Headscratchers / Star Trek: Voyager - Technology

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The Starship Voyager:

Voyager's Pristine Condition

• How does Voyager get trashed every week and yet always prove to be perfectly repaired by the next episode? It's not like they can stop at a Starfleet base for repairs.
  • There's a season seven episode where Voyager is sitting on a planet's surface, and B'Elanna is conducting extensive repairs and renovations. Portions of the warp engine interiors are visible, panels are missing from the hull, etc. One can assume retroactively that this was done every so often with parts and components either replicated or adapted from alien technology. It's the equivalent of a starbase repair session, only the Voyager crew have to do all the work themselves.
    • They called it routine maintenance, kind of like what the Enterprise put in for in "Starship Mine." And in her log to start the episode Janeway mentions that they were long overdue. What no one seemed to notice about that episode, however, is that in the episode right before that one, they had just given themselves a fairly major tune-up.
    • Speaking of "Starship Mine", why was the Enterprise-D apparently the only starship to ever need this very important but highly dangerous baryon sweep? We never see or hear of any other starship ever needing or having done it. Not the Defiant. Not Voyager, even though if it was such a problem for the Enterprise, then surely it would be for a starship cut off from the Federation and trying to do 70,000 light years in as little time as possible.
    • It could be a case of Technology Marches On, as Voyager and the Defiant aren’t Galaxy-class starships, nor were in existence at the time that episode took place. Materials that made the Enterprise may have been replaced by better material that made it resistant to baryon particles so that they’re not required as doing the sweep often (much like how PEEK and polyimide are resistant to gamma radiation and X-rays). Also, another thing to take into account is what is explained in the episode of “Starship Mine”: the Enterprise needed a stronger than usual sweep because it spent more time in warp in five years than most ships did in ten. So, as long as Voyager isn’t constantly doing warp speed (as we’ve seen multiple times in the series’ run that they often had to run her sublight to explore, gather supplies, etc), Voyager was nowhere near the level of baryon particles that the D was, and they made it back in seven years, putting her three years back in the Alpha Quadrant before a sweep is needed to be done (not that it matters, as Voyager was decommissioned shortly after she got back).
    • That was a weird problem Voyager seemed to have. It's almost as if episodes were shown out of order. One week they'd have a power crisis, and the next they'd be fine. One week they'd be running out of supplies, and the next they weren't, despite no mention being made of how they'd resolved the issue. Species would occasionally show up months and even years after Voyager should logically be far outside their space. Consistency was not the show's strong suit.
  • It's an unstated assumption of every Trek series that, beneath the shiny surfaces, their current location (starship, space station, whatever) is being held together on spit and duct tape by that series' resident brilliant engineer. Saves a lot on actual engineering research, I'm guessing.
  • And sometimes, as in anytime O'Brien says anything about the condition of Deep Space Nine/Terok Nor or the Defiant, it's a stated assumption.
  • Because in Star Trek: Voyager, Status Quo Is God
  • After season 4 or so, there were Borg parts mixed in with the Starfleet parts. Possibly they repaired the ship.
    • Which MIGHT have been plausible if after Scorpion Torres BEMOANS the Borg technology repairing itself as she REMOVES IT ALL.
    • No she doesn't. She removes most of it but is given permission to leave in stuff that actually improve things. We don't know if it was just that one thing or if Voyager now has minor regeneration abilities. Of course we're also occasionally informed of Voyager's actual status and it's never as shiney and perfect as it seems. Basically Voyager looks fresh but has serious damage under the surface that's constantly being worked on.
  • It's possible that there were friendly/neutral space stations and the like that Voyager was able to stop at for repairs between the exciting battles and Negative Space Wedgies. They might have stayed at some of these for weeks, seeing as a lot of the time we aren't given concrete timeframes between episodes.
  • And of course the real reason: the stock footage of Voyager used a physical model, not CGI, and it would have been far too expensive to have it redone to show battle damage.
  • Say what you will about Enterprise, but when the ship got beaten up in "Azati Prime," it damn well stayed beaten up for the rest of the season and on into the next one.
    • Not having replicators available can really slow repairs down. So long as Voyager had power they could fix almost anything back to near full given enough time between episodes and once they had the Astrometrics Lab with it's superior sensors and a former Borg with vast amounts of knowledge finding new power sources became a lot easier.
    • And of course the real reason: Enterprise effects were all done in CGI, so it was cheap and easy to re-render the beat-up ship model instead of the normal pristine one.
  • There is another possible explanation: we don't see the crew making repairs because to see engineers doing routine maintenance of a ship would be boring, unless something else happens.
    • Because there is no way we can just have it in the background or mentioned in the dialogue. Or use it as an excuse to have characters going to places the writers want them to be, because they are looking for help. It's not like we never get scenes of them doing routine thing.
  • In at least one respect, it may represent a lost opportunity. Numerous times along the way, Voyager was mentioned to incorporate elements of other technology, yet the only visible change was in the Cargo Bay for the alcoves. Imagine what it would have looked like if slowly different bits of alien tech had shown up, a new console here, a doodad on this wall, slowly accumulating over time.
  • What do you think the rest of the crew does every single day? Voyager, having been sent on a Maquis hunt, did not carry the usual complement of pure scientific research crew that a ship like the Enterprise had. Janeway's entire initial crew consisted of people meant to run the ship. Presumably these worker bees spend their active duty shifts going around performing whatever minor maintenance tasks need doing and which do not require the skills of one of the main characters.
  • It's very much a case of missed (actually deliberately ignored) opportunity. Very early pre-release (before it was even cemented that Voyager's Captain would be a woman), Voyager was described as a short-range vessel, geared more for combat missions. Not a warship per se, but a small ship packing firepower equivalent to a Galaxy-class, meant to launch from a starbase, go out for two or three weeks, then come back. This short-range vessel being stranded 75 years from the nearest Starbase, when it was meant to be no more than a week or two from the nearest Starbase, was intended to be a major source of drama (much like the ship having to make up its compliment from Maquis members who didn't know, and didn't particularly care for, Starfleet protocol). But the higher-ups didn't like the idea of Voyager having mechanical problems that needed to be dealt with, having to pull over for a month or two for repairs, or even just for intensive maintenance that can't be done outside of drydock, so shelved that aspect of the show in favor of "everything works just perfect at the start of the next the episode." To the point where the Intrepid-class is officially designated a Long-Range Science Vessel, despite the fact that Voyager had no attached senior Science Officer when it launched, its dinky bridge has no dedicated Science Officer station, and its mission of hunting Maquis terrorists in the Badlands is as far from the mission of a Science Vessel as you can get!

Night Shift

• Why is there a night shift on a space ship? In space. With no day or night other than that set by a random clock? Why does most of the crew appear to pop off to bed at the same time leaving a skeleton/junior gang in charge half the time? On a planet bound ship there's the excuse that less goes on at night, and night is the same time for everyone in the area. This is not the case in space.
  • Well, the crew's mostly human, and humans still function on a 24-hour sleep cycle, so they just designate 12 hours of the day "day", 12 hours "night", and schedule the work shifts accordingly. Though I don't understand why the "night shift" is expected to have it any easier than the day shift: it's not like Negative Space Wedgies and Big Dumb Objects know to hold off until the regular crew's finished breakfast. Then again, maybe Starfleet didn't want two competing, parallel chain of commands on one ship, and so the night crew's supposed to just wake up the senior officers if anything big happens.
    • Clearly they do. They also know to only mess with the better run Starfleet ships and not ships run by the likes of Harry Mudd. Otherwise some yo-yo crew would have destroyed the universe by now.
  • How do you know there aren't three 8-hour shifts, and that crew don't change their sleep patterns to match their shift? I think you're making assumptions. For all we see in the series, it's quite possible that there are two or three full crews, the "day shift" is just the arbitrary designation of whatever shift the Captain decides to head, and the other "shifts" live and work completely separate schedules, except for meeting with superiors, etc. (Of course that brings up the issue of, "why does important stuff always happen during the same shift?)
    • What we generally see is all the senior staff awake at the same time which makes the least sense. You want the most competent at all hours of the day. That's how the navy has long operated.
• In the TNG episode Data's Day it is established that there is a defined night-shift, during which the lights (at least on the bridge) are actually dimmed slightly at the change of watch. It might be safe to assume that the flagship sets the standard for the rest of the fleet.
  • However, in Change of Command, Captain Jellico, who was filling in for Picard, orders Enterprise to go to a four-shift schedule from their current three-shifts; establishing that this is all at the CO's discretion.
  • Deep Space Nine also used a four-shift rotation at least once.
    • In "Warhead" Harry took command during the night shift suggesting it doesn't have a permanent commander. When they detected something that needed investigation, he made the call. However when it came to actually sending people down to the planet he did have to wake up Chakotay. Presumably the night shift's job is just to keep things tracking along, whereas someone from the regular senior staff will need to be woken to make the call if they're to do more dangerous things like investigating an anomaly. If they happen to get suddenly attacked by a ship or dragged into an anomaly without expecting it, presumably they'd have to call "Captain to the Bridge!" and just try not to get destroyed before Janeway arrives (even if they didn't call her, I doubt she's going to feel the ship shaking apart and stay in her quarters because it's not her shift). So it does make sense that commanding the night shift would be less responsibility. If ever they were travelling towards anything they had planned to encounter (planet, space station, Borg Cube) Janeway could also make sure she was available at the time they arrived which takes that responsibility away from the night shift commander. As another example, in "One Small Step" they hit "Level 9 Gravimetric Distortions". Harry is commanding the night shift again and calls "Senior Officers to the Bridge". The next thing you see is a groggy Janeway stepping onto the bridge. She then complains that it's two in the morning then takes over to deal with the situation.
  • The human circadian cycle, if not respected, causes a variety of health problems from diabetes to depression. That's why in places like the International Space Station they do dim the lights when is supposed to be "night".

Shuttles

• In the episode Prophecy Neelix is forced to double bunk with Tuvok because he gave up his quarters to some Klingons. The question on my lips is why would Neelix ever have to share quarters with anyone for any reason? He has his own ship parked in the shuttle bay; why can't he just go sleep in that? Given how long he lived in it, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume he has some kind of bed in it, even if it's just a hammock or a mattress in the corner. But... taking this to its logical conclusions opens up whole new questions for me: Why was he allocated quarters in the first place? Why aren't other crew members told to go sleep in Neelix's ship or the shuttlecraft in such episodes where energy is at a premium? The Cloud, Demon and even Year of Hell spring to mind here. Remember that these vehicles are completely independent of Voyager; they have their own life support, power supply, environmental systems, free from any disease or toxin that's plaguing Voyager that day (due to being airtight) and even come equipped with weapons and shields should the need arise. By my count if they put at least two crew members in each shuttle and at least four in Neelix's ship, that would free up the burden on Voyager's systems having to support at least twenty people. This ship is supposed to have limited supplies and resources after all.
  • Shuttles are not completely independent of their host ships, their range and supplies are too limited for that. Then you're draining the resources on smaller craft that are still dependent on Voyager for refueling and resupplying. Neelix's ship is likely more like a runabout than a starship: good for hopping around known solar systems but not for cruising through deep space. It's probably more efficient to use an extra room on a starship than to have a shuttle just idling in the bay. By that logic, they might as well sleep in the escape pods since they have independent life support systems.
    • (op) Whilst you are accurate in saying that shuttles are not fully independent of their mothership the fact remains is that these things have enough power for several weeks (there is an episode where Paris moans that the Academy used to pack cadets into a small Class-2 shuttle for weeks at a time) meaning that in episodes where power is dangerously low such as Demon you would prolong Voyager's life support by a considerable amount by dumping off-duty or inconsequential crewmen in the shuttles and just keeping them parked in the shuttlebay. Personally I think your idea about the escape pods is a good idea; again what is the point of wasting Voyager's power in episodes where they are hours away from suffocating if you have vehicles with their own oxygen reserves? it's like having just enough oxygen for two men in your three man submarine whilst completely neglecting the fact that you have a spare aqualung on the back seat. Just refuel them when you do have the resources to spare.
    • Perhaps, when saying "Voyager's energy / air supplies are reaching the critical level," they are accounting for the fact that the oxygen reserves and energy resources of the various shuttlecraft / Neelix's ship have ALREADY been tapped dry. Or maybe it's an "iron rule" that the supplies and reserves on board such auxiliary vehicles may be accessed only as a "last resort." "Bleeding off" oxygen from an escape pod would be allowed only "in extremis." Neelix's ship might also have been "mothballed," and require several hours to put back into "operational mode."
    • The correct answer to the question is "because it was funny". Its true that he could probably have slept on his ship or even in a hallway somewhere, but that wouldn't have been nearly as entertaining. The in-universe explanation is that at that time Neelix is being treated as a member of the senior staff(notice he has his own multi-room cabin while the non-coms have to share much smaller spaces). His standard of living, then, is expected to be a bit higher than "go sleep in your junk-filled ship with no shower".
  • Even if the power was at a premium, the space wasn't. Neelix shouldn't have had to bunk with Tuvok as he could have crashed in a shuttle for a while. There's no way just using it as a sleeping space would consume any meaningful amount of power. The other headscratcher with shuttles is how often they forget that shuttles have a full set of independent systems including, in some of them, transporters which are "air-gapped" from the ship's as well as independently powered.

