Voyages
Voyages are a feature introduced in Update 3.0. They allow sending a manned ship on a long-away mission to collect resources and crew[1]. During a Voyage your crew 
can face Hazards and Dilemmas around the universe.
A voyage starts after a selection of crew and a ship, resulting in a combined value for each skill and a starting amount of antimatter. As the voyage progresses, activities will occur. A player will see a quick (20s) countdown timer at the bottom of the voyage log per activity and a long (2h) timer at the top of the screen for Dilemmas. A player has no influence on which activities occur, and only with Dilemmas can the player influence the outcome or reward.
Every expiration of the "quick" timer results in a voyage activity of type normal, hazard, or dilemma. These activities can reduce or increase available antimatter and may add a reward which can be claimed when the voyage returns successfully. The voyage will progress through normal and hazard activities, but every two hours the dilemma will halt voyage progress until the player makes a choice. This means the voyage will progress at most 2 hours at a time without player interaction to continue the voyage.
As the voyage progresses, the antimatter will eventually reduce to zero, resulting in a failed voyage. Before the antimatter has expired, the player may recall the voyage, collecting the voyage rewards after a recall time. After the antimatter has expired, the player may continue the voyage by spending a Voyage Revival Token or Dilithium, or the player may abandon the voyage causing the crew to immediately become available with the loss of any gained voyage rewards.
Starting a Voyage
Voyages were moved from the bottom left corner of the Galaxy map to their own screen at the upper-left of the main screen. To start a voyage you have to select a starship and twelve crew members. During the Voyage, the crew can not be used in away missions, shuttle missions, and can't be dismissed or fused. However they can be used in the Gauntlet or for skirmish events.
Crew selection occurs by filling the 12 voyage slots, 2 for each skill, with a crew member that has the named skill. The end result is a sum for each skill composed from all selected crew. A slot may only be filled by a crew member that has the named skill, but any other skills the crew member has also contributes to the total for that skill value.
The amount per skill contributed by selected crew equals their average roll (base skill plus average proficiency), so for example a crew with 
20+((5+15)/2) and 
10+((20+40)/2) will contribute 30 and 40. Note that such a crew may only occupy one of the two slots or one of the two slots.
Because crew with three skills generally have a higher amount when combining the averages of all three skills than crew with two skills or one skill, crew with fewer than three skills should be avoided when attempting to maximize skill totals, thus helping to maximizing voyage duration. Also, crew with three skills are more versatile since they can occupy one of six slots.
Featured skills
Each voyage has two featured skills: one primary marked with a gold star, and one secondary with a silver star. These skills are tested more often: the primary skill will be tested 35% of the time, the secondary skill 25%, and each of the other skills 10%.[2]
Data collected from the community suggests that the skill selected as the primary when the voyage begins is slightly more likely to be Command or Science 
(22.5% chance of each) and slightly less likely to be Engineering (10% chance), with the other three skills having a 15% chance of being selected. Secondary skills are equally distributed among all six.
It is important to prioritize the featured skills as they will, cumulatively, be tested around 60% of the time. Completely neglecting the other four, however, will cause your voyage to perform poorly, so some balance is required to maximize voyage duration from your active crew.
Antimatter 
A voyage starts with a certain amount of Antimatter (AM), which is required to power the starship on the voyage, depending on the ship and crew selected.
Each ship carries a certain maximum amount of Antimatter (AM). The amount of ship AM depends on the ship rarity and level (gaining 50 AM per level), as follows:
| Rarity | AM at level 1 | AM at max level |
|---|---|---|
Common 
|
1050 | 1300 |
| Uncommon
|
1250 | 1550 |
| Rare
|
1550 | 1900 |
| Super Rare
|
1850 | 2250 |
| Legendary
|
2050 | 2500 |
Starting Antimatter can also be increased during crew selection. Each of the crew slots along with the ship slot give you the opportunity to match traits. A matched ship traits adds 150 AM, while each matched crew trait adds 25 AM.
There is some balance required between selecting a crew that matches a trait, which would add 25 starting AM, and crew that has higher voyage skill values. A single missed hazard costs more 30 AM, so a trait match crew may save your voyage a single hazard. However, increased voyage skill values result in a better chance to pass the hazard. In addition, each time the voyage is revived, it will restart with the starting AM, so if you plan to revive multiple times, starting AM is worth much more than a chance to pass a hazard in a voyage over 12 hours, where chances to pass hazard are very low.
