Name a few

Saturday, 18 June 2011 Written by 

Fleet Operations tries to keep close to the Star Trek shows, especially for graphics and visual effects. Yet, we always had a slight but important issue: a starship's name and registry. Both are very prominent markings on a ship and were seen in many show and movie flybys. What would the Enterprise have been without the famous "1701"? Yet, we had to skip the nameplates entirely.


And that just changed! For the first time in Fleet Operations - and Armada - your vessel's name and registry will appear right on the hull to give a personal feeling of your fleet. Your battle-tested veterans and attack squadrons will no longer be just one of those countless clones - they are now individual ships! I will keep this post short and jump directly to some screenshots.

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We even went so far as to add the very small hull markings on the nacelles or the main bodies of starships, as you can see on the warpdrive in the Excelsior shot above. While they are not easily readable in game, they still add that final bit of "Trek spirit" to the Fleet Operations models. As only the Federation is seen to mark their ships, we only included this new feature for them, yet. But we could think of other factions, like the Klingons, to include a similar visual extension in the future.