Will travel time be an issue? Might it be a mechanic to keep players bunched and promote socialization or to prevent players from venturing too far into the delta quadrant?

Travel times aren’t going to be a problem. You’ll get around pretty quick. We can’t do real time travel, obviously, We’ve got a couple other mechanisms to make sure that players are interacting. Obviously there are going to be starbases and space stations. There will be natural chokepoints because there will be obstacles in space just like anywhere else; places that ships really can’t get through. And so players will be pushed into a corridor, so players will still be running into one another.

You mentioned instancing, how will Star Trek Online make use of non-persistent areas?

Definitely when you go to a certain planet, it’s just you and your teammates beaming down to it.

Al "Captain Geko" Rivera (lead designer): Every series and movie is considered canon, and we are staying very true to this in our development. Star Trek is rich with lore and history, and there is a great deal of material to build upon as we move into the 25th century with Star Trek Online. We are working with CBS to ensure that everything we create is true to Trek and makes sense.

We know that fans want to play Star Trek Online because they want to explore the Star Trek universe, and we are striving to deliver as authentic an experience as possible. Our team has seen all the shows and movies and we're watching them again every single day. We are also studying other soft canon resources such as novels and comics. From those, we are looking for inspiration and references to further enhance our game. Where it makes sense, we will include some soft canon elements in Star Trek Online as well.

• Customization of characters, including race creations, skin, eye-brows, hair, antennae.
• Humanoids at launch only.
• Ship exteriors, geometry, colours, decals, ship names, serial numbers.
• Ship interiors, limited to the faction such as Starfleet specification.
• PvP between Klingons and Starfleet, perhaps some war games also.
• 3D movement for ships.
• Ship combat will be tactical, much like tall ship navy combat.
• Ground combat will be fast-paced, more so than common MMO's currently on the market.

Connect to irc.stoirc.com with a regular IRC client and visit #startrek-games or use our AJAX client below:

type /nick to change your Nick name, /help, /cs help, /ns help, or /ms help for available commands

• * The opportunity to be a featured guild with personalized forum content
  * Various community sections for not only discussing the game and the RP within in it, but to schedule events and highlight them
  * Community Calendar to keep track of events well into the future
  * Thread tagging
  * Search cloud / tag cloud
  * Thread prefixes
  * Social Networking Tools (like your own MySpace in your profile)
  * Public visitor messaging on profile pages with 'conversation' feature
  * User picture galleries with user comment facility
  * User-created social groups with invite only and moderated membership options
  * Extended member profile pages
  * Customizable member profile pages with admin-controlled styling abilities
  * Inline editing of custom user profile fields
  * Lightbox viewer for attached images
  * Social bookmarking integration
  * RSS Poster Robot with up to

...I'm sorry guys, I thought if I brought the argument to Jack Emmert he would see our point. He says while possible to get STO to market as early as possible player crews will not be considered for initial release. He did say if the community was in favor they would consider putting it in a later release.

I videod the Q&A with the part most important our argument answered below.

Also discussed but not