...And also never exceeded warp 10, and ran on a dilithium focus antimatter powerplant described in exactly the same terms as the machine LaForge tended to. Apparently, Starfleet tried an alternate technology or two for a while, and then returned to Henry Archer's system. Which may have been copy-pasted from Vulcan databanks anyway, and may represent the accumulated galactic wisdom of the past few centuries; humans just had that damned pride of theirs that made them try silly things in between ENT and TNG.
Timo Saloniemi