Star Trek Online Adding ‘Janeway Class’ Ship (Inspired By USS Voyager-J) And It Has A Photonic Cannon

The third season of Star Trek: Discovery jumped the show forward to the year 3189, where the crew of the USS-Discovery met up with the 32nd century Starfleet. One of the ships that stood out to fans was the USS Voyager-J, carrying on the legacy of the titular ship from Star Trek: Voyager. The ship was seen only in glimpses during season three, and now Star Trek Online is giving us a closer look at their new class of ship inspired by the Voyager-J.

Meet the Janeway Class

On Friday Cryptic Studios announced they were introducing a new rare Tier 6 ship (their highest class): the Janeway Class Command Science Vessel into Star Trek Online. This ship is the massively multiplayer game’s version of the 32nd-century USS Voyager-J as seen in season three of Star Trek: Discovery.

The ship is being added on March 4th as an additional promotion bonus. When players buy a Research and Development Pack or a Duty Officer Pack they will have a chance to open into a rare Tier 6 ship, including the Janeway class.

Check out this video featuring the new Janeway Class (shown as the USS Voyager-J)

UPDATE: ZeeFilms video featuring Janeway Class

Even if it isn’t technically the same as the one seen in Discovery, the Star Trek Online version of the ship gives fans a better idea of USS Voyager-J.

Here is how the ship is described by the STO team:

In a distant future timeline, Federation starships have undergone a number of interesting evolutions of both technology and aesthetics. Some still reflect elements of their original lineage though, as is true with the Janeway-class Command Science Vessel. Drawing its original inspiration from the Intrepid-class starships of the late-24th century, this ship has been updated to focus on speed and maneuverability in local space, without sacrificing its scientific capabilities. Unlike classic science vessels, this ship focuses its power output on hull integrity rather than shield capacity, and has also been specifically outfitted to serve as a fleet command vessel.

Star Trek Online’s Janeway Class

Photonic Cannon!

There are even more details on the Janeway Class at the official STO site, but highlights include cloaking, 32nd-century phasers, and a “Photonic Cannon.” Here is how they describe it:

This weaponry was originally theorized in the late-24th century as an ingenious way to utilize photonic/holographic technology, but application of those theories only came to fruition with the introduction of programmable matter. Now that it has been realized, starships with both capabilities may rapidly deploy this technology while in the field. Deployment includes a sensor-masking suite that acts as a defensive countermeasture for the ship, while simultaneously creating an additional source of firepower to soften up any enemy starships unfortunate enough to be lingering in your ship’s forward arc.

Photonic cannon in action

Fans may remember that the “photonic cannon” was an idea that came from the episode “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy.” The concept came from a fantasy created by The Doctor, who had envisioned himself as an “Emergency Command Hologram.” Eventually, he would have to use the idea as a bluff (seen in the video below), but now it has been made real by Star Trek Online.

Cryptic explains why it’s a Janeway Class and not an Intrepid Class

In season 3 of Discovery (and associated concept art) the USS Voyager-J was identified as an “Intrepid Class” ship, which is the same destination as the original USS Voyager commanded by Captain Janeway. TrekMovie reached out to Cryptic for some clarification on why they are calling their version the “Janeway Class.” Design director Al Rivera points out how bringing a 32nd-century ship into their 25th-century setting had some practical issues they had to deal with:

“For Star Trek Online, each ship needs its own class name. It’s not an Intrepid Class for the sake of communication. It doesn’t have the same stats, doesn’t share costume pieces. It has no more in common than a Constitution [Class] has to a Galaxy [Class]. We simply cannot offer 2 completely different ships that have the same name. So we worked with CBS and landed on calling it the Janeway Class. It is pretty clear what we are referring to. It honors its lineage while communicating what to expect. If you want to get technical with the lore, one could argue this ship is a recreation of the one seen on screen. A reverse-engineered version of the 32nd-century Intrepid using 2411 technology. Therefore, it has a different class name. But the reality is we needed a way to distinguish the original Intrepid from this new ship.”

Long story short, Star Trek Online already had an Intrepid Class Science Vessel, so they called the new class inspired by the USS Voyager-J the Janeway Class, in honor of Captain Janeway. Seems fitting.

Intrepid Class in Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game that allows players to explore the Star Trek universe from within. It is currently available on PC, PlayStation®4 and Xbox One. To download and play Star Trek Online today for free, visit playstartrekonline.com.


