The latest edition of 'Ask Cryptic' has popped up on the official Star Trek Online site. As always, the series deals with community questions and developer answers. Read more!

Tamgros: How will partially damaged ships be handled in STO (ie: 1/2 hull dexterity)? Will it be like a typical MMO where everything works great until dexterity goes zero, or will you get debuffs/systems going off line?

Your ship and your items will not underperform as they get damaged. Your ship has hull integrity - or hull hit points - and your items, your subsystems, have durability. They'll continue to work at full capacity until they're destroyed. We don't want to force people into a downward spiral in combat where you just keep getting worse and worse. Your shields get weaker, but performance doesn't degrade until something goes offline.

There is another axis to this, though: You have crew on your ship. We lovingly refer to them as your redshirts. Different ships have different crew complements. The Defiant class staffs 50 people, and the Galaxy class staffs 1,000 people. Your crew help keep your ship running, and will do things like affect the repair rate of your ship and affect certain actions you perform, such as assembling boarding parties, repair teams or medical teams.

In combat, crew can die or get injured. As you lose crew from explosive devices like photon torpedoes, those abilities will weaken. So you may be less effective at repairing your hull, or launching boarding parties. You can revive some crew based on how good your medical skills and medical officers are, but inevitably, you will need to replace some of them.

Read the rest at the STO site linked above.