Voyager's Initial Energy Crisis?

• Granted, Voyager suffered significant damage right out of the starting gate what with the Badlands expedition, being transported to the Delta Quadrant, and fighting the Kazon - but why are they so low on power initially? Isn't the deuterium supply (as well as the antimatter supply) supposed to be replenished by the Bussard collectors?
  • Yeah, this was either a mistake on the part of the writers, or complete contempt for the intelligence of their viewers. Deuterium is a common isotope of hydrogen, and hydrogen is the most ubiquitous element in the universe. Most high school chemistry students should be able to tell you that.
    • It's not a mistake, it's Science Marches On. The short answer is that Bussard Collectors don't actually work that way, it turns out that the energy lost to drag exceeds anything they could hope to recover.
  • They've gone back and forth on how abundant deuterium is, so yeah the real-world explanation is that the writers didn't care. But since that's not a fun explanation, it may be that the Bussard collectors were damaged beyond the ability to fully repair them; Seven of Nine mentions increasing their efficiency by 23%, which is a big improvement for something that was fully functional before the enhancements. And while they could get deuterium from using the Bussard collectors, there shouldn't be any antimatter floating around in space so if that's what they were running low on then I could see finding it difficult to fill up.
    • Except that Federation starships manufacture their own antimatter. The deuterium powers fusion reactors, which run particle accelerators, which create antimatter, which powers the warp core. (Although thinking about it, there's no reason they couldn't use some form of replicator technology to create antimatter either.)
    • Except that doesn't work either
• It's troubling that Voyager is so concerned about rationing energy that they restrict use of the food replicators, but nobody seems to give even a thought to restricting use of the Holodeck, which is surely an energy-expensive pointless luxury most of the time. We know from the Barclay episode that holoaddiction is still regarded as a vice. Does the crew seriously see the Holodeck as a higher priority than food? Some use of the thing to alleviate claustrophobia on board ship would be one thing, but the Holodeck saw a lot of use.
  • "Parallax" notoriously included this exchange
  • JANEWAY: What about alternative energy sources? Ensign Kim, have you had any luck getting power from the holodeck reactors?
  • KIM: Not yet. We tried hooking them to the power grid and we ended up blowing out half the relays. The holodeck's energy matrix, it just isn't compatible with the other power systems.
  • So apparently, even if you turn off the Holodeck and have it consume no power whatsoever ever, you cannot then use that power to run, say, replicators. Is this explanation for why they can keep running the Holodecks more ridiculous than if they had just offered no explanation? You be the judge!
  • Of course, it creates a problem of another sort. If the Holodeck is completely separate to the power source of the rest of the ship, why not do everything there and preserve energy that way? For example, have the mess hall in there (even if you can't serve people holographic food, use its resources to prepare real food).
    • Or turn it into a powerplant. Use the holodeck's power to produce energy that the rest of the ship can use. This would, of course, be ridiculously inefficient, but you'd be trading a bunch of power that doesn't directly contribute to the survival of the ship and crew, for a bit that does. Maybe even enough to keep a few extra replicators running.
• Here's a thought: the holodecks are independent because they recycle energy in a very efficient way. The treknobable explanation is that they use "a different type of energy". But figure a hologram is photons held in place by forcefields. What if the holodecks on voyager have a sophisticated mechanism for retrieving most of that power after the program is ended? This also explains why proper shutdown procedures are so important. Energy is work, after all, but most of the energy on the holodeck isn't doing anything.

The Voyager Conspiracy bomb

• In the episode "The Voyager Conspiracy" Seven of Nine goes cuckoo and starts seeing conspiracies everywhere. One thing she digs up is that the Voyager used a powerful explosive to destroy the Caretaker's array, something which a light exploration vessel like the Voyager should have had no business carrying in the first place. While in the end Seven of Nine's conspiracy ramblings turn out to be her going crazy, they never refute her findings about the explosive. So why was Voyager carrying that around on their original mission?
  • Maybe it was originally on the Maquis ship?
    • The dialogue clearly excludes that possibility:
  SEVEN: The Captain ordered Commander Tuvok to destroy the array. He fired two tricobalt devices. Are those weapons normally carried on Federation Starships?
  CHAKOTAY: No.
  SEVEN: Yet they were part of Voyager's arsenal. Why?
  CHAKOTAY: I can't explain that.
  • Since Voyager is actually classified as a scout ship (fairly small, lightly armed), and was travelling into an active war zone to play 'needle in a haystack', it makes sense that they would be packing some inordinately powerful bombs in case someone bigger than them decided to start a fight. Remember, the Cardassian Galor-class ships were as much bigger than Voyager as Voyager was to the Valjean.
    • But why the secrecy about it... all these years later? This is one of those points where, of course, plenty of rationalizations are possible, but the episode raises this as an issue but neglects to offer any explanation whatsoever.
    • Actually a Galor-class is only slightly larger than Voyager. And Voyager could probably take on a single Cardassian ship in a fight, though having a one-hit-kill weapon like a tricobalt torpedo would still probably be useful since Cardassians rarely fight one-on-one.
    • It might just be a simple case of the accord that banned such weapons hadn't yet been ratified before Voyager got stranded.
  • The one thing that bugs me about the episode is all the talk and hype about someone using a tractorbeam to steal one of the arrays reactors and never getting closer in that.
    • ^This! They went to all the trouble of adding the tractor beam effect to the image of the Array exploding, and they dropped that plot element like it was a TOS love interest!
    • I think the insinuation was that Seven was, possibly subconsciously, creating evidence of conspiracies specifically so that she could chase them due to the effect the mental upload was having on her. Meaning that Seven essentially "photoshopped" the tractor beam image, either mentally in her sleep or deliberately while awake and then forgot about it. The whole point is that she's not in her right mind and inventing conspiracies, quite literally.

Caretaker

• No-one has considered that in Caretaker, given how over powered the torpedo's were that it totally annihilated the Array, why didn't they think to fire them at the Kazon Ship instead? Granted they only a limited amount and there were more ships on the way, but it would probably have made the Kazon consider backing down when they saw what firepower they had.
  • The Kazon were already outmatched and they just got more belligerent rather than realizing that it was a bad idea to pick on Voyager. As for a display of force, they blew up the entire caretaker array, a force which until then they were utterly incapable of handling. If that didn't make them back down, nothing would.
• If Water is such a precious commodity, why don't the Kazon consider using the Starships at their desposal to find a planet with water? Granted the Kazon we saw were pretty pathetic and another rival sect may control planets with abundant water, but it does seem ridiculous that they don't just leave Ocampa which is stated to have NO water at all.
  • They seemed to be obsessed with getting at the water beneath the planet. Also, if I remember correctly, the Kazon were not independently space-faring, but rather former slaves with stolen ships. Since they are too dumb to realize that their ships are powered by heavy water, then going somewhere else is equally out of the question.
  • Because the Kazon are Too Dumb to Live. It is in fact incredibly easy to create water from any number of chemical reactions, including the consumption of gasoline by an internal combustion engine, which produces water as one of its molecular byproducts. All you need are hydrogen and oxygen atoms, plus a little energy to get them to bond. But the Kazon are like a bunch of chimps trying to run a nuclear submarine, and are so stupid that even the Borg don't want to undermine their "perfection" by assimilating them!
  • The Kazon in space don't have any shortage of water. The Kazon on the desert planet have a shortage of water, which makes sense as they don't have replicators and are standing in the middle of a desert. They also don't have enough of an economy for trade routes to bring down much water from space. So, yes, it could easily be a scarce resource on the planet's surface. Now why Neelix, while up in space, was asking for water? My best guess would be to use it to barter for Kes's life. Why he couldn't get more on his own? No idea.
    • So two question on that. One: does it beggar belief that the Kazons would have space flight (even if they didn't invent their ships, they surely know the principles behind operating them by now) and not have the ability to fabricate water? Two: why can't they just harvest water of their own, given that they can fly in space? In our solar system and those like it, ice appears to be reasonably abundant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_ice.

Pressurized Nebula?

• In Year of Hell, the critically damaged Voyager is hiding in a nebula while making repairs. At one point, Janeway and Kim are making repairs in a corridor while gas from the nebula is pouring in. The only protective equipment that the two are wearing is some kind of breathing apparatus, so the corridor has to be pressurized to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 atm. How is that gas getting into the ship?
  • Probably a broken pump or something similar. Since Voyager is designed to enter atmospheres for extended periods of time, it makes sense that the ship would be able to pump in fresh atmosphere to replenish what is on board and/or avoid expending supplies.

Food

• During Voyager its often implied at the beginning that they're running out of food (they need Neelix to find more food... must be pretty desperate to deal with him). It's mentioned in an episode of Enterprise that waste is recycled back into parts and food. When you eat food all the same atoms still exist so the massive requirement of replicating new mass isn't the problem. The only thing that changes is that the energy in the chemical bonds is released, which is roughly equal to the energy expenditure of the crew. In order the restore the food to being nutritious again all you need to do is put the energy back in. Although inefficiencies could possibly exist within the recycling process the energy expenditure of 160 people (approximate crew compliment of voyager) would be miniscule against systems such as the warp Engines, weapons and shields. The series could have better presented a supply dilemma by having them run low on shuttles and having to jury rig repairs onto the remaining ones (they lose alot of shuttles during the series), or by having a chronic lack of crew members (this would be a interesting way to play with the concept of losing red shirts in other series). This wouldn't exactly add to the budget, just say the shuttle damage is not visible from the cockpit or externally and make a few plot points of saving what shuttles they have.
  • Bernd Schneider's website Ex Astris Scientia analyzed the shuttle problem, concluding that over the course of the show, ten of Voyager's shuttles were definitely lost, seven were probably lost, and eight were 'badly damaged.' If you pressured the show's staff for an answer—which, given how obsessive we Trek fans are, I'm sure someone has—they'd say that the crew constructed new shuttles out of replicated components. If they'd even once addressed this in an episode, though, many fans would probably be more willing to overlook the problem. I'd have liked to have seen those tiny type-15 shuttlepods from TNG start to show up as the show went on. Despite being the Pontiac Aztek of spaceships, they actually look like something you could build out of spare parts in your garage.
    • Hahaha Star Trek fans willing to overlook plot holes just because they were tossed a bone hahaha that's a good one
  • I imagine in terms of the food problem, many of the food replicators would have been damaged beyond repair, or the constituent molecules used to build the replicated food could have leaked out of the system.
    • Regarding the shuttle issue, Chakotay does say explicitly in "Alice" (sixth season) that they have a full compliment of shuttles. So either they had a lot of spares at the start or they've rebuilt as required.
    • And Star Trek: Prodigy, set only a few years after the end of Voyager, would later establish that the USS Protostar is equipped with the vehicle replicator, essentially a 3-D printer for shuttles. Sure, Voyager itself didn't say they had one, but 3-D printing wasn't on the radar back with Voyager was in production, so technology marched on and it's being retconned into use in that time.

