Pumping Irony

I’m horrible at getting these blogs written in a timely manner. The Vault was release last Saturday — ten days ago — and I’m just getting around to uploading a few of the screenshots I took and doing a brief writeup.

I was commuting home from work when The Vault opened and the massive influx of players brought the STO servers down, so I didn’t have to deal with that. Unfortunately, that also meant that my fleet-mates had already completed The Vault so I set out solo. Tipa did an excellent (and timely, imagine that!) writeup (with spoilers, however), as did MMO Gamer Chick.

I wasn’t certain how to get started with this Feature Episode (in fact, that has been true of all of them so far) but enough people were asking in chat that I didn’t have to. Captain Arwellyn was still in ESD from the Anniversary so she beamed aboard the U.S.S. Arkenstone and warped to Starbase 39 in the Sierra II system of the Alpha Centauri sector. My contact is Admiral T’Nae who in charge of the starbase. She has a reconnaissance mission for Arwellyn but one that requires more subtlety than the Arkenstone could provide.

Admiral T’Nae directs me to Lieutenant Commander Kyle DeSoto who gives Arwellyn a token for a Type-8 shuttle. The officer at the ship requisitions also had a runabout offered so Arwellyn picked up both shuttle types, then launched the runabout with her tactical officer M’rilana and set course for the Haakona system.

After arriving in the system, M’rilana brought up the coordinates from T’Nae’s mission profile and carefully navigated to a few waypoints to take sensor readings and determine a way to disable the security grid. Once the grid was down, Arwellyn carefully guided the shuttle through and up to the base using maneuvering thrusters.

Once inside the massive Romulan base, Arwellyn and M’rilana had to make their way to the epicenter. Defense systems were active, including turrets and energy shielding and even a few patrols by Romulan fighters. Oddly, even destroying the turrets or the ships did not seem to trigger an intrusion alert.

At one point inside the base they notice a Borg sphere mounted high above. Tying in with a few Star Trek novels I’ve read recently, and I think one of the non-Feature Episode storylines in the game, it seems the Romulans are trying to reverse-engineer Borg technology!

At the epicenter of The Vault, the runabout crew discovers the source of thalaron radiation, a very dangerous energy source which consumes organic material. While Arwellyn and M’rilana work to disable the thalaron weapon, a Reman named Obisek identifies himself as the true villain behind The Vault (if it weren’t for us meddling kids!).

The crew eventually shut down the thalaron weapon and made it’s way back outside the base where a Reman battleship had arrived. A Federation ship was also there waiting for our signal that our mission was a success. Being they were only in a shuttle, they opted to stay somewhat hidden by interference inside a nebula while the two capital ships battled. While Arwellyn flew evasive maneuvers, M’rilana fought several fighters launched from the Reman battleship and also destroyed all plasma torpedoes fired at the Federation ship until the Reman ship was destroyed.

With the mission successful and the thalaron weapon neutralized, Arwellyn flew back to Starbase 39 to report to Admiral T’Nae and was rewarded with a more powerful phaser array for shuttles as well as a limited deployment of Scorpion fighter ships to help protect the Arkenstone in future space battles!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 at 12:18 am and is filed under MMO, Star Trek Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.