USS Jenolan

The USS Jenolan (NCC-2010) was a Federation transport that was in service with Starfleet in the late 23rd century.

In 2294, the Jenolan was carrying passengers to the Norpin colony when the ship experienced an overload to one of its plasma transfer conduits. When the captain brought the ship out of warp, it hit the gravimetric interference caused by the gravitational field of a previously uncharted Dyson sphere.

The ship conducted a standard survey of the surface. Having discovered hundreds of communication arrays, Jenolan hailed the sphere. This inadvertently activated one of the sphere's docking tractor beams. The beam attempted to lock onto the ship, but only managed to cause the ship's systems to overload and aft power coil to explode.

Effectively disabled, the ship was caught in the gravity well and crashed onto the northern hemisphere, killing all but two of her crew. The ship itself sustained moderate structural damage, along with heavy damage to its memory core and main drive assembly. Additionally, its inducers were melted and its power couplings were wrecked.

The survivors, Ensign Matt Franklin and passenger Captain Montgomery Scott, were unable to devise a means of escaping the sphere. To maximize the probability of surviving until rescue, they placed themselves in suspended animation through an ingenious modification of the transporter pattern buffer by locking it in a continuous level 4 diagnostic, and feeding it power from auxiliary systems.

The Jenolan's distress call was not received until seventy-five years later, when the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) discovered the sphere crash site and detected a very low power signature from the Jenolan. An away team boarded the Jenolan and discovered that life support was still barely functioning and the transporter was still online. By this time only Scott's transporter pattern was still intact and only he was rematerialized.

While the Enterprise continued to investigate the sphere, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge and Captain Scott returned to the Jenolan to retrieve the sensor data gathered during the initial scan of the sphere. Necessary repairs were made more difficult as some of the repair equipment from the Enterprise could not easily interface with the much older components of the Jenolan.

Recovery of the data became secondary to restoring the impulse engines when the Enterprise failed to answer hails. The engineers proceeded to perform a series of jury-rigged repairs to the ship's impulse engines, including the shunting of the ships deuterium from the main cryo pump to the auxiliary tank, and were successfully able to make a week's worth of repairs in less than three hours. Following the Enterprises ion trail, the Jenolans short-ranged sensors determined the larger ship's point of entry into the sphere.

To help the Enterprise escape La Forge and Scott brought the Jenolan to a stop within the sphere's hatch, using the ship's shields to prevent the hatch from closing. However, the strain disabled the Jenolan once more, preventing it from moving out of the way so the larger ship could pass.

The Enterprise then beamed off the engineers and destroyed the Jenolan with two photon torpedoes just before the two collided, clearing the path and allowing the Enterprise and her crew to escape unharmed before the hatch closed once again. 

Background
The Jenolan model was a reuse of the transport shuttle from, albeit flipped upside down and with a bridge module and 23rd century style warp nacelles added. The original model was built by Bill George at ILM. (Michael Okuda, "Departmental Briefing Year Six - Production", TNG Season 6 DVD special feature)

The Jenolan was named for the Australian tourist attraction Jenolan Caves, visited by Naren Shankar and episode writer Ronald D. Moore following a convention. (Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion)

The name was Jenolan in the script and in a computer screen readout seen in the episode; however, it was misspelled Jenolin on the model and Jenolen in the closed captioning and subsequent entries in the Star Trek Encyclopedia.

When Scott materialized in the Jenolan's transporter chamber, the transporter effect, rather than being Next Generation standard or even that seen in the 23rd century films, was a re-creation of the transporter effect used in the original series.

contained an oddity in technology – while the shields of the Jenolan held the Dyson sphere hatchway open, the Enterprise was still able to beam Scott and La Forge from it before it was crushed. It has been well-established that transporters could not operate through shields. It is speculated that the vessel's shields were only active on the sides that were holding the hatchway open. It is also possible that Scott or La Forge simply transmitted the shield frequencies to the Enterprise, allowing the transporter beam to penetrate the shields. Alternatively, the Jenolan's shields may have been weak enough or outdated enough that the transporter was able to penetrate them.

The novelisation of the episode establishes that Scott and Franklin were on the bridge when the crash took place- Scott having volunteered his services after discovering the sphere due to his experience-, with the ship's captain and engineer dying in the accident, while the rest of the retiring officers were killed when the ship's residental quarters suffered a hull breach in the crash, all of them suffocating before Scott or Franklin could regain consciousness and let them out.

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