Uniforms

• Ok, Voyager's been tossed into the Delta quadrant. Why did their uniforms update when Deep Space Nine's updated? Heck, why did Voyager's uniforms change, PERIOD? Were they still getting updates in the uniform handbook or something?
  • Huh? They changed? I swore they were always black bottom, department-color top with plum undershirt. Even in the last episode. The Deep Space Nine/Movie change moved it to black bottom, plum top with department-color undershirt, and Voyager didn't make the switch, even after they made contact with the Federation and the new wardrobe.
    • Answer - they didn't change.
    • Looks like someone wasn't paying attention.
  • Even more buggy is why does Starfleet seem to change its uniforms every other year? No military has ever gone through uniforms that quickly. Next Generation should have kept something similar to the nice red tunics they had in the films up through Undiscovered Country.
    • The blue jumpsuits with service color piping of the ENT era; the corded sweaters of the TOS pilot(s); the uniforms worn on all the other TOS episodes; those ugly-ass things from the motion picture; the red tunics from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan through the time Wesley was born; the TNG uniforms without the collars, which went into service around the time Jack Crusher was killed and were phased out over the course of TNG Season 3; the TNG uniforms with the collars that were worn from Season 3 or 4 up through Generations; the Generations/early Deep Space Nine/Voyager uniforms that went into service in some areas (like Deep Space Nine) at the Deep Space Nine pilot and became standard for everywhere (except Earth, apparently) in Generations; and the uniform with the colored undershirts that went into service while Bashir was being held with Martok in that prison camp while a Founder impersonated him. That's the uniform that was in service up through Star Trek: Nemesis. Whether it was still in service eight years later when the Romulan sun went nova and Abrams kicked Trek canon to the curb, I don't know. I do know that that's nine uniforms in a 228-year period, from 2151 to 2379. I also know that the US Army issued its first set of Service Uniform regulations in 1779, and that by 2007, which covers the same period of time, it had been modified on 25 separate occasions.Take a look.
    • Flashbacks in TNG indicate that the change from the red tunics of the films to the TNG-style uniforms occured recently - they were still using the red tunics when Wesley Crusher was born (when his dad made a holorecording of himself at the time, he was wearing a tunic). In all probability, most of the Enterprise-D officers had been in service when the changeover occured.
    • What I heard was that the plan had been to have them wear the tunics on TNG but it didn't work with the TNG set. Considering how much better the tunics looked than the Season 1 and 2 uniforms (especially the ones with the little short skirts) and how the set at first had a pretty blase feel to it, they might have done better changing the set to match the costumes. (I know, I know, the costs would be prohibitive.)
    • Also, the TNG-style uniforms were obviously in something of a beta test when we first saw them, as they were refined later on to be more comfortable (presumably while Gene was looking the other way in real life).
    • The Uniforms on Voyager didn't change. Only the Uniforms of people still in the Alpha quadrant (starting with the Prometheus EMH and then moving on to the Pathfinder staff) changed to the First contact/ Late Deep Space Nine style.
    • Looks like someone didn't fact check.
    • Considering that Starfleet officers' uniforms are probably replicated on the spot, it's bound to be a lot easier for such a design change to be disseminated in-universe than in any Real Life military organization. You don't have to manufacture the outfits and then ship them to where they're needed, you just transmit the new clothing designs to the fleet's replicators and let the various vessels' crew members input what size they need.
    • I always felt that Voyager should have updated to the new uniforms once they got back in touch with Starfleet, at latest when they had two way communication. I know it wouldn't have been a priority and would be dependant on replicator power (not that that was ever really an issue), but it would have made the crew closer to home, figuratively, if not literally, and still part of the fleet/Federation. I know it was so that us viewers (as dim-witted as we are) could visually keep Voyager and DS9 separate just in case the space station and all out war over there wasn't enough), but in-universe it would have been a nice gesture from Janeway, as long as she didn't implement it the way Picard did in Generations; with a shrug and a whatever.
  • Specific to VOY uniforms, one thing that has constantly bothered me is the "provisional rank bar" or whatever you want to call it that all the Maquis have to wear, and for that matter how randomly it's applied. So, as I understand it, Janeway wants to consolidate the two crews into one, specifically a Starfleet crew. She tells the Maquis crew, essentially, "you are now Starfleet officers for the duration of this journey". But in practice, she immediately alienates them by making them wear a rank bar that highlights that they aren't real Starfleet officers. In what way is that supposed to make them feel like an actual part of the crew? At least she makes Chakotay and Torres wear it as well, even though they have Starfleet experience, but...in that case explain Paris to me. Paris may not have been part of Chakotay's crew at the time but he was dishonorably discharged, had at one point been a Maquis member, and in fact was pulled from prison to help Janeway locate Chakotay's crew. Compare to Chakotay, who had been a Starfleet officer for a long while and resigned by choice. Okay, so he joined the Maquis as well, but he was never tried, convicted or dishonorably discharged, which actually makes him more able (technically) to have his commission reinstated than Paris is. But Paris gets to wear normal Starfleet rank pips while Chakotay has to wear the bar. Is it just that the bar is only applied to Chakotay's crew, and if so, on what grounds? Sure, most of them had no Starfleet experience, but Chakotay does, and so, essentially, does Torres. Nothing in the regulations should state that a provisional rank means you can't wear real rank pips, so really, the bar is just there to mark out the members of Chakotay's Maquis crew, which is kinda...non-inclusive on Janeway's part. I know the real-world reason is so viewers will know which characters are former Maquis, but apart from that it seems really weird and kinda wrong. At the very least, Paris should have had to wear the bar as well.
  • Here's one for you, though: In the episode where they meet that Klingon generational ship that left Klingon space 100 years ago, the Klingons look like 24th century Klingons. And I'm not talking about the cranial features; we'll just leave those be for now. But they were wearing the same uniforms that Klingons wore on TNG and Deep Space Nine. If Voyager, which had been in contact with Starfleet since the last uniform change, didn't change, why would these Klingons, who had not been in contact with the KDF, change? How would they even know what to change to? A lucky guess? Did the Klingons plan the change out a century in advance and say "Remember, at such-and-such a stardate you have to start wearing these"? Those Klingons should either have worn civvies (since they'd despaired of ever reforming the corrupt Empire, they wouldn't be KDF at all) or worn the TOS Klingon uniforms, which would have been a pleasantly nostalgic throwback.
    • 100 years prior to "Prophecy" would put the Klingons' departure between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and the modern Klingon uniforms first appeared in the former movie.
    • If I'm remembering it correctly, the Klingons in question were civilians. We have seen almost every modern Klingon wear the TNG Klingon clothing, whether they were affiliated with the military or not. As civilians, they may not have been entitled to wear the TOS costume, which which we never saw civilians wear.
• I find it a bit more troubling that the Voyager crew didn't wear the TNG uniforms. It was hinted that the DS9 uniforms were more of a working uniform, and that the TNG uniforms were more akin to a service uniform (slightly more formal). During much of DS9 starship personnel were almost always seen wearing the TNG style, and it was occasionally seen being worn by background characters even after the introduction of of the black and grey First Contact uniforms. So, why didn't Voyager staff at least occasionally wear the TNG style?
  • Star Trek Generations almost made a plot-point out of the characters changing uniforms from the A-style (colored torso) to B-style (colored shoulders) uniform. Starfleet seemed to be actively phasing out the A-style uniform, possibly in preparation for the upcoming major style change. Still, this troper always enjoyed the idea that the A-style uniform was for ship-based personnel and B-style for shore assignments. Production-wise, the B-style was probably cheaper and considered more "current" than the A-style uniforms, the hero versions of each costing a few thousand dollars per.
    • I think you're right. Looking at the Voyager (B-style) uniform, it seems to be designed to make it quick and easy to alter for use by different actors. A pair of gussets run down the black fabric on both sides of the uniform's back, and the waistband is kept snug with elastic; meaning that any of them could probably be worn by actors of differing body types without the wardrobe department having to tailor them.
    • Maybe that beginning in 2369 new starships and installations, such as DS9 and Voyager, adopted the new uniform from the start, given that it was already being phased in. Existing starships, such as the Enterprise-D and the Lexington, kept the older style going until later. Not sure why everyone on Earth aside from Janeway when she was visiting Tom Paris, wore, or in Sisko's case reverted to, the old style, when as the capital of the Federation and Starfleet, you'd think Earth would be setting the trend...
  • Now with Star Trek: Discovery, we have another example of Starfleet utilizing multiple uniforms at once - one of the tie-in novels suggests that the uniforms worn during "The Cage" on the Enterprise were exclusive to Constitution class ships, the ships at the forefront of exploration efforts into the unknown. So it may simply have been that Voyager and her crew were issued the "worker" variant, while official Starfleet business that involves Starfleet HQ and political matters (as in the example of Sisko in "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost") called for the more "showy" version used on the Enterprise (which was dubbed the flagship of the fleet).

Captain's Private Dining Room?

• Why does a small ship like Voyager have a private dining room just for the captain? A ward room or officer's mess would make sense, but "Here's a little room that only exists so the captain can sit alone and eat" is weird. Wouldn't she have space to eat in her quarters?
  • It's *called* the "Captain's Private Dining Room," but that doesn't mean that it is intended to be used only by the captain, all by herself. It is probably intended to be used (also) for certain semi-official occasions, for example: When she wants to have a "working breakfast" with a few of her dept. heads, and the like, or maybe a tête-à-tête with her second-in-command, a visiting dignitary, etc. Using the Officer's Mess for such small meetings might be counter-productive: It might be too big for that purpose, giving the occupants a weird feeling.
    • Considering the size of the area that is Neelix’s kitchen, it does seem big enough for the Captain, a couple of other people and a table to make this possibility plausible.
  • And Star Trek: Enterprise firmly established that a private dining area reserved for the captain and a small number of guests was included in the first proper Starfleet vessel sent into deep-exploration missions, so this is easily the kind of thing that could be considered a Starfleet design tradition. On the successive Enterprises, they may have gone for the more formal dining areas for diplomatic receptions, but on a smaller ship like Voyager, a private dining area would be the right size.

Comfortable beds in sickbay?

• In "Demons", Neelix was extremely fussy about sleeping conditions yet he jumped at the chance to sleep in sick bay. Aren't sickbay consoles composed of glass or plexiglass like MRI machines? Maybe Talaxian anatomy is conducive to that but there were a lot of humans who followed Neelix into sickbay

Why did they commission Voyager for the Maquis in the first place?

