Would someone tell me what mortars are good for? I am a Tactical Officer so I can't make them, but my away team officers do. I have never seen mortars do anything except shoot balls of energy into the ceiling, or straight up into the sky if outdoors. The turrets, med generators, and shield generators are all useful, but mortars? meh.

What goes up, must come down (in this case in a big blue explosion that does a lot of damage in a large radius)

Mortars are nearly useless against mobile fast moving targets. But against fixed targets (e.g. turrets) and slow moving targets (e.g. Borg Drones) ...

I find morters are great more so when you drop 3 at once and all hit. You can wipe out whole groups of NPC's at once.

Mortars do heavy AoE damage, the difficult part is getting your targets to stay clustered long enough for the projectile to fall back down, meaning someone who can tank (preferably melee) needs to hold aggro. Unfortunately STO is very noobish in that it allows DPS to also hold aggro which is useless especially when doing ranged DPS.

Mortars also have a longer range than turrets and do not need line of sight. So you can drop them around a corner before you run into battle and they will still hit (even going into the next room if set up right).

Mortars will hit their target even indoors, so you don't have to worry about firing into the sky or ceiling.

That said, they're quite useful in some instances, such as killing turrets and protecting devices in the Cure Ground or fighting Armek in same. Most of the time though most teams and enemies move too fast for a mortar to be truly useful, and in some cases their role can be replaced by a timely Transphasic Bomb or Mine Cluster.

This.

The non-line-of-site factor is the largest benefit of Mortars, since it opens up different tactics. You can place a mortar behind a shield and it'll still fire at it's target. If you put a turret behind a shield, it can't shoot through it, since it depends on a line of site attack.

Think of them as chess pieces. The turret would be along the lines of a queen, while the mortar would be along the lines of a knight, since it can "hop" over obstacles.

Note that they also penetrate shields. Set up a melee BOff to tank, and boss fights go by quicker once it starts to rain mortar shells.

I finally figured out what the blue reticle things are that appear on the ground! Another couiple of years and I might know what's going on.