Crew Traits
Following is a table of crew traits used by voyage slot type over 100+ voyages (Contributed by Greybeard), which has been confirmed by further data collected from the community:
| Trait | |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Astrophysicist | x | x | x | x | ||
| Bajoran | x | x | x | |||
| Borg | x | x | x | |||
| Brutal | x | x | x | x | x | |
| Cardassian | x | x | x | |||
| Civilian | x | x | x | x | x | x |
| Communicator | x | x | x | |||
| Costumed | x | x | x | x | x | |
| Crafty | x | x | x | x | ||
| Cultural Figure | x | x | x | |||
| Cyberneticist | x | x | ||||
| Desperate | x | x | x | x | x | |
| Diplomat | x | x | x | |||
| Duelist | x | x | x | |||
| Exobiology | x | |||||
| Explorer | x | x | x | |||
| Federation | x | x | x | x | x | x |
| Ferengi | x | |||||
| Gambler | x | x | x | |||
| Hero | x | x | x | |||
| Hologram | x | x | x | x | ||
| Human | x | x | x | x | x | x |
| Hunter | x | x | ||||
| Innovator | x | x | x | |||
| Inspiring | x | x | x | |||
| Jury Rigger | x | x | x | |||
| Klingon | x | x | x | |||
| Marksman | x | |||||
| Maverick | x | x | x | |||
| Physician | x | x | x | |||
| Pilot | x | x | x | |||
| Prodigy | x | x | ||||
| Resourceful | x | x | x | x | x | |
| Romantic | x | x | x | x | x | |
| Romulan | x | x | ||||
| Saboteur | x | x | ||||
| Scoundrel | x | x | x | |||
| Starfleet | x | x | x | x | x | x |
| Survivalist | x | x | x | |||
| Tactician | x | x | x | x | x | |
| Telepath | x | x | x | x | ||
| Undercover Operative | x | x | x | x | ||
| Veteran | x | x | x | |||
| Villain | x | x | x | |||
| Vulcan | x | x | x | x |
This indicates that certain traits are favored in certain slots ( only has 6!) and there are only four traits which can appear in all possible slots: Civilian, Federation, Human, and Starfleet.
During the Voyage
Every expiration of the "quick" timer results in a voyage activity of type normal, hazard, or dilemma.
A new normal activity (consuming 1 AM) will occur every 20s with the expiration and reset of the quick timer. This means there are three activites per minute or 30 in a 10 minute period.
Every 140 seconds, a normal activity will grant a reward (every seventh activity).
Every 80 seconds, a hazard activity occurs instead of a normal activity, resulting in an increase of 5 AM or a loss of 30 AM, unless a reward-granting normal activity is due to take place, in which case it occurs instead.
Every 2 hours a dilemma activity occurs instead of a hazard activity (with the expiration of the long timer). When a dilemma is available, the voyage progress will halt until the player makes a choice.
As the voyage progresses, the antimatter will eventually reduce to zero, resulting in a failed voyage. Before the antimatter has expired, the player may recall the voyage, collecting the voyage rewards after a recall time. After the antimatter has expired, the player may continue the voyage by spending a Voyage Revival Token or dilithium, or the player may abandon the voyage causing the crew to immediately become available with the loss of any gained voyage rewards.
Normal activity
Normal activities range from poetry competitions to exploring alien planets. Each of these activities deducts 1 AM. Every 7th normal activity (every 140s) will produce a Reward.
Rewards
Rewards occur during normal activities, and in the process your crew will unearth resources (credits, honor, chronitons, components, crew experience training, replicator rations, items or crew) which your crew takes back to the ship. Activities which give rewards also deduct 1 AM.
Hazards 
Hazards test one skill indicated by the hazard marker. If your crew avoids the hazard, you will gain 5 AM. If they fail you will lose 30 AM.
Hazards test your crew's total capability in a skill set, not the individual skill of a single crew member. The total is computed as the sum of a single skill type over all crew for the base plus average proficiency (base + ((max + min) / 2)).
Hazards do not give rewards. Hazards are what will burn through your AM reserves very quickly if your crew isn't up to the challenge.
Difficulty of Hazards
The hazards increase in chance of failure with voyage duration, meaning that in the beginning the chance to win all hazards is very high until a certain point when the chance of winning a hazard is 0%. At that point, your crew will fail every hazard and your voyage will quickly lose its reserves of AM.
The hazard failure chance threshold increases steadily and is compared against your crew's total skill value, so the larger the skill values are the longer it will take for a hazard to reach a high chance of failure.
Below is a chart of hazard first failure times, which is the first voyage time (in minutes) at which a skill fails a hazard. The Voyage Skill Value is the composite skill value for all crew on the voyage for a single skill.
