So I played a bit more tonight, and didn't have any further issues with crashing and whatnot, this time being very careful to shut down any other programs running in the background -- like I said, WoW handles me running firefox, mediamonkey and skype in the background at the same time and alt-tabbing between them at will, but STO is in open beta and is considerably more unstable. Which makes me a little sad. The music in this game tends to be rather ignorable, and I was having more fun playing my own MP3s in the background.

Anyway, I zipped around, completing that mission I had crashed out of twice before, and the one after it, and then going on to complete my patrol of various star systems nearby.

Here's a pic of the first mission's system:

On the left side, a ship that's being attacked by space pirates. On the right side, an anomaly that I can loot. Ooh, sparklies. Ship under attack can wait -- for science!! *charges towards the anomaly*

And of course, they did wait, and here's a pic of the space combat:

Blow up the ship and it makes a HUGE explosion, with shockwaves and everything:

Though that pic is technically from a later mission, it took me a while before I could get a good shot with the shockwave in it.

I found a tribble in the ship I beamed over to, and found a creepy bug when I tried to let my best buddy Zara the Tactical Ensign use it:

Then we finish the mission, warp back to Sector Space, which is basically a galaxy map that you can fly around in, with exaggerated models of the various systems. Each system is an instanced mission, and I found the instanced nature of a number of these to be rather annoying.

In one, I flew in, was auto-joined with a group of other players, started flying around and shooting the enemies, and then the leader of the team booted me for no reason... I had to leave and rejoin in order to finish my mission.

Another mission had me flying around destroying pirate spacedocks all by myself -- it was a little time-consuming to do without any other ships to help.

A third mission had me and three other people escorting a mining ship that got lost in an asteroid belt back to the mining outpost. I've really got no clue why this required four people, since the freighter would only follow one person, and no enemy ships attacked. It was pretty much a quest of "wait around as the guy the ship randomly chose figures out how to use his map and flies in the right direction."

A fourth mission, which I enjoyed quite a bit, had me running around talking to several different people, and then the game basically quizzed me on what they had said, in order to prove that the federation cares about the problems facing the people of this world. I'm hoping to see more of those non-combat missions here. Blowing up ships is fun and all, but when I remember Star Trek, I remember them trying to AVOID conflict as much as possible.

I find myself wishing that instead of being an MMO, this could be a single-player game that takes place in a time period where flying around, exploring the galaxy and making friends with new, unknown races could actually work. But for the meantime, I don't think I'll be playing much more of the Star Trek beta. There's a ton of things to explore here, and while I do love testing it and helping them make the game better, I'd rather save the rest of the exploration for later, so that I'm not burned out on it when the game actually releases.

I'll leave you with one other picture. I got a third crewmember (I let him be Science just to be well-rounded) and he turned out to be a Male Of Unknown Species named Zar. This will not do, I say. My Tactical officer is already named Zara, I need to rename this guy. I was flipping through the Random name generator, cringing at the completely unpronounceable names it was giving me, trying to figure out who programmed these things. I mean, I know that he's an unknown species, but does his name have to be completely incomprehensible? One of the few that I could actually pronounce:

That's right. Ensign Gayer Coed, the Science Officer.

I was trying to figure out how to take screenshots that included the UI. Again, another failing that STO shares with Champions -- Sometimes I WANT to take a screenshot with the UI visible, did you ever think of THAT, Cryptic?? Anyway, I was trying to figure out how to take a screenshot of this, and I didn't want to lose the name, so... apparently, you can only rename your Bridge Officers once? It wouldn't let me rename him again afterwards, and didn't really explain why. I mean, why even let me open up that window if everything's just going to be grayed out? Why not just gray out the "Rename" button entirely? So... my Science Officer in the Open Beta shall forever be named Gayercoed.