  • Obisek plays this early on in the Romulan storyline.
  • Hakeev plays it even straighter throughout the entire storyline.
  • Also male Orions when the player is fighting against them.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: Inverted in the now-deleted mission "State of Q", when Q Junior tosses you into battle against three Borg Cubes... and then when they're just outside your weapons range he decides to go easy on you and handwaves two of the Cubes out of existence.
• Balkanize Me: The Backstory of how the Romulan Star Empire breaks up and unites repeatedly, strikingly resembles what happened to a certain other franchise's Empire. The first part is borrowed from the Star Trek Novel 'Verse post-Nemesis, where Senator Tal'aura and Commander Donatra had a falling out and Donatra led part of the military to form the Imperial Romulan State. In the game backstory, the RSE and IRS eventually merged back together ... just in time for Hobus to cut the heart out of the Empire and fragment it beyond belief. Nowadays a large chunk of what's left of the Empire is a military dictatorship under Empress Sela, with the Tal Shiar practically a state unto itself, while several breakaway colonies and the Reman Resistance have united under Proconsul D'Tan (Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Unification" two-parter) to form the Romulan Republic (the player Romulan faction), with Federation and Klingon backing. By the endgame Word of God and implications in-game indicates the situation has more-or-less flipped, but is no less balkanized — Sela's Empire has been reduced to a few holdout colonies not even able to scrape up a fleet equivalent to that the Republic began with, the Tal Shiar is a state of their own but has suffered severe losses and desertion after Hakeev's death, the debacle on New Romulus and the conflict with Imperial loyalists, while the Republic (with the Reman Resistance integrated into it) has grown to encompass much of the former Romulan Star Empire.
• Bayonet Ya:
  • The Klingon Honor Guard disruptor rifles have a wicked-looking blade affixed to them under the barrel. Couple this with the rifle striking melee attack, and you have a nasty surprise for anyone foolish enough to get up close with someone wielding these.
  • Special mention for Akaar's Dual Nanopulse Disruptor Pistols from the "Only Qo'noS Endures" event, which feature plasma bayonet blades under the pistol barrels, giving you a reasonably powerful and lightning quick slashing melee attack.
• Beam Spam: Beam: Fire at Will is the most literal interpretation given that it ends up with your phasers blasting away at anything in sight, but really, any broadside from a beam-laden high-level cruiser qualifies. If we count cannons, Cannon: Scatter Volley is about as spammy as they come. But the undisupted king of Beam Spam are the hangar pets that come on the Discovery-era Flight Deck Constitution and D7 cruisers. Most fighter-type hangar pets will have one energy weapon and one torpedo. These flyers don't have a torpedo. . . but they have nine micro omni-beams (6 front, 3 aft, not that it matters). The amount of firepower they spit out is best described as "face-meltingly brutal."
• Beard of Evil: Appropriately, this seems omnipresent in the Mirror Universe Terran Empire. At least for the men.
  • Also applies to most male Klingons when the player fights against them.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: This is ultimately the one thing that brings the Iconian War to an end. When the player goes back in time and aids the Iconians in escaping the destruction of their homeworld and then returns to the present with an Iconian artifact, L'Miren realizes who the player is and what they did for the Iconians and calls the war to an end.
• Beehive Barrier:
  • Your away team members can set one up for you to take cover behind. And then you've got ones on a planetary scale.
  • The Engineer gets one automatically around Lieutenant Commander 5 (level 15), bonus points because this uses the same graphic as the Power Armor Block ability in Champions Online.
• Been There, Shaped History: Your PC can take a crucial background role in several established canon events, like getting the Enterprise-C back to the proper timeline for her battle at Narendra 3.
• Betting Mini-Game: With the release of Season 2, Dabo is now been introduced in which you can earn Gold Pressed Latinum.
• BFG: Many of them. Your away team will likely be decked out with these after about three or four hours of gameplay.
• BFS: The Klingon Bat'leth sword, which can be used by both playable factions. They are also carried by Klingon Swordmasters, and it would be wise to take them down before they can get close enough to use it.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The Federation has gone to war. Enough said. Also might apply for the peaceful hunter-gatherer Aelasans (before their mission was cut) - see the Superweapon Surprise entry below.
• Bifurcated Weapon:
  • The Admiral level variant of the Galaxy-class can separate into the Saucer and battle sections, just like in Star Trek: The Next Generation. And then there's the multi-vector attack mode Prometheus-class, which can split into three separate ships.
  • Among the Tactical, Operations, and Science variety Odyssey Class ships, the Operations can do a saucer separation, and Tactical can launch an escort from the back. Sadly, while you can use both consoles on one ship, you can't use both abilities at the same time (splitting into three sections).
  • The Haakona Advanced Warbird available to the Romulan faction can split into two separate vessels. The ship's description mentions that this was developed from technology recovered from the U.S.S. Prometheus that the Romulans attempted to steal in Star Trek: Voyager.
  • The playable version of the Elachi Sheshar Dreadnought can pull this off as well; detaching the lower half which then functions as a separate vessel.
• Big Bad: STO actually has narrative arcs throughout its main-line story content that feature major antagonists and foils for your crew.
  • On the 'Klingon Front', "Ambassador"/General B'vat, who will do just about anything to keep the Fed/KDF war going so that Klingons don't turn on one another.
  • 'Spectres', the Devidian arc, has their leader, the Shrouded Phantasm, who is responsible for their nefarious plans on Drozana Station.
  • Colonel Hakeev of the Tal Shiar is the main antagonist of the 'Cloaked Intentions' story arc covering the struggle between the Romulans and Remans, as well as of the entire storyline for Romulan players, in which it's revealed that as an Iconian agent, he's the true source of basically all the evil that's befallen their civilisation.
  • 'The Fek'lhri Return', in which The Legions of Hell invade Klingon space, turns out to be the under the orders of, surprise surprise, Fek'lhr. Maybe — the Fek'lhri actually invading Klingon space keep referring Molor's (a legendary tyrant, and another of the bosses you defeat along the way to Fek'lhr) destiny to rule over the Empire and the galaxy, and sensor readings during your counter-invasion of Gre'thor imply the Fek'lhri might have been artificial proxies of some other power
  • In the 'Cardassian Struggle', the antagonists behind most^note Mirror Terrans have a mini-arc of their own, and the Undine make an appearance in the Federation version of Cardassian Struggle. There's also Loriss and Kar'ukan, the enemy leaders during the final few missions, who operate entirely separate from the others due to having been shifted forward in time along with an enormous Dominion armada from the height of the Dominion War. of the the various goings-on in Cardassian space turn out to be a Big Bad Duumvirate of two rogue Dominion operatives, First Lamat'Ukan of the Jem'Hadar and Laas the Changeling, with Gul Madred, leader of the True Way serving as their front man.
  • 'The 2800' are led by First Kar'ukan, a very stubborn time-displaced Jem'Hadar who hasn't heard of (and isn't much interested in) the peace between his people and the Alpha Quadrant. Along with him is his Vorta, Loriss, but he stops listening to her when she gets convinced the peace is real.
  • 'Cold War' features Thot Trel, a Breen warlord determined to rip apart the Orellius sector in search of its buried treasures.
  • The Borg and the Undine (Species 8472) serve as big foes during their arcs, and make brief appearances earlier in the game to set up the threat for later.
  • The true Big Bad of the game, though, is the ancient, lost civilisation of the Iconians, who once ruled the galaxy with an iron fist and feel like coming back for another go. They are The Man Behind the Man for just about everything in the first 10 seasons of the game, including the Hobus supernova, Hakeev's atrocities in Romulan space, the mysterious goings-on in the Tau Dewa sector, the Undine invasion. They may even have had some involvement with the Klingon Empire's mysterious run-in with the Fek'lhri (the Fek'Ihri themselves have another source, but when they show up in the Klingon arc they possess portal technology related to Iconian technology, which is not something their origin would explain).
  • After the Iconians are dealt with, Noye, a rogue Krenim becomes the leading threat of 'Future Proof' (he also shows up in the earlier 'Yesterday's War' mini-arc, although due to the involvement of time-travel for him it happens after the Iconian War despite happening before it for you).
  • Once Noye's Temporal Liberation Front is dismantled, the Tzenkethi return to the galactic scene in 'New Frontiers', led by Admiral Tzen-Tarrak and the Tzenkethi Autarch in a ruthless, genocidal crusade wiping all life from dozens of worlds, many of them inhabited. It turns out they are trying to weaken the Hur'q before they return, but end up fighting a counter-productive war when they refuse to explain this and commit several unnecessary atrocities in the process.
  • The Female Founder turns out to be not only the Big Bad of 'Gamma Quadrant', but responsible for some of the threats of earlier seasons. She isn't actually controlling the Hur'q anymore, but she used to, is directly and willfully responsible for them turning into a galactic threat, and is actively impeding the struggle against the Hur'q when it threatens to reveal her involvement, up to trying to kill Odo and revealing she's done so to several other Founders before. She was also responsible for creating the Fek'Ihri as a predecessor to the Jem'Hadar, although they went renegade, and was impersonating Tzen-Tarrak.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • You as a player get a whole bunch of these moments. This is also the entire purpose of the Fleet Support ability, which lets you call in another Federation ship once your hull integrity drops below 50%.
  • You're also on the receiving end of one of these in an early mission: You find out that the ambassador you've been escorting really is an Undine/8472 infiltrator, and he's beamed back to his ship... a Tethys-class dreadnought that you cannot possibly hope to fight under any circumstances. You can only hope to survive by shooting down the plasma torpedos it spews at you... and then help arrives in the form of the USS Kirk, leading a flotilla of warships which open up an incredible can of whoopass on the dreadnought.
  • The U.S.S. Enterprise-F coming to the rescue in Boldly They Rode.
  • Sela and the Dominion of all people show up to defend the K.I.S. Annorax in "Midnight".
  • The climax of the Season 13.5 episode "Brushfire" has Worf and Lady Sirella pulling this, arriving with a fleet of Klingon warships to reinforce the player when they find themselves outmatched by a massed fleet of House Torg loyalists, Tzenkethi, and Son'a.
  • The climax of "The Measure of Morality Part 2" sees every single incarnation of the U.S.S. Enterprise from every known timeline, NX through -F, along with guest stars like the Defiant and Voyager, appearing to help the player character against an overwhelming Borg fleet.
• Big Dumb Object: The Voth Fortress Ship. 134km long. Easily killable by five players.
• Big "NO!": Happens twice; first when the player escapes from Hakeev on Nopada Prime, then again when Undine!Cooper gets "repurposed" at the climax of "Mindgames".
• Bilingual Bonus: The Breen capital ships in the Orellius Sector Block (Snosk, Desna, and Istapp) are respectively named for the Swedish word for "snowshoe"^note Named for, note, not actually meaning snowshoe. That'd be Snoesko., the old Slavic word for "right hand", and the Swedish word for "icicle".
• Blamed for Being Railroaded: In the now-deleted and much-hated mission "Divide et Impera", the player leads an attack on what is said to be a Romulan weapons lab, but quickly turns out to be a medical research facility. Unfortunately, despite it rapidly becoming apparent that you're slaughtering helpless researchers, you're unable to stop until you reach the base commander, who gives you a What the Hell, Hero? speech, calling you out for "Federation hypocrisy". (According to the devs this was meant to be My Greatest Failure for the Starfleet PC and lead into a three-mission Story Arc, but the arc was never finished due to Cryptic's rush to finish. The Foundry community eventually stepped in and wrote a couple of sequels, including "Divide ut Regnes".) However, the Foundry has since been discontinued and the content is not accessible anymore.
• Blood Knight: B'vat, far beyond even the standards of other Klingons. He is obsessed with keeping the new Fed/KDF war going in perpetuity, because he fears that without a great enemy to fight then the Empire will turn on itself and rip itself to shreds in civil war, just to slake the Klingon thirst for warfare... just like it, uh, did happen in TNG and Klingon Academy. He's willing to slaughter billions, revive terrible weapons and kidnap Miral Paris to make sure the Fed is willing to fight the Empire as long as possible.
  • He's so far gone that when you meet his past self during a Time Travel mission, he asks you to give his future self an honorable death.
  • Amusingly enough, this character (almost to a T) duplicates one from ANOTHER videogame franchise - these are exactly the motivation AND the actions of Admiral Tolwyn from the Wing Commander franchise, as shown in Wing Commander IV.
• Boarding Party: Besides multiple in-story examples where you're boarding enemies or they're boarding you or friendlies, the "Boarding Party" Engineering skill allows you to launch crewmen in shuttles to board enemy ships and applies a debuff for every shuttle that makes it through their point defense.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Played perfectly straight by Hakeev, right down to the Evil Gloating, after cornering you in a cutscene in the "Cloaked Intentions" feature episode series. He spends just long enough gloating that your ship is able to arrive and beam you out right as his men try to execute you by firing squad. The Big "NO!" this gets from him is worth a laugh.
• Boom, Headshot!: A rare Trek example; Obisek finishes Hakeev execution style with a shot to the head. Arguably he had it coming.
• Boring, but Practical: If you're looking to create a ship build for the first time once you hit level cap, nothing says basic like picking up common (white) Mk XI gear. The Exchange usually sells these for much less than their normal value, meaning you can set up a ship build for under 200,000 EC if you play your cards right. You can even use the "infinity" scaling gear from your Tier I ships, which increases in effectiveness as you level up to the point that it's just as good as the Mk XII common, and it was absolutely free (as long as you didn't dismantle it when you started getting higher level gear way back when- once you dismantle them you can't craft or buy replacements).
  • The Mirror Universe ships are also this. While they tend to just have a different BOFF and Console layout than their normal counterpart and don't come with any neat equipment save for a different ship skin, they are insanely cheap (going for as low as 95k EC) and, especially with the recent releases for the Federation, makes obtaining certain ships easier. This also goes for the Mirror Universe ships' replacement, the Kazon Raider. Even if you're one of those guys who think the same way as the Borg and think they're all just junk.
  • In the same vein, the normal Tier V freebie ships you get. They're not as flashy as the C-Store, Lockbox or Lobi ships, but in a pinch, they'll pull you through.
  • A Science Bridge Officer's Tractor Beam ability. Doesn't launch a Macross Missile Massacre of torpedo's. Doesn't power up your beam array weapons or allow Beam Spam, doesn't grant your Heavy Cannons More Dakka. All it does, is severely slow the speed and turn rate of a nearby targeted enemy ship and do a little bit of Kinetic type damage. Which allows the Tractor beam user to unleash a devastating barrage of firepower on an area of the enemy's ship with weak shields and/or exposed hull. The Borg Cube NPC enemies, in particular love showing new players just how deadly a Tractor Beam can combo with other weapons.
  • Beam Arrays. In terms of firepower of the various ship weapon types, Beam Arrays sit on the low side of damage output. But next to Turrets, they have the second highest field of fire arc, fire 4 times per use, can take advantage of a large number of BOFF abilities, are good at taking down shields, and fairly easy on the Weapon system power loads. The fact that the Mid to End Game Cruisers, typically mount no less than at least 4 of them (2 Fore, 2 Aft), turns them into Beam Spam shooting terrors in a broadside fight.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: Apparently whoever designed the arena in "Coliseum" thought it would be a good idea to include panels in the arena that would allow the combatants to gain control of the security turret guns over it.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • The Zefram Cochrane shotgun from the 2014 Mirror Invasion event has an unlimited supply of 12 gauge shells and never needs reloading.
  • On a larger scale, ships in space combat never run out of torpedoes, mines, or other projectile weapons.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Having Epic Level MK XV everything. Many players will tell you that you're good with MK XII gear, but some will absolutely demand that you have to have the best of the best.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Praetor Taris seems to be this. She's pretty much unflinchingly loyal to her "dread masters", and for a Romulan that is weird.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: When 21st-century Earthlings meet the Borg:
  Man: What are those things? Robots? Zombies? Robot zombies?
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • The TOS Constitution-class starships, complete with blue phasers, as well as the Constitution Class Refit skin for the Tier 2 cruiser. The Miranda-class are also still going, while a refit Excelsior-class can be bought and was actually considered one of the top Starfleet DPS cruisers at the time. The NX-class would seem to be this, being over 250 years old at this point, but is actually a replica with modern systems (apparently the Corps of Engineers got bored or something).
  • As of the game's Third Year Anniversary event, the Ambassador-class - the same class as the ill-fated Enterprise-C - is also available, both as a mid-tier cruiser and as a retrofitted end-game cruiser, where it serves as a Jack of All Stats in-between the damage oriented Starfleet cruisers and the tanking oriented Stafleet Cruisers. Not quite an elder statesman to the same extent as the Miranda or Excelsior, but still pushing a century old.
  • The Romulan side in Legacy of Romulus plays this far more literally - your starting vessel is the ancient TOS-era T'liss-class warbird your hometown's mayor used to command, and you and Khev take it as it's your only real ticket out of Dodge. Veril comments later that she's amazed it hasn't fallen apart around your ears before she came along, and straight-up calls your singularity core an antique.
• Breather Episode: "Cold Comfort" in the Breen series. The episode features no combat whatsoever, and only several dialog puzzles.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: A whole bunch of things, both gameplay-affecting and cosmetic, can only be obtained using "Zen", which must first be purchased by someone on Perfect World Entertainment's website. Having said that, they can then be sold again in exchange for Dilithium, which any player can get a fair amount of every day. So, while someone has to spend real money eventually, it doesn't have to be you.
