This is the Kobayashi Maru... nineteen periods out of Altair Six. We have struck a gravitic mine and have lost all power...our hull is penetrated and we have sustained many casualties.

Prepare to face the most infamous Starfleet test! The Kobayashi Maru, the “original no-win scenario,” comes to Star Trek Online as a limited-time challenge for your captains. How long can you hold out against ambushing enemy ships? Can you keep the Kobayashi Maru intact while facing down waves of hostile attackers and space hazards? What would Kirk do?

The Kobayashi Maru event will come in two forms: timed and untimed. In each case, you will fight to keep the freighter intact while destroying successive rounds of enemies who will become more and more dangerous as the simulation continues. The longer you last, the greater your rewards! Once everyone on your team is defeated at the same time – or when the timer runs out, if you’re playing the timed version – the mission ends. The mission also ends if the Kobayashi Maru is destroyed.

Participating in the Kobayashi Maru event will give you a choice of marks, and if you survive for a significant amount of time you’ll also earn bonus dilithium ore. Playing the Kobayashi Maru for at least three days out of the event’s duration will also unlock special limited-time rewards for you: The Universal Console Reiterative Structural Capacitor. This technology was designed with survivability in mind. While not a sure fire way to avoid impending structural failure, this capacitor packs the reiterative properties to sustain oneself when under moderate to high damage bombardment. By harnessing the residual reverberations and energy echoes, this capacitor is able to feed them back into repair systems. This process deluges one's own systems so much that it is required to spill out towards other allied vessels. However, this means that they are able to benefit from these repairing properties up to a moderate range as well. Due to the nature of this procedure a single vessel is unable to withstand multiple capacitor processes running at one.

The Kobayashi Maru event will run on PC starting on September 28th at 8 AM PST through October 2nd at 10 AM PST. The queue is available to all captains of level 50+.

Jesse Heinig

Staff Game Designer

Cryptic Studios