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It seems to me that during every other Star Trek episode, the crew comes across a space-time anomaly (naturally occurring or not). Some of them were proven to be harmless, eg the inversion field in (VOY) Twisted, but most of them can be quite dangerous, eg the anomalies in the Delphic Expanse, the graviton ellipse in (VOY) One small step and so on.

In principle, if one could control the path of one of these anomalies, you could slam it on the home-planet or the starbases of your enemies and vanquish them as unlike an asteroid, anomalies are not so easy to deflect/shoot down.

So my question is: has any race in the Trek universe ever managed to weaponize any of these anomalies?

Canon and EU are acceptable.

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    The Q used supernova weapons against each other.
    – Valorum
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 12:20
  • Q tricked Picard into creating an anti-time thingy in order to destroy the Earth
    – Valorum
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 12:21
  • 4
    @Valorum I don't think supernovae count as space-time anomalies. Also, Q never tricked Picard into creating the anti-time anomaly seen in the last episode, but Picard did it himself and Q was in a sense testing him and humanity again.
    – Hans Olo
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 12:41
  • 4
    would you consider the Nexus (Star Trek Generations) such an anomaly?
    – NKCampbell
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 16:23
  • I think so, yes
    – Hans Olo
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 16:37

6 Answers 6

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Yes.

The Prophets weaponized their wormhole to send the Dominion fleet (2000+ ships) away or perhaps remove them from reality in entirety.

The Romulans use artificial singularities as fuel sources for their warbirds. During a core breach these can likely inflict significant temporal and gravitational damage in the vicinity.

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In Star Trek Voyager there is a race called the Krenim who create a large Temporal Incursion weapon that they kept out of phase with the normal universe so it couldn't be hit/detected, would go to the homeworlds of different species and erase them from existence, thus vanquishing them forever. (Voyager: Year of Hell)

This isn't a natural anomaly that has been weaponized, it is instead an artificially created anomaly, but other than that it meets all of your search criteria.

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Yes. Funny that you should mention the Delphic Expanse, because in the episode Countdown the Sphere Builders use the anomalies as weapons against the Enterprise, the Xindi Aquatics, and the Arboreals:

Additionally, I don't think anyone has mentioned the Son'a yet. In Star Trek: Insurrection they utilize "supspace weapons" when fighting the Enterprise-E. LaForge describes the weapon as producing a subspace tear that functions "like a zipper across space":

A subspace tear forms behind the Enterprise

Riker also claims in the film that such weapons are outlawed by the second Khittomer accord, perhaps explaining why they're not commonly used in the Alpha Quadrant.

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If you consider time wormhole as a "space-time anomaly", there are two instances of people using one to alter the timeline.

In the episode, Yesterday's Enterprise, Captain Picard sends the Enterprise-C back through one. The crew of the Enterprise-C altered/restored the timeline.

The whole premise of the movie, Star Trek: First Contact, was based on the Borg weaponizing a space-time anomaly. They did exactly as you described; the Borg created an anomaly and then entered it to alter Earth's past.

In both stories, the anomaly was used as a weapon against an enemy, although not by slamming the anomaly against a planet or starbase.

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The Tyken's Rift anomaly that appeared in the TNG episode "Night Terrors" is an ability in Star Trek Online though it's effects are limited to a very short duration.

Also the "Temporal Operative" specialisation available for both player characters and their bridge officers is focused around using controlled disruption of spacetime to both damage enemies and reverse damage to ships.

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The Federation's "Nuclear-Option" is something called a Tricobalt Device.
Excessively powerful weapons which apparently mess with subspace badly enough to make Warp Travel impossible for quite a wide area.

Their usage is strictly limited within Federation Space.

Captain Janeway uses three of them to destroy the Caretaker's Array.
They also crop up throughout the franchise with weapons created and used by the Romulans, Klingons and other alien species as well as the federation themselves.

Notably a small one is concealed inside the corpse of a tribble in the TOS episode The Trouble with Tribbles.

The Tholians opened a portal to a parallel universe by dropping a tricobalt weapon into a "dead star", kicking off the entire Mirror Universe series of episodes.

I'd say they qualify!

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  • I'm afraid you misunderstood the question... The question actually is whether some anomaly (black hole, spatial flexure, subspace hole etc) has been used as a weapon itself, not if some weapon (nuke or worse) can cause an anomaly ;-)
    – Hans Olo
    Commented Jun 29, 2018 at 15:25
  • That's a..narrow distinction, the destructive effects on space-time that a tricobalt device causes are explicitly one of the major reasons to use one, not merely that it's a big explosion with a hazardous side-effect. The So'na in Insurrection use a similar weapon to generate a tear in subspace which forces the Enterprise to eject its warp core to escape.
    – Ruadhan2300
    Commented Jun 29, 2018 at 15:49
  • But a distinction that is the querent's discretion to make.
    – T.J.L.
    Commented Mar 6, 2020 at 18:39

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