A New Star Trek Game Just Revealed The Hidden Reason Starfleet Actually Began
When was Starfleet created? Depends on which Starfleet we’re talking about.
When was Starfleet first formed? In Star Trek lore, that question might be a bit trickier than you think. Luckily, a new under-the-radar documentary, released by Star Trek Online, is offering new insights into the earliest days of the Final Frontier.
Every hardcore Star Trek person knows that the United Federation of Planets was formed in 2161, and that since that time, Starfleet has been the spacefaring armada, keeping the peace, and boldly going where no one has gone before. But, really, there are two Starfleets: the Starfleet that served the Federation after 2161, and the version of Starfleet that existed before, aka the first Starfleet. In Picard Season 3, when Jean-Luc (Patrick Stewart) and Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) are asked to celebrate “Frontier Day,” they’re basically talking about the first voyage of Archer’s NX-01 Enterprise, which predates the Federation.
But, as demonstrated in Enterprise, the 22nd century version of Starfleet already existed before the first starship with a warp 5 engine was launched. And now, as Star Trek Online celebrates the 16th anniversary of the game and the 25th anniversary of the 2001 debut of Enterprise, a new mini-documentary has dropped.
At 14 minutes long, the new in-game documentary, in theory, serves as a way of explaining four different starships that are a part of a new bundle for Star Trek Online. Those ships are: the Vulcan Suurok-class Science Destroyer, the Human NP-class Escort, the Andorian Kumari-class Battlecruiser, and the Human NV-class Multi-Mission Cruiser. If you’re a casual fan, and none of these are jumping out to you as famous Star Trek ship classes, that’s partly why the documentary exists. Remember some of those pre-NX-01 starships that show up in the opening montage of Enterprise? Well, one of those ships is more fully explained and unpacked in the documentary, which also serves as a kind of Trek canon band-aid: Who really started Starfleet before the days of the NX-01 in the 2150s?
As Enterprise unpacked with the background of the character Travis Mayweather, human traders called “Boomers” were some of the earliest pioneers, acting as merchants between Earth and other nearby planets.
The short answer that the doc outlines is that even the Vulcans, who were acting as a paternal power toward Earth in the late 21st and early 22nd centuries, generally didn’t intervene to help human ships that were the victims of piracy or other harassment. “When it came to the security of its freighters and colonies, Earth was on its own,” the documentary declares.
So what happened next? Well, again, this is all a bit of Star Trek prehistory that hasn’t really been explored in the various TV series, but in between 2063 and 2151 (“first contact” and the launch of the NX-01), the first version of Starfleet came together, essentially, to protect civilian Earth ships from alien pirates.
Starfleet Did Not Start as an Exploratory Group
One of the NP-class Escorts, the first “Starfleet” ships.
So in the Trek timeline, in the early 2200s, you’ve got tons of Earth ships being attacked by pirates and the Vulcans not doing much to help. According to the documentary, this led to a moment on October 17, 2123, where the United Earth assembly passed something called “the Ganges Resolution,” which was legislation that “funded the construction of six starships using hulls from mothballed cargo ferries...these new ships would be designated NP-class Escorts.”
This older ship type is seen in Enterprise a few times, and is now, as of 2026, a playable ship within Star Trek Online. But what’s interesting about this detail is that if we take this as real-deal canon, then the creation of these ships establishes, somewhat retroactively, that an early form of Starfleet was created 100 percent to defend slow Earth merchants from pirates, rather than to boldly go into space. As the documentary states, “Thanks to the NP-class starships and their interstellar deployments, Starfleet had a small, but growing cadre of professional spacefarers. This budding group was the seed that eventually grew into a true interstellar officer corps.”
An NP-class ship defends Earth against alien pirates.
Again, this period of Trek history predates Enterprise by several decades and has never really been explored on screen. And, for hardcore Trek fans, it's utterly tantalizing. Rumors suggest that the new Star Trek movie might take place sometime in the 22nd century, and this gritty period seems like an amazing place for the canon to go next. The 2200s, 2300s, and 3190s all seem pretty far away. But a hypothetical version of Star Trek set in the 2120s or 2130s feels closer to reality, and therefore... fascinating.