  • Of course, you can earn all the Dilithium Ore you want, but it must be refined before you can spend it, and you can only refine 8000 per day. At current rates^note 450 dilithium to 1 Zen; November 11, 2019, that translates to less than 20 Zen per day. Most items cost 400 Zen or more. Cryptic Studios know what they're doing. Granted, it's 8000 per character, and even free players that refuse to invest a cent into the game get three character slots. Still, you can't transfer unrefined dilithium between characters, so that means you have to spend the time to earn 8000 dilithium per character if you want to reach the full cap.
    • More subtly, many things one can spend money on encourage spending money on other things. Want a screen-accurate Scimitar? You need to buy all three versions for the gear that lets you have the original's resilient shields and the ability to raise them and fire your weapons while cloaked. The Thalaron weapon is the set bonus for having all that gear equipped on one ship.
  • There are also certain ships, non-combat pets, uniforms, and other items that are exclusive to 'veteran' players who purchased paid subscriptions.
• The Bridge: Players can choose from several different bridge layouts for their ships.
• Bridge Bunnies: Customizable Bunnies, no less. Yes, if you're a male captain you can have an all-female bridge crew. Yes, if you're a female captain you can have an all-male bridge crew with flattering shirts. They also serve as the cornerstone of your away teams, especially if playing solo or in a small group. You can have up to fifty-four of them under your command, as well (though that involves buying additional bridge officer slots). Illustrated quite well in this El Goonish Shive strip.
  • It has to be added that the artist's impression about bridge officer customization was wrong here - she would be perfectly able to do that.
  • Though it should be noted race, gender, and department are fixed, so you have, for instance, a Female Trill Science Officer or Male Vulcan Engineer. Beyond that, you have total freedom to define their face, body, and uniform.
• Bus Crash: In episode "Cardassian Struggle", mission "Badlands", you meet Joshua Riker, the son of Thomas Riker, William Riker's accidental clone who was last heard from when he surrendered to the Cardassians in DS9: "Defiant". After the Dominion War resulted in the collapse of the Cardassian Union and the barely averted extinction of the species, the prison camp where he was held was abandoned by the government, and the prisoners turned it into a settlement under Tom Riker's leadership. Tom died of heart failure after rescuing his wife when she fell into a ravine.
• But Thou Must!: Happens in several missions, but one particularly egregious example happens early on to KDF players. While pursuing a spy, a group of Federation ships is lured in by a false distress signal and accuses the player of attacking the ships that sent the distress. The player has the option of either insulting and attacking them, or explaining that it was a trick. The Federation captain actually listens, performs a scan, and then confirms that the player is telling the truth, apologizes, and offers to withdraw. However, the only option the player has at that point is to claim they've been dishonored and attack anyway, meaning there's no real diplomatic option.
  • Played for horror in the Romulan mission "Mind Game" where you are captured and placed under mental conditioning by the Tal Shiar, who force you to do some pretty horrible things (such as assimilating a captive Romulan). You can try to resist, but you can't stop it.
• Buzzing the Deck: Episode "Cardassian Struggle", mission "Rapier". After exiting the Bajoran wormhole you can buzz Ops on Deep Space 9. This grants an accolade titled "That's a Negative Ghost Rider, The Pattern Is Full".
• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": You don't often see a Starfleet captain looting destroyed ships and tacking their disruptors and engine arrays onto their own ship. Of course, in the game you can equip all kinds of weapons you pick up as random drops. Janeway did it a few times.
• Call-Back: The future of the Trek verse depicted here is a close, but not quite version of the Bad Future from the Next Gen Finale, All Good Things. However, it appears Picard did slightly alter that future: its still bleak but it has alot more hope in it.
• Canon Discontinuity: While Cryptic does have the option of incorporating any "soft canon" such as other games or novels as they see fit (see Ascended Fanon above), they've also outright discarded certain soft canon events, such as the entirety of the Star Trek: Destiny novel trilogy and its immediate successors.
  • The Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch novels are a good example, as only some of them are in the bin. A character who was Killed Off for Real there (Janeway) is alive and well here. Having said that, another plot point introduced there (that Miral Paris is the Kuvah'magh, The Chosen One for the Klingon people) is also alive and well here. But Project Full Circle, the return by a task force led by Voyager to the Delta Quadrant, was thrown out altogether, with nobody going to the Delta Quadrant until Delta Rising and the political landscape depicted being very different.
  • The wholesale discarding of Destiny likely stems from the fact that the initial plot outlines and whatnot for STO were being drawn up in 2008, and the Cryptic team wasn't included in the discussions of how everything would go down - never mind the fact that a lot of non-novel readers would be constantly asking "when are the Borg going to appear?"
• Capital Offensive: Each major faction's homeworld is attacked at least once over the course of the game, with the player character's ship usually leading the defense. And, a few times, you're the one leading the assault on the enemy's homeworld:
  • Earth is attacked by the Undine in "Surface Tension" and by the Iconians in "Midnight". Earth Spacedock takes heavy damage both times, but is rebuilt. Other important Federation worlds like Mars, Vulcan, and Andoria are also attacked at different points in the storyline.
  • Qo'noS is attacked by the Fek'Ihri in "Blood of the Empire", the Undine in "Surface Tension", and the Iconians in the TFO "Gateway to Gre'thor".
  • New Romulus is attacked by the Elachi in "Devil's Choice", and by the Iconians in "Blood of the Ancients".
  • The new Dominion homeworld Empersa is attacked by the Hur'q in "Home" thanks to Garak luring them there as part of a Batman Gambit.
  • In "Cutting the Cord", you invade Hakeev's capital city on Brea III alongside the Reman Resistance. And, in "Takedown", your character commands a massive Alpha/Delta Quadrant coalition fleet in an assault on the Vaadwaur homeworld, Vaadwaur Prime.
• Canon Marches On: The backstory of the game, post-Star Trek: Nemesis, is a synthesis of the Star Trek Novelverse and the tie-in comics to Star Trek (2009). Cryptic incorporated some of the new wave of Trek TV shows into its canon when they came out, but couldn't do much with Star Trek: Picard since its backstory directly contradicts the preexisting game canon in multiple major ways. After the series came out, Cryptic declared the game an Alternate Continuity.
• The Cavalry:
  • In "Devil's Choice" the Klingons and Federation both send fleets to help defend New Romulus against an Elachi invasion.
  • In the ultimate battle for Deep Space 9 in "Boldly They Rode", despite preparing for the battle, the forces to recover Deep Space 9 still find themselves being pushed back. That is until Captain Shon of the Odyssey Class U.S.S. Enterprise-F arrives to help turn the tide of the battle.
  • In "Revelations" the player and the Turei are being pressed hard by the Vaadwaur. Then two Voth mechs, allies of the Turei, drop in and start in on the Vaadwaur as heavy armor support. The Turei return the favor along with Voyager in "All that Glitters".
  • If the Kazon are called in early enough in "Takedown", another smaller group of them show up later to reinforce you due to disliking the way Maje Sessen had arranged for the official Kazon contribution to secretly be on the other side.
  • As things look bleak during the Battle of Earth in the Iconian War, Sela shows up with a Dominion fleet. Turns out she did get the Dominion to send aid after all!.
• Cavalry Betrayal: "Takedown" includes a multi-stage space battle where you call in one group of allies at a time. The Kazon join up with the Vaadwaur instead when called in. It doesn't really work out for them, since Captain Kim observes he never really trusted them to begin with, and had worked with Admiral Tuvok on a contingency in case something like this happened (calling in a group of Hirogen who would be more than happy to hunt Kazon and Vaadwaur for a while).
• Captain Ersatz:
  • If you look around, you will find a lot of custom species characters of non-Trek alien species, recreated to varying degrees of accuracy.
  • The Ferasans are essentially this of the Kzinti from Known Space, who were unable to be used for copyright reasons. Their previous appearance in Trek happened with permission of Larry Niven.
  • The new Avenger-class battlecruiser is clearly one of the U.S.S. Vengeance from Star Trek Into Darkness and the Borg Modified Romulan Lockbox ships are this of the Narada from Star Trek (2009) (in fact, the storyline ship the Borg Modified Romulan Lockbox ships are based on was originally identified as Narada-class — presumably the fact that technically the Narada is from the Prime Timeline gave them some leeway). As of the 2016 expansion Agents of Yesterday, the Kelvin Timeline Constitution and Dreadnought classes are available from Kelvin Timeline lockboxes.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: More so than the rest of Star Trek, necessarily due to it being an MMO played in real-time.
• Catching Up on History: The Temporal Agent storyline has this happen to your 23rd Century character when they're pulled forward in time by Agent Daniels. He implants via speed-learning everything that happened in history between your supposed death until the game's setting of 2409.

• Catch-22 Dilemma: A major meta-problem with the game concerning Klingon and Romulan players: these players want their own unique ships, especially science-themed, something the Federation has plenty of. However, according to an infographic, nearly 3/4ths of the player base plays Federation, so there's no need to make unique ships when there's such a low amount of players in the other two factions, which players don't mess with because there aren't many ships and they want more.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: Blast assault and assault minigun ground weapons.
• The Chains of Commanding: The Duty Officer System. Nearly every assignment has a risk to your crew. This means that yes, they can come back on death's door, and yes, they can actually die (though only if they're of "common" rarity). With this knowledge, do you send your crewmates on a risky recon mission? Do you send your medical staff to fight an outbreak of a deadly plague?
• Chain Lightning: A few ship weapons and abilities act this way; the Isometric Charge being the most literal one as it fires a ball of electricity that jumps from one target to the next (so long as there's several enemies in close proximity of each other), doing progressively more damage with each hit. The Refracting Tetryon weapons and active ability from the Nukara reputation also work in a similar fashion.
  • For ground, there is the Chain Conduit Capacitor kit module from the Kelvin Divergence Lock Box.
• Character Customization: Just in case we haven't hammered it home yet: Mother. Of. God.
  • While STO comes with an amazing variety of options to customize a character's head and allows for pretty alien looking body proportions, the options for clothing and non-humanoid body parts are far behind those of Champions Online's. This is especially noticable on the Klingon side, where many costume pieces are only available to specific races. Of course, NPCs get no such limitations at all.
  • The Klingons also got the short straw for ship customization, with only two designs per ship instead of the Federation's usual three, and even then it took quite a long time before any of them even got a second appearance or allowed you to customize different parts of the ship such as the hull and nacelles.
  • Certain Bridge Officers you gain through different means avert this. The Breen, Jem'Hadar and Reman BOFFs you gain from their Featured Episodes, the Borg you gain from the TFO "Khitomer in Stasis", the Romulan Borg and Photonic Tactical Officer you buy with Lobi and the Voth you rescue at the end of the Dyson Sphere Reputation Line cannot be modified in any way.
  • The ultimate in this trope? The Photonic Engineering Bridge Officer you get for completing all missions as a Delta Recruit. Virtually every possible design can be used on this BOFF outside of changing their gender or faction.
• The Chosen One: Turns out the player character is "The Other", the one who saved the Iconians in their darkest hour.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: In the "Afterlife" episode of the Fek'lhri arc, the Spectre of Treachery seems to have this - he backstabs the Spectres of Cowardice and Dishonor for his own gains by telling the player all about them, then tries to backstab the player and Kahless after they take the other spectres down. Fortunately, Kahless and the player are Genre Savvy enough to see this coming right from the beginning, and the spectre even lampshades the whole thing, admitting "It's not like I'm the Spirit of Honesty."
• Civil War: According to blogs released by the developers leading up to Season 7, it appears the Romulans are falling into this in an attempt to fill the power vacuum left by Empress Sela's disappearance since the mission "Cutting the Cord". As 'The Path to 2409' makes clear, it wouldn't be the first time in recent decades. Or the fifth. Or the sixth. Once Legacy of Romulus was released, it turned out that it had been slightly misleading — the Romulans already were falling into this before the spoilered event, with the Romulan Republic (supported by the Federation and the Klingon Empire) on one side and the Tal Shiar and Sela's Star Empire on the other. If anything the spoilered event cut the civil war short, as Sela's disappearance and Hakeev's death in the same incident caused the Star Empire side to disintegrate with the Republic already there to fill the power vacuum.
• Cliffhanger: The mission "A Step Between Stars" end with this, as we see Koren, Shon and Kaol walking away from each other after the rediscovery of the Jenolan Dyson Sphere.
• Close-Enough Timeline: "Butterfly" ends with one. History plays out much as it did, but a civilization (heavily implied to be the ancestors of the Sphere Builders) that should have survived to 2410 was assimilated by the Borg twenty years earlier while experimenting with Solanae technology. This results in the Borg becoming a lot more powerful than we knew them before.
• Clown Car:
  • The Klingon Vo'Quv carriers, Fek'Ihri Kar'Fi battle carriers, Orion battleships, Corsair flight deck cruisers, Federation/Caitian Atrox Carriers and the cross-faction Obelisk Carrier can all carry an almost ridiculous number of fighters, and have no qualms about spitting out squadron upon squadron to take you out. Hell, the Vo'Quv, Kar'Fi, Sarr Theln, and Jem'Hadar Dreadnought Carrier can each carry frigates.
  • With the Obelisk and its "swarmers", this is even invoked, as the Obelisk is meant to fight by spewing endless numbers of drone fighters at you until you're overwhelmed.
  • In an even more painful example the standard "crew deck corridor" for most ships is 180 meters long. Even on ships that only have a 150m saucer section (fleet science vessel retrofit).
• Cold-Blooded Torture:
  • The experiments done to Captain Shon and the Romulan who went with him in "Sphere of Influence", inflicted by the solanogen-based race seen in TNG. Shon had his left arm and both antennae ripped off, then reattached, as well as being injected with various other painful substances. The Romulan had his entire blood volume replaced with some sort of polymer... luckily you managed to save Shon.
  • The Tal Shiar is also fond of using prisoners as guinea pigs for testing salvaged Borg technology, as the Romulan Republic player witnesses in "Mind Game" and the Federation player almost witnesses in "Desperate Measures" (the Federation player arrive between batches, and promptly destroys the Tal Shiar contingent and rescues the remaining prisoners, while the Romulan PC has been Brainwashed and is forced to actually take part).
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each playable faction has it's own color scheme (carried over from the TV series and movies), which extends to the colors on the walls, lighting, map sections, etc. The Federation is blue/white, Klingons are red, Romulans are green, and the Original Series Federation is yellow. The playable Jem'Hadar (or officially, the Dominion, despite the only other race in it being a vareint) is purple.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The game uses white for common, green for uncommon, blue for rare, purple for very rare, light purple for ultra rare (reserved for Fleet gear or upgraded items), and gold for Epic (mostly upgraded items and a few mission rewards). For equipment, each tier adds an additional "mod" that grants a bonus like increased critical chance or a bonus to a character skill.
• Combat Medic: The Federation employs NPC's seen on ground missions that are specifically called this; they have higher health and shields than normal medics, and stronger abilities as well, making them an even higher-priority target when you find yourself fighting against them.
  • The Romulans and Voth have their own versions as well.
• Combat Tentacles:
  • The Aehallh worms found in the Colliseum aren't exactly tentacles, but they're pretty close.
  • Changelings like to choke your character by the throat and toss you around like a ragdoll by this method.
• Comically Missing the Point: The Ferengi ambassador in "Surface Tension" is more interested in his proposal to turn the Jenolan Dyson Sphere into "a resort to rival Risa" than on the actual purpose of the conference, which is to formalize an alliance to deal with the clear and present danger of the Undine stepping up their war effort against the Beta Quadrant nations.
• Company Town: The player can be sent to a planet with a Romulan mining town, completely controlled by a Ferengi and a mining company.
• Competitive Balance: The idea between the three classes and ship types. Players can customize themselves to extend beyond the original class they chose through skill point distribution.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • The D'deridex Warbirds used by the Romulans and Remans can fire several heavy plasma torpedoes in a row at you. Player ships are only capable of shooting one of these at a time. (Averted in Season 7 with the introduction of the Romulan Hyper Plasma Torpedo launcher obtainable from the Romulan reputation system.)
  • Enemies are clearly not bound by all the same rules as you are. Enemy crews frequently have access to skills players can't acquire, like torpedo salvoes, and ships have special abilities you can't duplicate. This is most clearly seen in the way enemy ships can zoom around at full impulse speed during combat, running away from player ships which are forced to cut full impulse as soon as they're engaged (and thus can't simply accelerate out of combat or catch up to a fleeing target).
• Conflict Ball: To people who haven't gotten deep into the STO universe and plotlines (and maybe even to some who have), the whole Federation-Klingon conflict can easily seem to be a contrived reason to have Stuff Blowing Up.
• Continuity Nod / Call-Back: The game is positively dripping with them to the point they could warrant their own page.
  • The Wolf 359 System. Especially with the Federation memorial in the middle (when you get close you start to hear the comm traffic from the battle).
  • Naomi Wildman is the commander of Deep Space K-7. Icheb appears as a mission giver, too.
  • Miral Paris is a plot-centric character whose storyline first introduces you to the Guardian of Forever and the Mirror Universe.
  • Akira Sulu is the Great-Grandson of Mr. Sulu.
  • Admiral Janeway.
  • Among the ships you will hear about will be USS Kirk, USS McCoy, USS Montgomery Scott, USS Archer and USS Tucker, among others.
  • Sela is the Romulan Empress. Not too many people mind any of this, and it's all quite well-explained.
  • The Galaxy-Class bridge set alone has plenty. The side consoles from Generations, the modified tactical console from the future Enterprise-D in "All Good Things", and a large transparent console panel behind the tactical station very similar to the one seen in the TNG seventh season episode "Parallels".
  • One of the engineers over at Memory Alpha before its removal from the game was Kirayoshi O'Brien.
  • One of the Starfleet contacts at K-7 is Mackenzie Calhoun.
