3 Star Trek Ships Way More Powerful Than The Enterprise (That It Still Defeated)

Star Trek’s defining icon is the USS Enterprise, the starship that carried James T. Kirk and his crew into the unknown of space on a mission of exploration. Ever since Star Trek: The Original Series first aired in the 1960s, the Enterprise has been on many adventures and engaged in many epic battles, earning a legacy that spans literal generations. Some of Star Trek’s greatest moments have been when the Enterprise is in the greatest peril, either because of some invader attacking from within – but most often because of some rival ship that is engaging the Federation in battle.

No matter which threat it has had to face, the USS Enterprise has emerged victorious. In the three examples listed below, the Enterprise was outgunned by a bigger, more powerful vessel. And even though Starfleet ultimately won the fight, these three ships have earned a respectable legacy as the top contenders the Enterprise has faced.

3. The Scimitar

Star Trek: Nemesis was the final film in the Star Trek: The Next Generation movie series, and also one of the wildest. Tom Hardy had one of his first big breakout roles playing “Shinzon,” a clone of Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) engineered by the Romulan Empire in a brazen scheme to replace the Enterprise‘s captain. Instead, the political winds shifted, and Shinzon was sent to work in the dilithium mines until the Dominion War allowed him to prove himself as a cunning military commander. Using a few strategic military alliances and the marginalized people known as the Remans as his force, Shinzon staged a coup against the empire and targeted Earth for annihilation.

To meet his goals, Shinzon fashioned himself a deadly and heavily fortified Reman warbird, the Scimitar. Shinzon’s ship was a nightmare for a ship like the Enterprise: “perfect” cloaking technology that allowed it to still deploy weapons and access warpspace while undetected; an entire armada’s worth of weaponry (52 disruptor banks, 27 photon torpedo bays), including a small fleet of attack fighters. Shinzon also had the ship fitted with a thalaron radiation weapon that was capable of killing all life on a planet in seconds, which he planned on using against Earth.

To win the battle, Picard had to do the one thing even his clone wouldn’t predict: going full Kamikaze with the Enterprise. Picard crashed his ship into the Scimitar and took the fight to Shinzon, hand-to-hand. In the end, Picard killed Shinzon while Data sacrificed himself to blow up the thalaron weapon, destroying the Scimitar.

2. The Narada

J.J. Abrams really wanted to make his mark on the Star Trek franchise when he directed Paramount’s 2009 reboot film, and that included a fearsome enemy ship for the Enterprise to face. The Narada is another nightmare vessel built by the Romulan Empire, but unlike the military warbirds Star Trek fans knew and loved, Abrams went with a new concept that played even better on a blockbuster movie screen, with a ‘nest of thorns’ design that is unique. The villain Nero (Eric Bana) needed an unbeatable warship to get revenge on the Federation, but he was no military commander, so he had to adapt.

The Narada is a 24th-century Romulan mining vessel fitted for warfare, making it a massive armored behemoth that came back in time to terrorize the 23rd century. Specialized future weapons like splintering missiles made it especially lethal in battle, but the real threats were the ship’s massive drill and the red matter weapon that could create miniature black holes. Ironically, that same superweapon that made the Narada so unbeatable proves to be its downfall when Spock kamikazes a smaller vessel into the red matter cargo, destroying the Narada in one of its own black holes.

1. Borg Cube

Any fan who watched Star Trek: The Next Generation knows that there is no fear greater than when a Borg Cube shows up onscreen. The starship vessels used by the Borg Collective, the Cubes reflect the mechanical race’s cold, industrial perfection. Each cube is linked to the other cubes in the fleet, as well as maintaining the interlinked connection amongst the entire collective. In addition to having formidable weapons and shielding (including a shield-draining tractor beam), the cubes also had entire systems dedicated to transforming other species into Borg Collective drones, including age-accelators to make young prisoners into mature adult drones.

The Enterprise didn’t win every encounter it had with Borg Cubes; the classic two-part episode “The Best of Both Worlds” saw one loss result in Jean-Luc Picard being captured and assimilated into the Collective, becoming the high-ranking drone, Locutus. However, in the end, Starfleet has defeated the Borg Cubes whenever the survival of Starfleet or Earth has been on the line. In almost every instance (in The Next Generation, the film First Contact, the final season of Picard), the Federation wins by somehow turning the Borg’s own technology against them or sabotaging a cube from within. But who knows? It may be only a matter of time and upgrades before the Borg have a truly unbeatable ship.

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