# USS *Leondegrance*

The Lancelot-class cruiser where Cadet Jean-Luc Picard first crossed the faster-than-light threshold.

[Starships archive](/starships.html.md)

## 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.