  • Deep in Cardassian space, you will encounter Joshua Riker, the son of a transporter-created clone of old Will Riker.
  • And then, who should show up from the mirror universe? Captain James O'Brien. Aboard the ISS ''Molly.''
  • Expect to encounter any and all types of food that are ever shown or mentioned throughout any of the series, including Chateau Picard wine. They even have Prune Juice, repeatedly mentioned and referenced as Worf's drink of choice.
  • The entrance to the Preserver archive resembles the Asteroid Deflector from the TOS episode "The Paradise Syndrome"
  • "The 2800" story arc is not only a continuity nod but also a continuation of a story arc from one of the series. A Dominion fleet suddenly emerges from the wormhole, attacking (and taking over) Deep Space 9, and still thinking the Dominion war is still going on despite checking a calendar since then. Starfleet is baffled by where they came from. It's the same fleet that the Prophets had seemingly willed out of existence when Captain Sisko and the Defiant single-handedly headed into the wormhole to confront. Turns out they just kicked the Jemmies 35 years into the future.
  • Gul Madred from the TNG episode "Chain of Command I & II" is the leader of the Cardassian side of the True Way Alliance. Pity, though, that player captains never get the chance to debate with him whether there are four lights or five...
  • Admiral Chakotay was promoted to the head of Starfleet Intelligence in 2406, and thanks to Voyager's encounters with the Undine, he was able to convince Starfleet to start "expecting" them to be among personnel, and start developing technology to help detect Undine Infiltrators.
  • Much like the 2800 story arc, the 3rd Year Anniversary mission is a direct continuation of a series episode, this time from TNG and the episode being Yesterday's Enterprise.
  • Many of the Exploration Missions were directly these before their removal and possible revamp, involving the Gorgons, the burial remains of the dead alien race from "Masks", and various other stuff (though it tends to play out Kirk-style).
  • The mission "Sphere of Influence", introduced in the lead-up to the launch of season 8, could be considered a giant collection of callbacks; the commander of the Romulans' new flagship is the daughter of Alidar Jarok from the TNG episode "The Defector", the player sees a couple of planets from episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and the aliens encountered in the mission are the same ones that abducted and experimented on the crew of the Enterprise-D in the TNG episode "Schisms". And of course the entire mission follows up on the TNG episode Contagion and the DS9 episode To the Death with Iconian gateways.
  • A possible result of getting a critical success on a Temporal Trade assignment (which you can only access with one-use items potentially found in an opened Temporal Lock Box) is to get a very rare (human-looking) duty officer named Isis. Her quote is 'Meow', and her species is marked down as Alien (which STO uses as a general term for anyone that doesn't have a specific species assigned).
  • The Dyson Sphere seen in TNG's "Relics" makes an appearance in "A Step Between Stars" and "Surface Tension", and becomes the Delta Alliance's main base of operations in the Delta Quadrant.
  • Almost all of the content released with Delta Rising is a reference to Star Trek: Voyager, with a couple of references to TNG added in as well (the 'neural parasites' from "Conspiracy" and Hugh, the liberated Borg drone from "I Borg" and "Descent").
  • Two of the ships on the new Earth Spacedock picket fleet are the U.S.S. Sovereign and the U.S.S. Geronimo.
  • The commander of the U.S.S. Kirk is an Andorian named Captain Thelin.
  • The triple laser grid used in the dilithium mining minigame is based on the laser drills seen in the mines of Rura Penthe (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).
• Continuity Snarl: With respect to anyone playing a Dominion hero. Their story starts off, understandably enough, with the Gamma Quadrant storyline; for any of the other races, this comes far down the list in sequence of the adventures, after all the empires have allied once again and are fighting common enemies. Then, because of the complete absence of any Dominion-specific content (beyond a very cursory introduction), they are forced to ally with either the Klingons or the Federation- and dumped right back to 2409, where the two are at war. The transition is especially jarring for Klingon-allied characters, who find themselves blowing up ships they were just fighting alongside. There's also a hilarious moment when the captain calls for a Gunship Rescue and, instead of their own ship, gets a Klingon Bird of Prey. (Which is still treated as being their own ship.) This entry still doesn't begin to cover the continuity issues with playing a Dominion story.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: When faced with any of the canon characters (J'Ula and Geordi LaForge come to mind), you'll find you can't possibly kill them off; they will always warp away at the last moment. This makes it very frustrating when your auto-targeting insists on shooting at the boss ship, instead of the escorts which are busily pounding you to scrap.
• Convection, Schmonvection: An early mission in the old Romulan story arc placed you on a planet that had active volcanic activity on the surface (along with local plant life that thrived in the lava). You could walk all over it and it wouldn't hurt you.
• Converging-Stream Weapon: Just as seen in Voyager, the Undine's original method of destroying a planet or other large target such as a Borg Unimatrix Command Ship in "Fluid Dynamics" is to have several ships arrange themselves in formation and all divert energy to a ship in the middle which then fires a huge beam at the target, annihilating it in one shot. The Undine Planet Killers seen in "Surface Tension" and onward use this as well, but it's not as impressive as the multi-ship formation.
• Cooldown Manipulation:
  • The tactical captain ability "Tactical Initiative" halves the remaining cooldown on any tactical bridge officer powers.
  • The science captain ability "Subnucleonic Beam" increases the target's boff power cooldowns, in addition to wiping out active buffs. Intelligence boffs can use a variant of this power with an Area of Effect. invoked
  • Certain duty officers have the ability to reduce cooldowns. One uses three Technician doffs to reduce all currently active cooldowns to the global minimum each time Auxiliary Power to the Emergency Battery is triggered, effectively doubling the rate at which you can trigger boff powers. invoked
  • The Skill revamp adds three skill trees called Engineering, Science, and Tactical Readiness that reduce the cooldown of boff abilities from each respective career.
• Cool Shades: Several different styles of shades have been added in the annual summer events, as well as part of the intelligence operative costume sets introduced in Delta Rising.
• Cool Starship: Many ships from across Trek canon have made their way into the game (Including an old-fashioned Constitution-Class and Miranda Class as starting vessels), and a few have been made especially for it, such as the mighty Odyssey and Bortas end-game ships.
• Costume Porn: Whilst Cryptic's dedication to character customisation meant there was always a small element of this, the game dived right in with Legacy of Romulus and the elaborate Romulan outfits.
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable / Worst Aid: This was the original way to revive a downed character. It has since been replaced with a quick tricorder scan.
• Crapsack Only by Comparison: Things have gone downhill compared to the era the shows took place in, but it's still a much better world to live in than say, the settings of Dead Space or Mass Effect 3. There are still awful places in the setting which are full-on crapsack, though, such as Nimbus III.
  • Crapsack World: Nimbus III. It was bad in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. But the Federation pulled out a hundred years ago in game (and in the Expanded Universe). Now its home to nothing but raiders, pirates, slavery, prostitution and nightclubs.
• Creature-Breeding Mechanic: There's tribble breeding, done by either leaving the tribble in inventory with particular foods, or by duty officer assignments found in your ship interior. The former creates a new tribble, the latter transforms your old one. Different tribbles grant different buffs: for example feeding a tribble ketracel-white will produce a tribble that buffs your damage against Jem'Hadar.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Federation's Dreadnought Cruiser and the recent Dyson Science Destroyers force a certain energy type (phasers and proton, respectively) that either force you to work a weapon build around it or ignore it completely. The Tactical Escort Refit and the Multi-Mission Explorer ships do the same, but their gimmick weapons can be removed, thus you're not bound to it.
• Critical Existence Failure: Ships suffer damage and systems can be affected, but until you suffer a warp-core breach (read: death), there's no downward spiral of failing systems, like the shows.
  • Zig-zagged; as your health drops scorch marks will appear, followed by your engines going haywire and multiple decks showing hull breaches and fires.
• Crystal Spires and Togas: The Deferi come pretty close.
• Custom Uniform: The developers were able to Handwave the glaring flaw about Starfleet's uniform code by stating in one of the Loading Screen notes that Starfleet relaxed their uniform codes to help its officers feel a little more comfortable, just as long as they still wore their primary color associated with their position. The last part happens pretty much only by playerbase preference and is regularly violated. After season 9, it's only player characters; everybody else wears Odyssey uniforms.
• Cutscene Incompetence: The Iconians' main superpower seems to be inducing this, starting with one of them gating straight into the Klingon High Council chambers on Qo'noS, vaporizing the entire High Council apart from the Chancellor, and not one single person present even took a shot at him. Ditto the Iconian in "Blood of Ancients" who turns up and monologues for a little while then kills a Preserver in passing, again, all while the PC was standing two feet away.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: A problem with the ships here is that many of them are portrayed as significantly weaker than they are in the TV series, leading to many a player being annoyed that their favorite ship is quite pathetic than they were shown on TV, a big offender being the Galaxy-class (prior to the release of the Andromeda-class) as players felt it was an insult to the Enterprise-D.
• Cutting the Knot: The "Azure Nebula Rescue" raid provides a game mechanics example in a scenario where Tholian warships are guarding captured Romulan ships. The most obvious solution followed by most players is to destroy the Tholians before releasing the Romulans. But the way the objectives are coded^note you're scored based on how many ships you rescue, not how many Tholians you kill and the Tholians positioned means that it's perfectly possible, if somewhat difficult, to sneak up from the far side of the asteroid and release the pointy-ears without ever even aggro'ing the Tholians. Another solution is to have one player Draw Aggro while the other releases the ship. Slight downside in that you don't get the XP granted by killing the Tholians.

Tropes D-G

• Darkest Hour: The situation at the end of "A Step Between Stars": With the rediscovery of the Jenolan Dyson Sphere thanks to the actions of the Undine, the alliance between the Federation, Klingons and Romulans are on shaky ground, due to the fact that all three want the Jenolan Sphere - The Federation because they had found it first over 40 years ago, the Romulans because it's connected to the Solenae Dyson Sphere and the Klingons because they want a super weapon, too! It doesn't help that Koren and Shon are Hot-Blooded Jerkass people.
  • The last episode of the Iconian War arc, appropriately named "Midnight" is even darker. The Alpha Quadrant Alliance has all but lost the war with the Iconians, and Earth is under siege by a massive Herald fleet. Traveling back in time to kill the Iconians 200 000 years ago is the only possible chance for victory.
• Darkhorse Victory: The Romulan Republic might just be the greatest example of this trope. The Romulans spent 20 years trying to rebuild the old Star Empire and never really suceeded (Sela being closest and only through ruling with an iron fist and murdering her own kind via the Tal Shiar & Hakeev). Over the course of a single year three groups of people: D'Tan and his aides, Obisek and his Reman Rebels, and the Romulan Player Character and their crew unite the Romulans under a new banner and make them the second largest superpower in the Quadrant (edging out the Klingons!). All thanks to a Reunificationist, the sacrifice of one of his aides, a Reman soldier and his rebel militia, and a rag tag warbird crew led by a farmer!
• Death from Above:
  • The various mortar weapons that can be erected by Engineering players & NPC's during ground missions.
  • The swarmer drones in the ground portion of the Solanae Dyson Sphere never miss a chance to take pot shots at players from overhead.
  • The accolade you get in "Cutting the Cord" by marking targets for Orbital Bombardment is literally called "Death from Above".
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If a player is killed or has their ship destroyed (possibly killing them), they can simply respawn with their ship shiny and new...minus a few Red Shirts. And the dead redshirts will be restored after a short period of time. Presumably Starfleet ships are crewed by Tribbles. Mitigated somewhat by the addition of the difficulty slider, which adds a death penalty at higher levels in the form of injuries, which can be removed at starbases or with items. Elite-ranked raids always have injuries turned on.
• Death World: Nukara Prime, a Y class "Demon" planet with a surface temperature of 500 degrees Kelvin, a corrosive sulphuric atmosphere, and rivers of acid. Players are REQUIRED to wear environmental suits if they don't want to be immediately engulfed in flames and die a gruesome death by bursting into ashes.
• Declining Promotion: An odd variant: despite the fact that you become a Vice Admiral/Lt. General at level 50, you're still in command of a single ship where most would be on the sidelines commanding whole fleets of ships.
  • Sidestepped with the introduction of the Admiralty System: You still solve problems personally with your ship and crew, but now you can also send out various other ships under your command to solve smaller problems that don't need your personal attention.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Par for the course with space combat. The initial explosion of a ship can damage you, but a few seconds later the warp core blows up for a second explosion. For ground combat, while most enemies who die from an "exposed" attack get vaporized, Tholians can actually self destruct, causing damage to anything around it. Mechanical devices, such as the various turrets and whatnot also explode when they're destroyed.
• Defeat Means Playable: The special reward for defeating the Breen during the Deferi story arc? A Breen bridge officer. Repeated with the Romulan/Reman missions, though technically it's the Romulans you're defeating and a Reman bridge officer joining you. It's also repeated in the Jem'Hadar missions.
• Defector from Decadence: The entire Reman Rebellion is this to what's left of the paranoid Romulan Government. And You in the Legacy of Romulus.
• Demoted to Extra: The Cardassians in, ironically, the revamped "Cardassian Struggle" arc. Whereas previously the True Way had a Story Arc all to themselves, in the redone version they're little more than a sideshow to a plot involving leftover Dominion forces in the Alpha Quadrant, and something to do with the Mirror Universe that leads into a couple Season 11 TFOs.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Lampshaded by Y'Dren in the mission "The Dragon's Deceit":
  Y'Dren: "Alpha Quadrant tech has too many redundancies; you've got backups for your backups, and none of it matters because emergency power always fails in an emergency!"
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: The player's ship.
• Detachment Combat: Several ships can turn parts of themselves into separate, independent craft, increasing their firepower and distracting the enemy. The Galaxy-class can detach its saucer, the Bortasqu' can deploy a heavily-armed escort ship, and the Advanced Odyssey can either detach its saucer or deploy a heavily-armed escort ship. The Prometheus-class escort takes the prize, though - true to the series, it can split itself into three equally-powerful ships, and you can choose which one you want to command the formation from.
• Developer's Foresight: Cryptic Studios's been tossing in various things towards certain classes, races, ships and the like in certain stages.
  • In Boldly They Rode the skill Security Escort doesn't work, as it involves teleporting crew from your ship which is presently inaccessible.
  • Leave tribbles in your inventory and some food? Well when you log back in the food is going to be gone and more tribbles will be there. This is used by player to get better tribbles. There is one exception, however: Polygeminus grex canibalis does not eat food in your inventory. They eat other tribbles in your inventory.
    • Not only that, there is a Duty Officer mission that would allow you to dispose of Tribble Carcasses (the remains of a tribble after a Cannibal Tribble eats it). Players have been known to transfer carcasses via bank slots to KDF characters as only the KDF has access to this mission. Cryptic obviously was aware of the implications as they wrote in a possibility that the Duty Officer mission will fail with the Duty Officer tossed into the brig for breeding tribble carcasses for profit.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Halfway through "Home" a haggard-looking Weyoun shows up out of nowhere and vaporizes Bashir's Hur'q cure samples, right before he was about to administer them to the core of the Hur'q command ship.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • "Broken Circle". Turns out that frontally attacking a fortified position where the other side outnumbers you thousands to one tends not to be a particularly bright idea.
  • The entire plot of "Butterfly": It's decided that the best thing to do is to prevent Romulus' destruction by stopping the U.S.S. Yamato from discovering Iconia. At best, you got the Borg nipping at Romulus' heels. However, D'Tan was still working on a free Romulan world, so it was okay! No one ever thought the Borg would take over Romulus.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Fek'lhri arc basically involves carving your way through The Legions of Hell, confronting Klingon Satan, and sticking a bat'leth through his face. Although your science officer suggests it was a technological simulation of some kind and that the Hur'q were involved.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The handful of larger ships that can mount cannons, like smaller and faster-turning escorts. Trying to keep cannons on a target with a cruiser's turn rate would be completely impractical, and requires unorthodox tactics:
  • The Galaxy-X dreadnaught has a cloaking device; a skilled player can use this to sneak up on an unsuspecting ship, de-cloak as close as possible and unload on the target before it has a chance to move out of range. The ship's unique phaser spinal lance does huge damage in a single shot (if it hits; the accuracy is pathetic), and fires twice when triggered; it's more than enough to ensure the first volley is fatal against another player ship in PvP if weapons are fired in the right order, fast enough so the target can't pop any defensive buffs. When the ship is already in combat and can't cloak right away, Tractor and Repulser beams can be used to keep the target in front and a Subspace Jump Console can be used to teleport the Galaxy-X directly behind a target, facing it.
  • The Klingon Bortasqu' comes with a Subspace Snare Console that takes a different approach than the Subspace Jump Console; it teleports the target in front of the ship.
  • The T5 D'deridex-class gets a lot of flak for its (apparent) low turning despite being able to mount dual cannons. This isn't helped by the Romulans' sharply limited ship selection, which results in the free T4 D'deridex coming right after the much zippier Mogai-class. But the Romulan battle cloak common to all warbirds allows it to turn much faster while cloaked, and having access to lieutenant commander boff powers in all three disciplines is all but unheard-of.
• Dirty Coward: Neman is totally useless in any kind of fight, cringing in fear, while he has no hesitation telling you to beat on the Jem'Hadar. Of course, this doesn't make him substantially different from most other Vorta we've ever seen.
• Disc-One Final Boss: B'vat, Hakeev and Kar'ukan.
• Disney Villain Death: Taris in "Uneasy Allies".
• Distinction Without a Difference: Moving the height slider along while generating a character will change their height from 5'12" to 6' tall; for international tropers, this is like going from 100 cm to 1 meter.