• To get a whole crew put together and have a Captain fly to a penal colony on Earth to recruit a helmsman is massively inefficient when you can add some nearby fire power. In DS9 episodes, don't they usually say it takes about a month to get from DS9 to Earth? By the time a crew leaves Earth and gets to the neutral zone, the Marquis might have changed their position significantly. If they have an insider like Tom Paris who will be their secret weapon, why not transport him rather than build a new ship around him?
  • Assigning Voyager to capture the Val Jean probably had more to do with Tuvok than it did with Tom Paris. Tuvok had infiltrated Chakotay's Maquis cell at some point prior to "Caretaker," and it was probably thought that someone who knew and understood him extremely well would be the best choice to work with him to bring in Chakotay while he was still undercover; hence Janeway. That would be somewhat dubious reasoning, but it wouldn't be the strangest call we've seen Starfleet Intelligence make. Paris was only attached to the mission because he was an expert at navigating the Badlands — he couldn't have possibly provided much insight into actual Maquis operations because he'd only been involved with them for a few weeks before being captured on his very first mission. As for why they might have sent Voyager, herself, this is speculation, but I've always wondered if after Chakotay and his crew were captured and delivered back to DS9, Starfleet was going to have Voyager poke around the Gamma Quadrant a bit. Voyager was one of Starfleet's fastest ships at the time, and was said to have some kind of advanced, state-of-the-art shield systems; both pretty handy traits to have if you happen to run into the Dominion. The Federation's shows of force didn't work, so this time they're sending a ship that can outrun the Jem'Hadar and might be better equipped to weather a hit from their weapons than Odyssey and Defiant were. The only real evidence I have to support this theory, however, is a holodeck training program we once saw Tom Paris use that pitted a shuttlecraft against three Jem'Hadar fighters. This is either a no-win scenario type test that puts the Kobayashi Maru to shame, or it's specifically designed to train pilots to evade Jem'Hadar warships. And as new as the Dominion threat was at the time, it doesn't seem likely that it's just a standard training scenario; but one that was specifically distributed to ships that are likely to encounter Dominion forces in the near future.
  • Tuvok was on a special assignment to spy on the Maquis, but still under Captain Janeway's command, making Voyager the ship that would go after him - witness how often that the respective crews of the other series set out to rescue their missing and captured crewmates. Tom Paris was picked as an expert because he'd actually been involved with Chakotay's cell before being sent to the penal colony - that's why he was IN the penal colony, he'd simply been discharged from Starfleet over the accident that killed his fellow cadets. And as for the distance between Earth and the Badlands... That distance is intentionally kept vague - DS9, Bajor, and the Cardassian border are meant to be on the edge of Federation space, but then we also have an episode like Homefront/Paradise Lost where the crew make it between the distance in a short period of time. It does help that runabouts, the primary mode of transportation in DS9's first two seasons, were said to have a maximum warp on the lower end of the spectrum, around warp three-ish. Meanwhile a ship like Voyager, capable of a cruising speed in the warp nine range, could make that journey much faster.

Holodecks and Holograms (Except the Doctor):

Holographic Lungs

• Neelix's holographic lungs in "Phage". How exactly do you project a hologram through someone's chest? They didn't even bother taking off his jacket.
  • Because holo-transmitters in Star Trek don't need a line of sight? This has been shown pretty much every episode with either the Doctor or the holodeck.
  • Also, how is it that the Vidiians could graft organs from completely alien races into their bodies and make them work, yet the possibility of using organs from non-sentient animals never seemed to cross their minds? Surely there must be some planets in the quadrant with vertebrates but no sapients, or a civilization that keeps livestock and can sell them a few tons of slaughterhouse leftovers.
• This episode, given that Science Marches On, is a major example of Zeerust. By the time the actual 24th century rolls around, the problem will be solved in 10 minutes:
  Doctor: I should have the new set of lungs ready in 5 minutes, Captain.
  Janeway: (to Vidiians) This is a bioprinter. You can have one if you go away and never bother us or anyone else again.
  Vidiian: You got it!
  • Uh, not really. If his lungs are impossible to replicate then I sincerely doubt any other conventional method will work.
    • That's why it's Zeerust - we're nowhere near Trek-style replication or hardlight holograms in the real world, but bioprinters - a technology that wasn't even on most people's radar in the mid '90s - are likely less than a generation away.
• So there's this massively adaptable parasite that an advanced biotechnology can't do anything about, bad enough to destroy their entire civilization. They beam aboard and explain this, then take a stroll through sickbay. No one, not the Vidiians, not Janeway, not the Doctor, no one thinks to take the slightest quarantine precautions.
  • What, usually everyone complains about No Biochemical Barriers in Star Trek, Voyager actually adheres to it for once and you're upset?
    • Justifying it with biochemical barriers doesn't fly because it's later established that the disease does in fact affect almost all species, not just the Vidiians. Just chalk it up to the Voyager crew being suicidally stupid as usual.
    • Keep in mind that the two Vidiians are initially just shown on the transporters; considering that Janeway was beaming over a hostile species, we can safely assume that they were initially concealed behind a forcefield that would have protected the Voyager crew from infection, and by the time the Vidiians were walking around and interacting with the crew, they would probably have submitted to some kind of analysis that would have allowed them or the Doctor to at least eliminate the risk of infection in the short term (if the Phage was so dangerous that it infected everyone immediately, there would be no point in the Vidiians stealing organs as they'd always run the risk of stealing from someone so much more vulnerable to the Phage that they'd be dead in minutes)

Holonovels

• How is a person supposed to progress through a holonovel if they have no prior knowledge of it? For instance, the Doctor's Photons Be Free novel apparently requires the user to have enough medical knowledge to diagnose several patients. How do users without medical training get past that part? And the only reason Tom and Harry know what to do in Captain Proton is because Tom wrote the story and kept telling Harry what came next. In short, how are holonovel users supposed to follow a prewritten plot in the ultimate Wide-Open Sandbox if they avoid spoilers?
  • The Doctor's ego at work. He didn't consider that using minor variations on Voyager's own situation and crew might upset his friends, all (excluding Seven and Neelix) cast as the villains of the story, he likely wasn't actually thinking about the average person's own medical experience - it's important to him, that should mean it's important to anyone.
  • I'd imagine most holonovels have some form of railroading to keep people on track. One of Geordi's complaints in TNG was that Data had read the novels prior, and thus could solve them instantly. From this, one could assume that the program probably has a cheat sheet of sorts to keep players on track.
  • I imagine most people in the Trek-verse know how to operate a tricorder, so the one provided in the story probably gives dumbed-down readings for the laypeople, providing a diagnosis for the player and giving instructions on what motions to go through to emulate a treatment. Most of the patients of that part had injuries that seemed like they wouldn't be too complex to treat with Trek technology, save one, and the story was dead set on preventing the player from working on him.
  • 1) Most popular holonovels are probably written by actual writers, who know how to deliver story in a fashion that subtly guides the player through the plot, and the Doctor and Tom are not full-time writers; and 2) diagnosing the patient isn't that different from having to learn dialogue and dress up for Janeway's weird 19th-century governess program; many works in real life are better appreciated either in-character or after varying amounts of background reading.
  • Probably, in the same way someone progresses through first-person shooters: the world itself is supposed to guide the player through it. With this comparison, Harry's behavior is similar to that of a noob who pesters a more experienced player asking constantly "What do I do now? Where do I go now?"
  • A few episodes of TNG sort of addressed this and confirmed that it does indeed work much like video-game railroading. Whenever the crew members started to go off the rails somehow, the holodeck characters would usually just ignore whatever doesn't match up with the story and then carry along with the script (like they'd mention Picard's Starfleet uniform by jokingly asking "Dixon Hill" why he's wearing pajamas, and then go right ahead with whatever they're supposed to say anyway).
    • Not that the "Dixon Hill" program is well-written. If you're the second player, you have to spend an hour sitting in a police office's waiting room while the first player's getting interrogated. Yawn!
    • Voyager also addressed this in the episode "Worst Case Scenario": the stories seem to function a bit like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" type visual novels. They have a general arc they follow, but players can make choices within them that potentially affect the outcome.
  • I'm sure it works similar to today's interactive romance novels: give players limited choices that in fact do not have any effect on the other characters and the story. Like your love interest asks you a question and whether you answer cute or extremely rude, they just love you all the more for it. You see some of this in the Beowulf story in season 1: hologirl says "What strange clothes you wear" then responds to whatever you say with "You must be a great warrior from a faraway land here to save my village." It's part railroading, part ignoring everything that doesn't advance the set story.

Holodeck Power

• In the episode Night, Tom and Seven are running one of the "Adventures of Captain Proton" in the holodeck. A ship-wide power loss occurs, causing everything, even the warp core, to go offline; the only things that seemed to continue working were wrist-bound flashlights, tricorders, etc. Why, then, did the holodeck's monochromatic (black-and-white) program act as if it itself had lost power rather than shut down the program?
  • Seven explains that independent sub-systems (like life support and holodecks) are still operational. OK, fine...but still, why'd the program act as if it had also been hit by a power loss?
  • That being said, when they're later attacked by an alien on the holodeck, Seven's still able to tell the computer to disengage the safety protocols by vocal command. Wouldn't the main computer be off-line, too?
    • The holodeck probably runs off of a separate computer system.
  • In "Night," the aliens didn't cut all power, they just cut the lights and anything generating large amounts of light, i.e., the warp core.
    • Yes, they did - the doors don't work, the turbolifts don't work, the sensors don't work, etc., mainly because the warp core itself was offline. A possible explanation for the holodeck's behavior is that it created lights and instrument displays that receive power from the warp core but the creation and maintenance of the force fields and holographic projections themselves are independently powered. That could be a safety mechanism; if a holodeck user happened to be twelve feet above the floor when a power failure caused the projection to collapse, they could get seriously injured. They just don't use that independent power system for something as mundane as powering the light fixtures - which is, admittedly, a flaw.

The Missing Holodeck OSHA Compliance

This is more of a general Star Trek Headscratcher but seeing as Voyager is guilty of the Holodeck Malfunction story on an order of magnitude higher compared to the other series, I thought it was fair to put it here. Why isn't there an escape hatch or a manual release for the Holodeck door? Why does the door disappear at all? I fail to see how a visible door would effect your enjoyment of the program when the very real threat of being trapped inside with deactivated safety protocols should affect your enjoyment substantially more. Failing that, why isn't there a circuit breaker to cut all power within the room? The ability to break a circuit is something we've been able to do since the dawn of man-made electricity. No malfunction would be able to affect a manual override as anyone who works with a generator in real life will tell you. Why is it that, when there is a Holodeck malfunction, no one considers taking a blow torch to the main door, walls, ceiling, or floor? Remember that the Holodeck (despite shoddy writing in instances where they can apparently pack as many people as they like into here) doesn't have TARDIS like proportions and is in fact no bigger than your average high school sports hall. The perception of vast inner proportions is a mere illusion as Data pointed out by throwing a rock at the wall in Encounter at Farpoint. Holodeck malfunction — saw through roof/wall/floor — drop/raise rope ladder — crew saved. Where is the problem here?

• Having a metal door just sticking out of nowhere would really break immersion. If you're creating a room or small space you may be able to put it behind some palm trees so it's not as glaringly obvious. If you're running Picard's horseback riding program, then it would just be weird to be galloping through the countryside and have this ugly grey door just flying along behind you. Data hitting the holodeck wall with a holographic rock is Early-Installment Weirdness, as it should have created the illusion of the rock landing where he threw it. As for the vast number of people, I don't recall an episode where more people were in the holodeck than there should have been room for. They are able to get lost in a simulated environment because once two or more people get far enough away from each other, the holodeck probably has them in an isolated zone where they run around on a forcefield treadmill of sorts and the illusion of depth is projected around them. A Fan Wank explanation for why cutting power isn't a viable option comes from SF Debris' "Unity" saga, where the mechanism that cleans up biomatter like sweat, hair, and uneaten food when a program is deactivated accidentally "cleans up" a crew member. Could be when you cut the power the computer registers it as an ended program and begins the cleaning cycle.
  • It's a good point about the the clean-up program that I didn't think of when I wrote this. You see I recently re-watched an early TNG episode called The Big Goodbye in which the senior staff are absolutely adamant that if they simply turn off the power, Picard and Data would cease to exist. Now there is undoubtedly as much Early-Installment Weirdness here as there is with the rock and the wall seeing as it is never brought up again in any other malfunction story. Nevertheless, if we take this episode at face value, it would seem that SF Debris is once again very astute in his observations.

Floor-wide Holodecks?

