USS Leondegrance
The Lancelot-class cruiser where Cadet Jean-Luc Picard first crossed the faster-than-light threshold.
Service dossier
- Registry / identity
- NCC-2176
- Class / type
- Lancelot-class Federation starship
- Picard's role
- Academy cadet aboard a training flight
- Recorded period
- Operated from 2288 to 2336; Picard's recorded flight was April 4, 2327
Why this ship matters
The Leondegrance was a Starfleet Lancelot-class vessel operated by the United Federation of Planets. From 2301 to 2305, Captain Nyota Uhura commanded it on an exploratory five-year mission to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, where the ship took part in more than one hundred first-contact missions.
In 2317, the ship became a training vessel, with Uhura remaining in command until her retirement in 2333. A Starfleet Academy commemorative placard noted that countless cadets experienced faster-than-light travel for the first time aboard the Leondegrance.
Jean-Luc Picard was one of those cadets. On April 4, 2327, he joined the Speed of Light Club after flying three hundred-thousand kilometers per second in level flight aboard this cruiser, an achievement later preserved on a certificate in his quantum archive at the Starfleet Archive Museum.
After the Leondegrance was decommissioned in 2336, it was placed on permanent display at the Fleet Museum.
Archive annotations trace the Leondegrance record through Picard's Speed of Light Club certificate and a later Starfleet Academy placard that made the Picard-Uhura connection explicit.