• Diverting Power: Ships have 200 points of power to distribute between weapons, shields, engines, and auxiliary systems. Most ships grant bonus power to one or more systems, and player skills or ship equipment can also increase the amount of power available.
• Doctor Whomage: The mission "Sunrise" (which kicks off the game's Temporal Cold War story arc) is packed with Doctor Who references: time traveler Kal Dano arrives from the far future in the game's 25th century present day on a small ship that is Bigger on the Inside, with a roughly circular interior around a cylindrical console at the center.
• Do a Barrel Roll: The "Rock and Roll" pilot skill introduced in Delta Rising allows the player's ship to avoid all damage for a few seconds. And, unlike Star Fox, this is an actual Barrel Roll.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Firing weapons (or taking fire, for that matter) in space missions will drop your ship from full impulse to a slower maneuvering speed. Full impulse will also divert some power from the other subsystems to the engines as well.
• Doing In the Wizard: KDF-side, your science officer suggests after the fact that the battle in Gre'thor may have been All Just a Dream and that the Fek'Ihri were created by biotech, possibly by the Hur'q. Victory Is Life continues this, revealing the Fek'Ihri are a renegade Dominion creation based on the Hur'q (both of them being prototype Slave Mooks Gone Horribly Wrong, with the Female Changeling finally succeeding with the Jem'Hadar).
• Doomed Hometown: The Romulan player's home colony of Virinat.
• Downer Ending: Several of the Iconian War missions seem to be trying to one-up each other in a bid to get this title; "Blood of Ancients" has the Iconians wiping the floor with the alliance and exterminating the Preservers, and then "House Pegh" has an Iconian killing Emperor Kahless and sending the player running with their tail between their legs.
• Dragon Ascendant: In "The Measure of Morality Part 2"Evil Twin Seven of Nine kills the Excalbian version of the Borg Queen and takes her place as the Arc Villain.
• Dramatic Space Drifting
• Dramatically Missing the Point: In the mission "The Doomsday Weapon", the Klingon Captain muses as to why K'Valk betrayed her. In the very next breath, she proclaims that he did try to explain but, because of Klingon honor, she blew him off because he was a traitor.
• The Dreaded: The Elachi for most of the Romulan storyline. Later, the Iconians for everyone.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought: "Dreadnought" is the catchall term for the biggest, most powerful, slowest and most cumbersome ships in the game. Some are playable, notably the Galaxy-X-class Dreadnought and three Romulan Warbird Dreadnoughts (based off the Scimitar from Star Trek: Nemesis).
• Driven to Suicide: K'Valk in the Doomsday Machine due to his part in helping the machine being activated. See Heroic Sacrifice below.
• Drop Pod: Episode "The Delta Quadrant", mission "Revelations". The Vaadwaur used them to invade the Turei homeworld, enabling them to punch through the orbital defense grid and sabotage it from below. They also appear in several other instances where the player faces Vaadwaur ground forces, and are equipped with built-in transporters, allowing them to rapidly reinforce positions once the initial force has gotten a foothold.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?:
  • The game ties Character Level to your player character's military rank in Starfleet, the Klingon Defense Force, or the Romulan Republican Force. This is tolerable up to level 39 (Captain or equivalent and below), but after that, not only are you an admiral running around in a ship, but by the time you hit the level cap at 60 (Fleet Admiral), you actually outrank almost every mission giver in the entire game, even Fleet Admiral Quinn, and Admiral Kererek, and have probably seen more combat in the last year than some of them have in their entire careers. Lower ranks still love to order you around like you're a totally green ensign and in some cases force you to personally complete tasks more suited to junior enlisted personnel. On the face of it, the season 8.5 featured episode "A Step Between Stars", where literally nobody in the entire mission except the Player Character ranks higher than Rear Admiral Lower-Half, can seem particularly silly about it.
    
    Interestingly, though, A Step Between Stars manages to zig-zag this. Your initial orders come from Joint Command, and while it is headed by a Subcommander (because the Romulan Republic is still small and is low on high ranking officers but are still the only neutral party between the FED-KDF War and this new alliance), he is in command of the Task Force which DOES make him your superior officer despite being of inferior rank, simply because he is the CO (although that doesn't explain why they couldn't have just promoted him). The next time someone ignores your advice is when Tuvok offers to let you shutdown the station (and open an Iconian Gateway at the same time). If the player tells Tuvok no, he'll do it anyway - which is actually still OK, because Tuvok's orders are to shutdown the station at any cost. Orders that didn't come from you. He was only giving you the option because you're of senior rank and have had more experience with this technology. And the last time someone subverts an order from you is if you provoke the captain of your opposing faction (or allied faction for Romulans) into a fire fight. As a Starfleet Admiral, you just proposed opening fire on the Klingons as the war was winding down, which could easily lead to your court martial. As a Klingon General, he's not just telling you to calm down but also Shon as well before things lead to the war going hot again. And as a Romulan Admiral, you're threatening your own government's diplomatic status by instigating both the Klingons and Starfleet into a war that could have the Romulans in the crossfire. Beyond that, your orders are followed (i.e. telling Tuvok what to do with Cooper, what defense strategy to take, telling Tuvok to the communicator while you get the Voth explosives), it's when you act like an Insane Admiral that the NPCs tell you eat shit.
  • Averted again in "Surface Tension". The player's admiralty rank becomes a minor plot point, with the player taking command of the task force.
  • It goes the other way, too (may not be if you play missions out of order) in "Sphere of Influence", where the player bosses the heads of fleet of the Federation and the KDF around.
    • Bonus points for the final discussion where the three powers decide how to continue with the new gateway. Represented by Admiral Shon (Federation), Ambassador Worf and General Koren (KDF) as well as some random Scientist who happened to beam in (A'dranna from the Romulan Republic). And yes, the latter speaks up as if the others were her peers.
  • And averted by Captain Harry Kim in Delta Rising, who makes a point of giving the PC the respect due his superior officer.
• Dump Stat:
  • For a long time, ground combat skills were a Dump Stat because most players didn't want to waste valuable skillpoints on it when space combat was considered to be much more fun and the primary appeal of the game. This was changed, making it mandatory to invest 20% of one's skillpoints into ground skills, but mercifully added 20% more total skillpoints to allow for this without ruining the builds that veteran players had created.
  • Now the Dump Stat is engineering skills. They make a ship harder to kill, but not enough to survive against the highest difficulty enemies, such as the eight Borg tactical cubes found in the Hive raid. For just about every other player vs npc battle, skillpoints in damage resistance aren't even needed. The focus for the top players now is on inflicting maximum damage with weapons and science skills. Only two engineering skills out of a possible ten are still useful to throw points into: the ones that increase speed and maneuverability, and the energy output of the ship's warp core.
• Dyson Sphere: Season 8 introduces one as a new zone for starships to fly around inside and explore. A related Republic Intelligence debriefing also mentions the Jenolan Dyson Sphere of TNG fame, noting its disappearance as one of the oddities that started happening after you unlocked the entire Iconian gateway network...
  • Ghost Ship: The Dyson Joint Rep Tier 1 and Tier 2 completion cutscenes reveal two things about the Dyson Sphere: that this was made by the Iconians as a means to get away and, mysteriously, it was left abandoned.
    • Later on, there's a dispute between the three superpowers over possession of the Jenolan Dyson Sphere and that there's a third one. And it's armed to the teeth with Iconian ships.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Because the 3rd Year Anniversary mission, "Temporal Ambassador", was placed at the end of the Klingon War storyline, new players, especially in the Federation, get to meet Obisek, Slamek, Rugan Skyl, and T'nae before their storylines take place.
• Earned Stripes:
  • Reaching the rank of rear admiral, lower half as a Starfleet Player Character unlocks a waistcoat in your uniform selection.
  • The official version of the Odyssey style puts admirals in a longer version of the uniform jacket that does not get tucked into the pants, and gives them metallic braid at the cuffs and around the divisional color bar. They also wear a belt buckle of the Federation's starfield-and-laurels insignia. Meanwhile starship and station commanders wear a version of the officer service uniform that has white shoulders, whereas ordinary officers get dark grey. Another color combination denotes enlisted personnel.
  • The Klingon Defense Force denotes ranks with progressively more elaborate baldrics. The Romulan Republic uses pauldrons and capes of increasing complexity.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • The Planet Killer (yes, that Planet Killer) does this to Imaga's moon in a cutscene to give the player an idea just what kind of power they're up against.
  • Galorndon Core falls victim to another Doomsday Machine in "The Core of the Matter."
  • The Dewans apparently did this to themselves when they hooked an Iconian gateway up to a geothermal power system and tried to activate it, wiping themselves out and leaving Dewa III (or New Romulus as it would later be known) uninhabitable for centuries.
  • The Undine do this to Kessek IV in "A Gathering Darkness" after the planet has been entirely assimilated by the Borg. They also intend to do this to Qo'noS in "Surface Tension" and several other worlds in the Alpha and Beta quadrants in the "Undine Assault" PVE mission.
• Earth-Shattering Poster: The logo for Season 13 depicts a habitable planet (New Kentar's moon) getting wiped out by a protomatter bomb.
• Easter Egg:
  • Before its discontinuation, in the late Borg front mission "State of Q", players could find one of these in the form of the USS Enterprise-D, seen through one of the hull breaches on the USS Saratoga. Also counted as a bit of an anachronism, as the Enterprise didn't make it to the Battle of Wolf 359 until after the Saratoga and the rest of the fleet had been destroyed.
  • In the discontinued Foundry editor, a huge number of the premade NPC costumes had funny captions, apparently because whomever originally cataloged them got bored and started making shit up to keep life interesting. The full list is here, but here's a few samples:
    Breen Lieutenant Male 01: Don't tell the Breen, but this is just a lonely guy who wears the suit to blend in.
    Cardassian Commander Male 03: His mother named him Kira, after her favorite historical figure. The merciless teasing inspired his military career.
    Elachi Lieutenant Scanner 01: EXTERMINATE. EXTERMINATE.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: The Omega Force, a joint Federation/Klingon task force developed to take on the threat of the Borg, generally gives this impression.
  • Starfleet and the Klingons have this as well in the form of MACO and the Honor Guard, respectively. Both come with fancy armor, weapons, and ship equipment that makes their 'normal' counterparts look pathetic by comparison.
• Elite Zombie: The Borg have this in the form of the Elite Tactical Drone; larger than a normal drone with tons of health as well as an Arm Cannon that drains the players' personal shields and does major damage. They can also deliver a backhand capable of knocking down your entire away team.
• Emergency Trainee Battle Deployment: The Federation player backstory is this, as the player's Canon Sue with their plucky band of cadets manage to take out numerous Klingons and Borg in their outdated Miranda-class starship before everyone gets a battlefield promotion.
• Enemy Civil War: Halfway through the Delta Quadrant story arc the Vaadwaur split into two warring factions; the main force led by Gaul and his parasite-infested commanders, and a rebel faction led by Captain Eldex.
• Enough to Go Around: The game subverts this in quest pickups by using Event Flags instead of inventory items for most things mission-critical. It then plays it entirely straight with certain items tagged as "Unique"—meaning every player gets to own exactly one of each.
• Epic Fail: The DOFF Assignments have a chance to be failed, especially if you're using Common DOFFs. What reaches this trope is that some missions actually give you a 100% chance at success (such as delivering captured contraband) and you still fail at it (as, despite a 100% success rate is displayed, that is usually rounded and there's still a minuscule chance of failure).
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: As you escape from the Iconian Command Sphere in "Broken Circle", you fly through a massive ship graveyard of the combined Federation, Romulan, and Klingon strike fleets, a fleet of hundreds of ships. You pick up a handful of escape pods...and no one else.
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Lampshaded. Upon encountering some hostile ice spiders in a cave during the Reman Uprising arc (not too long after fighting off hostile jackals), one of your officers loudly questions why every new species you encounter always wants to kill you.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: The Breen, complete with Human Popsicle grenades and lasers.
• Evil Counterpart: The Mirror Universe ships. They look the same, however they have things that are vastly different, usually by rearranging BOFF slots and Console slots. Prior to that, the Federation's ships were pretty much "swap skins".
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: At endgame there are special task force missions players can do repeatedly for rewards. There are three levels of difficulty for them and they all have optional objectives to complete which grant better rewards. With the Delta Rising expansion, failure to complete even one optional objective on the middle and highest difficulty level automatically failed the mission, though after various complaints optional objectives are once again, well, optional.
• Evil Sounds Deep: The voice of the Collective in Borg space missions, coupled with a bit of Voice of the Legion (naturally).
• Evil Twin: In addition to running into various Mirror Universe counterparts of heroic characters like Leeta, Sylvia Tilly, and Admirals Janeway and Quinn, the Terran Gambit arc introduces the Inquisitor, the Terran Empire counterpart of the player character, who acts as The Dragon for the mysterious Terran Emperor.
• Evil Versus Evil:
  • The main reason that the Federation and Klingon Empire haven't been all turned into cyberzombies or wiped from creation is that, even decades after the events of Voyager, the Borg and Undine still hate hate hate each other and gleefully rip one another apart at every opportunity (there's even one instance during a mission where the Borg abruptly break off from fighting the player to go after Undine and will totally ignore the player's ship unless fired on). The Federation and Klingons still ally against the Borg despite having a war on in other sectors.
  • Also, Empress Sela and Praetor Taris. The former has a few less atrocities to her name, but they're both still pretty unpleasant.
• Evolving Weapon:
  • Mark Infinity equipment improves in effectiveness as the Player Character levels up (although effectively topping out at about Mk XI).
  • The Delta Rising expansion introduced Tier 5-Upgraded and Tier 6 starships, which have a Starship Mastery feature which enables the Player Character to grind skill points to unlock stat boosts on that ship, as well as a perk in T6 ships which is usable on any ship.
  • T6 ships now level with the player, unlocking weapon and console slots as you gain access to high-tier ships, letting you captain a single vessel your entire career.
• Expy:
  • The Vesper for the Excelsior Class, and the Excalibur as a 25th century equivalent to the Constitution class. Both the original ship classes can also be bought.
  • Frankly, most of the ship variants count. Each Tier contains: 1) a ship from the TV series, and 2) two more ships that look different but are basically cosmetic redesigns. This allows the mix-and-match customization, since the warp nacelles, engineering hull, etc are all in the same position, but the cosmetic redesigns themselves are of variable aesthetic quality. The Exploration Cruiser (Galaxy pattern) is a particularly bad offender.
  • The Unimatrix 0047 Command Ships are easily this towards V'Ger of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, particularly with the metallic guitar riff when it warps in and its One-Hit Kill plasma torpedo.
• Expansion Pack: Legacy of Romulus, which launched in late May 2013. Included the long-awaited Romulan playable faction as well as huge changes to the rest of the game. This was followed by the Delta Rising expansion in October 2014. In practice they worked just as the previous Season updates (that is, a free and (if you want to play the game) obligatory update to the game that comes with a number of additions to the microtransaction store). It was just a much, much larger update than any of the previous Seasons, including a new tier of ships and the first and only so far level cap increase, which is why they took to calling it an expansion pack instead.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Commander Adet'pa, First Officer of the IKS Kor, says this of the player when you speak to her on the promenade of DS9.
  Adet'pa: So this is the warrior old Martok rattles on about? I expected a giant after all of his tales.
• Exploding Barrels: Players can find these on the promenade of DS9 in the mission "Boldly They Rode", and can use them to take out some of the Jem'Hadar without having to engage in protracted firefights.
• Explosive Instrumentation: This is Star Trek. How else do you duty officers get hurt realigning a sensor array or some of the other tasks that have the possibility of injury?
• Explosive Breeder/Extreme Omnivore: Tribbles. Once per hour, a tribble in your inventory or equipped will eat one food item and produce another type of tribble. There's a huge breeding tree with dozens of varieties, and they can even eat things like ketracel white, which is normally toxic to anyone who isn't a Jem'Hadar.
  • Although what they eat can be dependent on the breed — one particular breed, for instance, refuses food items and other consumables, instead favouring other tribbles.
• Explosive Overclocking:
  • The Override Subsystem Safeties bridge officer ability from the Intelligence specialization gives a massive boost to all current and max subsystem power levels. Theese bonuses decrease over time, and when they expire, a random subsystem is knocked offline.
  • The Exceed Rated Limits bridge officer ability from the Miracle Worker specialization greatly accelerates the fire rate of energy weapons and negates the weapon power drain from firing them while afflicting the user with damage over time and an all-subsystem power drain.
• Extra Eyes:
  • All the wildlife on New Romulus have six eyes, presumably due to mutation caused by long-term exposure to the radiation on the planet's surface.
  • The Iconians (and their personal guard, the Herald) have this trait as well.
• Extreme Omnivore: The Hur'q, driven mad by the absence of their normal food source, devour literally anything they can get their claws on, ranging from organic material, to ship hulls, and raw minerals.
  Elim Garak: "Unlike most burrowing creatures, the Hur'q ate their way through the ground."
• Face–Heel Turn: Expository text in the loading screens reveal that Worf had severed all ties to the Federation after they declined assisting the Klingons in fighting the Undine/Species 8472. Of course, given that he was worried about Starfleet Command and the Federal Parliament being shot through with Undine infiltrators and was rebuffed after being told it couldn't happen, exactly who ended up the face and who ended up the heel is a matter of perspective.
• Face Palm: One of the emotes you can do is a Picard face palm.
• False Flag Operation:
  • The Undine's attack on the Alpha and Beta Quadrant is because of someone using Iconian tech to mimic Starfleet spaceships and attack Fluidic Space.
  • The player is involved in one of these as well; capturing a Vaadwaur ship and sending it to attack the Benthans and Hazari in order to make them see the value of working together against a common enemy.
