Star Trek Online's Tholians

The Star Trek Online website has been updated with a new dev blog detailing the design work that has gone into the forthcoming introduction of Tholians to the game. This includes a very cool new Tholian EV suit design:

The fun part of making the characters came in designing the EV suit. Tholians live in extremely hot climates, so they can’t survive in an atmosphere hospitable to humans. They need to wear suits where we live and vice versa. Character customization has been a hallmark of Cryptic’s games going all the way back to City of Heroes, so we tend to make all of our characters modularly. In this case we wanted to create a base EV suit that could be transformed from a simple EV suit into a full on battle suit by adding a few new parts. Even though this is an enemy species, we didn’t want the base suit to be scary necessarily, but more believable as suit that would be used for working or exploration. The aesthetic for Tholians is geometric and angular with lots of facets, they love triangles and tri-symmetry. We carry that motif throughout Tholian design.

They have also prepared some new Tholian starships:

When it came time to make the ships, we started by studying little triangular craft seen in Enterprise and elaborated from there using our design rules. Adam Williams, Thomas Marrone, Concept Artist Chris Legaspi and I had quite a few whiteboard drawing sessions figuring out what this group of ships would look like. When you don’t have the benefit of a lot of time it’s really important to have a good team and to get them involved in the process. A good group will feed on each other’s ideas and produce a lot of them quickly. We steered away from shapes that were overly aggressive or streamlined, opting instead for an angular, faceted, slightly quirky feel. Tri-symmetry played a big part in these designs. Most of the ships have three major hull sections with the bridge pod tucked down in the center where it would be protected in a fight.

In addition to those on the STO site, Chris Legaspi has also posted some of the new designs on his website:

 

And here are a couple of shots of the new ships in game (both the dreadnought I think):