• In the two-part episode "The Killing Game", it is specifically mentioned that the Hirogen have converted entire floors of Voyager into holodecks for their bloodsport. However, given that distance doesn't matter for holodecks in Star Trek, what is the point? They could have easily just converted all the cargo bays to holodecks with the exact same results, while still keeping the rest of the ship available for other projects.
  • Perhaps to pack more prey into the settings? Typically, we only see any individual program involving two or three people at any one time, and, while functionally it's possible for a few dozen to be packed into a holodeck, with projections and force fields playing with perspective to allow the illusion of being able to have great distances between two people, the people in the program at once, the more work the computer is doing to maintain that physical illusion, not to mention the more likely it is that, in having two, three dozen people packed together, there's no real way for the computer's manipulations to hide the fact that, despite appearing to be on the other side of the room, you're packed in like sardines - we see in a couple of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that an object can be tossed against the holodeck wall and spoil the illusion, so there are limitations. Extend the holodecks out into the corridors, though, you've got more room to hunt more prey in a single program.

Holographic laborers

• I have a few problems with the alleged "controversy" of the Federation using holograms for manual labor. In Life Line, Lewis Zimmerman talks about how humiliating it is that all these holograms scrubbing out plasma conduits have his face. And in Author, Author, the Doctor equates this use of the EMH to slavery. Two questions:
  (1) If Zimmerman finds this situation so humiliating, why doesn't he just ask the Federation to change the appearance of the holograms? We saw in the DS9 episode Doctor Bashir, I Presume? that it takes mere moments to swap out the appearance of a hologram.
  (2) Instead of repurposing the EMH for manual labor, why didn't the Federation simply have Zimmerman build them a non-sentient hologram with the mind of an automaton? That would completely eliminate any ethical issues with holographic labor.
  • The closest thing to an explanation for ...everything... concerning holograms in Voyager is probably that the particular hologram technology used for intelligent holograms like the doctor is some kind of independent "holomatrix" that holds its computations internally, unlike simple background NPCs that are just projections run by the ship. If a holomatrix is an autonomous construct - the ship provides the base energy projection diddums, but the mind runs entirely within the matrix, using some kind of photonic hardware without necessarily having a direct connection to the ship computers - it's possible that it works more like an organic neural system and can't easily be redesigned to be non-sentient (e.g. animals can be stupid, but all animals still feel pain), especially while retaining enough intelligence to do useful work. This seems especially likely since Zimmerman-type holograms are apparently designed to copy personality traits and memories directly from live doctors, rather than being programmed manually.
  • As for the face... perhaps the whole idea of placing those holograms to work in mines was decided by some bureaucrat angered with the poor EHM 1 bedside manners, and giving them another face completely ruins the sadistic joke.
  • The bigger question that topic always raised for me is: why doesn't the 24th century have robots? Not self-aware, positronic androids or the kind in that one TNG episode that were sophisticated enough to become sentient, but simple robots built and programmed to perform a specific task like digging some ore and hauling it out of a mine. We can do that now. They don't even have Roombas, as far as I can tell.
    • In "Prototype", B'Elanna claims that the Federation does have a bunch of non-sentient robots doing manual labor and such. We never see any of them though.

To be honest I thought the whole plot for that episode was written rather poorly. The underlining message is supposed to be that slavery is bad. The only problem with that premise is unlike the Doctor (as well as Moriarty and his girlfriend) most holograms are not sentient. So they don't have to be treated as such. The Doc has an excuse for forgetting this do to his over inflated ego, the writers don't.

• The most baffling part is - HOW this all actually works? The Doctor is - without his mobile emitter, which is not a generally accessible technology - restricted to the sickbay or other areas equipped with holo emitters, e.g. holodeck. He can roam freely USS Prometheus, which is a brand new prototype equipped with holo-emitters everywhere (it seems even in the Jeffries tubes). Yet here we have an asteroid mining complex, where EM H1s are mining some ore. Manually.
• Had some breakthrough in holo-technology taken place while Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant, and Voyager's relatively ineffective holo-emitters were replaced by more powerful/effective ones, perhaps (somewhat) capable projecting holograms in quite large radius instead of only limited range emitters shown onboard of the Voyager?
• Even then, equipping an asteroid with holo-emitters, issuing emergency medical holograms picks and shovels, and reprogramming them for mining operations seems to be a rather ineffective way of doing things.
  • Especially considering that the humanoid shape really isn't well designed for constant repetitive work like this - robotic drones would be more efficient, and wouldn't require turning a medic into a miner.
  • Ultimately, I feel like this ended up being a metaphor that got away from them - "Author, Author" showing the Mark 1s at work builds off a line from "Life Line" the previous season, which was part of the reason that Zimmerman was refusing the Doctor's treatment, that the Mark 1s were considered a failure. That justified that episode's plot, but no one really seemed to figure out HOW having a spare doctor on call could exactly be viewed as a failure, so they hoped that the audience wouldn't think it over too much. Which... Have they even WATCHED the show?

Flotter

• Once upon a Time, Harry makes a Flotter doll for Naomi. He programs the Replicator from memory of playing the Game when he was young. But Flotter's parameters are already in friend Computer. Flotter is a popular game. Janeway and Samantha played it. The Computer ought to have a standard macro "create merchandise from common holodeck programs".
  • The Fed has no money. Fed copyright law is about the Artist's control of their work. Under Earth Law, Disney can sue anyone who makes a Mickey Mouse doll and doesn't pay Disney their percentage. Under Fed Law, Disney gets no percentage and can only sue people who make an inferior doll because it brings their brand into disrepute. Harry making an inferior doll does not get around either Earth Law nor Fed Law.
  • It could also be that between all the anomalies Voyager has flown through, aliens deleting files and having the main processor beamed off the ship that the original files for the Flotter doll were corrupted (it's probably a low-priority file when it comes to backups and recovery, anyway). So Flotter might come out looking like a cross between a Hirogen and a Species 8472. That' why Harry had to instead recreate the parameters for the doll from memory.
    • Probably, starships don't even store the file. The standard procedure would be to link up to the Federation subspace network and download the parameters, use them, then delete the temporary file. But Voyager is a little far afield to do that, so Harry programmed them manually. I will note that I actually liked seeing a sign that the 24th century has some form of pop culture that didn't originate in the 18th.

Holodeck Food

• So the Holodeck has a completely independent and apparently near inexhaustible power source. Fine, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but fine. Now it's already been proven that Holographic food and drink can be consumed because we've seen it happen dozens of times across TNG, Deep Space 9, and Voyager. So here's an idea... set up the Mess Hall in the Holodeck. We have a room that can produce an unlimited supply of food that doesn't drain the rest of the ships power in any way and yet we are reduced to eating Neelix's assorted creations and using our limited Replicator rations; Anyone else see the contradiction here?
  • There is a possibility of it simply giving the experience of eating and drinking rather than the actual material. Of course it's stupid that this is never answered in the series considering how often Star Trek writers go to the Holodeck for episodes. Another question would be why technology from completely different parts of the universe is compatible with Federation tech but they can't simply hook the replicators to the Holodeck source.
  • It's not inexhaustible, they ration that power in tight situations on Voyager too. And it may be that under normal conditions they replicate/beam food into holodeck and when they're running low on power you just can't run programs that have food in them.
  • Word of God does pretty much just Hand Wave the question about diverting holodeck resources by claiming the power source is incompatible with the rest of the ship. As for eating in the holodeck, holographic food probably tastes just as good or bad as the real thing and fills one's stomach just as much as the real thing, but it's the ultimate form of empty calories: without the projectors to keep the photons and force fields in place, it immediately dissipates. It can kill feelings of hunger, but it won't prevent anyone who eats it from starving to death. This may be part of what keeps the crew from getting overweight: you can chow down on all the holographic prime rib and fudge sundaes you want, but your digestive system won't be able to draw any nutrients from the food and the moment you leave the holodeck, your belly will be just as empty as it was before.
  • Actually, in some places it is suggested that the holodeck utilizes a replicator for edible stuff.
    • I believe that in Encounter at Farpoint it is explicitly stated that holodecks often replicate matter in the holodecks. The implication is that it is simply more efficient than creating holograms of said material.
• Which episodes had them eat food explicitly having been created on the holodeck, as opposed to bringing it from the outside like they do with a lot of their clothing?
  • The Cloud:
  Kim: I don't like to drink this late at night. I get an acid heartburn.
  Paris: Harry, it's holographic wine. It doesn't give you acid. Try to get in the mood, huh?

Pon Farr & Holodeck Pimping

• Voyager leaves us with a pretty confusing view as to whether a Vulcan can use a hologram or not in order to alleviate the Pon Farr - Vorik failed absolutely in Blood Fever whereas Tuvok completely succeeded in Body and Soul. So which is it? The two examples cannot possibly be more different.
  • It might vary, depending upon the individual Vulcan. Some people can get turned on by sex toys and some can't. Not to mention that Vorik was attracted to B'Elanna and wanted to mate with her, not some holo-Vulcan; Tuvok wanted his wife and got a tangible recreation of her. Although given that Vulcans are telepathic, it is odd that a holographic substitute would work at all, since Tuvok should have known she wasn't real as soon as he touched her.
  • It's also a factor that Vorik is a virgin (he admits this is his first pon farr) while Tuvok is a lot older. It could simply be that Tuvok is able to cope better due to having already been through the pon farr several times.
  • Considering that Pon Farr can kill and that Vulcans seem to be second (numerically) only to humans on Federation starships, you would think that there would already be emergency procedures in place for such situations where it is impossible to return to Vulcan. Everything that the Doctor tried on both Vorik and Tuvok did not work which makes it abundantly clear that there is no dedicated Pon Farr medicine on hand and clearly it is common knowledge to Starfleet Medical by the 24th century. And as a last resort, and as squicky as it may sound, ask one of your close female friends to do a Saavik in The Search For Spock instead of waiting for so long that you are driven to uncontrollably mind rape your own boss? Isn't that (dare I say it) a completely logical conclusion when the alternative is a horribly painful death for no reason? And, whilst it would be embarrassing for the person that you are asking, you would have to be a pretty bad friend to prefer his horrific death over your own comfort. I can't help thinking that if Pon Farr existed in real life, most of the problems presented in these two episodes simply would not happen.
    • The sad thing is that we have seen female Vulcans on board Voyager. It's personal, it's sad, it's degrading; hey fine, I get that. But when it's with a member of your own race who follows the exact same culture as you? And when the alternative is a horrifically painful death or rape? There really does not seem to be any excuse, and ever since Enterprise retconned females also having to go through Pon-Farr, then wouldn't they one day need the favor returned? It seems like a very mutually beneficial agreement all told and one that the otherwise strictly logical Vulcans would have no problem executing in a no-strings business-like way.
  • Okay, so holo-sex isn't a guarantee, and getting a shipmate to help "alleviate" the Pon Farr could get awkward and may be considered morally questionable. Meditation is clearly unreliable. But combat works, doesn't it? Why not throw a Vulcan with Pon Farr into the holodeck, turn off the safety protocols (which may as well not even exist), and let him bash a few holograms around to get it out of his system. (And credit where credit is due — Jim "Reviewboy" Wright suggested this first. I'm just agreeing with him.)
  • I believe the deciding factor in using the holodeck for either the sexual or combat solutions would be whether the Vulcan in question is able to get something genuine out of it or if they'd just be too aware of it being fake. It worked for Tuvok because he could use the image as a focus for his real wife but Voric couldn't even bring himself to try. The same would likely be true for the combat aspect, if was someone they genuinely saw as a rival/obstacle to mating with their selected partner then a holographic representation of them may provide the necessary emotional relief, but if not it'd likely fail. Ultimately it's all about achieving the emotional release to end the Pon Far.

Holodeck characters can see beyond the "fourth wall"

• Why did Starfleet or whoever made the holodeck not program it so that the characters are hard-coded to ignore things like people using holodeck controls? The episode "The Killing Game" shows that they can be programmed to ignore Neelix not looking anything like a human in a World War II simulation, so surely ignoring the arch isn't too far off? At the very least they shouldn't react to Starfleet uniforms either.
  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only times we have seen holodeck characters react to things they logically shouldn't is when the holodeck is broken.
    • I should clarify: what I mean is that all that's stopping a holodeck character from seeing something they shouldn't is a few lines of code, code that is far too often and far too easily overwritten. Instead of just 'ignore that thing that guy is doing', it should be made so that they physically can't see said thing.
  • Suppose they did make that change. What guarantee is there that it still wouldn't malfunction? What difference would "ignore this action" and "ignore this object" make as far as the holodeck's Weirdness Censor is concerned? We have absolutely no idea what kind of code or hardware runs the holodeck, or any other 24th century technology, meaning we have no basis on which to hypothesize a technical solution.