• Falling into the Cockpit: This is more or less how the Fed side of the game starts out. Your ship is ambushed and boarded, and while you are helping repel the intruders, the senior staff gets killed, and you, a lowly Ensign, now have to take command of an entire starship... against the Klingons and the Borg. The fact you actually win is why command makes your command position permanent.
• Failure Is the Only Option: In "Blood of the Ancients", you could be sporting Mk XV Epic gear, you're not killing that Dreadnought.
• Fake Defector: In the mission "Under the Cover of Night", T'Par is actually a member of Section 31, and capturing her is just part of a ruse to feed the Romulans false information.
• Fake Longevity:
  • The un-remastered Cardassian story arc was like this. Almost every mission in it was a Marathon Level with Loads and Loads of Loading between space and ground maps multiple times per mission, and usually involved a Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest. And then there were missions with the simple goal to interact with a few objects, except there were usually hordes of Respawning Enemies you had to chew through, and you were forced into Back Tracking through them most times. All the loot including the mission rewards was little better than Shop Fodder.
  • Most of the original storyline missions were like this, but have since been remastered and streamlined to be quicker, more interesting and fun to play.
• Fan Disservice: The scantily-clad, hideously ugly Fek'lhri Ravagers.
• Fanservice:
  • Orion Females play this straight, especially many Player Character ones. This also applies to female toons with the Enterprise-Era and TOS-Era Mirror Uniforms.
  • Special note to Nimbus III's Orion Hideout and Titty Bar, Shangdu. There is fanservice for ANYONE in this nightclub with scantily clad dancers everwhere. This is notable because it's not just the standard hot chick schtick and features as the three main ones a Trill Female in a bikini, a Caitian Female in a tank top and go-go boots, and a Human male in a speedo. The equality of it was actually praised on the forums - especially when you consider that the primary person watching the male dancer is also male, and has atmospheric lines like, "I think I'm in love".
• Fantastic Diet Requirement: The Victory Is Life expansion reveals that the key ingredient in the Jem'Hadar life-giving drug ketracel-white is derived from a fungus originally from the Hur'q homeworld, and is a critical nutrient to the Hur'q. The Female Changeling rendered it extinct in nature in hopes of using the need for it to turn the Hur'q into Slave Mooks, but it Went Horribly Wrong and rendered the formerly civilized Hur'q an Ax-Crazy Horde of Alien Locusts instead.
• Fantastic Ghetto: If you aren't a Klingon noble or a KDF officer, First City isn't that great of a place to live. During a "tour the city" optional mission you find that the southwest side of town is a dingy slum packed full of non-Klingons who came to Qo'noS looking for work and weren't successful.
• Fantastic Ship Prefix: In addition to canon prefixes, the game adds a few new ones.
  • Romulan Republic ships use the prefix RRW, apparently for Romulan Republic Warbird. Romulan Empire ships have IRW, presumably for "Imperial Romulan Warbird."
  • Gaul's flagship in Delta Rising is identified as the VSW Vozroz. VSW most likely stands for Vaadwaur Supremacy Warship.
  • The Klingons use, depending on era, either IKV^note Imperial Klingon Vessel, for the 23rd Century, or IKS^note Imperial Klingon Ship, for the 25th.
  • With the latest expansion, named Cardassian Union ships, like Garak's ship, the Tain, use CUV for a prefix. This likely stands for Cardassian Union Vessel.
  • Also from Victory is Life, comes the Dominion ship prefix, DV. Likely stands for Dominion Vessel.
  • A full, regularly updated list of ship registries is available here, including per-ship registries like T.S.C. for Tellarite Star Cruiser or N.F.V. for Nausicaan Free Vessel.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Par for the course. Thankfully, there is no such thing as a Warp Queue.
  • However, due to the way FTL travel is actually played, it's entirely possible to get in a 20 ship pileup in interstellar space...
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Octanti hate all Borg. Even if they're Liberated, Borg are Borg. However, a number of Octanti start to reconsider this, especially when they save their skins and the brother of an Octanti ambassador returns to him.
  • One of the Krenim hates all Alpha and Beta Quadrant races, referring to them as "The Voyagers", even if they weren't part of Voyager. In fact, it gets so bad that Seven of Nine quits the team working on the Temporal Warship because he refuses to listen to any of her concerns.
• Fantasy Conflict Counterpart: A fantasy postwar counterpart in the Cardassians, whose treaty with the Federation following the Dominion War reduced their military to a defensive organization of considerably smaller size, rather like what happened to Japan after World War II. The rest of the picture looks like post-invasion Iraq, with many former Cardassian Guard officers joining the True Way, a reactionary terrorist organization.
• Fighting Your Friend: Some of the missions (such as the Starbase 234 patrol mission for Fed players) has the player engaging in 'wargames' against their allies to hone their combat skills. This is also the main premise of the same-faction (Fed vs Fed, KDF vs KDF) PvP missions, where players square off against others from their own faction.
• Five Rounds Rapid: Happens to a Romulan security team facing a Vaadwaur Overseer on the bridge of the Lleiset in the mission "Capture the Flag"; the redshirts open up on him with multiple disruptors (which are all hitting him dead-center, by the way) only for their target to stroll right up to them and decimate them all with just his fists.
• Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: Dual beam banks and most offensive boff and console abilities can only fire in a 90-degree cone off the bow of the ship. Dual cannons have an even narrower firing arc of only 45 degrees. Escorts additionally have a "heavy weapon" slot that also has a 90 degree front firing arc. Torpedoes can be mounted either fore or aft, but still only have a 90 degree firing arc.
• Flanderization: One of the few things we learned about the Breen in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is that they wear refrigeration suits because they prefer cold temperatures. The game takes this up to eleven by making everything about them relate somehow to cold: they use cryonic grenades, encase their prisoners in ice, and somehow scatter snow across the corridors of enemy ships they're boarding. And then there's the Idiosyncratic Episode Naming of their story missions, all of which have something to do with cold.
• Fluffy Tamer: The player can become this, with numerous species of animals that can be domesticated and kept as pets, some of which can even be used in combat.
• Flunky Boss: Just about every elite level boss ship you have to kill (and some battleship-level mobs) will have a squadron of escort ships or fighters buzzing around it.
  • Some high-ranking ground enemies will have the ability to summon low-level grunts as backup.
• Foreign Cuss Word:
  • In "Ragnarok," Pavel Chekov cuts loose with "Bozhe moi!" ("My God!")
  • Players of all factions will hear plenty of well-known Klingon epithets over the course of the game, such as "petaQ", "taHqeq", "veQ", "baktag" and so on.
• Foreshadowing:
  • During the debriefing following the completion of 'Cutting the Cord', Temek and T'nae each tell the KDF & Fed players that "the return of the Iconians could change everything". Cue 'Surface Tension' and 'Uneasy Allies'...
  • There are many hints during "Coliseum" that Slamek isn't what he seems. He knows exactly what to do to escape, exactly which way to flee in a wilderness where he shouldn't know, and finally claims to see the smoke of the crashed ship well before he actually could.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum:
  • "House Pegh" has the eponymous Klingon black-ops team in possession of a wide-area cloaking device capable of hiding ships in formation with the equipped vessel from Iconian sensors. Surely this is a brilliant technological advance that will change the course of the war! Nope, never mentioned again. However, we learn soon enough that being able to hide half or two-thirds of the Alliance fleet would not make much of a difference in the war.
  • In "Time and Tide", Noye steals the Krenim temporal weapon ship from the Time Police and naturally tries to cause The End of the World as We Know It in succeeding missions. Said Time Police are remarkably clueless about the possibility of simply time-traveling themselves to before the weapon was stolen in the first place and disabling it entirely^note this would be explainable by another piece of phlebotinum, temporal shielding, which would keep the Krenim ship unaffected by temporal interventions... except that by the rules established earlier that would mean that the moment the temporal weapon ship's shields were knocked down it would integrate with the established timeline and be disabled.
• Four-Star Badass: The current maximum rank a player can achieve is Fleet Admiral (Federation & Romulan Republic, allowing them to become five-star badasses) and General (KDF)^note the final KDF promotion is Dahar Master, but that technically is a title rather than a rank. Per Delta Rising, there are eighteen months between the low-ranked game start and flag rank. The Romulan PC at least has the minor justification that the Romulan Republic is new and short on manpower, but the Federation PC (in the post-season 8 tutorial) starts as a fourth-year cadet on his/her senior midshipman cruise and is given a battlefield commission as a lieutenant.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • On paper, the Escort class ships are supposed to be this: Quick and deadly, but light on defense. Player customization and skill determines if that is true or not.
  • The fighters, runabouts, and shuttlecraft can also also be considered this; small, agile craft good for quick hit and run attacks, but will be slaughtered wholesale by battleships and cruisers that get a clear shot on them.
• Friendly Enemy: What basically the Klingon-Federation War devolves to due to outside factors. While they start their conflict beating each other up, they end up having a conference about how to defeat the Borg on Bajor despite being actively at war with one another. Omega Force and the Honor Guard were already teaming up against them. This ends up involving the KDF player and the portion of the Klingon military controlled by the ambassador in the war against the Dominion Remnants. The Klingons also cooperate with the Federation Temporal Security Agency from the 29th century. Really, by the time the war officially comes to an end, it's obvious both sides have bigger problems to deal with.
• Friendly Fireproof: Other players and friendly NPC's won't be harmed by a stray phaser beam or torpedo during combat.
  • Subverted with some of the confuse abilities, which reverses the victim's friend or foe ID systems and renders them vulnerable to attacks from allies.
• From Nobody to Nightmare:
  • The Romulan PC goes from being a simple farmer on the backwater world of Virinat to a Romulan Republic Fleet Admiral who discovers a habital planet for relocation, founds the New Romulus colony on said planet, takes down the Tal Shiar, and saves the galaxy several times.
  • The Tuterians used to be a relatively obscure and peaceful Delta Quadrant species. Thanks to the the Alliance, they've since become the omnicidal Sphere Builders.
  • Wesley Crusher of all people is revealed to be the Emperor of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe, and has been behind (most) of their machinations and now seeks to harness the power of V'ger for himself.
• Fun with Autocensors: Until 2018, the autocensor on the official forum replaced banned words with four asterisks. In late 2018 the admin changed the replacement text to "TRIBBLE".
• Fungus Humongous: Some ground maps have this in effect to varying degrees, the most notable example being Imaga in "The Doomsday Device".
• Funny Background Event: In the 20-man FM event Starbase Fleet Defense the freighters you escort for a full minute make ridiculous but easily missed comments ranging from Space Is an Ocean to discussing about their romantic encounters with the comm channel over.
• Future Me Scares Me: Past-B'Vat, complete with TOS Klingon style smooth forehead, is terrified at what he will become in the future, and helps the player in taking down his future self
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Of a sort. The Duty Officer (Doff) system represents your junior officers, and every ship is supposed to have their crew number's worth of Doffs. However, you start at 100 for free, up to a max of 500. However... some ships crew numbers don't fit with this, like the Defiant with a crew of 50. Very few ships have Doff numbers close to their crew numbers, while others are unrealistically packed. Also, since quite a lot of their missions require them to go someplace halfway across the quadrant, the number of runabouts or other small craft needed is somewhat excessive.
  • The New Romulus story introduced in Season 7 has what one can call Story And Story Segregation: continuity-wise it explicitly takes place after and relies on events in the Romulan arc in the Federation story (for instance, the disappearance of Sela is the reason for the civil war that is the reason for the New Romulus exodus, while the Tal Shiar's actions are influenced by the loss of Hakeev), but there's no restriction on doing the New Romulus missions before even beginning the Romulan arc.
  • The Romulan arc mission "Mine Enemy" has you decipher coded files. One file refers to the Vulcan ambassador you exposed as an Undine agent, which you may not have done yet.
    • This is made worse with the addition of the Klingon storyline. While the Romulan early-game storyline starts a couple of weeks before the Federation early-game and chronicles how New Romulus is created, the Klingon storyline takes place after both storylines and yet you're still there dealing with the Tal Shiar long after they were dealt with!
  • More Story and Story Segregation in the Third Anniversary mission, "Temporal Ambassador". Given that the mission guest-stars Tholians and 29th Century Starfleet timeships, the mission should be set somewhere near the Endgame and post-Endgame content. However, the level restriction for "Temporal Ambassador" is level 6 - Lieutenant rank, a far cry from Endgame. When the mission was shuffled into the post-early-game missions, it's at Level 20 and yet you're still dealing with things that you won't deal with for another 30 levels.
  • This is the problem with the Iconian War as a whole. Despite the game and the story blogs stating that the Iconians are kicking our collective butts, players are genuinely confused and have outright mentioned on the message boards "Why are we losing when I'm kicking their butts?!" not realizing that various PVE missions and the like are only considered once. This has spurred calls for making the war so much more expansive.
  • Taken further during the Wham Episode "The Khitomer Discord", where J'mpok frames the player for his attack on Khitomer, declaring the PC an enemy of the Empire and ordering Alliance forces to arrest you and your crew, forcing you to go on the run with J'Ula and Martok. However, once the mission ends you're able to fly around the galaxy as usual and visit all the hub locations like Earth, Qo'noS, and New Romulus with no one batting an eye. KDF players can even walk right up to J'mpok in the High Council chamber and go through the usual dialogue options with him, minutes after he promised to send you to a dark Hellhole Prison for the rest of your life!
  • And taken up to eleven with the Klingon "House United" expansion, in the climax of which J'Ula actually kills J'mpok, and L'Rell is installed as Chancellor; yet J'mpok congratulates you on your promotions! L'Rell and J'Ula do, however, become the ruling duumvirate in the hub world. It's also rather difficult to know how some of the new task force missions fit in, since at least one pits you against J'Ula's forces, yet in the new storyline she is your ally.
• Gatling Good / More Dakka: One of the options for either yourself or your crew while on foot is essentially the energy-weapon version of a Squad Automatic Weapon. Having one of these around is rather handy. Not the first time we've seen 'em, either.
• General Failure: Captain Kagran in the Iconian War missions. Of the first five missions of the Iconian arc released, three of those involve trying to hit the Iconians really hard. By this point, at least 2/3rds of the unified fleet are dead as well as Emperor Kahless. Conversely, a mission involving Tom Paris is able to deal a painful blow to the Iconians and a mission with Nog has them rediscovering the Krenim.
  • He does, however, drop the idiot ball in the last episode and redeems himself in the eyes of the majority of the playerbase.
• Genocide Dilemma: "Butterfly" and "Midnight" deal with the idea of trying to eradicate the Iconians to stop the war. Using the Krenim Timeship was automatically tossed out as it would cause too much change in the timestream. When the player character, Kagran and Sela travel to the past and Iconia's fall, Kagran has second thoughts over the entire thing and when Sela attempts to follow through, she comes to realize that, whoops, she's the reason Romulus and Remus are now asteroid fields.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: All of the bosses with voice actors do this in their featured episode series. They appear, taunt the player and run away and can't be killed until the very end for story reasons.
  • This works for bosses of factions that care about self-preservation, but turns into a total Out-of-Character Moment whenever a Klingon boss runs away, because they're a warrior culture who never retreat and put fighting until they win or die honorably above all other concerns.
  • An even worse example occurs with a boss who runs away after disobeying the orders of a leader his race worships as a god. Kar'ukan is a Jem'Hadar, a clone warrior species who are literally engineered to obey and worship changelings as gods without question and always fight, and never ever run away (there are canonical examples of Jem'Hadar going rogue, but even they kept up the warrior 'fight to the end' attitude).
  • That said, in the mission "Afterlife", where the Klingon player and their crew join up with Kahless to raid Gre'thor (Quite literally the Klingon version of Hell), the Spectre of Cowardice takes this up to eleven while making it perfectly in-character. He flees into an underground maze, and the player has to search the maze for him, fighting him until he runs away again.
  • This is also naturally the case for any of the established characters in Trek canon; when Captain Geordi La Forge shows up to fight you (during the Klingon campaign), needless to say his ship warps out instead of being destroyed. This makes him arguably a bit of a Dirty Coward considering he leaves the rest of his force behind.
• Gladiator Games: Prominently featured in the Cloaked Intentions episode series.
  • In one mission on Nimbus III, Hassan throws you and your party into one.
• Glass Cannon: The Escort.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: As of season 7, the Borg Queen. That arc quickly got streamlined though, so you won't find her anymore during the main storyline, only in PvE queues.
  • Empress Sela as well, to a minor extent.
• Godzilla Threshold: After the player character strikes down M'Tara, K'Tet decides that it's time for the galaxy to drown in blood. This forces everyone's hand to use the Time Weapon.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The above mentioned Threshold? The big plan was to prevent the U.S.S. Yamato from finding Iconia. This leads to the Borg taking over Romulus instead.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: Players will have access to these in Delta Rising; they will allow players to zipline, rappel, or simply horizontally traverse from one area to another. This is only useable in certain hotspots, though, so not the general feature players anticipated.
• The Great Exterminator: There are titles granted for defeating specific numbers of enemy races or factions, such as Cardassians, Klingon, Borg, etc. For example, defeating 10,000 Starfleet officers in ground combat will reward the "Scourge of the Federation" title.
• Grenade Launcher: The pulsewave assault rifle available as part of the Klingon Honor Guard and Adapted MACO ground sets have one of these built in. Engineering players can also erect automated grenade-launching turrets.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: One of the weapons the player can get is a severed Borg arm cannon, which makes for a form of Hoist by His Own Petard since it's most often used against other Borg.
• Guile Hero: You get the chance to be this on occasion, especially during the Drozana Station missions.
