USS Gander
The USS Gander was a 24th century Federation  runabout operated by Starfleet. This ship was assigned to Deep Space 9.

In 2375, the Gander was piloted by  Ezri Dax in her search for Worf, who had been reported missing in action from the  near the Badlands. She directed the ship to where his escape pod's last known position likely was, and shut off engines to allow the plasma storms to drift the Gander to the same place the escape pod was. Her plan worked, although the ship took minor damage from the plasma field. She was able to lock a tractor beam on to the escape pod and transport Worf aboard.

On the return trip to Deep Space 9, the Gander was attacked by two Jem'Hadar attack ships near the Goralis system. Their engines damaged, they entered Goralis III's atmosphere, beaming down shortly before the Gander exploded in the night sky above them. ()

Appendices

Background information 
According to the , writer René Echevarria had originally used "the Ganges, and his script reflects that decision. "Then some smartass said, 'That one was destroyed [].' And I said, 'Oh, yeah? Well, this is a new one.' And the discussion got all the way up to Rick, who said, 'It was destroyed. We need a new one.'" Clearly, it would have been simple for Echevarria to come up with the name of a previously untapped river, but he was feeling feisty. "My feeling was, 'So what if it was destroyed?'" he says. "That was five years ago. This is a new one. How many s have there been?" Ultimately, the majority ruled and the runabout was christened Gander, after ." 

The line was dubbed in post-production, but still appears as Ganges in closed captioning. Even then, on the DVD subtitles, it was mistakenly spelled Ganda, and Ganda was, according to the , the name of the runabout. Furthermore, the runabout model was labeled with this name. The authors noted that Ezri's pronunciation might sound like "Gander", which was the name of a river in Canada, and conclude by saying, "It could go either way."

Apocrypha 
According to the  RPG sourcebook, the Ganders registry was NCC-72311.

External link 
 

de:USS Gander
fr:USS Gander
nl:USS Gander
Gander