In the midst of the recent hullabaloo over Star Trek Online's free-to-play transition, September's Ask Cryptic focuses on what players can expect from the change. Executive Producer Dan Stahl touches on the subject of skilltree revamps, server availability, and much, much more.

Space skills are getting a few sweeping changes in order to make them more applicable to players of all builds. As such, skills that "apply only to a specific ship class or energy type" are being replaced with more general skills, such as increased damage, increased turn rate, and so forth. Stahl also reveals that the team has ordered new hardware and made perfomance tweaks to the game in order to allow for a potential influx of new players once the game goes F2P.

Players also ask about new content, noting that talked-about post-Season 4 content has not materialized as players expected. Stahl notes that Borg Red Alerts were just released, and work on the Deep Space Nine Feature Episode Series is progressing steadily. The Q&A also details the upcoming Borg Ground Invasion, which assigns players the difficult task of removing a Borg infestation before the Collective can successfully assimilate an entire planet.

The Q&A goes on to touch on new social zones, a great deal of "nice to have but low-priority" additions, and oodles more. For the full Q&A, hop your way on over to the full Ask Cryptic post.

Hard to port! Disruptors on full! Fire the tachyon beam! Oh, hello again. Welcome back to Captain's Log, Massively's weekly -- y'know what, hang on. These Cardassians are being a real pain in the toukas. Yes, Ensign, some torpedoes would be fabulous right about now. And you wonder why I haven't promoted you.

There is much buzz in the MMOG universe this morning about the upcoming title Star Trek Online. Being absolute fanboys and fangirls of Star Trek ourselves (much like our friends at STO Zone who had the same idea) we wanted to show you a couple of nuggets of interesting art that we've extracted. These two images were taken from the backgrounds of the Cryptic Star Trek Online site that was unveiled last night.

The top image shows an Andorian female in the foreground of what appears to be an away team. Some of the staff think that may be either a Bolian, Benzite or an Orion male to her left, but it's very hard to make out. (Not that many people remember the Orion males anyway.) Below that is a Klingon at the helm of what appears to be a Bird of Prey with a Human, Ferengi, Cardassian and Vulcan manning the controls, dressed in Federation uniform, or wearing Federation insignia. Speculation from some blog sites suggest that Cryptic is likely looking at a period of time post-DS9, tied to the Officer Exchange Program that started in the episode "A Matter of Honor" during the TNG series. It seems like an excellent spot in the continuity to place an MMO, we think.