To Boldly Go… The USS Enterprise

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The Starfleet flagship, the USS Enterprise, is one in the line of iconic Constitution class starships. These phenomenal spacecraft have become the backbone of a rebuilding and reinvigorated Federation. Each model in the class is fitted with the latest technology the Federation has to offer.

Star Trek Fleet Command

It’s the ship you downloaded the game to get. The USS Enterprise. The big Jerry Goldsmith theme played in my head as she emerged from the Shipyard. When you get yours, it’s going to be a big day.

When I got mine, it was even a big deal for my seven-year-old son, whose introduction to Star Trek has been this game. He was so excited when I told him a few months ago that today was the day we’d be getting the Enterprise.

How to Get Your USS Enterprise

Unlike the uncommon and rare Tier 3 ships, you can’t grind your way to a USS Enterprise per se. You’re not going to have blueprints drop by hitting hostiles. You can buy blueprints either with faction credits or with actual dollars. You can get some in missions, and you can get some in rare and epic armadas.

You’ll also have to have a level 34 shipyard, and you’ll need to have a respected reputation with the Federation.

The key, unless you’re willing and able to fork over a lot of money, is to grind out the faction credits. This means living in Klingon space, and hunting Klingon Scout ships like it’s your job. You’ll need 180 of them a day (more if you’ve leveled up your rep past respected.)

It also means getting your Vi’Dar as strong as you can and grinding out Borg probes for charged nanoprobes. It’s going to be a long road, but it’s worth it.

In order to help keep you focused, and doing what you need to do every day to get your Enterprise, I put together this Blueprint Calculator. A number of people have told me that it helped them stay focused, and get their ship sooner.

blueprint calculator
My Blueprint calculator will let you know how long it will be until you can build your Enterprise.

The Ship Ability

Giving What She’s Got – As long as the ship has Morale, the USS ENTERPRISE heals the Shield Health whenever it gets hit.

This ability starts at 5% at level one and works all the way up to 25% at level 45. This means your shields will heal 5% for each time you’re hit in battle. So if you’re at level 1 going up against an Augur (which should be the ship to defeat the Enterprise), you’re going to get hit four times in round one, so long as your ship has morale, you’re going to get 20% of your shield back before the next round.

At level 45, you’ll get 100% back.

Since the key to just about every battle in Star Trek Fleet Command is surviving and giving your weapons more chances to fire, this ability is tremendous. It’s going to feel like you never run out of shields. Even when you lose, your still likely going to have shields left over.

But, you will need to make sure that you’ve got officers on your ship that will get you morale to make it work. Which leads us to how to crew the ship.

Crewing Your USS Enterprise

In order to take advantage of the Enterprise’s great ship ability, you’re going to want to activate Morale. As of today, October 24th, 2020, there are only a few officers who do that. James T. Kirk, Alexander Marcus, Arkady Ivanov, and Hikaru Sulu.

Of these, you’ll probably want to go with Kirk, or Marcus, or both.

Given that the Enterprise’s ability will tend to get you in longer battles, Khan to increase your critical chances becomes a very good choice. If you’ve got a decent Paul Zhou he’s great with any morale crew. Officers like Uhura or Kang will also increase your accuracy.

You might also want to go with an anti-faction officer like Krell or Mirek (anti-Federation), Yan’agh, or Yuki (ant-Romulan), or L’Nar against Klingons. Yuki also makes a great captain for your Enterprise, as her shield stripping will remove a portion of your opponent’s shields per round – and again, in long battles, this will help you. All of that damage will now be going to your opponent’s hull.

If you’ve got John Harrison, he’ll also be somewhat effective. The rub is that he only works for one round, but the Enterprise is built for long battles and has it’s biggest weapon damage in even-numbered rounds.

Against hostiles, your Pike crew will do just fine.

The great thing about the Enterprise is that it gives you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to the crew. It’s a Swiss-army knife of a ship. So depending on which officers you have, what you’re trying to accomplish, and your level, you’re going to find a combination on this ship that works for you.

