Worst Starship Disasters?

[Mojochi]

I haven't given it much thought yet, but right now, my vote is going to go to the USS Brattain, from TNG's Night Terrors.

Thirty-something people aboard all go completely insane from REM sleep deprivation, and murder each other, in all manner of gruesome ways, over a period of weeks adrift, where they fell into mutiny, psychotic episodes, & rampant paranoia. Honestly, that captain's log is just plain terrifying

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Vulcan ships from "The Expanse" and "Impulse" have that beat - the crews turned into zombies and ate each other!

 

[Tosk]

I assume we're discounting events where an opposing force just blew them up?

 

[Mojochi]

I assume we're discounting events where an opposing force just blew them up?

I mean I suppose so. Blowing up is bad, but it ain't torturous. I'd think Borg assimilation is probably up there though. Enterprise C's survivors being carted off to a Romulan prison camp sucks bad too, I guess

So I suppose we can categorize it as what's some of the worst stuff to have ever happened to a starship crew?

 

[1001001]

The Enterprise crew all devolved into monsters.

That was a bummer.

I haven't given it much thought yet...

Great way to start a thread...

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

The Yamato. Destroyed because they could figure out how to switch the ship off and then on again.

 

[DonIago]

^That was the one that first came to mind for me. They got to experience malfunctions that evidently became increasingly life-threatening, and then just as potential rescue comes along they get snuffed out entirely.

Apparently Varley didn't even make an effort to evacuate the families first. Great captaining there.
...not that Picard made any effort to do so either.

The folks on the original Defiant ("The Tholian Web") didn't have a great time of it either. All went slowly insane and finally murdered each other.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

The folks on the original Defiant ("The Tholian Web") didn't have a great time of it either. All went slowly insane and finally murdered each other.

I think one thing this thread will highlight is that space madness is the real threat crews have to face.

 

[at Quark's]

The Starship Titanic, built in the early days of Improbability Physics that seconds after its launch, suffered “a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure."

For people complaining that that's supposed to happen in an entirely different universe: that's why it's called improbability physics.

 

[Galileo7]

The Yamato. Destroyed because they could figure out how to switch the ship off and then on again.

Agree.

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[Mojochi]

Great way to start a thread...

Well, I'd given thought to it maybe being an interesting topic of conversation, just hadn't made up my mind on what I felt was the worst way to go yet. I don't' t always have a definitive stand or opinion when I try to strike up a chat. I like to see everybody else's thoughts

I'd agree that Genesis would've been a pretty gruesome demise, had they not survived it, reverting into beasts that fed on each other

I'm thinking it must've sucked to be the remaining crew on the bridge of the Pegasus. Matetializing in solid rock might be a quick death for the others, but those that lived through it got to scramble for who knows how long, until they were exposed to space

 

[at Quark's]

Do disasters that were reversed/undone count too /must they be lethal by definition ?

Then I would also include voyager's Macrocosm or TNG's Genesis as pretty nasty though I agree that the Night terror way is probably the most horrific one.

Oh, and probably also the unseen crews driven/infected by those jellyfish torture beings from TOS's Operation: Annihilate.

 

[Nate]

A candidate from Discovery

Spoiler: Discovery Spoilers

What about the USS Glenn ? Weren't they anatomically inverted or something equally as horrific ?

 

[Mojochi]

Do disasters that were reversed/undone count too /must they be lethal by definition ?

All of the above are worth mentioning, but surely a permanent or fatal horror of the week is probably going to trump a temporary one

 

[MacLeod]

Don't forget the Tsiolkovosky some of the crew decided to blow themselves into space.

The 1701 also suffered an "unfortunate accident" which resulted in the loss of life of all those on board.

 

[Levi]

What about the Cadet crew of the Valiant? Lots to argue, but in the end a full ship of Cadets was lost.

 

[Captain Rob]

How about the USS Intrepid from TOS. A ship full of Vulcans that Spock had sensed had all immediately died. Since the ship was slowly being digested by the giant Space Amoeba, wouldn't it make sense that the outer areas of the ship would decompress as the structure dissolved? With most of the crew dying when that last are where they had sheltered imploding. Such as Sick Bay and the central core of the saucer section.

 

[Phoenix219]

Agree.

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Man, old school TNG's music was so much more dramatic and intense.....! Thanks for the reminder.

 

[Timo]

Not sure why booting a PC would make one confident of the virtues of booting a starship.

I mean, very few complex things even today survive booting - primarily, it's the bugs inside that do. A starship would be the epitome of complex. So Varley trying to boot his ship would be like Crusher trying to cure her patient by killing and resurrecting: technically doable but unlikely to do any good.

Even assuming that a starship is somehow comparable to an 1980s PC, where would Varley get whatever is analogous to "backup files" in the future? And how? (Transferring of files between ships is what resulted in infection in the episode.)

That Data benefited from dying is the absurd thing in the ep, not the Yamato skipping the procedure.

...Worst starship disaster? Khan's ship not blowing up on her own while he slept.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BigDaveX]

The Yamato. Destroyed because they could figure out how to switch the ship off and then on again.

To be fair, I got the impression from Geordi's dialogue that the trick the Enterprise used wouldn't have worked on the Yamato, because they also had to reload the ship's core software from backups, which would likely also have been corrupted in the Yamato's case.

Getting back to the topic, the Pegasus incident springs to mind. Best case, it started off as a mutiny, possibly costing a few lives, before their illegal cloaking device malfunctioned and killed everyone aboard, and eventually failed and left the ship fused into an asteroid. Worst case, the crew weren't instantly killed by the malfunctioning cloak, and were left alive and helpless on the crippled ship for days or weeks before power finally ran out, the lucky ones were instantly killed by being fused into rock, and the remainder were left to suffocate or freeze to death.