The Enterprise-D above The Armada
The Armada was a colony of agricultural domes built on the Maltese asteroid belt. It featured eight hundred acres to grow crops of fruits and vegetables - including quadrotriticale, plomeek, and uttaberries - which fed millions of people throughout the sector. The entire operation was Federation approved organic, with birds and insects introduced into the ecosystem to control infestation, and fertilized with pungent natural fertilizer. The farmers also utilised a large species of lizard as a mount. In addition to growing crops, the farms also processed some of their produce, making Uttaberry jam and wine.
In, or slightly before, 2365, some of the farmers’ children discovered a Romulan missile, inside which they found an amount of chroniton particles. Bored with life on The Armada, the children devised a scheme to use the chronitons to treat the crops and make them grow faster, giving them more free time. They took this suggestion to their parents, who agreed to implement it. However, not satisfied to simply accelerate the growth, the children altered the formula to sabotage the crops, to make them rot, so their families would be forced to leave The Armada and find a new more exciting life elsewhere.
The children's plan worked, and the crops soon began to fail, turning as brittle as glass and utterly inedible. With the food supply for millions at risk, Starfleet sent the USS Enterprise-D to investigate. Data was soon able to trace the chronitons in soil samples he took, and when Riker and Picard confronted Hummon, the childrens' father, with this, he quickly admitted what he had done, unaware the children had further complicated the plan.
Meanwhile, Wesley Crusher, who had gotten to know the children a little, suspected there was more going on, and correctly deduced it was the children, eager to escape The Armada, who had sabotaged the crops. He confronted them with this, and after a brief brawl, they agreed to tell Picard and their father what they had done.
Some time later, a similar form of chroniton radiation contamination was used to sabotage crops on a Cardassian colony, forcing them to abandon the planet. Picard speculated this act was part of a conspiracy which had used technologies and phenomena recorded in the logs of the Enterprise-D to create offensive weapons. (TNG comic: "Space Seeds")
Residents of The Armada
- The family of the farmer Hommun was said to have been farming for eight generations. However it was not specified whether all those generations lived on The Armada or he simply had a farming heritage dating back to other worlds or installations.