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The Weapons of the USS Enterprise

uss enterprise firing pattern

Your Enterprise is loaded with three energy weapons (even if two of them are called “photon torpedoes, which really should be kinetic weapons.)

The two photon torpedoes will fire once per round.

It also has a disruptor bank, it fires twice every other round.

To give you some basic stats on the weapons, here’s are the stats on my Enterprise with Mark 4 weapons.

Obviously, these will change with research and other factors, but just to give you an idea. The disruptor is bit stronger than the photons.

 Mark 4 Enterprise  Photons  Disruptor 
 Min Damage  per round         13,288         17,246
 Max Damage  per round         15,946         20,695
 Armor  Piercing           2,465           3,204
 Shield  Piercing           2,817           3,662
 Accuracy          22,142         22,142
 Critical Chance 10%10%
 Critical Damage 150%150%

Owning and Upgrading Your Enterprise

uss enterprise cost of ownership

The Enterprise is an explorer, and as such is going to require a lot of gas to upgrade.

A lot, so investing in some of the pure gas techs to reduce these costs is going to save you a bunch in the long run.

The secondary material is ore.

You’re really going to need to focus on research to reduce these costs.

Nit-Picking

Why does this ship have disruptors instead of phasers? I realize my nerd-sign is flashing here, but come on, this seems like it’s a big enough deal that it should get fixed in an update at some point. Seems like it should be an easy fix.

And here’s a video for you super-nerds out there, explaining the difference between phasers and disruptors.

USS Enterprise Trivia

Given that we’ve got a lot of new content coming out over the next year, and possibly another Enterprise incarnation or two, I’m going to start with the creation of the original, and then hit on the 2009 version.

The original Enterprise was created by designer Matt Jefferies (for whom the “Jefferies Tube” was named.) Jefferies was a World War II veteran who had served in the US Air Force on bombers.

In the original drafts, the Roddenberry’s hero ship was called the “Yorktown.”

The original three-foot demonstration model of the ship was built in November of 1964 by the Howard Anderson Company. They also did optical effects and models for movies like The Manchurian Candidate, Airplane!, Superman II, among many others.

After Roddenberry approved the first model, an 11-foot model was constructed in December of ’64 by  Richard C. Datin, Jr., Mel Keys, and Vern Sion at  Volmer Jensen‘s model shop.

Original USS Enterprise model
The original model and three of the men who constructed it it in December, 1964 (left to right): Richard C. Datin, Jr., Mel Keys, and Vernon Sion. TrekMovie.com photo

And shown against a bluescreen for production.

uss enterprise model against blue screen
The large Enterprise model at Anderson’s, filmed for the 2nd pilot (Memory Alpha photo)

2009 Enterprise Redesign

I’m not really a fan of the 2009 redesigned look. It’s fine as far as it goes, but I much prefer the look of the refit Enterprise from the original series movies.

This alternate universe Enterprise was much larger than its TOS ancestor.

This video gives a pretty good overview of the reasoning and redesign of the Enterprise for the newer movies.

On the other hand, this newer Enterprise did appear in Rihanna’s video for her song Sledgehammer in 2014 from the sound track of Star Trek Beyond. Also, swarms and the Starbase Yorktown.

It’s a good song, and a nice video. But I was kinda hoping for a Peter Gabriel cover. This, for my money, was the coolest video of the 80s. And that says something, when the coolest video of your decade was made by the same guys who did Wallace and Gromit.

And now I bet you’re wondering if there’s a Peter Gabriel connection to Star Trek.

And there is. It was his cover of the David Bowie song, Heroes, that appears in the Short Treks episode, Children of Mars.

Bring your Enterprise Home

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You can get your XL edition of the 2009 USS Enterprise at Eaglemoss today! You can also get the Original Series Enterprise, Refit Enterprise, or the 1701-D from The Next Generation.

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