Transferring Holodeck Energy

• Okay, I understand the idea that you can't transfer energy between the holodeck and other systems on the ship. I don't understand why, since they often interface with non-Federation systems and whatever the power source having holographic Leonardo run on a treadmill could at least power something. However, this explains why they're free to use the holodeck even when there's an energy shortage and I get it. However, sometimes they do transfer energy from the holodeck. In "Fair Haven" it was a plot point that they had to transfer energy from the holodeck in an emergency and didn't have time to run the holodeck shutdown sequence (a little known sequence which, if not run before transferring energy off the holodeck, causes severe damage to the running/last running program). Is this just a plot hole or did they gain the ability to transfer energy off the holodeck at some point? If they gained the ability, did they just not care about saving energy by this point?

Starfleet "Security" does it again

• Meld - Crewman Darwin is murdered in engineering. Where are the security cameras? In TNG's The Drumhead it's shown there's at least one camera in engineering. Did they get rid of Voyager's to cut costs? Or maybe they quit working at some point.

Torres' Holobaby

• In Phage it is a major plot point that Neelix will be confined to a bed for the rest of his life as the hololungs will vanish if he gets up with the implication being that Starfleet holography is simply not sophisticated enough for such a task. But if that is true, then how in the The Killing Game could the Hirogen project a baby into Torres? One that is apparently sophisticated enough to kick. Why didn't it vanish? And am I the only one that thinks such a thing would probably have been really dangerous for her? Surely you cannot just beam a half-grown baby into a woman's womb with no repercussions - unless we are going to get into some real Fridge Horror territory with actual holosperm and holoeggs that grew inside her.
  • I always assumed it was like a holographic pregnancy simulator, not something actually inside her body. The neural interface made her feel the pregnancy as real, but even when it was turned off, she still had the weight on her body and the holographic fetus kicking her real abdomen.
  • This was actually a mix of Hand Wave and Real Life Writes the Plot, as Roxanne Dawson was actually pregnant at the time.
  • Bear in mind that, in the case of Neelix's holographic lungs, they had to actually function as anatomically correct lungs in order to keep him alive. Torres' fake baby was just that: a fake. It only needed to create the illusion of pregnancy, not simulate an entire working baby inside her body. Furthermore, it's a point that Talaxian lungs are more physiologically complex than those of other humanoids, which necessitated extreme precision that could not be achieved without keeping Neelix immobile. Torres' projection, on the other hand, could be off by a millimeter or two without being noticeable because, again, it's only superficial.

Reprogrammed EM Hs

• I don't understand what happened to all the failed copies of the failed EMH Mk 1. They're computer programs that could easily be deleted and wiped from memory, with no more thought than when you uninstall an old game you no longer play off your PC. Why all this effort to reprogram them to be miners? They're _very_ over qualified for the job! It would've been easier to just write new holominers from scratch. All the effort to reprogram the doctors down would be like reprogramming your old copy of Halo to be used as a scientific calculator!
  • It's at least vaguely implied that dilithium mining requires a softer touch than can be provided by large industrial machines. In every instance shown on the various shows, we always see people walking around with little rock hammers. The implication is that extracting dilithium requires clearing away the waste rock, then carefully extracting the individual crystals by hand. This would go a long way towards explaining why dilithium is so rare and prized: even in the future it required considerably sentient labor to gather.

As for why use EM Hs? Simple: there's no reprogramming required. You just set up a stationary holo-emitter and tell them "see the crystals that look like that? Carefully chisel them out and put them in the box." The doctor's holomatrix is complicated enough to do a very good job of it (he's a surgeon after all) and smart enough to comprehend the basic instructions. We learned from DS9 that you don't need a whole room to be a holodeck; and while the Voyager EMH's mobile emitter is a one of a kind, a man-portable emitter the size of a filing cabinet is not hard to make.

Delete character

Alice invites Bob to her new holonovel she's been playing for a while. Bob meets an annoying character he hates and he casually instructs the computer "delete character."

• Why do these people keep deleting characters? From other people's games?! You come into my Animal Crossing village and delete my best friend, I'd be pissed off! Just say "hide character" or "remove character". Why delete everyone?
  • Saying "Delete character" does NOT permanently delete the character from the program. Rather, it's like temporarily removing a, say, Bishop from the chessboard. The next person to play can put the missing Bishop back in place (or, more probably, the computer does that).

Crell Moset hologram should not be defending the actions of the real Crell Moset

• In the episode "Nothing Human", when the doctor discovers that the real Crell Moset is a war criminal, the holographic program of Crell Moset tries to defend the actions of the real one. But why would he do that? The hologram is based on what the federation thinks of Crell Moset. The federation doesn't know Crell Moset is a war criminal, and neither did the doctor when he created the program. Therefore, the hologram he created of Crell Moset should not be defending the inhumane medical experiments carried out be the real Crell. The hologram should be just as horrified by them as the Doctor is, right? Why would the hologram defend the actions of the real Crell when he isn't programed to be in favor of such actions?

Propulsion, Slipstream, and Transwarp Drive:

Prime Factors

• In Prime Factors the whole ethical dilemma involves the aliens sharing their space-folding technology with Voyager, which (I guess) would have to be installed on the ship for it to work, so Voyager could theoretically steal it.. Since it could only work once, why didn't they just ask the aliens to put in a time-lock on it to destroy it after Voyager was done? Or did they not trust that they could actually build such a lock that couldn't be picked? (I know, the real answer is Plot Armor.)
  • The aliens have their own version of the Prime Directive that says they can't share the technology with Voyager. When Voyager asks, their government says no, and Janeway respectfully accepts that. Presumably the idea of some sort of timed lock/self-destruct mechanism was considered and rejected, and not included in the episode because law of conservation of detail. Voyager is clearly clever enough to reverse-engineer the technology and the aliens weren't willing to take the risk.

Threshold

• In Threshold what was the point of having simulations of going to warp 10? If it's never been done before, then the computer has no idea what the result will be. It can have a theory but that's no better than anything a human can create by going through calculations. In the early days of studying nuclear power, there was a fear that setting off a nuclear bomb might ignite the atmosphere^note this theory was discarded before they did the testing during World War II. A computer simulation during that time could have easily resulted in a simulated atmosphere catching fire and it would tell the scientists nothing of any scientific value.
  • The point was to make sure the test shuttle didn't destroy itself. That's what the simulations were for. "Holodeck says the shuttle will survive? Good. Now we move on to practical trials."
    • But the computer won't know if it'll survive until they actually try it. If you could simply put in the variables and get a perfect answer there wouldn't have been any need to keep sending shuttles up during the Space Race, they would have known what was going wrong and fixed it after the first one.
    • If you want to be really, really, overly generous to the episode... the simulations don't necessarily have to test for everything, only certain things they know will be among the consequences of the real-life test. e.g. "in the buildup acceleration, the shuttle frame will be under increasing amounts of structural stress in the following places...", so they can test and fix the elements of the design that are working within known physics. Then you can read the "successful" simulation as "assuming the magical parts actually work, they won't break the ship trying to reach Warp 10". Of course the episode itself doesn't even try to make this much sense (why a cockpit simulation is needed for any of this is another question...).
    • The point of the simulations is because even the most competent and anal person or even people can't think of every factor that could possibly have an effect on their tests when they make calculations. The computer automatically finds the factors they didn't account for and factors them into the simulation so that people don't have to, cutting out the middleman and making it easier to be successful in an actual test. It's the same reason that when scientists come up with a theory on how anything would work, even with rock-solid calculations behind them, they still build and test prototypes until anything unknowable that could screw with the calculations is ironed out instead of just throwing it on the assembly line right away.
    • In real life, aircraft models are given plenty of flight simulator time while they are being designed. You can design for certain aerodynamic parameters and to withstand certain stresses, but even perfect knowledge of aerodynamics and perfect knowledge of structure, warp field theory, etc., doesn't mean you have perfect knowledge of how they interact — some changes in aerodynamics change the way you need to fly the craft, which might stress the structure in different ways than you anticipated, and so on. The complex interactions need to be ferreted out by going through particular scenarios.
• There is another problem with the episode. They now managed to work with a speed that would allow them to return home in an instant. And yes, it also turns people into lizards, but the Doctor found a way to revert the change. So... why not use it with Voyager itself? Yes, all the crew would be affected... except the Doctor. And they would have plenty of time to organize things in advance, first giving the Doctor the protocols to run the ship when everybody else is incapacitated, and then to manage a mass healing with the procedure he used with Paris and Janeway.
  • This one is really hard to explain in-universe since the real answer is, "the episode was so awful the writers wanted to forget about it as soon as possible and never bring up again." Even the database of navigational information the warp 10 shuttle gathered was completely forgotten.
    • Perhaps the size of Voyager versus the shuttle inhibited it (or made it infeasible).

Threshold Disavowed?