Keep up with all the Star Trek Online news and updates here at TrekMovie.com.

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LOL. How many more ways can Star Trek rip off stealing the front 2/3 of the Battlestar Galactica design and calling if the Voyager?

As many times as fans can mistakenly confuse a new design with idea theft.

So 0 then? ;-)

It’s like Five Guys essentially being brought forward as slightly different version of In-N-Out. Burger fans like both, but In-N-Out was the obvious basis for Five Guys.

Infinite. :)

Hold on… BSG didn’t have a detached propulsion system… it’s so novel and ingenious…

You know, that would be funny in the new BSG they are supposedly working on had detached fighter pods….LOL

See? Kurtzman truly is a generational talent… XD

That ship will cost you $80 to $200 in game after you end purchasing all of the Packs. Why can’t you just purchase good ships in Star Trek online with real money?

Because PWE are a Chinese company that only want to make the most (all) money possible. I was a LTS for over 10 years and I left the game when the Legendary bundle came out and it was as much as a car payment.

Absolutely sickening.

Those separable warp nacelles still look like wi-fi routers with those blinking blue lights…

It’s strange why they called it “Janeway Class” almost a thousand years later. It’s the Voyager-J, maybe that’s the reason the writers chose “J” as a letter to begin with… I really hope for a Picard-class Enterprise-P shortly :-) Or Pike-class?

Lots of 24th century ships are named after explorers and scientists from hundreds of years ago.

Right. Look no further than the shuttles “Galileo”, “Columbus” from TOS. Both historical figures are 700 years old by the 23dr Century.

Sisko Class sounds good to me.

I just love that Janeway made her mark in the galaxy she now has a fleet of ships named after her a millennium later!

Why going forward (very forward) is much more fun! You can do literally anything lol.

Still upset we didn’t even see the ship in action in Discovery! Such a tease!

But really like it. It looks like a very different ship from her 24th century older sister being in a much later era but still familiar enough, just like the various Enterprises. The original Voyager is still one of my favorite ships and hoping we see her again in Prodigy.

I can’t wait for the USS Ensign Kim

The USS Chief O’Brien is long overdue…

At least he got a statue.

He’s the most important Starfleet officer in history, the guy should have a planet named after him like Captain Archer has!

LOL I still think it looks like detachable nacelles were invented to keep the 3d animation effort to a minimum with some pretty basic shapes. Some tapered triangles, slap a texture on them, add “Voyager” and done.

Lol – no way! Didn’t you see Kurtzman cut no corners when it came to the revolutionary finale of the best series of sci fi… no… TV ever… of Star Trek Picard and the Starfleet… um… fleet?!?!

I don’t know what the cause is for this franchise developing a hardon for unattached nacelles, but I lament it having happened.

@ Bryant Burnette – you and me both!

This is the direct result of the fans who insisted that the show move into a post NEM future, and insisting that they evolve the ships and tech to “look more advanced.” Because after TNG era, there’s only so much more advanced you can go without it starting to break from our contemporary reality and look strange to modern audiences. It also risks just not looking very “Star Treky” if you move too far from five decades of established norms, as realistic as that might be for a far flung future.

But the truth is, 500+ years is a long way to extrapolate tech. I think free floating nacelles actually makes technological sense, they just don’t really work visually for Star Trek, and the bizarre angular design isn’t helping matters. In this case, it just looks odd and “Not Star Trek.”

As optimistic as I was even through the first couple of seasons of DSC, I’m pretty much done with Kurtzman’s vision, and am holding out a tiny sliver of hope that SNW can be the Trek I really wanted.

Agree 100% with everything said here.

Haha – when Trek fans said “post-Nemesis” I think we meant real life time difference between Nemesis and the next series… not 700 years.

I agree though about the challenges of extrapolating future tech. Heck – it’s hard enough to envisage what we’ll have in a decade!

It doesn’t matter how many years, if it had been 25, fans would have screamed “tech needs t look more advanced!” Same principle applies. Fans are a little nutty with their demands.

Frankly, I would have rather they set a show 20 years later, with exactly the same tech, look, and feel as Voyager, but with more cinematic filming. I can perfectly accept that tech and ships will have a dated 60s-90s futurist look.

