By Aaron M Pollyea
Creating and fleshing out starships for the newly-released Delta Quadrant Sourcebook for the Star Trek Adventures RPG was an interesting job. Most of Voyager’s trek through that far away space saw them encountering alien civilizations only briefly, and we rarely got a look at anything in depth. But there are always exceptions. The Borg is the clearest example, but also the Hirogen and the Kazon, each of which appeared multiple times.
Both the Kazon and Hirogen had enough appearances that there was ample material to ensure they had a couple starships each, but detailing them meant diving into their culture. The Hirogen and their lonely wandering existence of hunting meant that their starships had to be both rugged and easy for few crew members to maintain. The Kazon were similar in this regard as they had stolen the technologies and had difficulty maintaining it all in the first place. Giving them a bit more flavour, then, was fun and still a challenge compared to Romulans or Klingons.
But the Borg are always the boogy-man in the corner. Strangely the Borg are the most difficult and easiest vessels to flesh out. On one hand, they are highly specialized in duty or by definition adaptive to their situation, and it’s fairly simple to say “Hmm…the Borg would have a specialized support vessel to build things.” But where it becomes difficult is ensuring that the Borg have a reason more than ‘It makes sense and can save some time doing something” just because when you have trillions of drones and millions of cubes, any task becomes trivial. I hope I’ve made the Borg vessels in the Delta Quadrant have this reason for existence.
Borg technology is also covered including the transwarp conduits and transwarp drives. While incredibly fast, effectively allowing the Borg to move across the Galaxy in weeks rather than decades, this propulsion system should have reasons why it isn’t the single type of FTL navigation Borg vessels have, and without giving it away, I think there is ample reason why you wouldn’t use it exclusively. Other technologies include auto-regeneration units, something that assist in repairing damage on board a Borg vessel and is what happens to small animals caught up in a Borg assimilation frenzy. Finally, rules are given for assimilated starships, how a gamemaster can use them in their game and what rules and attributes they should have. Want to know what happens when a Steamrunner class gets to be a part of the Collective, here you go!
Finally, I couldn’t have a starship section without including vessels that were found in the fan favorite two-parter “Year of Hell”, the Krenim Warship and the Krenim Timeship, codename JABBERWOCKY by Temporal Investigations. These vessels should be fun for readers to go through and see how dangerous they can be, even to something as intimidating as the Borg Collective.
There are more surprises beyond those I’ve talked about here. I hope you enjoy them!