Robert April- A Star Trek Personnel file
"No matter where I've traveled in the galaxy, Jim, this bridge is more like home than anywhere else." – Commodore Robert April
The first Captain of the Enterprise, NCC-1701, Robert April commanded the starship for 5 years and is considered one of the most decorated Starfleet Captains in history.
Personal Details
Robert April was born in 2195 in Coventry England. He was known to wear cardigan sweaters over his uniform due to a rare blood disorder (not described but likely anemia). He married his wife Sarah sometime after joining Starfleet.
Starfleet and the Enterprise
April oversaw the construction of the Enterprise (the first Constellation class starship), at the San Francisco Naval Yards. He eventually took the ship out on its maiden voyage in 2245 for its first five year mission. Sarah, his wife, served as his chief medical officer. Christopher Pike served as the First Officer. In 2250 Starfleet promoted April to Commodore and Christopher Pike became Captain. April went on to become a well respected and honored Ambassador for the Federation.
In 2270 he returned to the Enterprise with his wife Sarah. Doctor McCoy was surprised that most of the technology commonly used in Sickbay was designed by Sarah April. The ship’s sensors picked up a collision alert of a ship traveling at Warp 36, which is impossible for current Starfleet ships. They dodged the ship as it hurtled towards the Beta Niobe supernova, and tried to slow it down using a tractor beam. This drug the Enterprise into a high warp till it reached warp 22+. The ship pulled the Enterprise into the Beta Niobe supernova. They emerged going backwards with the stars being black and space white. The alien they had tried to communicate with, previously not understandable before passing through the barrier of the supernova, was now understandable as she was speaking “backwards” before. Quickly the crew of the Enterprise worked out that they had crossed into a parallel universe where everything was backwards such as a flower that was dying in Sarah’s hands was now reversing and getting younger. The alien identified herself as Karla Five and offered to take the Enterprise back to her planet Arret. There the crew witnessed that Karla’s father was now a young child and her son an elderly man. They compared maps of the strange galaxy that they were in and realized that Arret is actually Terra spelled backward. They found a dead star in the antimatter universe that corresponded to a supernova in the Enterprise’s universe.
The crew of the Enterprise was starting to regress rapidly and grow younger, including the elderly Aprils. They hypothesized that they could use an unmanned ship to pull the Enterprise back to their universe by igniting the dead star into a nova. The Enterprise successfully breached the filament between the two universes just in time as the only adults now able to function still are the Aprils. The transporter was used to reverse the crew’s regression as there were copies of the crews original molecular structures in the transporter systems memory. The Aprils were faced with the choice of staying young, or accepting their age and moving on with their lives, knowing that mandatory retirement was upon April.
After filing their reports Starfleet reversed the mandatory retirement due to the heroic actions of the Aprils and Robert April remained a Federation Ambassador-at-Large until he decided to retire from Starfleet and the Federation.