Hear hear. Oh and would it be too much to ask for some coherent writing too please?

I don’t blame the writers for this actually. I blame Kurtzman. I was an ardent defender of his for the first season and a half, because I thought (and still think) it’s important to give producers/showrunners some leash and lead time to find their sea legs.

But three seasons in and his work as producer is what I blame for the failings that I see. I think the problem with the writing stems from his direction to the showrunners and writing teams. His history shows an emphasis on melodrama over story, character, and even performance. Keep in mind, melodrama is not the same as drama. Melodrama is manufactured and severely exaggerated drama for the sake of evoking very specific feelings in the audience, at the expense of everything else.

Frankly, Trek has always been at its best when its character first. DS9 was so truly great because it was able to equally balance a great story with some strong characters (though to pick on DS9 slightly, it was always the side characters that were best written, with some of the regulars being quite weak).

I’m holding out a sliver of hope that with so many shows in development and production (DSC4, PIC2, SNW1, S31, LDS, etc) his focus might stay on DSC, and be so diluted that the showrunner for SNW will get to do more of his own thing.

By his own account Kurtzman took a pretty hands-off approach during early Discovery. Yes, he co-developed it with Fuller, but Fuller was supposed to be the showrunner and when Fuller left Berg and Harberts took over as showrunners. Kurtzman said he only stepped in when they fired Berg and Harberts early/mid-2nd season because the show was suddenly without a boss. He has also talked about handing over the reigns to Michelle Paradise as she gets more familiar with Discovery since he seems to see himself more as the “big strategy” guy.

“It doesn’t matter how many years, if it had been 25, fans would have screamed “tech needs t look more advanced!” Same principle applies. Fans are a little nutty with their demands.’

No one is complaining Picard doesn’t feel advanced enough for it’s time period and unlike Discovery the tech feels just right for the period. So no I don’t buy that at all.

Lol yeah I don’t remember complaining the show needs to be thousand years into the future. Most of us just wanted a show a few decades after Nemesis like what we got in Picard. Maybe 100 years tops post Nemesis but not 800 years. That was solely their decision.

And part of that was because the ship ALREADY looked and felt advanced, even pass the 24th century ships. None of those had spore drives! 🙄

Yeah, I miss the days when they still built starships out of Douglas Fir…..they don’t make em like that, anymore.

Detached nacelles are literally the dumbest idea ever. So, you have to transport over to do engineering work? What happens when your transporter system is down because of combat? What happens when the system keeping the nacelle’s proximity to the main hull takes a hit and your nacelles shoot off on a divergent trajectories at warp 5?

Do they look cool? Arguably so. Would any ship designer actually do this? Really hard to believe. And what idiot at Starfleet would put their whole career on the line by approving it?

SMDH

Don’t be fooled, ‘promotion bonus’ means gamble box. PWE only goal in mind is to make as much money off of you in the most despicable way possible. It’s why I left the game after 10 years when it got really bad.

The R&D drop box has maybe a 0.03% or less chance of dropping the new ship, you’ll have to spend over a hundred dollars to maybe have a decent chance at it.

Still a bit too boxy for my taste, looks a bit like a Trek Ship from an early Super Nintendo 3D game ;) I always saw “the futures future” designs as ultimately organic – at least some other 32nd century designs like the NOG show that evolution.
But what bugs me the most is the overly prominent hull plating. I know this “greebling” is supposed to give a sense of scale. But one would think, by the 32nd century they would have figured out how to build a hull “smoothly” without welding together metal plates… especially with the whole programmable matter thing.

It makes sense to me. Ships don’t need curves in space.

I think Star Trek Online should include all the 32nd century ships just so I can get a proper decent look at them. It’s like how when you see all of the Discovery season 1 and 2 ships via Eaglemoss models/magazines and you think “oh wow these actually look pretty cool” and then you try and seek them out in the show itself and just get blurry, vaguely starship shaped blobs of grey mush. The ENT cgi ship shots, especially in seasons 3 and 4, are so crisp compared to what we get now and that was 20 years ago now. I just can’t get my head around it.

I hate…I mean HATE….that free floating nacelle design. Lazy. Stupid. Pointless. Like so much of this modern Trek….

That may be the single ugliest ship I have ever seen. Not even just in Star Trek. Hideous.

