In Star Trek Online, a new “season” was released about three weeks ago. I’ve talked about it before, so I won’t get into it. But a big part of it was the ability to get a new end-game ship by grinding out some of the new content every day. Which I did, and I got the ship. Now, the above shot is of my ship; you can see the official news page to see how it looks by default, its stats, and all that fun stuff.

I’m going to talk about my experience with it the past couple of days. I’ve only flown it in a few patrols, so it’s not like I have extensive experience or anything. I’m also probably doing it wrong. I didn’t take any screen shots with my ability bar (or any ui at all), so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I put what I believe is the Lukari T6 vanity shield on it. That’s why it looks so different from the default. I like that shield, though it’s a lot more blue than purple, compared to a lot of other ships I’ve used it on; and thanks to the lighting, it looks pretty gray. But I’ve never really liked the Elachi default skin, so having this makes me a lot happier.

But how does it fly? Pretty good, I guess. It’s a lot slower than I thought it was going to be. I think I was just expecting it to be more of a raider than an escort, based on its size, and the fact that most of its boff slots are universal. But it still turns well enough to use cannons or dual beam banks effectively, especially when using the Competitive reputation engines.

As I said, I don’t think I’m using the thing right. It has an Intel specialization boff slot, but I’m not using any of those abilities; I’m just sticking to the boring ol’ vanilla stuff. I’m not going to upload my whole build (mostly because I don’t have the game with me, and I don’t remember), but for the universal slots I have tactical and science in the LtCdr slots, engineer in the Lt slot, and tactical in the Ens slot.

Also, the thing is pretty squishy, as one would expect from a “frigate”. I really don’t know where Cryptic is going with this in its naming scheme: NPC frigates are the lowest of the low, while this thing is actually rather good. I think I should have put five DBB’s in the front, instead of three with two regular beams. It’s clear this thing was meant for cannons (and that’s what the NPC version has), but I’m not a huge fan of them. (Now, going full turrets, THAT’S where the fun is. But it’s also not terribly effective.)

So, overall? Not really sure. But even in the last two days it’s grown on me. I’ll call this one a success.