Star Trek Online Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich confirmed during an interview with Videogamer.com (via MMORPG.com) that the sci-fi MMO "will be out the first quarter of 2010." If all goes according to plan, you can expect to take command of your starship between January and March of next year.

As for the closed beta, Zinkievich said its "really just right around the corner. I think that there's a press release that's going to go out in just a couple of days." You can still apply to be a part of the the beta on the official Web site.

In other Star Trek Online news, Cryptic will be hosting a dev chat tomorrow, Oct. 20, at 11:30 a.m. PDT on player progression. All the information you need to participate in the IRC chat can be found after the jump.

Next Tuesday, October 20, at 11:30 a.m. Pacific time (we’re GMT -7 right now), we’ll be holding a developer’s chat in the official Star Trek Online IRC chat!

This week's topic is player progression. We've talked about this previously in an Ask Cryptic, but we'd like to use this chat for any follow-up questions you'd like to ask the devs in real time.

The chat is scheduled to last 30 minutes. If you can’t make it due to time constraints, we’ll be posting a transcript of the chat on the forums.

If you’d like to join us, point your IRC program of choice toward #STO on coldfront.net, or click right here for a Java client, then type "/join #STO" in the input area. And if you can’t make it, just reply with your question in this post’s comment thread. We’ll be selecting questions from the thread to put to the developers.