STO: A Table of Captains (the new Captain Database)

Actually, I’m not sure what the collective noun for a group of captains is, but since we have a Captain’s Table in STO, I’ll go with that.

Anyway, as BD pointed out to me this morning, the Captain Database is now online at the STO site, under “Community”.  Woot!

Well, mostly woot.

Though the table you start with has Captains and Handles, you can only search by the former.  Once you have a captain found, you can click on the @ handle and see all the captains that person has.  That display gives a rather dim headshot of each captain, their short name, rank, current command/ship, and a link to their profile.

(You can also go directly to “My Characters“, which looks the same as drilling down to your own handle’s set of toons, except you’ll be asked to choose one as your “main” — what this means isn’t explained.)

The profile page gives a larger version of the headshot, short name, species / gender / class, and their current command/ship name.  The biography section gives the online biography for the character, with a sidebar for the current ship (including name, class, registry, crew complement) and a list of bridge crew (but no info on them beyond name, rank, and class).

The captain’s log tab duplicates the online captain’s log, registering (with date stamps) all Missions and significant Activity (e.g., a bridge officer promotion).  You can also put in manual Captain’s Log entries, and supplemental entries / comments on all activities.

The system is nice so far as it goes, but could use some improvements:

1. There’s no searching by @ handle.  Hope you can remember your friend’s captain names.
2. The search is a bit wonky.  One of Margie’s toons is “B-47” but that search doesn’t come up with anything (though that’s the name on her profile page, once I manually went to it).
3. There’s no backlink from the captain’s log to the profile page.  Once in a profile, there’s no reference to the @ handle or way to get back to the captain list for that handle.  If you’re going around inside your own toons, you can go back to “My Characters” from the Community menu, but, still …
4. The generated profile photos are awfully dark, to the point of being difficult to see in some cases.
5. The individual entries and logs and comments do not have their own URLs (let alone RSS), so it’s not easy to incorporate them into a creative activity outside the walled garden of STO.
6. Given the (creative) importance of Bridge Officers, there’s no reason why we should not be able to pull up more info on them — mug shots, at a minimum.
7. We should also be able to see a picture of the ship.
8. CO had a clever (but horribly implemented) profile picture generator/editor.  STO should learn from that, rather than just creating a static head shot.  We love our uniforms, not to mention stances.
9. Actually, I’d love to be able to do a “group picture” of my captain and his/her bridge crew, perhaps with the current ship in the background.  Yes, I can do that manually.  No, I don’t want to.

So, a good start, and an easy way to create a linked reference to your STO captains — but not much more than that.  Kudos for what it is, and hopes for what it could be.

(If nothing else, this demonstrates how many bad captain names there are out there.  And I’m not even counting the folks who have been forceably renamed “BadName 54123” and the like.)