Star Trek: Voyager - Across The Unknown Just Adapted A Fan-Favorite Storyline
A desperate mission certainly calls for a new toy.
Unlike Star Trek: The Original Series — a science-fiction adventure show predicated almost entirely on voluntarily advancing humankind’s exploration of the cosmos in the name of discovery and the pursuit of knowledge — Star Trek: Voyager was a pretty significant departure in the context that the Voyager’s mission wasn’t entirely voluntary, nor was it an exploratory romp through the universe. The fourth live-action Star Trek show overall, following TOS, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, Voyager shook up the formula by revolving around a starship inexplicably transported light-years away from Earth into the fraught and unexplored Delta Quadrant on the far side of the Milky Way galaxy.
While Voyager still retained a great degree of the idealism, levity, and wide-eyed speculative wonder of other Star Trek shows, the initial premise feels like it lends itself so well to something desperate and a little grittier, with Captain Janeway and the rest of her crew’s quest to get back home reminiscent of a Robinson Crusoe story in space. Luckily, the 2026 game Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown allows players to experience just how difficult the 70,000 lightyear return journey to Earth would be for themselves, and a recent update might have just given them a specific tool to make life on the Voyager a little easier.
Across the Unknown’s freshly released 1.7 update introduced (among various quality-of-life changes) the fan-favorite Delta Flyer, a ship created by combining Starfleet and Borg technology. Its first appearance was in the season 5 Voyager episode Extreme Risk, in which Tom Paris, Seven of Nine, and a few other characters work together to build a shuttlecraft that could withstand the volatile conditions of the Delta Quadrant better than traditional Starfleet ships. Created to retrieve a satellite probe from a dense gas giant before the Malon, the Delta Flyer was instrumental in several missions before it was destroyed while approaching a Borg cube spaceship in season 6’s Unimatrix Zero.
Players can build the Delta Flyer in the game’s shuttle bay, which will open up a whole new questline featuring Tom Paris. Building the shuttlecraft also unlocks it as a combat ally, which means it’ll automatically aid you in battle (although, as of right now, there’s no option to pilot it between sectors the same way you can with the Voyager), and there are also multiple new Delta Flyer branches in a few of the game’s pre-existing quests.
The Delta Flyer was designed to withstand punishment from the elements and combat that a normal Starfleet vessel wouldn’t, which makes it a perfect addition to a notoriously difficult game.
Across the Unknown has gone through painstaking lengths to recreate the show while allowing players to captain the Voyager their way, and the introduction of the Delta Flyer is just one of many love letters to the series. Even though it was a bold swing for the franchise to rewrite the formula with Voyager, something like AtU is proof that the show’s idiosyncrasies and original ideas are a strong part of what made it so memorable in the first place.
