Insectoid pod ship

The insectoid pod ship was an immense starship 300 million years old, manned by a race of ancient insectoids.

The vessel was made of arches, flying buttresses, spirals and huge metal pods, and was covered with hexagonal patterning like bee honeycombs. Its hull metal was unidentified, but woven and spun.

The metal pods contained accumulators that absorbed whatever types of energy were nearby. The scale of proportions suggested that its personnel had been significantly larger than Humans.

History
300 million years ago it was invaded by a parasitic life form capable of controlling its computers and mechanical systems. The ship ended up orbiting a dead star. Its commander chose to set the ship to self-destruct to trap the magnetic organism in orbit, and prevent it from escaping to other planets. The commander rigged a protective energy field around one room to protect visitors and recorded a warning log. The destruct blew holes outward through every pod in the ship.

In 2269, Nyota Uhura picked up radio emissions from the pod ship shortly before the hyper-gravity of the dead star also snared the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701). Upon seeing the immense vessel, James T. Kirk considered that its designers must have been engineers, poets, and artisans. Kirk, Spock, Leonard McCoy and Montgomery Scott beamed aboard the vessel in life support belts to study the ship. Unfortunately, the magnetic organism survived those millennia and transported back with the landing party, subsuming itself within the Enterprise. One of its first acts was to lock phaser banks on the pod ship and destroy it.