The K’Vort is a grade 3 Rare Klingon Survey ship built for one job: pulling Crystal out of the ground faster. Its always-on ability raises your Crystal mining rate, and a player-triggered defense mode lets the ship fight back when a raider hits it on a node. You unlock the build at Shipyard level 30. For a mid-game Crystal farmer, it earns its dock.
How to get the K’Vort
The K’Vort needs 100 blueprints, and your Shipyard has to be at level 30 before you can start the build. The build cost is 2,500 3★ Common Refined Crystal, 6,000,000 Tritanium, 144,000 Dilithium, and 625 3★ Common Refined Gas, and construction takes 21 days. Where the blueprints appear rotates over time, so check what is currently offering them in game rather than counting on any one source.
K’Vort ability
The ship ability is Crystal Mining Laser. It raises your Crystal mining rate by 70% at ship level 1 and scales up to 250% at level 45. Ship abilities are always active, so the bonus applies the moment the K’Vort is parked on a Crystal node. If Crystal is the resource holding up your builds or research, this is the ship that clears the backlog fastest in its grade band.
K’Vort active ability
The K’Vort also has an activatable ability, Automated Defenses, that is separate from the mining bonus. You turn it on while the ship is attached to a mining node, and it sharply raises the survey’s combat power against players who try to knock you off. It runs on a cooldown that shortens as the ship tiers up. Save it for the moment you expect to get jumped mid-mine instead of leaving it idle. The ability is unlocked through a refit, covered below.
Stats and tiers
Base values from the current game data; research, buffs, and officers raise them in play. Mining speed is included because that is what this ship exists to do.
| Tier | Warp (speed / range) | Impulse | Cargo (protected) | Shield HP | Hull HP | Health (displayed) | Mining speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.1 / 30 | 75 | 262,500 (3,000) | 7,490 | 7,490 | 7,490 | 7.65 |
| 5 | 3.2 / 40 | 75 | 412,560 (3,520) | 21,390 | 7,490 | 14,440 | 10.5 |
| 9 | 4.5 / 70 | 75 | 750,000 (5,000) | 61,100 | 7,490 | 34,295 | 18.2 |
Two things stand out for a miner. Protected cargo climbs to 5,000 at max tier, which shields a slice of your haul from a raider who cracks the hull, and total cargo reaches 750,000 for long unattended runs. The hull HP stays flat while the shield does the growing, so survivability leans on the shield and on the Automated Defenses ability rather than raw armor.
Weapons and firing pattern
Warm-up is the round a weapon first fires; cool-down is the number of rounds between shots after that. The K’Vort carries a single kinetic weapon, so this is a mining vessel that can bite back, not a warship.
| Weapon | Type | Shots | Warm-up | Cool-down | Damage | Crit chance | Crit damage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kinetic weapon | Kinetic | 1 | 1 | 1 | 11,838–14,469 | 10% | 150% |
Crew slots and officer bonus
The K’Vort opens its first officer slot at ship level 5 and works up to seven slots at level 45.
| Ship level | Officer slots |
|---|---|
| 5 | 1 |
| 10 | 2 |
| 20 | 3 |
| 30 | 4 |
| 35 | 5 |
| 40 | 6 |
| 45 | 7 |
The ship also boosts the officers you seat on it. As the ship progresses it steps up the ladder below, raising your officers’ attack, defense, and health stats. On the K’Vort those three bonuses are identical at every step.
| Amount | Bonus (attack / defense / health) |
|---|---|
| 200 | 30% |
| 400 | 60% |
| 650 | 90% |
| 900 | 120% |
| 1,200 | 150% |
| 1,600 | 180% |
| 2,200 | 210% |
| 3,000 | 240% |
| 4,000 | 270% |
| 6,000 | 300% |
K’Vort refits
The K’Vort has one refit, and it is worth knowing about because it is what turns the ship from a pure miner into one that can defend its node.
| Refit | What it does |
|---|---|
| K’Vort Auto Defense | Unlocks the Automated Defenses ability for the K’Vort. While it is active, the survey gains drastically increased combat power against players while it is on a mining node. Costs 120 shards to unlock. |
Crew for the K’Vort
This is a mining ship, so the crew principle is simple: seat officers that add mining rate, protected cargo, or protection while mining, and treat the captain’s chair as your biggest single lever. Because the K’Vort’s own ability only touches Crystal, pairing it with officers that widen mining speed or guard your cargo is where the extra value comes from. Combat officers matter less here, since you are mining, not hunting. Current best picks shift with the game’s meta, so check the Officer Tier List for who is strong right now and build the bridge around your own officer roster.
The K’Vort in Star Trek
In Star Trek canon the K’vort name belongs to the Klingon Bird-of-Prey lineage, a larger cruiser variant of the same wing-forward design seen throughout the Next Generation era. Star Trek Fleet Command reworks it into something different: the game presents this K’Vort as a survey vessel, a standard cargo hauler that the Klingons retrofitted with design ideas borrowed from an early human transport to make it warp-capable. That framing is why an in-universe warship name sits on a mining ship in the game.
Is the K’Vort worth it?
For a mid-game player who needs Crystal, yes. It slots in around Shipyard level 30 as a dedicated Crystal miner with a large protected-cargo hold and a self-defense trick most survey ships do not get. It becomes scrappable at Operations level 41, which is the honest signal that it is a workhorse for its grade rather than a keeper forever. Build it if Crystal is your bottleneck; skip it if you already have a stronger Crystal miner.