SS Valiant
The SS Valiant was an Earth starship that was in service in the mid-21st century. In 2065, the Valiant embarked on a mission of deep space exploration. (, display graphic)

During the expedition, the Valiant encountered a magnetic space storm that overwhelmed her impulse engines and swept the vessel into the energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy. The galactic barrier caused severe damage to the Valiant, and the death of six crewmen. One of the crewmen affected by the barrier began to develop extremely powerful psychokinetic abilities, posing a threat to the ship. In an effort to stop this individual, who was growing more dangerous, the captain of the Valiant gave the order to destroy his own ship. Just prior to its destruction, the Valiant ejected its own disaster recorder.

By 2265, the Valiant had been missing for two hundred years. The Valiants disaster recorder was recovered by the starship , as the Enterprise was preparing to probe outside the galaxy. Reviewing the  recovered from the memory banks of the recorder, the crew of the Enterprise discovered the final fate of the Valiant. ()

Personnel

Appendices

Background information 

The year of launch and the type of mission for SS Valiant were stated on a computer screen graphic in . The episode  suggests, however, that the launch might have actually occurred a few years later. In the episode, the Friendship 1 probe, launched in 2067, was said to have paved the way for all the manned missions sent out to contact other species.

The first draft of the script stated several facts about the ship that were later removed in subsequent rewrites, including the description when first encountered as an "old class cruiser" with a gross weight of about 190,000 tons. When the disaster recorder was recovered, it was marked with "USS Valiant" and "Galactic Survey Cruiser".  When Spock retrieved the data from the recorder he described the following: "The U.S.S. Valiant, Class IV stellar cruiser, launched 132 years ago. It was on a mission in this quadrant when last heard from." 

The final draft of the episode's script revealed the Valiants call letters as VAL 115, but was cut from the completed episode. The script also referred to the ship, interchangeably, as both the USS Valiant and the  Valiant, but most commonly with the former of those prefixes. 

The Valiant was again referred to as a galactic survey cruiser in Star Trek Maps (), which also gives the vessel the registry NCC-S1104. According to the same source, the ship exited the galaxy at a vertical upward angle slightly towards the galactic center and encountered the galactic barrier approximately 780 light years away from Earth. The same account of an upward trajectory was repeated in Star Trek Star Charts (; p. 10). However, the point at which the ship encountered the barrier was depicted to be approximately two thousand light years away from Earth.

A reference model of the Valiant was built by Greg Jein and photographed by author Mike Okuda for representation in , which continued to be used in the second edition, as well as in all editions of the , becoming one of the few conjectural designs ported over into that otherwise strictly canon work.  On its hull, the ship was named Valiant, with no USS or SS. The model was also marked with the registry number ADC-11031 and the number 02 on the bridge module. Of Jein's design, an appreciative Okuda has stated, "I'm not sure, but I think it may be Greg's homage to "," whose registry also had an ADC prefix. Greg built the Dark Star ship model, and he knows I'm a big fan of that film." Jein delivered his model to Okuda without warp nacelles, but it was decided to add these after all, reusing nacelles from the  model Jein had also constructed for Okuda's Chronology project.  According to Doug Drexler, this model influenced the design of the , a ship also launched in the 2060s, created for the  episode . 

The model had been one of four Jein had constructed for Okuda out of his own volution, and free of charge. In return, both Okuda and Drexler had tried hard during their tenure on the Star Trek franchise to get Jein's designs elevated into canon, and while they succeeded for the , and Bonaventure models, the Valiant was not one of them (the other one having been a pre-Original Series-era Romulan warbird).

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