SS Valiant

"Our overriding question now is: What destroyed the Valiant? They lived through the barrier just as we have. What happened to them after that?"

- Captain James T. Kirk The SS Valiant is a fictional spacecraft featured in the Star Trek film and television franchise. It was first referenced, though never seen in the second series pilot episode of the original Star Trek television series, "Where No Man Has Gone Before".

History
The SS Valiant was an Earth-based exploratory vessel launched sometime around the year 2065. Little is known of its crew or mission parameters, but it is known that it encountered a powerful magnetic space storm while exploring the edges of the galaxy. It was swept a half light year out of the galaxy, thrown clear, and then turned around and head back inside the galaxy. It is theorized that one of the electromagnetic radiation from the storm had a mutagenic effect on one of the crew members, granting enormous psionic powers. It was likely this being who forced the ship to turn back into the storm. The ship was severely damaged and at least six crew members were killed during this incident. The Captain made repeated urgent requests from the ship's computer records regarding ESP. Afterward, launched a disaster recorder probe from the ship then set the Valiant 's self-destruct sequence. The Valiant was presumably destroyed with all hands aboard.

Two-hundred years later, the Federation starship USS Enterprise found the Valiant 's disaster recorder and beamed it aboard the ship. Science Officer Spock examined the data from the recorder's memory circuits and was able to obtain a crude interpretation of what transpired on the ship. The Enterprise then encountered the same magnetic anomaly, which mutated crew members Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell and Doctor Elizabeth Dehner, giving them god-like psychokinetic abilities.

Armament

 * No known armament, but the ship did possess a self-destruct program.

Notes & Trivia

 * Assuming that Captain Kirk's assessment of the Valiant 's history is correct, the ship would have been launched only two years following the maiden voyage of the Phoenix, the first Earth-based manned space vessel capable of achieving warp drive. The likelihood of such a craft making a journey to the far reaches of the galaxy at the dawn of Earth's deep space exploration program however seems implausible.


 * The disaster recorder of the SS Valiant measured 1 meter in diameter.