[brianeyci]

Actually I just thought of an exception. I remember in the spectacular battles in DS:9 in the final season... a lot of "fighter-like" craft. However, you don't really see widespread use of fighers at all outside of that. In First Contact, you didn't see runabouts and shuttles flying around shooting the Borg. (Maybe they were all assimilated, who knows). At any rate, get rid of PD and missiles... or do this, just get rid of PD and make missile speed almost instantaneous or something, and make sure no other weapons can target seekers.

The motivation behind this is that missiles use supply. I wonder if you can alter the amount of supply a single missile shot does. Why wouldn't Janeway always use torpedos? Well the reason could be simulated by making missiles act as antimatter torpedos, which use up a lot of supply. That way smaller ships would be designed with a lot of "phaser banks" to be economical.

Maybe a way to make ships more cooler is to make ships very valuable. As in, it takes the resources of a homeworld-esque planet to support the maintainence and build cost of a very large ship, like an "Enterprise" class ship.

Also, ships in Star Trek rarely miss when firing, unless incapiciated somehow (nebula, etc)... perhaps you could get rid of to-hit modifiers entirely (give every race a talisman-like component at basic tech level). It does take some of the mystery out of the game, but oh well... the only time I recall Star Trek ships missing when they don't want to is in those fighter battles in DS:9...

The specialty weapons (ship capture, weapon overloading, engine overloading, armor bypassing, master computer destruction etc) could become more important (although how I haven't thought of)... How many times have you heard "target their engines" or "target their weapons array" or "lock on a tractor beam" rather than "blow the hell out of them Riker" in Star Trek? Exactly. Maybe these specialty weapons could become more efficient/prevalent at lower tech levels.

There should be a lot of Star Trek Canon in it. Have you seen one of the Last few Voyager episodes, where Janeway uses that armor that can let a shuttle take Borg cube shots? I want that on my ship lol. Shields seem to be the most important thing in Star Trek, and other than a few exceptions like above I think that shield technology should be important to research.

Maybe you could make ships forced to put tons of shield components by making boarding parties ultra-cheap kilton wise. Star Trek ships seem to have far more endurance than in other sci-fi series. Maybe seeing an aft-fore-port-starboard shield generators, and auxillary shield generators, wouldn't be uncommon, and having a lone "phaser bank" or two would be the norm.

Anyway I went crazy with my ideas. Hope you will use some =D