The ship was hijacked in early 2617, under mysterious circumstances. Of the total 50,000 serving crew members only the acting captain, Anthony Hawke, survived.

After its hijacking, Dragon disappeared from all galactic surveillance systems; its current whereabouts or fate, a mystery. Around June 2617, it was tracked moving around a number of uninhabited independent-declared regions of space.

The battleship was one of the main targets of Operation Menelaus. The Confederation aimed to recover it by using an in-built fail-safe: a remote deactivation system. The attempt failed when the Pandoran forces occupying the vessel purposely complied with the de-activation request and lured the allied forces into a trap. It then turned its main gun, an antimatter cannon, on Grendel, destroying the ship.

It was summoned as back-up by Anthony Hawke when he failed to destroy Griffin, with Julian Rissard at the helm. The ship's attempt to turn its anti-matter cannon on Griffin failed when it was engaged by the White Knights and five ATAFs. After being hit by the combined forces of five plasma accelerator beams, Dragon was forced out of combat.

Dragon was a latecomer to Coyote, only arriving after the Pandoran forces had evacuated Mythos and had nuked the planet. The battleship's opening act was to immediately take down Erik the Red and another UNF warship, driving into between the two and delivering the full power of its port and starboard accelerator beams to destroy the ships in seconds. It then made to eliminate the more powerful CSN and UNF vessels, targeting Griffin immediately with its anti-matter cannon. It never succeeded, however, the imminent destruction of Grendel's Mother and the danger posed by the explosion of the Tachyon Star Bombs forcing it to abandon its attack. It fled Coyote shortly after the incident.

Dragon lead the Pandoran fleet during the push beyond Mitikas space and expansion into the Independent and Confederation systems, acting as the flagship. In all that time, no physical damage was ever brought against it.

The battleship became the Pandoran fleet's principle weapon in their campaign, after it was discovered that an anti-matter detonation in a planet's atmosphere was enough to cause a firestorm to engulf it. The first planet to fall to Dragon's anti-matter cannon was Torelli, the anti-matter shot missing its intended target and striking the planet itself. After destroying the planet in record time, the Pandoran fleet's main objective turned to granting safe passage of Dragon to a target planet, so that the planet could be quickly destroyed.

Dragon escaped phase one of Black Widow, being held back from the fleet of Pandoran warships and fighters that jumped into the Temper system. Dragon later formed part of the ambush group that attacked the allied forces in the Adetton system, destroying several of the allies warships during the brief encounter.

Sky, in Alpha Centauri, was the last planet to be destroyed by Dragon, prior to its arrival in Sol. Before it did so, the allied forces formulated a plan to defeat the battleship by deploying an explosive device (initially a nuclear warhead, then a set of torpedoes, and finally the prototype TSB) to the centre of the vessel. When the initial attempt at deployment of the Dumb Waiter failed, Simon Dodds manually completed the insertion of the bomb, piloting his ATAF onto one of the battleship's flight decks.

Dragon was destroyed on 26th December, 2624, mere seconds before it was able to fire the anti-matter cannon at Earth. The anti-matter intended for Earth was instead wrapped in tachyon parcels, as part of the TSB's process, and catapulted into the surrounding space, eliminating a number of Pandoran warships gathered close by. The destruction of Dragon caused the remaining Pandoran fleet to immediately flee from Sol, essentially ending the war.