STO Guidelines

Contact: Admiral Quinn
Level: 10
Type: Episode
System(s)
Briar Patch System

Briefing
Briefing goes here

Objectives
Destroy Klingon Turrets (10)
Defeat Klingons and beam onto the research station
Beam to Station
Rescue captive scientist (2)
Destroy experimental weapons (4)
Escape the weapons lab (shoot door)
Destroy all escaping Klingon ships
Tips
One of the most annoying missions. The Briar Patch consists of flying through explosive metrion gas and destroying 10 (actually 13) Klingon fixed Disruptor cannon turrets and a few Klingon vessels in a nebula which limits your maximum speed.
This mission requires a lot of time and patience to complete.

If the metrion gas explodes within 4 km of your ship, if (and that’s a big if) your ship survives, it will be heavily damaged. The gas will explode if it is hit with a phaser or it takes somewhere between 1000 and 2000 pts of damage. Gas bubbles/pockets randomly respawn after a short time so you can’t just clear a path. You can use the gas to damage/destroy Klingon ships if they are close to a gas pocket. The gas never spawns within 4 km of a disruptor turret (at least not that I ever saw).

Dealing with the gas: Gas will appear as enemy targets until you get about 15k from it. Usually you can ignore it, however if are engaging an enemy ship you or he may hit a gas pocket and take out your ship including a pocket which spawned behind you and thus you didn’t see it. Before engaging enemy ships its best to clear any gas pockets near you and between you and the enemy. Photons work best for clearing gas pockets as they can be carefully targeted, don’t fire too quickly and 1 hit detonates a gas pocket. A phaser hit will also detonate a pocket but sometimes phasers fire so quickly they may detonate a pocket and then immediately switch target to a “too close” gas pocket and blow your own ship up. Ship disruptors and cannons seem to take multiple shots to destroy a pocket. In one attempt, I had a Klingon player show up cloaked and follow me around behind me until I was close to a gas pocket upon which he would uncloak and set off the gas cloud. Effective and annoying.

Dealing with the disruptor turrets: These tend to come in groups of 1-3 close together. If you attempt to fight them like you would with a ship, they will rip your ship apart in a hurry. To deal with a disruptor turret, carefully inch up to it and when you reach 10km and it comes into firing range, immediately stop. Put power into your shields and continuously reinforce the front shield (even still you will take some internal damage). Hammer it while keeping your front shield reinforced. Photons work particularly well as the disruptors apparently do not have shields. After you’ve blown up the closest one, inch towards then next nearest one and repeat the process.

Dealing with the ships. These consist of a few fighters and Birds of Prey. You can use the gas to take out and damage a few. Clear out any nearby turrets and fight the enemy ships. Limit your maneuvering as you don’t want to drift near any gas yourself.

Once you have cleared out the ships and the 10 turrets you have to approach a base in the middle of a donut shaped asteroid. There are 3 more turrets protecting the base and an Escort. Clear out the turrets with the same method and then take on the escort. On my mission I let the escort wander close to a gas pocket and hit the pocket which took out about 50% of the escort. After that you close on the base and fight a long ground action on the base.

After finishing the base mission, you beam to your ship and have to chase down an escaping Klingon battlecruiser. Your ship starts behind the battlecruiser and the turrets are now gone, so taking out the battlecruiser isn’t too hard.

The mission now appears to end at this point; currently it’s not certain if this is a permanent change or a temporary one. If the change is permanent it’s a welcome change; the mission is still long, but nowhere near as long as it was. Previously the mission continued as outlined bellow.

Previous Continuation
This sends you to another pain-in-the-a mission in a different system. Now you have a large asteroid belt surrounding a planet. Seeded within the belt are a mix of Klingon ships and disruptor turrets. The turrets are a mix of large and small ones. There is no gas this time. You have to destroy 4 ship groups before you can beam to the planet and complete the mission. The ship groups are the usual graduated type. First a group of Birds of Prey followed by a cruiser and then a battleship followed by a heavy cruiser. I was doing fine using my creep and shoot method to clear the turrets and then taking on the ships. That is until I got to the battleship. I wasn’t worried about the battleship as I had my escort and I can usually easily handle a lone battleship. Zoom around behind him, close, match his speed, reinforce the front shield and just hammer his six until he pops. With vastly superior maneuverability it is no problem to stay behind him. However, this battleship was a little different. To my surprise, it launched a swarm of marine filled shuttles who swarmed all over my ship and shut down every system I had, shields, engines, weapons, everything. The problem with an escort is that it has a small crew and doesn’t repel boarders very well. Next time I planned to keep the range open and shoot shuttles when they appear. A team of players would help enormously, one to attack the battleship and the other to pop shuttles.

I repeated the mission and this time I was prepared. I nailed most of the shuttles although a few got on board which caused weapons outages for about a minute. I finished off the battleship and the remaining Klingon ship which lead into a ground mission.

The ground mission, which was lengthy, had you following a trail to find 3 weapons to be tagged and beamed aboard your ship. The weapons/torpedoes are near large buildings. After tagging the weapons you beam back up into space to chase and destroy some escaping ships. The scenario is completed successfully after killing almost all (but not all) of the escaping ships.

At this point, it is announced that the Klingons have activated a Planet Killer from the original Star Trek show and the only thing that can stop it are the weapons you are carrying. To arm the weapons, you have to fly through the center of the cracked planet nearby. The Klingons have a ship close to the planet but if you stay away from it you can ignore it. Set your course to the center of the broken planet and engage max speed. Fly through the core and you get 5 special weapons. These show up in your inventory and go in one of the ship slots where you usually put special batteries. Some Klingon ships show up and attempt to engage you. A short time later, a friendly fleet shows up and engages the Klingon fleet.

After the Klingons are eliminated, you have to destroy the Planet Killer. The instructions say to fire the torpedoes down the mouth of the Planet Killer right after it has fired. Instead, I found it is best to fire right before it fires its weapon. You can tell when it is getting ready to fire because the mouth glows brightly red. It takes a couple of shots to kill it. You don’t have to be directly in front of it to fire into but you can be slightly off to the side but still in front. Not that it matters because the weapon fires a wide coned shaped charge that will hit you even you are not immediately in front of it. The Planet Killer does 12,000+ damage with every shot. The Planet Killer turns which makes it hard to stay in front of it. I don’t know what happens if you run out of shots (I killed it with the 5th of 5 shots) or if you can keep/use the torpedoes if you still have some left over after killing it. Terminating the Planet Killer ends the missions/episode trail.

This is a long mission trail and is time consuming and requires a lot of patience.