Krenim weapon ship

Krenim weapon ship

The Krenim weapon ship was a weapon developed by the Krenim Imperium some time prior to 2174. Its design and construction was spearheaded by Annorax, a military temporal scientist.

History

Deployment

The design of a weapon that removed targets from space-time, and the construction of a ship to house it, was overseen by Annorax in the 22nd century. In the 2170s, the weapon ship was activated and used against the Rilnar, the primary enemy of the Krenim Imperium at the time. This temporal incursion restored the preeminence of the Krenim, but unexpectedly also resulted in a plague that cost over fifty million Krenim lives. Annorax attempted to rectify his error with a second incursion, but inadvertently erased the Krenim colony at Kyana Prime and with it his beloved wife.

Annorax continued to alter history with the weapon ship over the next two centuries, obsessed with restoring his wife. Among the civilizations he eliminated were the Alsuran Empire, the Malkoth, the Zahl, the Garenor, and the Ram Izad.

Use against Voyager

The weapon ship deployed against the USS Voyager

The weapon ship was also employed against the Federation starship USS Voyager (Component 049 Beta in their calculations). Voyager had been passing through what in a previous timeline had been Zahl space when Annorax used the weapon to erase the Zahl, turning Zahl space into Krenim space. Attacked repeatedly by Krenim warships using chroniton torpedoes against which their deflector shields were useless, they were forced to develop temporal shields to use against the torpedoes. These shields disrupted the precise calculations Annorax' crew had made to direct the results of their temporal incursion against the Garenor. This caused the incursion to "miss"; instead of the desired results, that is, the restoration of all of Krenim territory, including Kyana Prime, a timeline was created in which the Krenim Imperium never existed at all. This was, of course, totally unacceptable, and thus Annorax turned the weapon on Voyager. Voyager, however, was able to escape by going to warp speed, taking advantage of its faster warp capability to outrun the weapon ship.

Self-erasure

File:Krenim timeship exploding.jpg

The weapon ship begins to erase itself

The weapon ship itself was eventually erased from history when Voyager, all but destroyed by Krenim attacks, led a small fleet, composed of two Mawasi cruisers and three Nihydron warships, against it. Tired of the seemingly endless and futile mission, some of the crew, led by Annorax' second in command, Obrist, shut down the temporal core. This caused the ship to phase back into normal space time, so that conventional weapons could affect it. Though the vessel's conventional weapons were limited, they were still enough to overpower the attackers.

However, Voyager's captain, Kathryn Janeway, was aware of the exact location of the ship's temporal core. Alone on her ship after being forced to order the rest of her crew to abandon ship due to its ruined state, she piloted it into that section in a kamikaze attack, causing the core to destabilize. This exploded the weapon ship and, moreover, caused a temporal incursion that erased the ship itself from history, and with it, every one of the alterations in the timeline it had ever made.

Ironically, this had the effect of accomplishing exactly that which Annorax had been attempting to do for centuries; Kyana Prime was never erased, and Annorax never lost his wife. (VOY: "Year of Hell", "Year of Hell, Part II")

Technical data

Method of operation

Its main weapon was a beam that pushed objects out of the spacetime continuum, effectively erasing them from history. Careful and meticulous calculations were required to create the exact changes in the timeline that were desired. The ship could be deployed against an entire species by firing the weapon on the species' homeworld, pushing the species out of the spacetime continuum. This caused a causality paradox; all of history the species played any part in would be altered.

The following gallery is an illustration of the method of operation, in which the weapon was used against a colony.

Krenim temporal weapon ship 1.jpg

The weapon ship fires on its target

Krenim Weapon Ship Firing on Zahl Colony.jpg

The beam hits the target, in this case, a colony

Zahl Colony Being Erased.jpg

The colony is erased from history

Zahl Colony Erased from History.jpg

The colony has been erased from history, leaving untouched land

Capabilities and limitations

The ship obtained its power to affect time from its temporal core. When in operation, the core also kept the ship, and everything and everyone on it, outside of normal space-time. This rendered the ship immune to all conventional weapons and protected the crew from the flow of time, effectively rendering them immortal. Without the temporal core however, the ship was vulnerable as its shields were so weak that even a photon grenade could penetrate its hull. In addition, the vessel's great mass prevented it from exceeding warp 6. The ship did mount a formidable array of directed-energy weapons for conventional warfare. (VOY: "Year of Hell", "Year of Hell, Part II")

Apocrypha

The Star Trek Online mission "Time in a Bottle" reveals that the Krenim are aware of the events that befell Annorax, and offer the Delta Alliance (the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Republic) a set of schematics for the weapon ship to be used against the Iconians; in "Broken Circle", the Alliance makes an attack against the Iconians to give the researchers time to complete the ship. In the mission "Butterfly", the ship - christened K.I.S. Annorax - is completed, but the researchers reveal that using the weapon directly against the Iconians would result in warp travel being delayed for more than 50,000 years. After holodeck simulations to determine an ideal scenario, the ship makes a temporal incursion that restores the destroyed planet of Romulus, but finds it has been completely assimilated by the Borg. The ship is thus forced to make another temporal incursion, this time against the Borg transwarp network; the ship is damaged by Borg attacks and its temporal shielding fails, reintegrating the ships and their crews into the "main" timeline. The ship was later made available to players as the "Annorax Science Dreadnought".