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AND you know its at least partially true,

Since we are on the torpedo topic, could Voyager have made their torpedos MORE powerful and therefore more useful by increasing the amount of m/am aboard one? I have never had the opinion it took alot to achieve the kind of explosions in space we saw. Don't you suppose there is likely more room in the casing they could have packed in more m\am???

Probably, but making them bigger would probably make them less agile.

It also would have used up more of their M/AM stock, and that stuff can't be easy to come by.

I've always thought this was something indicative of the major flaw of Voyager's basic premise. B/B felt like they got in too deep and were way too lazy to keep up with all the canon material established in DS9 about the AQ so they wanted a way to create a reset button-heavy series where they can continuously create uninteresting new plots with uninteresting new alien races. Of couse, it was on a tightrope because the show REALLY wasn't about being an intense, desparate attempt to get home. No, that would have been Star Trek: Equinox, and that would have actually been exciting and inspired.
So they didn't REALLY want to make a show about being on the other side of the galaxy, they just wanted the TNG premise but they were too afraid of commitment so they set it on the other side of the galaxy. The absence of starbases, etc. make the condition of the ship (pristine for 7 years except for Year of Hell, which was realistic so it unhappened) TOTALLY unbelievable. Again, flawed attempt to resist the flow of Star Trek advancing forward.

Exactly, it was just a continuation of TNG without consequences. Hell, even the episode numbers they used has VOY as a part of TNG (with VOY's first season being reffered to as "season 8").

Uhhh... I think only OVEG does that as a piss take. The offical material uses standard numbering I think.

Yeah. Season 1 is still season 1.

You sure? I'm pretty sure OVEG mentioned that that was how it was officialy numbered.
I'll go look it up.

Chris Propst wrote:I've always thought this was something indicative of the major flaw of Voyager's basic premise. B/B felt like they got in too deep and were way too lazy to keep up with all the canon material established in DS9 about the AQ so they wanted a way to create a reset button-heavy series where they can continuously create uninteresting new plots with uninteresting new alien races. Of couse, it was on a tightrope because the show REALLY wasn't about being an intense, desparate attempt to get home. No, that would have been Star Trek: Equinox, and that would have actually been exciting and inspired.
So they didn't REALLY want to make a show about being on the other side of the galaxy, they just wanted the TNG premise but they were too afraid of commitment so they set it on the other side of the galaxy. The absence of starbases, etc. make the condition of the ship (pristine for 7 years except for Year of Hell, which was realistic so it unhappened) TOTALLY unbelievable. Again, flawed attempt to resist the flow of Star Trek advancing forward.

Voyager really was screwed over right from the start because its premise is simply unworkable.

It's all very well to say that they should have an intense struggle to get home... but they can't ever actually get home because that's the end of the show. So all they can really do is either dangle a possible way home, and then have it fail, or do something not related to going home.

If they do the first, the crew look like a bunch of mororns. That happened every time Voyager had a chance to get home and failed - you end up thinking "Geeez, Picard would have been on Earth having some earl grey by now".

Or, you do stories unrelated to going home. In which case, it looks like the crew don't particularly care if they get home or not.

There's only two basic categories of stories you can possibly tell on Voyager, and both of them are weak ones.

Voyager really was screwed over right from the start because its premise is simply unworkable.

I'd disagree with that. It's quite possible to have the premise of a ship searching for something over a long period of time, without constantly bringing up ways for them to get home that will inevitably fail.

For example, just off the top of my head, you could have something like this:
VOY is stranded, not due to Janeway's stupidity, but because the Kazon ship crashing into the array fucked it up too badly for it to send them home.
Caretaker dies, but before doing so reveals to Janeway that there's another Caretaker in the quadrant that could help them. However, it doesn't know the exact location.
Then you could have VOY wandering around the quadrant in search of clues or leads to the second array. This allows you to have plenty of episodes unrelated to finding ways of getting home, while still making it clear that they have an actual goal in mind.

It's still self-limiting. The condition of the ship is a symptom; if it were really shown to detiorate as it "really" would, they'd be flying a Sopwith Camel well before there was a conclusion to the series.

Mikey wrote:It's still self-limiting. The condition of the ship is a symptom; if it were really shown to detiorate as it "really" would, they'd be flying a Sopwith Camel well before there was a conclusion to the series.

Not necessarilly. Look at nBSG, or the NX-01 during season 3, for example. In both cases they've depicted a slow, steady decline in the ships' condition without doing it so quickly that they fell apart before the end of the series. Dropping in occassional refits at alien stations would further extend the ship's effective life without resorting to the magic reset button.

In fact, seeing such a slow decline would have made Voyager more interesting. While "Year of Hell" was one of the best eps Voyager produced, the extreme battering Voyager took and the reset-button finish wouldn't work over the long run.

Agreed, although Voyager should probably have ended up in the state she was in at the end of YoH by the end of the series.