• Guns Akimbo: Klingon Swordmasters and other types of enemies often use twin disruptor pistols, but the Player Character and their officers can too.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Just because you have a Phaser, doesn't mean you always have to use it. Far from being an Emergency Weapon, some enemies just go down faster if the player simply holsters their weapon and hands them their ass. Having the Leg Sweep ability for crowd control makes this even more useful. See also BFS.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: The Orion Vixens, complete with confuse-inducing Seduce skill. They're also a popular choice amongst the RP community.
• Guide Dang It!: While not as heavy as most MMOs, STO does have a handful of prizes that people wouldn't know how to obtain. For added frustration, some weapon sets are completed by items that players would never know are no longer available, such as consoles on exclusive seasonal event ships.

Tropes H-M

• Hand Wave: Story-wise, the Tutorial shows that your character is merely an ensign who's very first assignment out of the academy takes them to the Vega Colony, where the Borg very specifically kill off all the commanding officers on your ship while you transported over to the U.S.S. Khitomer to help them get their ship back up and running. This technically placed you as the highest ranking officer in the chain of command, and Admiral Quinn decides that you have earned the right to remain as captain of your vessel due to the dire situation all around the Alpha Quadrant, and they need every last ship they can use in service. Players are actually given the choice to skip the Tutorial if they want. If they do, they start the game in Starfleet Academy, and have to go see the Commandant of the academy for graduation. He decides that your academics are so admirably remarkable that he recommends you for a command assignment. That's it. He tells you to go grab some supplies from a nearby locker, select a first officer, and get to work.
  • This has been cleaned up a lot in the new tutorial, introduced in Season 8. The new tutorial has you on your first assignment as a freshly graduated cadet from the Academy acting as First Officer. After the Captain is killed in a Klingon ambush, you receive a field promotion to Lieutenant from another Starfleet Captain. You then get caught up in the initial stages of the Borg invasion. Your actions in evacuating the survivors of the Vega Colony prompt Admiral Quinn to make the promotion official.
  • Undine ships are normally piloted by a single Undine with a strong psychic connection to their vessel. Since no other species can replicate this, captured Undine ships require a traditional crew, thus allowing game mechanics involving crew to function the same as with other ships.
• Hard Light:
  • The player encounters several walkways made of this in Facility 4028. The various forcefields seen in different missions, as well as the shields used by player-characters and ships could also count.
  • The various holograms can also fall into this category.
• Hard Mode Mooks: The PVE raid "The Breach" has a stage where you have to blow up structural integrity field nodes on the exterior of a Voth fortress-ship. In the "elite" version of the raid, the field nodes are guarded by a Bulwark-class battleship in addition to the beam and missile turrets they have on normal.
• He Knows Too Much: At the end of "Tenebris Torquent", The Female Changeling orders her Jem'Hadar to execute the player character and their team (as well as Garak, Odo, and Dr. Bashir) so they can't reveal her role in the creation of the Hur'q to the Dominion or the Alliance. Until a mutant Hur'q shows up and interrupts them.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: The absolute maximum hitpoints a player ship can have is roughly in the 60k range, however boss ships on elite difficulty have hundreds of thousands to millions of hitpoints. In a subversion, these boss ships often have One-Hit Kill weapons that have to be avoided rather than tanked. Player ships can do some serious damage too, but nothing that can solo kill a boss in one or two hits.
• Heel–Face Turn: The Remans, and particularly Obisek, who starts off stealing thalaron weapons and siccing fighters on you.
  • As is par for the course for Star Trek, quite a few enemies of the day will become allies later. This starts with the end of the Federation-Klingon war for members of those factions, New Romulus and the Dominion join the Alliance, including Cardassia. And at least part of the Borg (obviously the liberated ones), the Elachi, even the Tholians will work closely with you.
    • On a lower scale, quite a few encounters include working with an enemy against a common bigger threat, like with the Voth against the Vaadwaur, and similar.
• Heinz Hybrid: Kal Dano from "Sunrise". Like Temporal Agent Daniels from Star Trek: Enterprise, he's a 31st century man with very mixed ancestry (your science officer identifies Vulcan, human, and Lukari DNA in his genome).
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Even in the 25th century, the typical Klingon military uniform still looks like something you'd expect to see members of KISS wearing.
• Heroic Mime: Finally averted with the Mirror Universe arc, as your character gets a voice and speaking lines in cutscenes. Otherwise zig-zagged; your character nods and moves as if they're speaking the responses you choose from the Dialogue Tree, but are only audible in-universe.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • K'Valk does a suicide run into the core of the Doomsday Machine to at least try to disable it. And he does it while singing the Klingon War Song.
  • Admiral D'Vak nearly does one too; sacrificing his ship to draw fire from insanely powerful Borg weapons. He survives, though.
  • Guroth, the weapons expert of Delta Flight, does this in "Broken Circle", flying his ship head-on into the Iconian flagship and causing enough damage that it's forced to leave the front lines and the Alliance & the player are able send over boarding parties.
  • Temer sacrifices himself on the final mission of the Romulan introduction to save the attendees of the conference and single-handedly improve the standing of the republic.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: Aennik Okeg, the Federation President during the time of the game, was never once seen on-screen and only mentioned in some of the backstory material (we get a glimpse of him in an in-universe blog). He seems content to leave off-world diplomatic matters to the player, Admiral Quinn, or the Federation Diplomatic Corps in general. Finally broken with Season 11.5 and the "Temporal Front" storyline mission.
  • The Iconians were this for the most part, up until "Surface Tension".
• Historical Rap Sheet: For a purely fictional example, the player discovers partway through the Starfleet "Romulan Mystery" and Romulan "In Shadows" arcs that the Tal Shiar faction led by Hakeev and Taris triggered the Hobus supernova and the destruction of Romulus.
• History Repeats: The Klingons make the exact same mistake in the lead-up to the Federation-Klingon War that they made in the lead-up to the Dominion War. They unilaterally invade the Gorn, insisting that the Gorn have been infiltrated by shapeshifters (unlike with the Cardassians, the Gorn actually have been), and then when the Federation doesn't believe them, instead of trying to back up their claims they withdraw from the Khitomer Accords. And just like with the Dominion, this resulted in a Federation-Klingon War that only weakened the quadrant for the inevitable bigger fish. Once again, the Klingons' Honor Before Reason tendencies play right into the hands of a Manipulative Bastard adversary.
  • In-game, this exact scenario repeats itself again on a small scale in the mission "Diplomatic Orders". A Klingon cruiser commander gets information that a Federation diplomat is really an Undine. Does he submit his findings to the Federation? No! He leads a deep-strike into Federation territory to kill the ambassador himself, and instead of coming out firing, he sacrifices the element of surprise to high-handedly demand that the Federation PC hand over the ambassador. The Fed PC reacts surprisingly calmly to this: instead of just blasting the idiot out of space on sight (remember, the Feds and KDF have now been at war for four years and the Klingon is asking a Starfleet officer on an Escort Mission to hand over his charge to an enemy combatant), he asks to see the Klingon's evidence, and the Klingon instead takes umbrage and attacks, and because he's up against a Plot Armored Player Character he dies completely pointlessly and Starfleet makes the kill against the Undine. Klingon Defense Force regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Ships with Battle Cloak can pull this off, go in, fight, and quickly cloak while in Red Alert and GTFO. The Enhanced Battle Cloak-equipped ships can go even further and torpedo away while hidden.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act:
  • While some variant of this could be said to make up a fairly large storyarc of the game, the most specific example occurs in the log entries of a Time Cop from the future unlocked by one of the reputation systems. Said individual is pretty sour over the fact that to preserve the timeline, at one point she actually had to save Gul Dukat (as opposed to just not killing him), who's right up there with the trope namer as far as the setting goes. What's even more personally insulting for her is that she's Cardassian, and having to save someone whose name is synonymous with her entire race's most shameful period of history.
  • One special duty officer assignment, which pops up via the lockbox rewards, is "Prevent Assassination of Earth 20th Century Dictator" by an overzealous rookie time traveler. No points for guessing which dictator.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The game has this in spades, as there's countless examples of players being able to acquire other factions' weapons, ships, even people and turning them against their original owners. Some missions even have players sabotaging enemy defense systems to attack the enemy on the player's behalf.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: "Down the ChuSwI' Hole". Note that ChuSwI' are from the Star Trek Novel 'Verse.
• Hollywood Hacking:
  • Your Captain character is seemingly versed in every operating system in the galaxy, hacking an alien computer is just a matter of pushing some buttons. The few times you actively have to defeat computer security yourself, you're required to either play one of the minigames, or solve some incredibly simple math puzzles. The only one of any complexity can also be solved by brute force, i.e. rotating through the solutions until you get the right one.
  • The trope is really cranked up when Terran mirror starships somehow wirelessly breach a space station's network from outside and start stealing data.
• Holographic Terminal: Starfleet absolutely loves this trope; first seen on Memory Alpha and the bridge of the Enterprise-F, it was later added to Federation fleet starbases and the revamped Earth Spacedock in Season 9. The Klingons and Romulans have this as well, but not nearly as much.
• Homage: Kal Dano from "Sunrise" is based on a character of the same name from the Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels (probably meant to be the same guy, but if so he's a different species and from a different century), but he's really just an excuse to make Doctor Who references. He has a Pint-Sized Powerhouse timeship that's Bigger on the Inside, and said interior consists of a circular room around a glowy central core. And he turns up to solve a Time Travel-related problem with more Time Travel and Technobabble.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • The Klingons, repeatedly, to Idiot Ball levels. Would qualify as a Deconstructed Trope were it not for the fact the game takes their side every time.
    • In the backstory they react to Federation condemnation of their unilateral invasion of the Gorn Hegemony by breaking off diplomatic relations and beginning attacks on Federation colonies. Just like they did before the Dominion War.
    • In the mission "Diplomatic Orders", a Klingon cruiser commander gets information that a Federation diplomat is really an Undine. Does he submit his findings to the Federation? No! He leads a deep-strike into Federation territory to kill the ambassador himself, and instead of coming out firing, he sacrifices the element of surprise to high-handedly demand that the Federation PC hand over the ambassador. The Fed PC reacts surprisingly calmly to this: instead of just blasting the idiot out of space on sight (remember, the Feds and KDF have now 'been at war for four years and the Klingon is asking a Starfleet officer on an Escort Mission to hand over his escortee to an enemy combatant), he asks to see the Klingon's evidence. The Klingon instead takes umbrage at this supposed insult to his honor and attacks, and because he's up against a Plot Armored Player Character he dies completely pointlessly and Starfleet makes the kill against the Undine.
    • Then there's "House Pegh". Emperor Kahless breaks away from a covert infiltration mission that is going surprisingly well because he sees an Iconian on a security camera and wants to challenge it to honorable combat. T'Ket at first ignores the idiot, then basically toys with Kahless for a while until B'Eler technobabbles away T'Ket's Nigh-Invulnerability. Instead of pressing his unearned advantage home, Kahless cuts off T'Ket's arm then starts monologuing about honor, giving T'Ket time to recover and vape Kahless.
  • In "The 2800", Jem'Hadar First Kar'ukan is so determined to regain the honor he lost by failing to pass through the Bajoran wormhole, he disobeys multiple direct orders to stand down from the female Changeling, whom like all Jem'Hadar he otherwise regards as a deity.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Hur'q. Swarms of insect-like ships that Zerg Rush you in space battles? Check. Ground troops that look and act like giant beetles and praying-mantises? Check. Eats anyone and everything in their path? Double-check.
• Hub Level: Earth Spacedock and Starfleet Academy for the Federation, First City and Klingon Academy on Qo'noS for the KDF, New Romulus Command and the Romulan Flotilla for the Romulan Republic. There's also several cross-faction social hubs: Deep Space 9, Drozana Station, Dyson Joint Command, and Delta Quadrant Command.
• Hub Under Attack:
  • In "Second Wave", the cross-faction social hub Deep Space 9 is attacked by Dominion forces in the middle of a multinational summit, forcing the PC to fight their way to their ship through Jem'Hadar boarding parties with the dignitaries in tow.
  • "Surface Tension" has the Federation faction's social hub, Earth Spacedock, come under attack by the Undine. The PC boards the station to help take it back and rescue Admiral Quinn. At the time, Cryptic Studios used the battle damage to justify swapping in a new, improved ESD map.
  • The raid mission "Brotherhood of the Sword" has the PCs battling Iconian Heralds through the streets of the Klingon faction hub, First City on Qo'nos.
  • "Storm Clouds Gather" has Deep Space 9 come under attack again, this time by the Hur'q.
• Humans are Leaders: The only race with the Leadership trait, which increases subsystem repair and hull regeneration. An entire crew of purple quality Human bridge officers lead by a Human captain will have a very fast regeneration rate and recover from subsystem attacks that temporarily knock them out such as Target Subsystem: Engines.
• Humans Are White: Early on this was true, but the game's humans and near-humans began to be diversified considerably starting roughly at Legacy of Romulus.
• Humiliation Conga: Hakeev gets put through one once his plans start falling apart.
• Humongous Mecha:
  • The Voth have some rather formidable mechs that they employ in ground combat which can be rather difficult to defeat without a concerted effort from a team of players and supporting bridge officers.
  • Also the Elachi walkers used in their invasions of various colony worlds in the Romulan Republic story missions and the Rhi Atmosphere PVE, which are a rather blatant shout-out to the Martian tripods from The War of the Worlds.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • The Tribble With Klingons, Which gives us such gems as: Whack-A-Tribble, Tribble Savior, Tribble Topia, etc. Be warned, this has undergone rapid Memetic Mutation in the player base.
  • The KDF has a lot of this. One of the Klingon Player Versus Environment missions is called "Sulfur My Wrath." Players collectively groaned upon seeing it.
  • Mentioning the word 'Gorn' in zone chat is just begging for a veritable flood of puns based on the word.
  • An accolade available for killing enemies on Nimbus III is "Gorn Gone".
• Hyperactive Metabolism: we will have this trope in the future.
• Hypocritical Humor: During your first meeting with Mirror!Tilly, she pulls a phaser on one of her own crew, for referring to your crew as "assholes". Next episode, she herself calls you the same thing.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: It's easy to play this up with certain ships as they tend to have consoles that many players tend to consider useless and try to dump in order to raise their DPS.
• Idiot Ball: In the episode "Quark's Lucky Seven", Quark will insist on rigging up the player's ship with a second-hand cloaking device he got from his cousin Gaela, even if he's on a Klingon or Romulan ship that comes with a top-of-the-line cloak as standard equipment.
• I Have a Family:
  • The Republic prisoner on Hakeev's ship says this as the brainwashed player is about to forcibly install Borg implants into them without anesthesia. It doesn't do them any good.
  • Va'kel Shon uses this as his excuse for not helping Romulan and KDF players get past the Tholian guard in "Temporal Ambassador".
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Poor Miral Paris. She hates the fact that she is considered the Klingon Messiah. She just wants to be the head of security on the U.S.S. Kirk. Even worse is that the Guardian of Forever confirms the fact that she is the Kuvah'magh.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All five missions of the "Breen Invasion" episode include the word "cold" in the title, referring to the planet Breen being very, very wintry.
• Implacable Man: If you don't have a frequency remodulator device, Borg drones can easily become this once they adapt to your weapons. The only way to stop them then is to engage them in melee combat, where you risk possibly being assimilated.
  • The player-character and their crew can come off as this as well; taking everything the universe can throw at them and coming back for more.
• Immunity Attrition: Borg drones will adapt to incoming energy weapons fire after a few hits, but this only reduces incoming damage from that energy type. Even if you don't refrequence your weapons with a cheaply replicateable item, you can still Cherry Tap the drone to death.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • The Gorn equivalent of the Klingon Swordmaster likes to grab a chunk of the ground and throw it at you. Yes, even on a space ship/space station. A homing chunk of rock, no less, it tracks you if you run or dodge.
  • Orbital Strike for Engineer captains. It doesn't matter where you are—on the surface, underground, on another Federation starship, even back in time.
• In-Game Novel: The Path to 2409, a 29-volume text which tells the major historical events between the end of Star Trek: Nemesis in 2379 and the game's beginning in 2409.
• In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face: While most of the environmental suits and helmet-bearing elite armor sets in the game avert this, it's played straight with D'Tan and a Romulan scientist accompanying him in the cutscene at the end of the last Romulan reputation mission.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: There is one very prominent example on the Starfleet Academy map. Your character is not able to access the waterfront, even though there's only a literal waist-heigth fence in your way - one that you could jump over under normal circumstances. Many other maps use noticable Invisible Walls. Those are most prominent around the edges of maps, where your character suddenly can't go any further for no apparent reason, although in some maps (e.g. some of the Borg ones), there are energy fields acting as these.
• Infinity -1 Ship: The summer and winter event ships. Both have the console numbering of the Fleet ships, only requires a time investment (usually no more than 10 minutes tops) a day to get what you need to unlock them and once you unlock one, all you need is just a day's run through your other characters to get the rest.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • Many C-Store ships that come with special weapons usually bear the "Infinity" symbol and come with special modifiers that other weapons don't. What makes them Minus One Swords is that they only really scale up to about Mk XI.
  • The Reman Advanced Prototype Shield is actually one of the better shields available, especially if combined with the other pieces in its set. The "-1" version drops from the Coliseum mission, since it's only Rare quality and drops at Mk XI; if you want to make it better you have to pay via the upgrade process. It still has an awesome cosmetic effect, just like the version you can build in the Rep system.