• The pages for Canon Discontinuity and Discontinuity Nod both claim that the writers disavowed "Threshold" by having Paris say "I've never been in transwarp" at some point. Yet web searches for this phrase fail to return anything definitive. Did Paris ever actually say this, and if so, where?
  • IIRC, it was in dark frontier.
    • I can't find it in this transcript: http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/517.htm.
    • Can we just declare that somebody was overzealous (and probably suffering from the "false scene memory syndrome" which has struck us all at some point) and remove those entries?
  • In Day of Honor Tom states "I've never navigated a transwarp conduit" while discussing Seven's nascent attempt to duplicate Borg technology. On one hand, it's easy (and perhaps preferable) to interpret this as intended Discontinuity Nod. On the other hand, his line fails to do this effectively, owing to the fact that transwarp is a generic term. Transwarp speed is explicitly achieved in Threshold by using a new kind of dilithium to break the warp 10 barrier and be everywhere in the universe simultaneously. Depictions of Borg transwarp in TNG's Descent and all VOY episodes are more akin to artificial wormholes - incredibly fast, but not infinitely fast. Narrowly defined, Tom is simply saying that he's unfamiliar with how the Borg do transwarp. Ultimately, based off of this, I would say his statement that he's "never been in transwarp" is almost certainly a Beam Me Up, Scotty!.
    • Indeed; Borg Transwarp appears to identical in both function and in visual effects to the Hyperdrive from Stargate by using a subspace tunnel fast enough to travel between galaxies in days (although ironically the FTL drive featured in Stargate Universe appears to operate in a similar fashion to Star Trek style Warp Drive and that is even faster.) I agree with the interpretation above that Tom's statement is a misconception; Borg Transwarp would appear to be something in the region of Warp 9.99999 (Voyager at Warp 9.975 would take 75 years to cross the galaxy) fast certainly, but not in any way close to Warp 10.
  • There is a bit of a complication in that we really don't know what 'transwarp' means. It's generally accepted that the transwarp drive tested by the USS Excelsior was a failure, but believe it or not, that's not canon. There is never any mention of whether the project succeeded or failed in any TV episode or movie; so it may well have succeeded. Transwarp may just mean something like "a much higher warp-factor than we could attain before." In fact, the warp scale was revised between the TOS movies and TNG. That could very well mean that the old scale was no longer sufficient for describing the velocity we can now attain as a result of Starfleet's transwarp project.
    • The writers seemed to be well and truly in love with the word "transwarp" but created a ton of confusion by using it indiscriminately — the "transwarp" of "Threshold" is obviously not the same thing that the Excelsior was purported to have or the Voth definitely did have, much less the transwarp conduits and transwarp coils that the Borg use. I suppose the best explanation is that it's a general term that describes a range of phenomena, but then one wonders why there aren't more precise terms available (isn't the "transwarp" of "Threshold" a bit inadequate to describe being everywhere in the universe simultaneously — maybe "ultrawarp" or "suprawarp" or something similar but less lame?). "Threshold" builds on a description of Warp 10 in the first TNG technical manual (sensibly presented as a theoretical concept only, not something just a teensy bit faster than warp 9.9...), but that tome sensibly does not use the abused term "transwarp" to describe it.
    • Omni-warp?
  • I've always titled that episode 'Threshold: Doctor What and the RE-TARDIS' in my mind. The writing of this one was indeed rubbish, but did no-one notice the obvious here? Transwarp is basically explained as being everywhere in space at once. Tom Paris clearly made a trip through Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. He then dies under the care of the EMH Doctor What Is Your Name? Then comes back to life and has grown a second heart as the first symptom for his mutations, followed by radical- erratic personality changes. Regeneration, anyone?
    • It wasn't 'regeneration'; what happened to Tom was nothing short of resurrection. Tom, somehow, spontaneously came back to life after meeting every definition of the word 'dead' for several hours. I think even The Doctor, would be stumped by that one.
    • It's not the TARDIS that passes through every point in space at once — it's the Infinite Improbability Drive.
• Like weeds, references to this disavowal are back on the pages for Canon Discontinuity and Discontinuity Nod (where it's misattributed to "Dark Frontier." Does anybody have any statements on the part of the creative staff to prove that Paris's line was intended as a shot at "Threshold"? Because on the face of it, "I've never navigated a transwarp conduit" is a fairly banal line and seems unlikely to be a Take That!.
  • Unfortunately not but it's no secret that they grew to hate that episode, I feel people are just reading between the lines;
  Brannon Braga:' "It's a terrible episode. People are very unforgiving about that episode. I've written well over a hundred episodes of Star Trek, yet it seems to be the only episode anyone brings up, you know? 'Brannon Braga, who wrote 'Threshold'!' Out of a hundred and some episodes, you're gonna have some stinkers! Unfortunately, that was a royal, steaming stinker."
  • Tom says he never navigated a transwarp conduit, which can be interpreted as him just being overly specific. However B'Elanna says they don't know anything about transwarp technology, which plainly isn't true.
    • It's almost as if the "transwarp" referred to in "Day of Honor" (and for that matter, every other time) is a completely different thing than the "transwarp" of "Threshold"!
    • While we're at it, why wouldn't they know anything about transwarp technology? The Enterprise used it in "Descent" — just exploiting a technology set up by others, admittedly, but by the end of the episode they must have ample opportunity to put the transwarp conduit to study.
    • And that wasn't even the first time that happened to the Enterprise. When the Traveler got distracted...by Wesley Crusher, he somehow made the engines shoot the ship to another galaxy. Later, Reg Barclay did the same thing—though thankfully, he managed to do it without developing an uncomfortable fascination with a teenage boy. This suggests Starfleet not only has experience with something they would probably describe as "transwarp," but that Starfleet ships could travel at those speeds with only a few modifications to their existing engines.
    • Why some people always have dirty thoughts about adult-teens friendships?
    • Like Wil Wheaton, you mean? When even the actor who played Wesley realizes in hindsight that his scenes with the Traveler were creepy, it's not having "dirty thoughts" to find those scenes uncomfortable.
    • Yes, like Wil Wheaton, considering he has turned "bitching about Wesley Crusher" into a career.
    • Wheaton's opinion change nothing, is just the same sexualization that modern society gives to all relationships in general. Some psychologists would say that's a projection.
    • If you allow me, disregarding that this part of the discussion derailed from the main topic, maybe both are right with your appreciations. On one hand the Traveler is not even human and we don't even know if it has sexual urges, considering that it is implied that he is some sort of Energy Being taking A Form You Are Comfortable With, so thinking that the Traveler has some sexual interest in Wesley is kind of a stretch. On the other hand, it is the normal instinctive reaction of a human being to assume that as the viewer is watching an adult 40 year-old man fascinated with a teen boy, even when the adult is portraying a probably asexual Energy Being, the human mind is not receiving that image to its brain.
  • I think most of these transwarp problems can be solved with Depending on the Writer and the fact that they just really enjoyed using that word even though it often made no in-universe sense. It's clear that the Excelsior's transwarp, the Borg transwarp, and the warp 10 transwarp are completely different things by any fair measure.

Slipstream

• So, I have two issues with this:
• First: Why the hell didn't they test it more rigorously? There was no time factor beyond their arbitrarily selected test date and the simulations revealed a potentially catastrophic fault in their highly dangerous, highly experimental new technology only hours before it was due to go online, yet their reaction is "Meh, what's the worst that could happen?". Surely anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together would have postponed trusting their lives to the thing and explored the problem further?
  • There WAS a time factor - when Kim and Paris confronted the Captain about the simulation issue, Kim mentioned that certain components within the drive were already starting to decay and that it could be years before replacements could be fabricated. Janeway listened to their concerns (including Chakotay's statement that if they used the drive in the morning, the crew would be in the escape pods by afternoon) and asked Kim to write-up his proposed solution. She weighed the risks and made a judgement call, even calling the decision one of the bigger risks she'd taken. Still, it was her decision to make. To be fair - it nearly worked, the doomed Voyager was only a few parsecs from Federation space.
• Secondly: Why not use it repeatedly in short jumps to get home?
  • The unfortunate real world answer are two men that go by the names Brannon Braga and Kenneth Biller. It's a tired meme that they helped destroy Star Trek with their awful scripts but just because something is cliché doesn't make it wrong and chief among this was their ability to introduce a technology/character/strategy and completely forget about it in order to maintain the status quo. The Slipstream Drive joins other such prime examples as the Warp 10 engine, the Doctors mental breakdown, the Doctors back-up holo module, Seven's Borg shields, and the Vidiian Scanner from Phage that is never seen again despite being superior in every way to the Starfleet Medical Tricorder. That is but a fraction of a very large and embarrassing list.
    • I don't disagree at all, but this is broader problem than Voyager, or than latter-day Star Trek. Think of all of the things that get mysteriously forgotten in TOS: superior technologies, superior building materials and, my favorite, the ability to give normal humans amazing telekinetic powers at will (in "Plato's Stepchildren"). Seems like that might have been a useful thing to hang on to, no?
  • Without knowing how the retrofitted slipstream drive works, it's hard to say for sure. The instabilities show up 17 seconds into the flight, so if you just turn the engine on and off every 15 seconds you could presumably avoid the problem, but it may damage the engine or hull by having the stress of entering and exiting slipstream many times in a short period. It could also be that entering slipstream uses up a lot of energy but once you're in it energy consumption is lower, so it's only practical for long-distance travel and more than a few jumps would deplete their fuel reserves. Perhaps there's an acceleration factor and for the first few seconds it's not any faster than their standard warp, and the benefits only really start if you're in slipstream for at least a minute. I always prefer the WMG answers to Headscratchers rather than the real-life explanation of, "The producers just suck."
    • I always kind of assumed that once they learned their alternate future fate, they concluded it was too dangerous to use the thing again, even in short bursts. They can't guarantee it would behave exactly the same way every time and they don't have time to make any system alteration to make it even the tiniest bit safer, it makes sense that they would decide it wasn't worth the risk.

Transwarp Coil

• In "Dark Frontier" they manage to acquire one, and it enables them to travel about 20,000 light years before burning out. They never seem to try to acquire another one, which might be forgivable in that it would require raiding another Borg vessel. But how about simply copying the technology? Instead of using it until it is fried, why not just put some distance between themselves and Janeway's latest debacle, then stop and study the technology? Wouldn't Seven already have at least some idea as to how it works and how another might be fabricated? Sure, it might take some time. But it's not as Voyager was expecting to get home soon anyway. Given that, even with all their shortcuts, they had only managed to shave a few decades off their travel time, they still had a long way to go. Instead the transwarp coil becomes just another piece of Forgotten Phlebotinum, to be used and then never even mentioned again.
  • I tend to assume that the transwarp coils and the slipstream drive have similarities, particularly given the similar "tunnel" effect for the two methods. If that's the case, then it could be that, like mentioned about the slipstream drive, there's a time factor on how long the coil is viable for use. Granted, that does lead to "how do the Borg use them?" which I'd suggest that the Borg apparatus that they take it from is what keeps it intact. If Voyager's crew couldn't maintain the slipstream drive functions, perhaps that same lack of tech, tech that might depend on science and designs that could not be manufactured with Voyager's own resources, is why they couldn't build their own coil.

Vague warp velocities

• Star Trek has always been (correctly) vague about the exact velocities of warp drive, to allow Traveling at the Speed of Plot. But in this series Tom Paris mentions that Warp 9.9 means going about 4 billion miles/sec. Light itself only goes 186,000 miles/sec. The Hand Wave is that Voyager can only sprint at 9.9 for very brief periods of time... because, if that speed was sustainable, they would have gotten home in 3.2 years.
  • To its credit, that Hand Wave has been with the franchise pretty much from the start: whenever the plot demanded it, Kirk could always tell Scotty to give the Enterprise an extra-hard push over its top speed, but it was always for some emergency, and of course Scotty always got to complain that "she cannae take much more o' this, Captain!" The Voyager presumably had a higher top speed, but the same general idea applies: Torres can't push the speed up over warp factor 9 for very long, or she'll blow the warp engines. Moreover, unlike Scotty, she's generally not exaggerating when she assesses Voyager's vulnerabilities or how long repairs will take if Janeway pushes the ship too hard. Add to it, the Galaxy-class Enterprise-D was explicitly stated in TNG to only be capable of sustaining warp 9.9 for ten minutes.
  • Also keep in mind that if the Enterprise started putting too much wear and tear on her engines, she could cruise to the nearest starbase for repairs. If they really blew out their engines, they could call the nearest friendly starship and ask for a tow. Voyager doesn't have that luxury, meaning that they have to be even more careful about overtaxing their engines.
  • Speaking of Enterprise - the Enterprise D at least was said to have a normal cruising speed of Warp 6 and a maximum cruising speed of 9.2. However, those are cruising speeds - meaning it could maintain them indefinitely. It could certainly go faster, but sooner or later (depending on just how fast it sprinted) it would need to drop back down to cruise eventually or risk failure.
  • Demonstrated, for example, when they were pursuing the Borg cube in "The Best of Both Worlds" and Wesley stated that they could only maintain their speed of warp 9.6 for about three hours. Voyager may have a higher top speed, but similar limitations would still apply.

Escort through Borg space

• Part of Janeway's arrangement with the Borg centered around the Borg taking Voyager through their space. Putting aside the answer "because that would end the show then and there," why does no one suggest that the Borg use their transwarp abilities to just drop off Voyager, rather than conventional warp travel? The transwarp corridor used in "Descent" would be known to Voyager, and the Borg could easily have dropped Voyager through their space, or given them a transwarp coil like Voyager would later seek to steal from the Borg directly. Obviously, the Borg were never going to uphold their end of the agreement and intended to assimilate Voyager as soon as Janeway gave them the information that they wanted, but there were faster methods of travelling through Borg space that Voyager and her crew never even seem to acknowledge than just relying on conventional warp. Why don't any of the Voyager crew mention these methods, particularly methods that they already knew about and later do seek to acquire from the Borg?