The ship itself is fine. The only two elements that don’t work for me are the kitchen board hole and the detached wi-fi routers… Do you have Fritz! Box in the US? It’s a German wi-fi router and those nacelles are version 2.0.

I…see…four…lights!

La Sirena? Pizza Cutter Discovery? The Expanse’s ships are hardly lookers, but they look like Akira classes in comparison to the junk on Kurtzman Trek.

She’s Beautiful

I love it.

Detached nacelles. They make 0 sense other than to introduce a design element that says, “See! It’s the FUTURE!” And did they forget how to fully illuminate a ships name without a single light source?

The art of Star Trek ship design seems to be a lost art.

I agree with this. I don’t mind them, but it basically does feel like it’s done just to say ‘WE’RE IN THE FUTURE!!!!’

You know what, it might work had they taken the time to have some kind of tractor beam effect, totally changed up the hull and then had it where the nacelles are moving or something that it doesn’t just look like lazy 3d work.
I mean where is the M/AM drive, in the engines? If in the engines, why the secondary hull?
If still in the secondary hull, why not some distinguishable energy transmitter/receivers (better yet, why not show some plasma beams)??

now see? your comment is indicative of the mentality of most Trek fans. So many varied ideas. Let us know when you become head of the Star Trek franchise. Your ideas might be good ones or bad ones depending on what the fans say. You simply can’t please everyone. It’s not possible.

Well, FTL drive makes zero sense to anyone even remotely familiar with Relativity, yet Sci-Fi persists. Flight dynamics is a real thing in zero-g, too, yet it’s routinely ignored…or bull s**ted away with force fields.

Well M/AM annihilation is real and space can move faster than light (far off galaxies are actually moving away from us faster than light)… but even from a story perspective it’s good to see some kind of thought put into the concept.
I’d at least have the designers decide where the energy is coming from if only from a story perspective (see ST II:TWOK where Khan blasts the secondary hull to take out engineering, etc).
I think the floating nacelles would have been much better received with some indication that there was at least tractor beam emitters and maybe some energy transfer mechanisms. Could have a cool scene where the ship loses shields, enemies take out the tractor beams and the nacelles end up disconnecting. Or if the nacelles really have their own M/AM reactors, have like four nacelles with two being able to go fight themselves (maybe even having a battle bridge?).

Actually, far off galaxies aren’t moving FTL, it’s the dilatation of the fabric of space that creates that illusion. What’s put into stories is the suspension of disbelief. If someone had actually put some thought into what the Trek aesthetic should look like, that’s scientifically correct, Trek wouldn’t look anything like it actually does.

From a Trek science standpoint, I think they do make sense. We can assume they are using some kind of “technbabble” field to keep the integrity, but keeping them detached would probably lessen the intense stresses the warp fields put on the struts and secondary hull.

After all, a plausible reason why the nacelles are normally outward from the primary hull (in-universe that is)– and one could reasonably postulate it’s to lessen warp stress on the ship’s structural integrity.

By extension, this lessened warp stress would probably increase engine efficiency, making them plausibly able to achieve greater speeds at less power.

The thing is: The nacelles do attach during warp flight. They seem to be detached only during sub-warp maneuvers. They even made this a story point in the season finale when Owo severed the nacelle to drop the ship out of warp.

Why take the time to detach them then when they aren’t doing anything? Or they are using them as really expensive impulse engines??

Ships of the Kurtzmann era are ugly . They have nothing special , no aesthetics and no soul.

Hard to disagree with any of this. He’s a man devoid of talent somehow making a killing in TV and film, but good luck to him! I don’t know how he’s done it (like how Granit Xhaka is a professional footballer/soccer player).

Yeah the ships are pretty ugly. I like the shows but I really wish they got some of the designers from the old shows for these ships. The 32nd century refit of Discovery is improved though but it’s still lipstick on a pig!

Am I the only one who feels like the ship designs in modern Star Trek look like they just went with the first draft general concept “Just to get a feel for the shapes” doodles? Like, instead of bothering with a second draft they just go, “Ok, I like the napkin doodle you just sent me, we’re going to go ahead with exactly like the doodle.”

Does she come with coffee?

You bet… in a cup with a detached handle lol

They had floating chairs and tables so why not?

You trolls will find any excuse to belittle and bully Kurtzman won’t you? Get a life, seriously.

I wholeheartedly agree. So many critics in our society.