• Infinity +1 Ship: The Fleet, Lockbox and Lobi ships. All three are top of the line ships: high hull strength, high shield modifier, usually a superior Bridge Officer layout and their upgrades makes them even stronger. However, getting Fleet ships means being in a Fleet and getting to the Level required to unlock that certain ship. Lockbox and Lobi ships are even worse as they require an insane amount of money, either real life cash or EC.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Key: The game features periodically changing "Lock Boxes" containing random items that need to be unlocked using a "Master Key," which costs 125 Zen (or 1125 Zen for a pack of 10 keys) and is consumed in the process. The lock boxes themselves drop frequently enough that, unless you use real money or sell/discard the boxes, you're likely to have way more of them than keys.
• Interface Screw:
  • Some missions will require you to hide your ship inside a nebula. Inside these nebulae, static interference will obstruct your entire view of everything on the screen save for the UI itself. Your map will also be obstructed by static as well.
  • Getting assimilated by the Borg during ground missions will also implement a fisheye lens-type effect on the camera that lasts until your character is defeated.
  • Being critically low on health in ground combat will cause the screen to grey out.
  • Having your ship boarded by an enemy in space combat will cause the edges of the screen to flash red until the effects of the boarding parties have expired or been neutralized.
  • In "The Long Night" part of the Empok Nor map has an effect where friendlies sporadically appear as hostile (red) and hostiles as friendly (blue), causing friendly fire situations until you activate a series of consoles to pump a hallucinogenic gas out of the atmosphere.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • In a mission where you've secretly been in a Holo-Deck the entire time, your away mission's map shows a yellow grid pattern.
  • An early Romulan mission involves checking three systems — Dewa, Gamma Eridon and Galorndon Core — to see which is the most suitable for colonization to become 'New Romulus'. Thing is, Dewa's name on the sector map was once Dewa III/New Romulus. This was later updated so that the sector name lacks the reference to New Romulus until some time after said mission. (During the mission, it still states you have arrived at New Romulus the first time you warp in, giving away that this will be the end of your search.)
• An Interior Designer Is You: Sort of; you get to choose what kind of bridge your ship has, and you can now run around your ship's interior. Cryptic has stated outright that they want to expand greatly upon this and eventually give you full control of your ship's interior and possibly even a starbase for player-made fleets.
  • You also get to design the exterior of your ship from several options for each major ship section, natch. It took them a while to add Klingon options, however.
  • Starbases have finally been added, which allow for very limited customization of both exteriors and interiors.
  • Also, the Foundry allowed for the creation of custom missions, as well as custom mission maps, including indoor, outdoor and outer space mission arenas.
• Item Crafting:
  • The system has gone through several iterations and is slated for updates
  • This is the only place to obtain the Aegis Space Gear for your ship. Thankfully, it's sellable on the Exchange for those who don't want to work for it.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Invoked in the "The Vault", as the player is exploring the inside of the massive space station.
  Tactical Officer: "Quiet in this area - too quiet."
• Jack of All Trades: A few starships tend to lean towards this pattern. This is easily shown with Lobi-bought Tal Shiar Adapted Battle Cruiser and the Jem'Hadar Dreadnought Carrier, as both are heavily armored and shielded ships who can utilize systems that can weaken an opponent in some way while dishing out punishment while losing out on certain things that would make them a Game-Breaker
• Jack of All Stats: The Fleet Support Cruiser Retrofit. Not as strong as the Fleet Exploration Cruiser Retrofit, not as powerful as the Fleet Assault Cruiser Refit, not as maneuverable as the Fleet Advanced Heavy Cruiser, but will get you through things in a pinch. In fact, many players opted to keep this instead of going to the equally laid out Guardian Cruiser.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While rescuing a Federation ship from a Borg sphere, Q, for seemingly no reason than his own amusement, will get involved and start resetting time, forcing you to rescue the ship against increasingly desperate odds. However, after the third go, he'll then send you and your away team back in time to the battle of Wolf 359, on board the Saratoga, where he reveals the Iconians have opened a small rift, letting a handful of Borg on board, where they will proceed to kill or assimilate Ben Sisko, and throw the entire future into chaos, unless you stop them. After clearing the ship, Q will admit he's moderately impressed, and will helpfully stop time, giving you a chance to get ready for the boss fight (which you will need). He can be an epic jerk about it, but Q seems to be looking out for the human race, and at least giving them a fighting chance against the Iconians' more cosmic level shenanigans.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Most of the Vorta, as you would expect. Neman, for instance, is utterly full of himself, especially since you have to take him to the Founders' homeworld, where no other Vorta has visited. He frequently drops snide comments like it's a waste that the PC has to kill off so many Jem'Hadar, but "you can always grow more..."
• Jump Scare: During "Time in a Bottle" (see Just One Second Out of Sync), occasionally while moving around at the Krenim outpost, an out-of-phase Iconian Herald, from a group that was fighting you earlier, will appear right in front of you, or sometimes with you standing in the same space with it. Since they look like 8 to 10-foot tall phantoms, trailing greenish-white eldritch fog, it's a nasty surprise at best. At worst it will shock the bejeebers out of you.
• Just Following Orders: Subverted in "Cold Comfort". Tran, a captured Breen Combat Medic, was ordered on an attack against a Deferi civilian freighter to gather intelligence about the Preserver Archive that Thot Trel is trying to find. He followed his orders, but tells the Player Character that he regrets doing so because attacking civilians is dishonorable.
• Just One Second Out of Sync: In the mission "Time in a Bottle", the player character and Captain Nog investigate a Krenim artifact. They discover a Krenim outpost that managed to evade the Vaadwaur's genocide by hiding half a second away out of the "regular" timestream. They also have plans for a great Timeship but need Alliance aid to build it.
• Karma Houdini: The universe has an unfortunate number of these in the main storyline.
  • J'mpok gets this as he is responsible for the Klingon Empire's Face–Heel Turn and has committed numerous war crimes like forced relocations as well as conquering the Gorn race. Ultimately, the Federation has to ally with him to keep the Iconians off their back. A Downplayed Trope example as events strip him of most political allies as well as get his best friends killed. Eventually he will outhoudini himself though and get his comeuppance
  • The Female Changeling gets one after avoiding this in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. After spending thirty years in prison for murdering over 800 million Cardassians and God knows how many other people, she's allowed back into the Dominion in exchange for stopping the Jem'Hadar remnant's invasion. It's also clear she's learned nothing from the experience. Ultimately subverted in the Victory Is Life expansion: it turns out she was responsible for the Hur'q invasion, their having been the first attempt at Slave Mooks a la the Jem'Hadar Gone Horribly Wrong. Shortly after she reveals this to the Player Character and an Allied team, whom she is preparing to have shot, a mutant Hur'q that's been stalking the protagonists kills her.
  • Actually Subverted despite first appearances with the Iconians. The Iconians look like they get away with massive destruction of the galaxy but they ended up with the same situation as Sela. It turns out their actions caused all of the pain and distress which drove them to all that murder in the first place.
• Kick the Dog: Gaul does this by shooting a Talaxian cook. In fact he had a complex plan to make certain there would be that dog to kick, that the player would be there to see the kick and that it would be the most senseless kick manageable in the whole Quadrant. When it fails to cause the right reaction from Neelix, he proceeds to stomp on the whole litter just to drive home that he is Evil.
• Kill and Replace: Standard M.O. of Undine infiltrators. On three separate occasions in-game they've replaced members of Starfleet or the Federation diplomatic corps, and in one case a Klingon commander, and the Gorn Hegemony leadership in the backstory was infested with them. The infiltration problem was discovered when they tried it on Ja'rod, son of Torg, but underestimated his badassery.
• Kill It with Fire: Some weapons, particularly plasma-based weapons, will often set targets ablaze when they hit an enemy. Applies to both ground and ship-based versions.
  • The 'four spectres' the player fights in Gre'thor and Fek'Ihr himself will also use this trope to devastating effect. Get caught in the area of one of their flame attacks and you can pretty much kiss your ass goodbye.
  • The fighting pit in Hassan's Shangdu hideout on Nimbus III features trapdoors that drop anyone (player or NPC) unlucky enough to tread on them into flames which are immediate death.
• Killed Mid-Sentence:
  • Thot Trel during the Breen arc.
  Thot Trel: "...But... I'm... Thot... Tr..."
  • Also happens to a Vaadwaur Mook in "Capture the Flag"
  Vaadwaur soldier: "Your ship is do—" *incinerated by plasma*
  • Clauda, the Tuterian researcher assisting with the Krenim weapon in "Butterfly", gets this as well when saying farewell to her husband
  Clauda: "I lov-" *gets erased from time*
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Played with. Torpedoes are far and away the most damaging weapons in your starship's arsenal, but they kind of suck against shields—even if you just have a sliver left, that's enough to negate most of the damage. That's where phasers and disruptors come in, and the Command specialization features a number of traits to boost torpedoes. On the ground, meanwhile, melee weapons have the advantage of ignoring shields and Borg adaptation, guaranteeing a steady damage output if you're willing to risk your skin up close. The TR-116 rifle is a good example of this. While it's only a Mk I level weapon, it can penetrate shields and be shot around corners thanks to that mini-transporter. It can be killer in PVP if used right and very effective against the Borg. The only issue is that they were only available via pre-order from Target and the contract has prevented them from making it in-game via rep system or drop. That all changed when the transporterless TR-116B became available in the crafting system.
• Klingon Promotion:
  • Not only does the game implement this in the KDF tutorial missions as the main way a lowly Warrior gains command of an entire starship, but fleets (the in-game "guilds") can also implement a non-violent version of this when leaders have been negligent in their duties; if the fleet leader has been inactive for a set period of time (usually several months), junior members can usurp control of the fleet from them.
  • The death of the Female Changeling leaves Odo as the de-facto leader of the Dominion at the end of the "Victory is Life" storyline.
• Klingon Scientists Get No Respect:
  • So much so that the Klingons don't actually have dedicated Science Vessels. Instead, they have Birds-Of-Prey, small, ultra-manoeuverable ships that have universal Bridge Officer slots which can be assigned any type rather than being limited to one. Then again, their Carriers have similar capabilities to Science Vessels (fewer weapons, increased shields, extra Science stations, Auxiliary Power bonus...) and the Gorn, members of the Klingon side, have outright Science ships though without the Klingon trademark attributes like cloaking.
  • In-game the chief engineer of the Klingon flagship complains that the engineers do all the work and the warriors take all the credit.
  • Demonstrated in "House Pegh". Kahless is given all the credit for wounding the Iconian T'Ket (right before T'Ket ran him through), even though he wasn't even able to dent it until science officer B'Eler technobabbled away its Nigh-Invulnerability.
• Knight of Cerebus: "So you are the heroes of the Milky Way. You have come further than we expected, but still you chase our shadows. We give you a single warning. Do not attract our attention again." Although the playerbase complained about the Cutscene Incompetence of roughly everyone else present, all of whom were armed, in not vaporizing the Iconian on the spot while she was monologuing.
• Knock Back: There are tons of different weapons and attacks that deal this out, both on the ground and even in space. Hell, some types of personal shields your Captain and away team members can wear have the ability to deal this out to anyone attacking them. Romulan warbirds even do this to other ships hit by the Planar Shockwave of their singularity cores exploding when they're defeated.
• Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game:
  • Some of the promo art features a young female Vulcan◊ wearing a Starfleet-styled Custom Uniform of Sexy with plentiful cleavage. On the other hand, when the Expansion Pack Legacy of Romulus was dropped, another Romulan showed up in the promo wallpapers, dubbed "So'Hott" by the players. According to Word of God this is meant to be Commander Tiaru Jarok, the captain of the Romulan Republic flagship RRW Lleiset (the Romulan counterpart to the Enterprise). She becomes a Recurrer starting with the Season 8 teaser mission "Sphere of Influence" but wasn't in the game until that mission was released.
  • Promo art for the second expansion Delta Rising played this straight again. This wallpaper features a hot female Romulan in a Spy Catsuit, a hot blonde Liberated Borg Starfleet officer in tactical greys, and a big, burly Klingon with a bat'leth. Though the Romulan at least bears some resemblance to Commander Mena, the Romulan mission giver for much of DR's storyline.
• Lampshade Hanging: You get an accolade for scanning an anomaly inside the Bajoran wormhole. Its title? "Isn't This All One Big Anomaly?"
• Large and in Charge:
  • The more important the Breen, the bigger they are. H'ren are a bit shorter than humans, senior officers are One Head Taller, and Thot Trel is an absolute colossus.
  • Exaggerated further with the Fek'lhri, who range from the wast-high Hordlings to the Slave Masters, who are twice your height... and the Horde's senior leadership are even bigger than that.
  • The Gorn seem to be fond of this as well; low-level grunts look like anemic midgets compared to their superiors. One could be forgiven for mistaking a high-level Gorn officer for a T. rex or Godzilla.
  • Kar'ukan, the leader of the Jem'Hadar near the end of the Dominion storyline, is twice as big as the other Jem'Hadar under his command.
  • The Tholians employ this to some degree as well, most noticeably when wearing environmental suits; Ensigns are roughly human-sized, whereas the Captains are almost twice as big.
  • Also applies to NPC starships too; you have dinky little frigates at one end, then massive, hulking dreadnoughts at the other which are considered to be capital ships and/or flagships for their respective factions.
• Large Ham:
  • Colonel Hakeev of the Tal Shiar. To such a degree that he can be hard to take entirely seriously. For instance at Khitomer: "I don't care if you have a hundred Klingon ships. You will NOT stop me." And then there is his Big "NO!" at the end of the Coliseum episode. Coming at the end of a rather hammy monologue as it does. [1] Tropes Are Not Bad, though, as his hamminess is about the only thing adding some levity to what is otherwise a VERY grimdark storyline compared to the other two factions'.
  • Noye. After his Face–Heel Turn and vendetta against the player character, he brings the hamminess up to eleven. Like Hakeev, Supervillain!Noye serves as some necessary comic relief.
• Laser Blade: Yes, in Star Trek. There are Nanopulse Lirpas and Bat'leths (which is by the way based in an ACTUAL canon technobabble) which give off the glow full time. The one that is kinda controversial is the new Tholian Energy Sword which harnesses energy shot at its wielder and converts it into an energy blade that reflects incoming fire like a lightsaber. the controversy comes from the fact it's so blatant about it and being an Ass Pull of tech. It's still moderately popular simply because of the trope though.
• The Legions of Hell: The Fek'lhri are a space-faring version of this. They are malicious souls of the damned. Spirits sent to Gre'thor, the Klingon version of Hell. The Klingons have a story arc where you and your crew are sent down to Gre'thor itself, where you must find why and how the Fek'Ihri reappeared. Along your travels you will fight, among other demons, the physical personifications of Treachery, Cowardice, and Dishonor, then finally Molor and Fek'Ihr, something like the Klingon versions of Asmodeus and the Devil. Possibly subverted: Your science officer suggests after the fact that the battle in Gre'thor may have been All Just a Dream and that the Fek'Ihri were created by biotech, possibly by the Hur'q. Nothing comes of this... until Victory is Life, which reveals the Fek'Ihri are renegade Dominion creations inspired by Klingon myths and based on the Hur'q.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: The Dominion, true to their Pragmatic Villainy roots. In "Victory Is Life" we learn that after turning the ancient Hur'q into mindless monsters and accidentally unleashing them on the Galaxy, the Dominion used special lure devices to draw the swarm to worlds of their choosing, worlds that they wanted to add to the Dominion. The Founders would offer the targets a choice: join the Dominion and be saved by the Jem'Hadar, or refuse and watch their world and everyone on it be eaten alive by the swarm. It worked for millennia, until the Hur'q swarms became too large and too powerful for the Jem'Hadar to contain.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: When an Iconian shows up at the end of Surface Tension and casually kills the Klingon High Council, Admiral Quinn points out that they are the reason they should stop this pointless war and work together. Which formally ends the Federation/Klingon War.
• Let's You and Him Fight: In episode "Allies", mission "Memory Lane", the Tal Shiar leak false information to try and get the Romulan PC and an RRF captain allied with the opposite faction to take each other out. This fails, but not before the Romulan PC kills several of the other captain's squads.
• Level Scaling: In order to maintain some of the challenge, all instances that the player enters into will feature enemies that scale up to your level. This also helps please the fanbase by maintaining that the Klingons, the Orion Syndicate, the Gorn, and all the other races you engage in the low level story arcs are still a viable threat against you at level 50^note and that while an assault cruiser (e.g. Sovereign class) is still clearly significantly more powerful than a light cruiser (e.g. Centaur class), it is not by several orders of magnitude as happens when comparing two players with a 40-level difference. Public areas like space conflicts still scale the enemies to their appropriate levels, making it very easy to destroy entire Klingon armadas with only a few phaser shots to drop the shields and a torpedo to finish off the ship. This can produce odd effects when a low-level character gets behind the helm of a T6 ship from the Zen store; patrols and other solo instances are often much easier at low level than when finally reaching max rank.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Escort class ships. Once you learn and train your tactical officers with the Cannon Rapid Fire ability, you will tear almost any ship's shields to shreds faster than they have time to turn around and start fighting back. Add torpedoes into that mix and they'll be dead in seconds. Defense can be easily enhanced through shielding and skill distribution into science or engineering skills.
• Lizard Folk: The Gorn, Saurians and Voth.
• Loads and Loads of Loading:
  • One of the few nearly-universal complaints about the game is that due to the way sector space, solar systems and human-scale stuff is divided, you have to transition between loading screens a lot. Admittedly, because of the way they go from environment to environment in the shows so quickly, there wasn't all that much of a way of escaping scene changes, but on older machines or lower-quality connections the load times can hurt.