List of Hazards
Dilemmas 
If your crew has survived enough hazards lasting two hours, your crew will be presented with a Dilemma - a stop point during your voyage that presents a situation that requires interaction. You, the player, must choose a course of action, all of which award some loot, possibly including Honor (30 to 100), Chronitons (30 to 75), Ship Schematics, Crew or Items.
During a Dilemmas, the voyage is paused. AM is not consumed and the timer does not advance. Until a solution is chosen by the player, the voyage will not continue. This can be used as a fail-safe by players -- for instance during an overnight voyage. However, if your skills are not strong enough, you can deplete your AM before reaching the next Dilemma.
A helpful method to use for determining whether your voyage will meet the next dilemma is to divide your current AM by 21 to get a worst-case estimate of the number of minutes your voyage has left if it fails all hazards. This is the result of the following calculation:
Worst-case voyage AM decay rate (if all hazards fail)
- One hazard every 80 seconds, skip every sixth (every 480s is a reward instead);
- 30 AM loss per hazard, +3 AM loss for three ticks at 20s, 40s, and 60s
- = -33AM/80s
- = -.4125 AM/s
- Non-30 AM loss every 480s
- = 30AM/480s = .0625 AM/s
- Add 1 loss every 480s
- = 1/480 = .002083
- = -.4125 + .0625 + .002083 = -.347916 (*60 s/m) = 20.875 AM/m
So a voyage with 630 AM remaining will continue another 30 minutes if all hazards fail, and longer if any pass. This also means having 2400 AM guarantees another 2h of voyage time, which is long enough to make it to a dilemma.
List of Dilemmas
Rewards over time
As time progresses rewards improve, making longer trips more valuable. For instance, it is possible for a player to obtain only 50 chronitons 
after a 2-hour Voyage, and 300 after a 6-hour Voyage.
Dilemmas, one every two hours, have a unique reward table. It is possible, for instance, to obtain a batch of 600 schematics, even for otherwise unobtainable ships (such as the NX-01 Enterprise), making Voyages the only currently available way to obtain elusive ships.
Before the first dilemma
In the first two hours players will be mostly awarded with common crew, basic components, and batches of 3. The first dilemma threshold crew reward is usually an uncommon and in very few cases a rare, as well as 30 Honor and 30.
Between the first and the third dilemma
Between 2 and 6 hours of voyage time players can be awarded rare crew, common components, batches of 8 and rare Replicator Rations. Most dilemmas still award an uncommon crew, 30 Honor and 30, but from the fourth hour (second dilemma) onwards, dilemmas which award a rare (or very occasionally a super rare) crew, 60 Honor and 50 become available, and from the sixth hour (third dilemma) those which give a super rare crew member, 100 Honor and 75.
Note that dilemmas which award one of the voyage-exclusive super rare crew do not award any honor or chronitons.
After the third dilemma
When your trip lasts more than 6 hours, mid-voyage rewards increase remarkably, including uncommon components, super rare crew and batches of 15 . The same loot table and percentages apply for voyages of any longer duration.
Reward Drop Percentages
This table lists approximate drop rates (over 300 voyages from Greybeard) for items by type between dilemmas.
| Item | 0-2h | 2-6h | 6+h |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrons | 15% | 15% | 15% |
| Credits | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Crew* | 0.75% | ||
| Crew** | |||
| Crew*** | 0.75% | ||
| Crew**** | 0.75% | ||
| Honor | 0.75% | 2% | 2% |
| Item | 27% | ||
| Item* | 27% | ||
| Item** | 30% | ||
| Replicator Fuel** | 0.8% | ||
| Replicator Fuel*** | 2% | ||
| Replicator Fuel**** | 2% | ||
| Replicator Fuel***** | |||
| Schematic | |||
| Training*** | 40% | ||
| Training**** | 38% | ||
| Training***** | 31% |
This table lists approximate drop rates (over 300 voyages from Greybeard) for items by type at dilemmas. (Note that the 97% rate for chrons/honor is due to those not rewarded when selecting voyage-exclusive crew from a dilemma sequence.)
| Item | 2h | 4h | 6h+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrons | 100% | 100% | 97% |
| Credits | |||
| Crew* | |||
| Crew** | 98% | 80% | 65% |
| Crew*** | 2% | 19% | 15% |
| Crew**** | 1% | 20% | |
| Honor | 100% | 100% | 97% |
| Item | |||
| Item* | |||
| Item** | |||
| Replicator Fuel** | |||
| Replicator Fuel*** | |||
| Replicator Fuel**** | |||
| Replicator Fuel***** | 1% | ||
| Schematic | 0.5% | ||
| Training*** | |||
| Training**** | |||
| Training***** |
Recalling a Voyage
As long as you have AM remaining, you can recall the starship. The voyage home does not consume any AM. The ship will take a certain time to return to you, and you will receive the rewards and be able to use the crew otherwise.
