So what is that room we're seeing on the balloon reflections?

Probably just a generic HDRI map.

When I was on qo'nos, it looked like the reflection was of the courtyard map outside of the great city.

yeah, STO "reflections" are actually an illusion. It displays something, but it doesn't render your actual environment.

Probably just the skybox for whatever map you are on.

Nah, it can't be the skybox. You see walls and stuff, but... not all of the details of the map.

It's called a cubemap. Anywhere you see reflections in game, is actually using a cubemap. We (Environment Artists) have to generate them. So essentially, we pick a point that is roughly covers the average space, run a script that spits out 6 images, one for each orthogonal direction. Then we assemble those into a cubemap, and project that onto objects as reflections. It's static, and clearly not as accurate as realtime raytraced reflections, but it's also vastly less performance intensive.

The problem is that, since the map was created by positioning the camera at a single point, the reflections are only really accurate at that point. However, 90% of the time it isn't terribly noticeable, as long as you're using a cubemap that looks roughly like your interior. For instance, if we used a dark, red cubemap in a Fed ship interior, it would look out of place. But if we use a standard Fed interior cubemap on ESD, mostly it looks ok.

Ah, cool. Thanks!

STO meets the Cubist Movement.

We are One... Herbert.

Now in its later days CoH did something interesting where they had cube maps for their environment reflections but if you turned your reflection quality high enough you could get real time actor (characters, players, moving things) reflections. In most cases the somewhat blurred actor reflections definitely made things look better as you didn't notice the cube map reflections as much.