10 Deadliest Accidents In Star Trek

7. Oberth And Death

At over a century (and counting), the Oberth-class science vessel ranks amongst the longest serving Federation starship classes, alongside the likes of the Miranda class and the Excelsior class. In all that time, and with limited capacity to defend itself, the Oberth has fallen afoul of more deadly misfortune than most.

Partly an accident, if you want to place the blame on the gunner like Commander Kruge, the USS Grissom (Oberth-class) was destroyed by the Klingons in 2285. Skip ahead to 2366, the USS Bonestell met its end at the Battle of Wolf 359. Definitely not an accident! The USS Cochrane, once transport for Admiral Satie and for Wesley Crusher, suffered losses in the Dominion War. At some point in her Starfleet career, Beckett Mariner also crashed an Oberth.

The most infamous of the class has to be the USS Pegasus. A mixture of malfeasance, accidental explosion, and much-needed mutiny against Captain Pressman saw the deaths of everyone aboard but nine in 2358. The precise number of lives lost that day was given by Commander Riker in These Are the Voyages… — "seventy-one" (the standard crew complement of the Oberth class is eighty). Some of those officers ended their existence inside solid rock.

The 'curse of the Oberth' also struck the SS Tsiolkovsky in 2363. Whilst studying the collapse of a red supergiant, its crew succumbed to a form of polywater intoxication, largely similar to the Psi 2000 infection that had spread to the crew of Kirk's Enterprise.

Suffering from the sensation of extreme heat (in more ways than one), part of the Tsiolkovsky's 80-strong crew died by lowering the environmental controls to freezing point. The rest were "sucked out" (*correction, "blown out") into space when they released the emergency hatch on the bridge. No amount of modesty blankets or carefully placed hands could save them.