The trip back requires 40% of the Voyage time (e.g. if your trip was four hours long it will take one hour, 36 minutes for the ship to come back). You can speed up the return with dilithium.
After the return you will have a chance to see the complete log of your Voyage.
Running out of Antimatter
A player can run out of antimatter only because of normal activity (one AM per action) or of hazards (30 AM per failure). When reaching 0 AM, the ship is stranded in space: the player has the choice of aborting the mission (sacrificing all the rewards) or refilling the AM by spending a Voyage Revival Token or dilithium.
If any voyage revival tokens are in your inventory, they must all be spent before you are able to spend dilithim to revive the voyage. They can be earned in some events as threshold rewards and are sometimes offered as compensation for bugs and server crashes in the game.
The amount of dilithium needed to restore the antimatter depends on how long the voyage has lasted thus far with the equation:
<math>\frac{Time_\left(Min.\right)}{5}=</math> 
.
This works out to:
| Hours | Cost per Step
|
Total Cost
|
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 24 | 24 |
| 4 | 48 | 72 |
| 6 | 72 | 144 |
| 8 | 96 | 240 |
| 10 | 120 | 360 |
| 12 | 144 | 504 |
| 14 | 168 | 672 |
| 16 | 192 | 864 |
| 18 | 216 | 1080 |
| 20 | 240 | 1320 |
| 22 | 264 | 1584 |
| 24 | 288 | 1872 |
If you choose to abandon the mission, then your crew will be returned to active duty immediately without a waiting period, but you will not receive any of the rewards you've collected.
It is not possible to recall a ship and obtain the rewards without at least 1 AM left.
Strategies
The WereDragon Strategy
Further tests has shown that the gold skill will occur nearly 36% of the time while silver skill 24% of the time (Sample size: 3,165 skill checks in 10 voyages). The other skills will fall between 7% to 12% (with one occurrence of 15%).
The silver and gold skills will occur 60% of the time. These skills should have your primary focus. If you are intending to do a 6 hour voyage, they should be minimally at 6,000. The higher, the better. 7,000 would be recommended.
Choose a skill to sacrifice. You want that skill as low as possible to boost your other skills. As an example, lets sacrifice engineering. A fully equipped lvl 100 Gangster Spock has the stats of 276 eng, 992 sec, and 671 sci for voyages. You can use Gangster Spock as your engineer to boost up your Security and Science. Engineering skill checks will fail most of the time and eventually all the time as the voyage progress, BUT you are playing the odds. In this example, Engineering will only come up 7% to 12% of the time. That's it. That is a very small percentage. And by sacrificing engineering, you can boost the other skills and those skills will take longer before they start failing skill checks.
A modified strategy (called the NATE mod), is to sacrifice 2 skills but not to the same degree. With a pure WereDragon strategy, it is quite possible to have the skill beneath 1,000. In the NATE mod, the 2 skills will fall between 1,000 and 3,000. Again, the thought is the same. You are playing the odds. You sacrifice 2 skills to boost the other 4 skills.
Player suggestions
- A player-made tool to calculate an approximate duration of your Voyage using your crew's skills can be found here.
- Due to the fact that all the skill points of a crew contribute to the ship's total, Voyages have a slight bias in favour of crew members with points in three skills.
- As the difficulty increases at a certain point you will start failing all hazards. At that point you can roughly calculate how long it will take you to run out of AM based on your current reserve. The pattern of hazards every four activities and rewards every seven means that, once all hazards are being failed, antimatter depletes at an average rate of slightly less than 22 AM per minute. There is no point in recalling the ship when it has hundreds, or thousands, of AM in reserve, but waiting too much might result in accidentally running out. Running a voyage is safe until you have 31 AM or less in reserve - using the pattern can enable you to work out the optimal time to recall (immediately after the last reward you can collect before you reach a hazard that would bring your AM below 1).
- Voyages offer a great amount of common and uncommon crew, and are one of the fastest and cheaper ways for newer players to obtain all copies of such crew.
References
- ↑ Forum post on Voyages.
- ↑ Voyage Estimator forum post with link to data spreadsheet