Hello all, Ric here with a breakdown on a viewer requested topic, the Krenim Temporal
Weapon ship as designed by Annorax and seen in the epic two-parter Voyager episodes, “Year
of Hell”!
The premise behind this impressive vessel was quite simple, create a ship that could
erase its target from time completely and thereby alter history in monumental ways.
Exactly the sort of thing that the Temporal Accords were written to prevent and had it
been present in the 26th century onwards, it may have even been a factor in the Temporal
Cold War.
As mentioned, the ship was conceived and built on the designs of the Krenim scientist, Anorroax
from Kyana Prime around 2170.
The vessel was powered by a Temporal Core, which supplied not only the power for its
main weapon and time travel capabilities, but the general power for the ship.
The vessel could travel at conventional warp, but that was far from its strong suit, being
only capable of Warp 6 as most.
However, it did not need to be fast as it quite literally had all the time in the galaxy.
At the fore of the ship was a large apparatus that made up half the vessel’s length and
was divided into six pylons, which amplified and focused the temporal energies channelled
through it into a single burst of high chronoton and tachyon energy.
Upon impact, this beam simply isolates the physical mass of the target it is calibrated
for and removes it from history.
It is as if whatever it strikes is simply deleted from the timeline which in turn causes
a temporal shockwave to ripple outwards from the point of origin across the galaxy.
This shockwaves alters everything it touches as an aftershock converting everything into
the new timeline that was created.
The only things that are not affected by the changes are things enclosed within temporal
shielding, which allows them to persist into the new timeline, unaffected by outside influences.
The Weapon Ship itself has just such incredibly sophisticated shielding, which serves to isolate
the ship from the space-time continuum, otherwise it would be subjected to even the most basic
of paradoxes.
That being, if travels to point A, to delete item A and succeeds, then it no longer had
a reason to travel there to delete it in the first place.
However, the level of shielding on Annorax’s ship was so advanced and so complete at removing
it from the time stream, that the entire vessel, and everything on it including the crew, were
no longer subject to general time, nor conventional weaponry.
As long as one remained aboard the Krenim Temporal Weapon Ship, one was fundamentally
immortal and in this way, its mission to restore the Krenim Imperium ran for at least 200 years
of on-board ship time as the crew made numerous alterations.
The Krenim vessel also boasted armaments of temporal Chronoton Torpedoes that were similarly
out of phase with space-time and used this feature to simply slip past regular deflector
shielding as if it was not there.
it also carried basic energy weapons, but like speed, offensive firepower was not its
strong suit.
The vessel also had incredibly detailed sensors that could monitor fluctuations in time as
the weapon was fired and provide near instantaneous readings on the results of timeline alteration.
This is pretty impressive as it means that the ship was capable of monitoring galaxy-spanning
changes instantly, faster than any sensor system that Starfleet has, so I suggest that
this was based less on observing a change, and perhaps comparing histories with a before
and after database of events.
The ship also has a very advanced computer designed to process multiple simulations and
possibilities as it tries to account for every possible variable to any change they are considering,
however as we see in the show, not even this advanced temporal computer is capable of accounting
for every factor in existence.
On board the Vessel, Annorax developed a rather morbid museum of lost relics from the hundreds
of worlds and cultures that his ship had erased from existence, down to meals of extinct planets.
Although extinct I guess isn’t the right word, if they never existed to begin with?
But then again, the targets of the Temporal Weapon did exist, and so long as the weapon
exists, there is a pocket of unaltered reality where their victims still once lived.
When the ship was eventually destroyed, the temporal core within was detonated and the
Krenim Weapon Ship itself was erased from time amid a new rippling incursion that restored
the timeline to a point before Annorax began meddling.
In the restored history, the man’s family was restored to existence, themselves a casualty
of the Krenim meddling.
This led the designs for the Temporal Weapon to never progress beyond the theoretical stages
as Annorax was no longer being driven by grief.
At least, that’s how I interpreted the ending of the “Year of Hell”.
Of course the ship does see itself crop up again in apocryphal content as someone picks
up those schematics from the Krenim archives and continues Annorax’s work, but eventually
that is all sorted out by the Temporal Agencies of the future and a messy story.
If you’re interested in that one, I have already covered it in a Temporal War breakdown
video I’ll link below.
Annorax was a great villain in Trek, and the temporal weapon ship a formidable foe for
the lone USS Voyager to contend with, one that took everything the ship and crew had
to remove.
That two-parter story remains one of my favourite Trek storylines to this date, even if it does
ultimately fall back into the trope of and it never happened, like a dream!
So, what do you think of the Temporal Weapon Ship and if you remember the episode, you
did you feel at its conclusion?
I’ve been Ric, thanks for watching this one and I hope you remembered to raise your
own temporal shields, of you’ll have forgotten about the 9 minute introduction of tap-dancing
penguins and that was a pain to choreograph.
Wait, I think I removed that by accident.
oh…