Which Star Trek Ship Is The Franchise's Most Powerful?

It's the kind of question fans (read: nerds) delight in debating endlessly at conventions or between rounds of "Fortnite," the kind that has no definitive answer but massive libraries of evidence. Build a universe with sufficient canon and these kinds of questions are inevitable: Is Superman stronger than the Hulk? Could Batman outsmart Dr. Manhattan? Which "Star Trek" ship is the most powerful? Power itself is a very relative metric.

Is it a measure of pure strength of arms? Does it represent a ship's ability to "project power" like real-world naval vessels? Is a ship that can materialize, strike into the heart of an enemy fleet, and then disappear again into the stars more or less powerful than a ship that can destroy an entire planet? For our purposes here, we're leaning more towards the latter, the kind of raw, destructive power that makes entire civilizations cower in fear, rather than "soft power." In those terms, there's one, clear answer in the "Star Trek" universe: the terrifying, oppressive might of the Borg cube (which you can now buy a PC in the shape of).

The Borg love a geometric shape. Alongside the cube, they've also fielded a deadly sphere, the scout version of the more heavily weaponized cube. However, the cube remains the pinnacle of Borg military technology, a nearly invincible starship capable of annihilating entire fleets of enemy vessels. Borg cubes are staggering in size, dwarfing nearly every other vessel portrayed in the "Star Trek" universe, as the cast of "The Next Generation" when they time-travelled to battle the assimilating aliens in First Contact.

They measure more than three kilometers per edge, with an internal volume of over 28 cubic kilometers. More terrifying is their weaponry, however. A Borg cube bristles with deadly weaponry, including missiles capable of draining enemy ships' shields, a cutting laser that can either surgically dismember or disintegrate pieces of a starship, and a tractor beam that paralyzes a foe while also siphoning away its shields.

The true strength of a Borg cube, however, is its durability. Cubes make use of a specialized electromagnetic field that renders them nearly invulnerable to many weapons and capable of adapting to nearly any other (not wholly dissimilar from the rejected landing field technology that never made the show). They're also able to regenerate their hulls, quickly repairing any damage an enemy attack is able to inflict. In its first large-scale encounter with a Borg cube, at the infamous Battle of Wolf 359, Starfleet lost 39 of the 40 ships it deployed while inflicting trivial damage to the cube.

While it's hard to argue with the Borg cube's dominance, there are a few other vessels in the history of "Star Trek" that could potentially vie for the crown of most potent. Starfleet's most powerful single vessel, for instance, is probably the USS Vengeance, a massive Dreadnought-class starship designed exclusively for war. The largest ship ever fielded by the Federation, the Vengeance was operated clandestinely by Starfleet in preparation for a potential war with the Klingons.

Speaking of truly massive vessels, there's the Voth city ship from "Star Trek: Voyager," a ship literally the size of a city and so huge that it was able to capture and physically beam the Voyager, a large starship in its own right, onboard. Then there's the Scimitar, a supership constructed as part of a plot to overthrow the Romulan Senate. The Scimitar was the only Romulan ship capable of utilizing "perfect" cloaking technology, allowing it to remain completely undetectable even when firing its weapons or traveling at warp speed. It was also equipped with a staggering fifty-two disruptor banks and twenty-seven photon torpedo bays, as well as a planet-killing radiation weapon that could eradicate all life on a world in seconds.