The Kehra – the Most Disappointing Ship in STFC

The Kehra is a disappointing ship. It’s annoying.

It’s annoying on the level of stepping on Legos, Rainy Days, Mondays, Boy Bands, Reality TV, the DMV, 3600 data nodes, robocalls, angry people on Twitter, bad remakes of classic movies, Pauly Shore, Nick Bakay, Pentatonix, Envoys mining Latinum, dog bites, bee stings, Shamrock shakes, and Hugh Jackman.

End of Dr. Cox-style rant.

As an aside, why hasn’t John C. McGinley been on any Trek property? He’s good in everything. Even bad movies. 

Aside #2, Donald Faison is a bit of a Trekkie. He’d be great too. If you’re not listening to Fake Doctors, Real Friends, you need to start.

Why Do I Loathe the Kehra?

It’s not that it’s not an improvement from the Phindra. It most certainly is. But it should be so much more than it is. I’m a big fan of interceptors, for its level the Phindra is a good ship, and the Saladin was my top ship for the better part of a year. You want it to be on a par with the Jellyfish or the North Star as a combat vessel, and it’s not. It’s the first 3* ship in the game, and you’re ready for a big upgrade, and instead, you get a massive letdown.

It’s not good at cracking bases. It’s not good at PvP. It’s not good at PvE. And it doesn’t do anything against the one ship it should really be able to handle in the combat triangle, the Kumari.

Its ship’s ability is “Armor Breaker.” If the opponent’s ship is a Battleship, the Kehra increases its Armor Piercing by 10%. By level 45, that will go up to 60%.

The problem is that any decent Kumari will be able to overcome this with pure power alone.

To give you a comparison, here are the grade-2 ships. I took these shots from my level 14 account. The Talla is obviously stronger than the Phindra, but they’re at least comparable.

Now let’s look at the grade-3 common ships, again, from the level 14 account. The Kumari comes out of the box three times stronger than the Kehra. The combat triangle isn’t going to overcome that.

And this difference just gets worse the more you tech them up.

The Kehra’s firing pattern compares poorly with its peers, the Vahklas, which fires three energy weapons per round, and the Kumari, which fires two energy weapons per round, and a kinetic weapon every other round.

And while a few people have told me that the Mayflower is the most disappointing ship in the game, but the Mayflower has been better since the rebalance, and even if they hadn’t, you can still scrap it for 4* materials.

The Kehra takes 3* materials to build, and you scrap it for fewer 3* materials.

Building the Kehra

The Kehra requires a level 20 Shipyard, Grade 3 Ship Research, and Unlock Kehra Research in order to build. You can also build more by getting blueprints by hunting level 28 hostiles. I can’t imagine why you’d ever want more than one Kehra, but some people are into pain.

After everything I’ve said above, you should build one. They aren’t all that expensive to build, and you can use them to hit hostile battleships to get parts for your Kumari.

But I wouldn’t recommend putting any uncommon materials into it. Save that crystal for your Horizon, and your Saladin.

Background

The Kehra is based on the Tellaraite Cruiser from Star Trek: Enterprise. If you remember, the Tellarites were the pig people, who originally appeared in the TOS episode Journey to Babel.

The Tellarite Cruiser appeared in the Enterprise episode, Babel One, where one was destroyed by the Romulan Drone Ship.

The name Kehra comes from one of the moons of Tellar (the other one is Phindra), as described in the 1989 reference guide, Star Trek: The Worlds of the Federation.

Trivia

Here on Earth, Kehra is a town of about 2,600 people in northern Estonia. It’s the hometown of model Karmen Pedaru.