  • With the release of Season 10, sector space was revamped from seventeen separate regions into three major quadrants which are enormous to cross, but cut down massively on loading screens. Trying to transition from sector space to a human-scale environment (say, from sector space to Earth Spacedock) still takes several loading screens in rapid succession, though.
• Locked Room Mystery: In "What Lies Beneath," the party hears a cry for help coming from the intercom outside a locked room. After breaking in, they find the body of someone who'd just been shot with a phaser, with no sign of the shooter. Solution: It was done by a malfunctioning maintenance hologram and its mobile emitter probably just flew through an air duct or something.
• Long-Runners: By its ten-year anniversary in 2020, STO had become the longest-running continuous Star Trek project in history.
• Lord British Postulate: During a limited-time event, Cryptic put a hologram of Deep Space 9's Captain Kurland on the Promenade as the contact point to get a prize. Klingon Defense Force toons quickly discovered they could fight him due to a coding mistake, and hilarity ensued.
• Loophole Abuse: Following the outcry of "too much grinding" for new ships in the fourth anniversary event, Cryptic introduced a system that allowed players to obtain the ships for alts at a significantly lower cost after unlocking it. Took a year and some change for Cryptic to realize these players were now just grinding for the ships now and waiting until next year so they didn't have to do the grinding then. They were much faster in stopping players from doing that with dilithium and marks, though, either way, players got angry because they felt Cryptic was being angry.
• Lower-Deck Episode: Played with. You are, of course, The Captain, so it wouldn't make sense for you to be deeply involved in one of these. However, the game does offer "Duty Officers," who are semi-randomly generate and whom you can send on Lower Deck Missions, bringing back small amounts of EXP, EC, dilithium and "Commendation Experience," a second set of levels which give you some new abilities. What's interesting is that Duty Officers themselves are Serious Business. The cheapest Bridge Officers, the NPCs that form your away team, start at like 100 EC at the exchange. The cheapest Duty Officers start at 30K.
  • This is a direct result of free-market economy, plus Starbase maintenance silliness on the part of Cryptic. Why do Starbase development projects require so many "Common" quality Duty Officers? Why are they spent like provisions or industrial energy cells? Whatever the reason, the fact that every player owned fleet is constantly hungry for Duty Officers is what drives the Exchange price so far up. Bridge Officers have no such demand, and thus are much cheaper.
• Luck-Based Mission: "Azure Nebula Rescue". Four asteroids in the corners of the map spawn one of four random Romulan ships held by tractor beams and guarded by Tholians, you have to rescue them. Ships are assigned different point values: one for a T'Liss Warbird, 2 for a Dhelan Warbird, 3 for a Ha'pax, 5 for a Falchion Dreadnought. The more points you free during the mission, the better you do. There's also an optional objective to free ten points of ships "quickly," i.e. within five minutes. There's not enough DPS in the galaxy to make it through the Tholians and free ten individual ships in five minutes, so if all the asteroids will spawn are T'Liss, you fail (the optional objective is, fortunately, optional but has a serious impact on the rewards). Even if you're getting a mix of T'Liss and Dehlan Warbirds, you'll be hard-pressed to get to ten points in the time alloted.
• Machinima: The "The Veil Of Space" trailers.
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • The "High Yield Torpedo" abilities allow a single launcher to fire 2, 3, or 4 torpedoes at a single target, but the prize goes to the "Torpedo Spread" ability that fires 3 (reduced damage) torpedoes each at up to 3 targets (9 total) at lowest level moving up to a theoretical maximum of 9 torpedoes each at up to 9 targets (that's up to 81 total) from a single launcher at the top end.
  • The Armitage Heavy Escort comes with a console that targets 8 enemies around you with 6 photon torpedoes. That is about 48 torpedoes. Combine this with the highest version of the above "Torpedo Spread" ability, and you are now looking at up to 129 torpedoes that will absolutely shred a group of enemies in front of you if their shields are weakened.
  • The Borg command ship from the sector invasion events love to use Torpedo Spread on the players. For a ship of it's size, from the player's perspective, it looks like you're getting hit point blank with buckshot from a shotgun. Say goodbye to your shields and 90% of your hull from the initial impact.
  • Plasma Torpedoes launchers only fire one torpedo at High Yield (it gets modified into a slower, destructible, but much more damaging torpedo instead), but the Romulan Hyper-Plasma Torpedo fires three High Yield torpedoes as the default mode. Torpedo Spread doesn't have quite the impact it does on other torpedoes (it goes from 2 torpedoes per three targets to 2 torpedoes per 5 targets), but on the other hand, 10 torpedoes is pretty impressive for a single attack by a single ship.
  • The Breen Transphasic Torpedoes have this in spades. The normal ones fire two or three at once, with a normal shot, but when the Torpedo Spread ability is used in tandem with it, it is a real massacre. And then there's the Transphasic CLUSTER Torpedo launcher, this baby fires a single slow torpedo. When that torpedo gets close enough to its target; it instantly splits into TEN mines. What's more those mines don't have the delay that the normal ones have. The only thing that ballences this weapon is its 60 second recharge time, and the fact that the torpedo is all but useless if it hits strong sheilds. However, if these babies hit a target with a downed facing shield; well, the target will fall way below 25% in health even if it was at 100% before the torpedo blew it all to heck.
  • The new Tactical Pilot Ships have one. For bonus points, it's actually micro missiles instead of torpedoes. Feast your eyes: [2]
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Captain Shon of the Federation, Captain Koren of the Klingon Empire, and Commander Jarok of the Romulan Republic tend to assist the player characters far more than any other characters, possibly excluding the TV series' alumni of course.
• The Man Behind the Man: The Iconians, architects of all the strife sweeping the galaxy. All it took was one Iconian Portal to literally walk into Fluidic Space and mess around with the Undine, a race who simply wants to be left alone, enough times to get them to do all the rest of the work.
  • On a smaller scale, this trope applies to the Romulan Empire. While Empress Sela does in her own right hold a great deal of authority and power, The Tal Shiar have always had their own agenda and goals of operation. They work under their own masters, and don't recognize Sela as the true ruler of the empire.
  • In Victory is Life, we learn that the Dominion created both the Fek'Ihri and the Hur'q as predecessors to the Jem'Hadar.
  • On top of that, in "Tenebris Torquent" we learn that Tzenthethi Admiral Tzen-Tarrak, the one who started their genocidal campaign against Hur'q-infested worlds, was actually the Female Changeling in disguise, trying to wipe them out so the Dominion wouldn't have to.
• Manipulative Bastard: This is the Iconians' Hat. They're responsible for starting everything that has happened in the first 10 seasons.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: When you beam down with your Away Team, you can set their actions via boff commands, but there's no real way to order them once combat begins, or sometimes to even control where they walk in the environment. Making it worse are the frequent displays of Artificial Stupidity on the part of the program steering your team. For instance, in the mission where you have to travel on a Klingon planet using holographic disguises, taking all the care you can to avoid being sniffed out by passing targs won't stop your crew from walking right up to them and triggering a fight when they're discovered. These sort of incidents can result in looking round and suddenly realizing that your whole team is downed by enemy action, without even a hint to you that something was happening.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: During the invasion of Klingon space by the Fek'lhri, nobody is quite sure whether they're up against demons or artificial constructs. "Victory Is Life" confirms that the Fek'Ihri are artificial constructs created by the Dominion, based on old Klingon mythology.
  • And then "Leap of Faith" muddies things even further by actually having the player retrieve a Klingon's soul from Gre'thor, so she can be placed into a clone body, after which the Fek'Ihri come through various portals over the Monastary at Boreth, leaving it dubious as to what is magic and what is mundane.
• Meaningful Name: The R.R.W. Lleiset, to anyone who knows Rihan: Lleiset means "Freedom".
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Most ships either have equal numbers of fore and aft weapons, or more in the front than the back—typically 4/4 for cruisers, 4/3 for science ships and escorts, 3/3 for carriers, and 5/3 for some battlecruisers and dreadnoughts. The Vorgon Ytijara Dreadnought Cruiser uniquely has a 3/5 weapon layout, which makes it look like a Joke Character at first glance. That said, its stats are pretty good for a ship of its class and it comes with frigate-class hangar pets, so in the hands of a decently experienced build-maker it turns out to be Difficult, but Awesome: you're usually recommended to put all dual beams in the front and a mix of omnidirectional beams and mines in the rear and fly it like you would a battlecruiser.
• Medium Awareness: During "The State of Q", Q himself will speak through the yellow text message pop up on screen that says "Intense, isn't it?" These yellow messages are typically reserved for system notices such as when you receive a reward for completing quests, goals, duty officer assignments, and such.
• Megaton Punch/Touch of Death: It's possible (though very rare) to disintegrate enemy NPCs or other players with hand-to-hand criticals.
• Mêlée à Trois:
  • More like Melee a Dodécaèdre. The galaxy at the beginning of the game is a huge mess of big wars, small wars, and Enemy Mines. The Feds are at war with the Klingons and in border fights with the Breen, the Romulan Star Empire, the Tholians, and the True Way. The Klingons are fighting the Feds and RSE, and have a covert ops war going against the Undine. Meanwhile the Feds and KDF are also allied in support of the Romulan Republic, which is fighting Sela's RSE and a splinter state ruled by the Tal Shiar.
  • The mission "Skirmish" opens up with a three-way fight between Starfleet, the KDF, and the True Way. The PC discovers later that the Devidians are also involved and attacking the True Way.
  • Upon arrival at the Preserver outpost world, the player finds several Breen and Jem'Hadar ships fighting for control of whatever's on the surface. The player's crewmates encourage them to attack while both are distracted.
  • On a macro scale, the conflict between the Voth, the Alpha Quadrant powers, and the Borg, shown in Dyson Reputation cutscenes and spoken of in the dev blogs. The Voth are fighting the Borg in their home space, as is the Alpha Quadrant, but the Voth are fighting the Alpha Quadrant for control of the Dyson spheres.
  • "A Step Between Stars" is initially just between the Voth and the Dyson alliance. Then the Undine blast their way into the Jenolan Dyson sphere and wipe out what's left of the Voth fleet before engaging the Dyson alliance.
  • In Delta Rising's "Borg Disconnected" TFO, what starts as an effort to rescue Borg drones liberated after "Hive: Onslaught" from re-assimilation turns into a Mêlée à Quatre between the players and Borg Cooperative, the Borg Collective, the Undine, and the Voth.
• Memetic Badass: In universe. The player fully achieves this status, complete with random Starfleet NPCs fawning over the player's character... as early as the first moment you arrive at Earth spacedock. Justified, in that...oh hell, just read this page from top to bottom. Don't even bother looking behind the spoilers.
• Metagame: Like many games, it has this. This goes double for the Special Task Force PVE missions. The game's Power Creep shot this to hell until Delta Rising arrived, forcing this back and angering players, who failed these missions because they couldn't just faceroll and blow everything up instantly.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • One way to play the cruiser allows significant toughness (though less than the all-out defense build) while maintaining a pretty dangerous offense. You're still slow and won't turn for anything, but when you shoot (especially broadside) - the enemy WILL feel it.

• Mini-Mecha: Voth "exosuits", higher-level creatures that act as mini-bosses in Season 8's Ground Battlezone, and are about three times the height of the average player character. They're stylized like fat dinosaurs and have Arm Cannons, mortars, and a barrier field that shoves players backwards.
• Mildly Military:
  • As ever for Starfleet. In fact, you can customize the uniform on your captain and on each bridge officer - while they'll still be Starfleet uniforms, they don't even have to match. With TOS, TNG, Deep Space Nine, the various films, and even mirror universe uniforms available, they don't even have to have the "new" look.
  • Averted with regards to the M.A.C.O. marines, who are definitely NOT Mildly Military. The player gets away with the multiple uniforms at higher levels despite being one because they're primarily Starfleet with a dual commission. The STO tie-in novel The Needs Of The Many actually shows what being a M.A.C.O. is like and they sounds like any marine you've met in real life. Their uniform doesn't change much, it's based on what Mark equipment your using and how good you are.
• Military Brat: NPCs in Starfleet include the children, grandchildren, or other descendants of Hikaru Sulu, Mira Romaine, Miles O'Brian, Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres, and Samantha Wildman. (The latter two were born aboard Voyager during that series' run.) Civilian descendants include those of Harry Mudd and Cyrano Jones.
• Mole in Charge:
  • Undine seem to be good at this, given how the entire Klingon Empire is at war with the Federation because of them. "Diplomatic Orders" has you escorting someone who turns out to be an Undine imposter.
  • The genocidal Tzenkethi are being led by the Female Changeling, impersonating high ranking Admiral Tzen-Tarrak.
• Mook Maker:
  • Klingon Targ Handlers will spawn an endless legion of creatures to attack you until you take them down. On the other side of the neutral zone, Tactical Player Captains can summon a two man team of NPC redshirts from their ship to fight for them every two minutes. But if you combine that with the Tactical Initiative skill, which instantly recharges all of your abilities...
  • Carriers are this mechanically, since the only cap on how many fighters you or the AI can launch is on how many birds you can have in the air at any given time.
  • This is the Hur'q's shtick. The ground troops will permanently spawn assistants, the space ships will spawn swarmers - not as a carrier, they will just appear.
• More Dakka: Whereas Cruisers are more into Beam Spam, Escorts' ability to equip considerable numbers of rapid-firing cannons puts them into this trope instead. Especially since most cannon-related abilities involve increasing their rate of fire even further. The current king of dakka is the Federation's Andorian-designed Kumari-class escort, a pure Glass Cannon with an Alpha Strike that looks like something out of a Bullet Hell game.
  • Guroth, the weapons expert of Delta Flight, practically worships this trope, as he explains when he meets the player;
  Guroth: "Most weapons on ships are too puny; I make them strong. Have you ever considered what would happen if you loaded five quantum torpedoes into one casing? You have to reinforce the tubes, but the result is most satisfying!"
• Morton's Fork: At the end of each of the Excalbian's trials between good and evil in "The Measure of Morality Part 1", you are given the choice of saving or sparing a character. Whichever option you choose will result in a darker, more terrible timeline than the one you experienced, according to Yarnek:
  • The "Cutting the Cord" trial: You are give the option to save Obisek, or leave him to die and capture Hakeev. If Obisek dies, the Remans never unify with the Romulans and form the Romulan Republic, and the two races eventually go to war with each other. If you save Obisek and let Hakeev go, he convinces his Iconian masters to use scorched-earth tactics in their invasion of the Milky Way galaxy, resulting in a far bloodier Iconian War than the one you experienced.
  • The "Ragnarok" trial: Letting the Female Changeling kill Noye makes him a martyr for the Temporal Liberation Front, who then use the Tox Uthat to destroy the stars of all the Alliance worlds, including Sol and Qo'Nos. The TLF eventually becomes the dominant force across space and time. However, if you reverse time and kill the Female Changeling before she can kill Noye, he surrenders peacefully. But without the Founder and her schemes, the Dominion is overrun by the Hur'q, who go on to ravage three of the four quadrants, killing trillions.
  • The "Red Angel" trial: Saving Future!Burnham prevents her from taking the Sphere data to the future, and wiping the data ends up killing her. In either case, Control merges with Seven of Nine's Borg nanoprobes and spawns an Evil Twin Seven of Nine, then escapes.
• Motile Vehicular Components:
  • The seven destroyer-class ships that are given out as bonuses for buying a lifetime subscription all have moving parts that change configuration based on two flight modes.
  • The Avenger- and Arbiter-class battlecruisers have armored shutters that close over the viewports, windows, and warp nacelles when the ship goes to Red Alert.
• Moveset Clone:
  • The Starfleet Avenger-class and Klingon Mogh-class battlecruisers have the same bridge officer layout, virtually identical stats, and very similar unique consoles that act as Recursive Ammo weapons. Their primary difference is that the Mogh has a built-in cloaking device, whereas the Avenger has to use the cloak console add-on. Justified as the Avenger having been based off of stolen plans for Klingon battlecruisers, and the Mogh being based in turn on the Avenger.
  • The Dyson ships, introduced during the 4th year anniversary event are this. The purchasable ships take this even further: each faction has access to the same variation (based on career path) of the ship. This is justified as all three factions were working on the same technology developed after the discovery of the Solanae Dyson Sphere. Slightly averted as the Federation version has no cloaking ability.
  • Since of Delta Rising, new ships based on new specializations (Command, Pilot, Miracle Worker) are this. Like the Dyson ships previously, each faction has access to the same variation (based on career path) of the ship, right down to the consoles used. The T6 Multi Mission Explorers also apply. Also slightly averted as the Federation version has no cloaking ability.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Tzenkethi feature two sets of arms; one huge pair that would make The Incredible Hulk jealous, and a smaller pair used for more precise interactions.
• Mundane Utility: One duty officer mission has you sabotage a provisions stockpile of the KDF. Do you destroy the food or poison it? Nope you just beam over about three tribbles and let them do it for you.
• My Greatest Second Chance: In the Klingon mission "Afterlife", you'll find First Officer Doran, who was slain in the Klingon Tutorial Mission. You find out that her death was a one way ticket to Gre'thor, Klingon Hell. Your player convinces her to team up with her husband and give her a clean slate so she can go to Sto-vo-kor, Klingon version of Heaven or Valhalla.
• Mythology Gag:
  • When the Romulan PC is captured and subjected to Tal Shiar brainwashing, they can acquire a pair of accolades ("There Are Four Lights" and "There Are Five Lights", depending on whether they fully resist or fully comply with the brainwashing) inspired by the 2 + Torture = 5 scene between Picard and Gul Madred in Star Trek: The Next Generation: ""Chain of Command, Part II".
  • The "Feminine" pose in the costume editor is identical to the female androids in I, Mudd.