10 Deadliest Accidents In Star Trek
ZERO DAYS SINCE LAST TRANSPORTER MALFUNCTION
In Star Trek, anyone stepping onto a transporter pad or boarding a shuttle is intimately aware of the deadly consequences should things go wrong. No amount of Heisenberg compensators or magnetic interlocks can prevent the unpredictable or frustrate the fallible. Save for certain cases, 'human error' post-First Contact is equally anthropocentric. On the contrary, accidents in Trek are literally, almost comfortingly, universal.
The opposite of accident is intentional act or (in some cases) culpable negligence. You can't blame the Mars Attack on wet floors. By definition, an accident is not a natural disaster. That rules out, for example, the volcanic eruptions that led to the near extinction of the Scalosians by the year 2268. No gravitational wavefronts, solar flares, or natural sources of radiation either.
Particularly for legal purposes, 'accidental death' tends NOT to include death by disease, other illness, or old age. (You'd have a hard time finding insurance in Star Trek's future anyway.) That does mean death by virus aboard the USS Exeter in The Omega Glory, and death by rapid aging in The Deadly Years (and Unnatural Selection), won't be included here. As for the giant space amoeba in The Immunity Syndrome, we'll let the Vulcan lawyers figure that out.
'Deadliest' is also DEADLIEST, so rest in peace (ish), Commander Sonak. In memoriam A.G. Robinson, and our apologies to all the others left off this list. Accidents do happen, after all. Go big or blow up on your way back to starbase!
10. Dyson Sphere Disaster
In 2294, the USS Jenolan, a Sydney-class passenger transport ship, went missing on its way to the Norpin colony on Norpin V. It took 75 years to find out what had happened. Given the traumatic nature of events, we can forgive Scotty a few Aldebaran whiskies, too.
The Jenolan had, in fact, crashed into a Dyson Sphere — a truly gigantic structure built around a star to harness its energy. This particular Dyson Sphere was 200 million kilometres in diameter, with an interior surface area of over 250 million M-class planets. It had been abandoned by its creators.
The direct cause of the crash wasn't the Sphere's rather large gravitational field, but an incompatibility between the resonance frequency of its tractor beams and Starfleet power systems. When the Sphere tried to lock on to the Jenolan, it overloaded the ship's aft power coils. Badly damaged, the Jenolan could no longer resist gravity's pull. Only Scotty and Ensign Matt Franklin survived the collision. Only Scotty made it out of transporter suspension.
Though no such numbers are mentioned on screen, the novelisation of Relics gives the Jenolan's crew complement at 36, plus its captain, James Armstrong. The number of passengers, in addition to Captain Montgomery Scott (retired), isn't specified, though it is implied there were quite a few. The novel does state how the passengers died — from asphyxiation due to a hull breach caused by the crash.