Dear Beloved Developers,
sitting on the bridge of my star cruiser today, i was looking at the computer displays, watching some sort of statistical bar graph moving up and down (between 2 frames that is)
it was then when i realized that this was the most fun thing to do on my bridge at the moment.
so, my suggestion is, ADD SOME FUNCTIONALITY to the bridges!
im not going to ask you to let me steer my ship from the bridge, yet

, but it would be pretty cool if you were to keep the ship and bridge in the same instance. lets say im sitting outside of space dock. when im on the bridge, i can look out the view-screen and see the ships around me. i walk over to a bridge station, and i can see a map of the region, with my ship and all the surrounding ships, represented by icons (escort, long range science vessel, assault cruiser, exc.)
in another map, i walk over to another station, and run a scan of the region. the scan tells me there are 4 anomalies in the area, or maybe even 3 enemy ships 25 kilometers away.
lets say in my last battle, my ship suffered several injuries, my shields have a debuff effect that keep them at 60 percent, and my torpedo launchers are offline. so, i walk to my engineering station, where i can access my engineering officer's or my abilities, and select emergency power to shields (i want this to last longer than 30 seconds, so it just provides a higher shield power setting, rather than regenerating them)
now i redirect more emergency power to weapons, to compensate for the loss of torpedoes.
after this is all done, i walk to the center chair, and enable tactical view, and wait for the battle.
this would all not only increase immersion, but give a further reason to be on THE BRIDGE.
Comments
I agree with this. Recently listened to an interview with dstahl and he said while it would be nice to be able to integrate the space map with the map of your ship (so you could ultimately fly around in sector space from your ship or bridge). Currently the game only handles one map, either sector space/the system you are in, or your ship's map/ground map. He said it would take a large piece of "tech" (as he calls it) to finally implement this.
It would be awesome to simultaneously pilot your ship and roam the corridors, a feature that everyone wants to see. But as of right now, Cryptic has other plans like more content and possibly those playable Romulans.
I must have missed something, did you say you were on a Federation or Klingon cruiser?
What would be nice to see is some of those small change ideas, I personally think some mini games should be added to the bridge to add functionality.
Mini game ideas:
Ships Library: It will show information on race's, planets, types of ships, and even the history of STO. Having the path to 2409 in a ships Library would give the history of STO without putting a huge work load on the Devs. And we already have a ships library on the main site, but it doesn't need to be that elaborate, but having information on each ship with a picture or two of that ship would be nice. Plus a brief description of each race and a picture of that race, and finally a list of solar systems and imporatant planets should also be added.
- Finally, make this set up to be kinda like the Ships Log, where you could ADD YOUR OWN information to the library and maybe even allow you to share it with other players. We could use an item to record our version of the library and send that item to other players.
- This idea is feasible because most of the Tech is already there. You have a ships log which could be converted, and all you need are a few ship/race pics. Transferring your Library to a friend however, might be too difficult, and if it takes too much time, maybe it could be dropped for a latter date.
EPS Power Flow Mini Game: Toying with this will give you a few bonus points (not a whole lot for a game breaker) but if done right, you could get a bonus boost to your power for a set amount of time. You could say, this is played from the engineering council on the bridge, thus giving it a reason to exist there instead of engineering, but you could have the mini game in both locations, no real reason why they can't.
The most you could get is a plus 15 power for 15 minutes, OR if you went for length, plus 5 power for 30 minutes. It all will vary but it seems like a cool rough draft idea.
Tactical Mini Game: This will allow you to boost damage to your weapons, again, it won't be a huge game breaker, but may help for PvP if done right. The game should only give a temp buff, same as the engineering mini game. The two should be identical in bonus, BUT REALLY SHOULD BE DIFFERENT IN THE MINI GAME. As in it's two different games, each with a different set of rules to play.
In fact, I think I should add a thread about this...
Federation.
and to all those who are saying it would take a whole lot of time, so be it! i can wait! but they need some motivation to do it. and if you want my opinion, they should not even add the Romulans until most of everything in the game is somewhat finalized. (bug fixes for season 2.0, stuff like that) and then after the Romulans were added (which i seriously think is going to be later rather than sooner) they can work on expanding the games immersion, such as keeping ships and interiors in once instance.
Sadly, not going to happen. If your ship interior were in the same instance as your ship, that means so would everyone else's.
If this were possible (in this engine, atleast), then it would be a trivial matter to let you steer it from inside too.
On the ground, your avatar takes the form of a "humanoid" and you control it like you do in any other game. The bridge and ship interiors are "ground" environments or maps. They are not the interior of your in-space avatar.
I think that it would take a lot of coding, or rather re-coding / re-writing of the game engine and the game itself in order for it to display both forms of your avatar at the same time while tracking each forms movement through its respective environment.
For all of you folks asking to be able to control your in-space avatar in one map at the exact same time as you are being presented your on-ground avatar in another map through some interactive controls in that ground environment are, IMHO, asking for far too much from STO.
If they can't do something on this line by the time TOR ships it will be an excuse for thousands to bail. To be fair, I think they know all of this and intend to do it as soon as they figure out how. I seriously doubt the problem is insurmountable. Difficult yes, but if they say they simply can never do it they aren't trying hard enough.
As it is, I'm just waiting for season 2. I can't bring myself to do another B'Tran daily between now and then as I've gotten enough marks for 6 admirals to completely outfit a new ship for each one in purple mk x gear. Of course soon we'll be grinding dailies for mk xi gear. The diplomatic corps will hopefully help with the grindy feeling I'm having right now from doing hundreds of exploration missions in a row.