Now I have been saying for the past few days that the new Excelsior consoles suck. And, quite frankly, they do. However I had a change of perspective earlier that lead me to think they dont suck as much as I thought.

I run 9/9 in all performance skills. I'm sure a lot of people do regardless of what ship they fly. They are staple skills in my book.

At max level the T5 version adds 7.6 to all your Performance skills. Not much really. Not enough to warrent a console slot as it only provides 1 power to each subsystem.

However if we look at the Performance skills for a minute. 9/9 provides +52, 8/9 provides +48 and 7/9 provides +44.

So if we include the +8 (rounding) from the T5 Excelsior's console we can achieve the same results speccing 7/9 in all the performance skills as we currently do for speccing 9/9.

With Weapon and Auxillary Performance both being T5 skills and Shield and Engine Performance both being T4 skills, the difference between speccing 9/9 in all four and 7/9 in all four is a massive 3600 skillpoints.
Thats a whole T4 skill at 9/9.
Thats +52 to a previously unspecced T4 skill.
Pretty awesome actually.
If you dont really have another skill you want to spec into, throw the points into the ship skills between tiers 2 and 5 and improve your ship slightly in overall performance.

If you are worried about the rounding of 7.6 to 8 you can go 8/9 in all four performance skills and save 1800 skillpoints which is enough for a T2 skill at 9/9.

Ok to take advantage of this you have to be willing to spend a respec token. And having done so you have to be pretty sure you will not be flying anything except the Excelsior in the future.

Still I think this console is actually pretty cool.

In summary; The T5 Excelsior console is effectively a +52 console for something you haven't specced into.

Thanks for reading.

That's pretty sweet actually; thanks for the tip.

Very interesting...thanks for the write-up.

its a shame that someone has to state the obvious, but nice work ;-))) i wish i had enough free sci-console slots ... (i put all my special consoles in my scislot in cruisers ;-) ) but unfortunately the the venture has just 2 ^^

What did i miss? The excelsior is getting a console? What is it?

it's transwarp ability will now be a console, so you gain an engineering console slot, i think it is.

oh i see...neato.

Another perspective:

I would still rather keep all my TW powers, not having to slot two consoles for them all, than getting +1 energy to every system.

If you only care about the transwarp abilities just carry the consoles in your inventory and slot them when you want to use one.


Nope. No additional console slot for the Excelsior. Its still
4 eng
3 tac
2 sci
same as it always was.

Under the new version the ship gets +5 power to each subsystem other then weapons. This means a major upgrade of +15 power output. As for the Console I can live with it. Hope you can put it on any ship being a non combat item.