Dilithium!!??
 

I've probably missed something but I'm a little confused, I am new to STO and MMOs in general. May seem a stupid question but like I say I seem to have missed something.

I've been looking at how to get new ships at the Sol Starbase and can see that I need to be a certain rank for certain ships and so on. I also see that I need dilithium to pay for the ships. Where do I get the dilithium??

Thanks

When you hit a new rank, you will be given a free ship token to buy a new ship with. If you would like another ship after you already bought one with that token, you will need the dilithium. You obtain it through various means, such as pvp matches to fill the mission quota, or dailies, such as daily missions.

the Doff system and exploration daily give out dilithium, so do events that happen in various areas.

These include, but are not limited too:

Breen Daily Missions
Academy "History" Dailies.
Officer Report Daily
Explore New Worlds Daily

Suffice to say that you can easily hit the 8,000 daily limit in dilithium exchange every day...

says who? Sorry but I don't think its for gold members only, that would mean, that every new f2p player would start the game, play it until he ranks up for the first time, just to find out that he can't use new ships.
He/she would simply leave, because for new players the ways to obtain dilithium are very limited AND they would find out very soon about the EXTREME limitation of rifining this dilitithium too.
IF there are no free ships for all players (no exceptions made) the free2play system will not be a step forward, but it would be a backshot.

really? well that sucks for new players.

http://www.startrekonline.com/f2p_features

yes I'm very sorry, I just read that too and wanted to anwer that I now know, I apologize.

But I would prefer, in future, that if anybody says that silver players do not get free ships, that they should say, that free players do not get captain and admiral ships for free, because they do get LCDR and CMDR ships for free and the captains ship for discount price :) It would really be better to be accurate at those things :)

Thanks guys you have been very helpful

I just have one last question on this matter now that you've mentioned the gold and silver memberships.

As STO F2P doesn't come into effect until January 17th 2012 and at the moment there are no gold or sliver memberships, what happens in the meantime? Does it mean that if I rank up before then I don't get any kind of new rank ship benefit, I'm just a few points off Lt Cmdr but I don't want to advance if I miss out on a benefit that I would get when F2P comes in!