The Most Powerful Weapons In Star Trek History, Ranked

05/05/2024

The official stance of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets is one of peace and universal understanding, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t also carry some big sticks. Exploring the universe can be dangerous, and the Head of Security or the Armory Officer are often the most important jobs on a starship.

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Some of the most powerful and devastating weapons in the Star Trek universe were built or developed by the Federation to defend starships and their crew. Others have appeared courtesy of less idealistic races for the intention of conquest and destruction.

Varon-T Disruptor

So Brutal The Federation Made Them Illegal

Appeared In: Star Trek: The Next Generation, S3E22, “The Most Toys.”

The Varon-T Disruptor is a rare type of phaser weapon possessed by obsessed collector, Kivas Fajo. Kivas threatens innocents with his deadly weapon to coerce Data into helping with a nefarious plan to lure Enterprise to the colony.

Only five of these weapons were ever manufactured, which is why they’re valuable collector’s items. Even the worst type of hand-held ranged weapon will often, at worst, put a hole in the target or disintegrate it. The Varon-T Disruptor, however, rends the target’s body in an agonizing implosion and rips it apart from the inside.

Tricobalt Warhead

A Real Weapon On A Planet Of Fake Ones

Appeared In: Star Trek: The Original Series, S1E23, “A Taste of Armageddon.”

The Enterprise came to the planet of Eminiar VII on a routine mission to establish diplomatic relations but got mixed up in a unique war when they arrived. The ship had been “hit” by the “virtual” warheads of the opposing planet, Vendikar.

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This was the first time that these weapons were mentioned. Even though these were not real and only part of the war “role-play” actual warheads like this do exist and they’re powerful enough to vaporize a large starship.

Smaller devices have been used as controlled explosives, like the one from the DS9 episode, “Trials and Tribble-lations” and in the Enterprise episode “In a Mirror, Darkly” the Tholians used a tricobalt warhead to create an explosion so massive it created an interphasic rift.

Multikinetic Neutronic Mines

A Lethal Weapon Of Borg Design

Appeared In: Star Trek: Voyager, S4E1, “Scorpion.”

Captain Janeway broke protocol a few times while guiding Voyager through the vast and unknown Delta Quadrant, making deals and stealing tech from some hostile and dangerous races. At the end of season three, she even struck a deal with the Borg to fight a mutual enemy, but the plan wasn’t as clear-cut as she led her partners to believe.

Part of the plan involved the possible use of multikinetic neutronic mines, which Janeway described as a weapon of mass destruction. These mines had the power to destroy entire star systems and their inhabitants, which goes to show how desperate the Borg was to combat Species 8472.

The Stone Of Gol

An Ancient Weapon With A Twist

Appeared In: Star Trek: The Next Generation, S7E4, “Gambit.”

This would be a weapon that Captain Picard would understand, which is one of the reasons he’s the one who figures out its true power and how it works. It was a type of psionic resonator that was so powerful the Vulcans that built it split it into two pieces and hid both in separate places.

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It resurfaced again in the TNG episode “Gambit” when a mercenary was charged with recovering it for the Vulcan Isolationist Movement. Captain Picard was the one who figured out that it was only useful against people with aggressive or malevolent thoughts. In a time of peace, or with those who could control their emotions, it was useless.

The Genesis Probe

The Power To Create And Destroy

Appeared In: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

It wasn’t built to be a weapon, and when it was first used, it seemed to have benevolent, maybe even miraculous powers to generate life from nothing more than bare rock and dead air. The Genesis Project was the creation of Carol Marcus and her son, David, and it was designed to bring life to dead planets.

It seemed to work at first, with the probe detonating on Khan’s ship over a lifeless moon, but the natural cycle of the planet was accelerated, and it started to destroy itself. This was due to David’s use of protomatter with Genesis, a dangerous and volatile substance that’s banned throughout most of the universe.

The Klingons, who stole some of the secret files that described Genesis, were intent on stealing the probe and using it as a weapon to destroy planets instead of making them lush and inhabitable.

The Doomsday Machine

The Final Resting Place Of The USS Constellation

Appeared In: Star Trek: The Original Series, S1E6, “The Doomsday Machine.”

Where it came from, who built it, and its exact nature always remained a mystery. The best that Kirk and Spock could determine was that it was some ancient “doomsday” device, and it likely destroyed whoever built it.

The USS Enterprise followed a trail of destroyed ships and galaxies to find it and finally caught up to not only the Doomsday Machine but also Captain Decker and the shattered hull of the USS Constitution. From what Decker could describe, the machine used antiprotons to destroy planets and ships, and the exterior was made of solid neutronium, which is virtually impenetrable.

Captain Decker, who was suffering from survivor’s guilt and serious trauma, took it upon himself to fly a shuttlecraft into the weapon and blow it up. This revealed that an attack from the inside might disable or destroy the machine, and the unfortunate Constellation was the obvious choice.