Star Trek Online will soon let you 3D-print your starships

Star Trek Online has some of the best-looking starships in the quadrant. But players have never been able to touch, feel, and display their customized Galaxy-class cruisers, Romulan Warbirds, or Klingon Bird of Prey scouts from the Cryptic Studios-developed online game. That’s changing thanks to a new partnership between publisher Perfect World and Eucl3d, a 3D-printing company.

Perfect World announced the news Friday in a blog post. Right now, the parties haven’t released any pricing details, but the ships will be 12-inches long. It’ll work through a button inside the game (though it will take you outside to pay for it; you can’t use in-game currency to pay for it). In a visit yesterday to Cryptic Studios, lead designer Al Rivera and art lead Samuel Wall showed me a prototype, a Federation shuttle that looks a lot like the Delta Flyer from Star Trek: Voyager. It weighed more than I thought it would, and while it was a little rough, you could see many details, such as small vents and running lights.

Star Trek Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (think World of Warcraft, but in space with Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi, and even the Borg) gives players a great deal of room to put their own stamps on their vessels — you can fiddle with colors and lights, nacelles (the long engine-like parts on many starships), the saucers and hulls, and so on. With the free-to-play online experience launching earlier this month on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the show’s debut on CBS in 1966, adding a few little ships like these feels like a fitting tribute.

Just don’t display them anywhere near Captain Picard when he wigs out.