Miscellaneous Technology:

Message in a Bottle

• "Message in a Bottle:" The Doctor beams himself to the Alpha Quadrant temporarily and makes contact with Starfleet aboard an experimental new warship. It's got a lot of shiny new secondary systems, which is usual for experimental new warships (the USS Monitor was the first US Navy ship on which you could flush the toilets) but the main thing with it is that it can divide into three parts which can attack an enemy in unison. Is it really that big a deal? Why not just send three ships into battle with orders to operate as a unit? I know Starfleet is Mildly Military, but is it that hard to find two captains in the entire fleet who are NOT such insubordinate hotheads that they will disregard orders from the flagship the second they see a Jem'Hadar fighter?
  • Apparently not. After the experimental ship was hijacked, what did they do? Sent a three-ship task force after it!
  • I'll put this as lightly as possible. Starfleet's status as a military organization has... degraded quite a bit since Kirk's day. The TNG era does a lot of things that would not be tolerated in any real military, so you could ask a similar question about a lot of things seen in Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and The Next Generation. For instance, why did they change the shape of the phasers from the conventional gun-shape of TOS to the ergonomic nightmare tv remote design of the TNG era?
  • It makes as much sense as the saucer separation design of TMP (All There in the Manual) and TNG. My guess is that since a separated saucer is slow, weak and not very maneuverable, they were toying with the idea of having a saucer section that is semi-autonomous. In case the stardrive section was destroyed in the battle that required the saucer to stay behind, they wanted the survivors to have a chance to escape or fight. And since Starfleet was designing ships specifically to counter the Borg, and Riker had successfully used the saucer and stardrive in "Best of Both Worlds" as two combat-active platforms against a single target, they wondered if three autonomous, explicitly combat-oriented sections would be even more effective. As for why not send three ships instead, when it's a large battle they always do but when it's a lone ship entering a skirmish (like what happens in every Trek series) it's usually somewhat unanticipated.
  • Bear in mind that one ship in three parts isn't the same thing as three ships: it's probable that the separated components don't really have much in the way of secondary systems (fuel, repair systems, decent engines... I don't know) and are really just weapon platforms; only the unified ship being able to properly power, repair, maintain itself etc. Thus delivering more weapons to the battlefield at a much lesser expense, something that fits in neatly with the plot of DS9 happening in the background. So its real advantage is efficiency/economy (compared to wasting a whole Galaxy-class cruise-ship-with-weapons-tacked-on).
  • It's possible that the design, power systems, weapons distribution, etc. were designed so that the captain had a choice of fighting with three quick knives or one big claymore. There are situations where one would be preferable to another. It also represents a return to form for the Fed designers, who seem to really like versatility. The Defiant, built with the same philosophy as the A10 Warthog (BFGs strapped to an engine) was a major departure for them.
  • It's also possible the design was stupid, and a failure, and was never produced in number. It was an experimental ship. Hell, the Russians built two circular battleships in the late 19th century before they realized the concept was awful. Or, more recently, the US built the Sea Shadow stealth ship concept in the mid-80s and proved to be a mostly useless, unworkable design.
  • Breaking into three ships could be very useful in battle because of the way battles work in Trek. Consider that we rarely see any ship attack more than one target at a time. The normal method is to pick one target and blast away until it's down, then turn to the next. (In reality, any ship's computer should be capable of targeting multiple ships simultaneously with different weapon systems, as DS9 does, but we rarely see that, if ever.) With three separate ships, two of them could be whaling away at the enemy while only a third of the crew is stumbling around as the third ship takes hits.
  • I can see the flaw in the design immediately. You have one serious battle and having sent three split-into-three-ships out there you come back with one and two thirds worth of bits. And some of them are duplicates. Its worse than mixing together three boxes of legos and then losing half of it. Plus you have to wonder just exactly what the effects of battle damage would be on coming time to put them back together even if all the bits survived. How quick is the turn around from that? Can you get all the bits back together before the reinforcements arrive? It is a logistical and engineering nightmare (and that is before the captains who came back with incomplete bits start arguing over who gets to keep the one whole ship they can reassemble from those bits and who gets stuck with two middle of the sandwich hulls, now there is a morale shredder). The triple hull thing sounds cool, but it is feature-creep at its worst.
  • The Prometheus was stated to be a prototype. As for why they built it... My guess is that it was a technology demonstrator: the saucer separation of the Galaxy class was supposed to allow for the evacuation of the civilians, but it failed big time due the lack of separate warp engines while still depriving the combat section of the phasers, shield and fusion reactors of the saucer. The Prometheus was most likely a demonstrator of multiple technologies with the ability to separate in three warp-capable parts being the main one, with a new practical generation of explorers to be built with it after the war. This of course doesn't call into question the wisdom into putting unnecessary civilians (and especially children) on the ships most likely to get in battle with the Romulans and other possible threats...
    • Prometheus was, in fact, a fraud - like the "Operation Fortitude" developed to mask the real D-Day invasion of Normandy or President Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" intended to lure the Soviets into bleeding themselves dry trying to "keep up." The Federation was actually hoping that foreign powers would steal the plans of the Prometheus and wastefully expend resources trying to duplicate its faulty design.
  • A major challenge for Starfleet was the high mortality rate in their officer corps. After Wolf 359 and with the Dominion War, they were short on experienced commanding officers. The Prometheus was equivalent to delivering three Defiant-class starships to an engagement with only one captain (and a smaller crew overall) needed. It also offered a tactical advantage. If you look at most starship battles, the ships commonly pound away at each other's shields to try to break them down. Often, multiple smaller ships (e.g. Birds of Prey) can overwhelm larger individual ships simply by hitting them from multiple directions. The Prometheus was designed to give its crew the ability to distribute their firepower. Each section was warp-capable, thus eliminating the problem that conventional saucer separation (limited to impulse) presented. Because each section had independent warp capability, they were not post-battle sitting ducks, nor would severe damage to or destruction of one or two of the sections prevent the remaining section(s) from fleeing the battle. New sections could be built to replace lost ones, and you wouldn't even have to change the ship's name or registry number! That could be a morale booster of a sort.
  • It's not about how well they'd work together, it's about using resources as efficiently as possible, especially given that they're in the middle of a war. Doing everything as a three-ship operation means three crews and three ships that can't be used elsewhere. With a ship like the Prometheus, they have the defensive capabilities of three ships, but functionally it's only one ship and one crew tied up on any given assignment; that's two ships that can then be used for other missions or kept on the line for defense. Multiply that by ten or twenty ships in that class and the difference adds up quickly.

Language

• The Voyager is across the galaxy from home, 70000 light years from Federation space, but somehow everyone they meet speaks their language fluently.
  • Universal Translator. It's an established technology of Star Trek.
  • The Star Trek Wiki indicates that that technology is present in their comm badges. In Cathexis the crewmembers captured by the Vidiians have their comm badges confiscated, but have no difficulties communicating with either the Vidiians or their fellow prisoners.
    • The prisoners and the Vidiians have UTs themselves that can't be confiscated?
    • The various races they encounter likely have Universal Translators of their own, given that they are space-faring species that encounter aliens on a regular basis as well. Since the Vidiians are using prisoners for slave labor, it makes sense that they would have a method of talking to whoever they were keeping as slaves.
  • Truth is, nothing Voyager does with the UT is any stranger than what any other Star Trek series does.
  • We've seen in DS9 that other races have their own translators (the Ferengi appear to have their implanted). As a technology it doesn't really make much sense, but then it's one of those necessary things to ignore to have a sci-fi show of this nature.

Melee Weapons

• Why are there no standard melee weapons for officers to carry? There are plenty of occasions where phaser fire would cause an explosion so they avoid using them, and I get that some security officers might not feel the need due to the advanced training they receive but... come on. Some times it's necessary... For instance during a Borg attack? I seriously doubt their shields will adapt to a knife to the jugular.
  • A phaser set to stun wouldn't cause an explosion. Remember: we only see the times a phaser doesn't work because it's interesting. There's probably people getting stunned 20 times a day all over the Federation whom they never bother to tell us about.
  • I'm sure that if the Borg can adapt their shields to block phaser fire within a few shots, then they'll be able to either magic up or have added back at base so thicker body armor or something.
    • Haven't we seen that despite all that's happened a good punch and kick is still effective against the Borg, though?
    • A Borg drone is strong enough to punch its way through a metal door. There is a reason why the only person to choose to go properly barehanded against a drone is Data, everyone else just takes advantage of their slow speed and indifference to go for the neck tubes.
  • There are a couple exceptions. Janeway packed a Ka-Bar in "Macrocosm" (Seriously, it was an honest-to-goodness Ka-Bar Combat Knife). She retrieved it from an equipment locker aboard Voyager, implying it's standard-issue aboard Federation starships. Later, in Star Trek Enterprise, MACOs carry a metallic side-handle stun baton. Odd choice for an infantry weapon, but it comes in handy on more than one occasion.
  • Borg can't adapt to melee attacks. Blocking actual physical attacks requires force fields, which are more power intensive than shields, and in the Trek setting have usually been shown to have problems with being easily mobile, so any Borg equipped with one would probably have to stand there unmoving while it was hacked at ineffectually (meaning it is neither doing anything useful nor actually immune to the attack, just not damaged by it). Most likely the reason that anti-Borg melee weapons aren't standard issue is the fact that Borg are still mostly made of metal, carbon nanofiber, and other crap that equals armor, which means that for the most part unless you're of above-Terran strength like Klingons or Vulcans you're probably not going to have much luck with cutting them, so equipping and training people with melee weapons was probably deemed more effort and trouble than it was worth.
    • They absolutely can adapt to melee weapons, they demonstrated that in their very first appearance on Next Generation.
    • And yet they never do it again, so Early-Installment Weirdness on the first appearance of the Borg.
  • I believe this can mostly be explained away by the Federation being a science and exploration force, not a military one. Time and time again we see that they are just the worst at fighting, strategy, planning for conflict, etc. It's a wonder they ever beat anyone. Sure, The Enterprise D is armed with formidable weapons, but over the course of the series how often do they use them as weapons vs. as tools? The Ka-bar is a good example: knives can be used for so many things besides stabbing that of course a Federation ship would have them on hand. But actual melee weapons? That's not their thing. Its ultimately a question of lack of imagination, they simply aren't trained to think militarily.
    • That Ka-bar actually suggests the opposite, really. It's a dual-purpose knife—meant for general utility purposes, but with a heavy emphasis on hand-to-hand combat. It's meant to do both, so it's not the best design for either. That means that Starfleet made a very bad decision in using Ka-bars if it doesn't issue them with hand-to-hand combat in mind. It's not very useful for working on a starship, which would most likely require more delicate or specialized tools. It's fine in a survival situation, but there are much lighter, more compact designs that do the same job, and take up less space in a survival kit or on an equipment belt. And if it is meant for general utility purposes, the question of why we've never seen a member of an away team carry one before has to be asked. And also why Starfleet issues a big, aggressive-looking, fixed-blade utility knife that doesn't fit in with their ethos of not appearing heavily armed in most situations.
    • Its a good reference point that in Star Trek: First Contact, Worf is the only one to think of packing a melee weapon during the EVA. Everyone else out there was probably thinking "oh no, what do we do if our phasers break?!"

Borg dissimilation

• I can see why Seven would have a hard time having her implants removed, since she's been with the Borg for 18 years, she has nanoprobes through her body (presumably unlike Picard/Locutus), and her treatment was in a small starship medical bay compared to Starfleet's flagship. But, in the episode Unimatrix Zero, Janeway, Tuvok, and Torres get themselves assimilated, on purpose. The process that often involves the removal of an eye and limb. To be fair, none of them have that happen to them (that's another question as to why that's the case), but surely they should still have some implants throughout their bodies, nanoprobes, or physical scarring? Maybe even be able to hear the Borg, like Picard can. Is anything mentioned as to why that's not the case?
  • The three were only assimilated for a few days at the most, it's likely if they'd been around longer their implants would have become more intimate and specialized. Seven was assimilated as a child and had been a drone for most of her life so her adult body was grown around her implants.
  • In addition, it's explicitly stated at the end of the Part 2 that the neural inhibitors that kept them from being integrated into the hive mind made the extraction process easier. Because Tuvok's inhibitor started to wear off, his recovery was more challenging.
  • Also, regarding the last point about Picard still being able to hear the Borg post-assimilation, that has been explained in Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard. Locutus was an experiment in assimilation on a genetic/biochemical level that caused him to still act as a receiver for the collective consciousness even absent all of his technological implants. That's why he's always been treated as "special" by the Borg Queen(s).