The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing huge

I know, I know. "Think three-dimensionally; there's plenty of space above and below it", but that thing is expansive as hell. It just... I mean, I look at maps from Star Charts and whatnot, and from one end to the other, it absolutely dwarfs the Federation, Klingon and Romulan Empires in size.

I understand this has certainly been discussed to death several times over, but I just felt a profound need to state the obvious, here. It kind of makes me laugh that Janeway's jaw didn't drop when Seven showed her that image.

Omega Particle, pfft.

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

At it's height in the center the galaxy is 500 light years up, and 500 light years down that winnows down to a conceptual wedge when you finally make it to the galactic barrier.

We live on a plane, not a sphere.

The galaxy is flat.

i think the more important question of note is why that snap shot you took has the closest antenna in the network perhaps some 25 thousand light years from the border tot he Alpha Quadrant.

If every one of those nodes in the network has a range of 25 thousand light years, then surely four of them could cover the entire galaxy, if one was placed at the centre of each quadrant?

So really.

That pattern is stupid.

Unless it's more a question of security and what we are seeing are more phone booths than transponder towers?

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Yeah, really makes me wonder. Even phone booths that wide! Just massive in scale, what the hell. What have we explored of the Alpha Quadrant, according to the sometimes-wrong, often-"right" Star Charts? Like... 15% of it or something?

And then take another look at that pic.

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

The brightly glowing parts of it, certainly. But Trek has shown that planets and civilizations exist around the unlikeliest of stars, so there could well be star systems of significance in the galactic halo as well. And that's roughly spherical, and thus tens of thousands of lightyears "high".

...If we assume that the four spokes there denote quadrant borders, that is.

Funnily enough, this appears not to be the case. The onscreen route map of the Voyager, as reproduced on pp. 76-77 of the Star Charts booklet, shows a galactic spiral that is shaped or at least oriented quite differently vs. the axes.

If we instead assume those spokes represent the centerlines of the galactic wedges, with the UFP in the middle of the wedge with the additional edge symbology, then the commnet layout makes perfect sense...

(No, that doesn't exactly match the canonical galactic spiral, either. But it's a somewhat closer match...)

"Where No One Has Gone Before" says 11% of the galaxy is explored (without specifying quadrants; these episodes preceded the invention of the four-quadrant system, after all); "The Dauphin" says 19%. Take your pick, invent your excuse, redefine your terms...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

A lot of the conceptual spirit of the Delta Quadrant is a giant, uncharted wilderness filled with small tribes, ancient civilizations that are basically gone, reclusive powers, wild spatial phenomena, and of course, the Borg, which is kind of like a giant zombie kingdom (think of all the dead worlds, all the civilizations in the Borg Collective where they harvested all life from, even animal life from the world, and destroyed the world's ecosystem to turn it into a resource-extraction mine, all the structures they destroyed. A whole swath of the Delta Quadrant is "dead"). The Hirogen are another fallen civilization. They had closer ties, but became ever more reclusive nomads. As the dude in the Nazi costume said, their core civilization was all but gone. They had pretty advanced tech, no doubt from when they were closer tied together. Sure, individual hunters might invent new hunting gear/weapons to adapt to resiliant prey, but odds are due to those ever thinning ties, the discoveries don't get shared. They seem to have built that network (unless it's from an even older civilization and they salvaged an abandoned network like the Stargate system or the Jumpgate system).

The Delta Quadrant had a few quadrant-spanning things: the Borg Collective, the Hirogen communications relay, and the Vaadwaur subspace corridors.

But they are spread out so thin, they've become a bunch of individuals or bands. They've lost their status as a civilization.

Yes, but it's what, 1000-2000 ly thick? It's flat, but not thin.

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Did the Hirogen say they built it or was it a relic of anothr civilisation that they laid claim to?

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

They call it "our property" once in "Hunters", and that's pretty much it. But they call a lot of things their property, or "relics of the hunt" or whatever.

It's probably just as likely that the Hirogen used it for hanging their trophies on, as our heroes had no real evidence of them using it for communications.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Not that there's any proof, but they could have forgotten that they made it, if we consider the splintering of their communities to be so extreme that they don't even have an oral history any more, that they could have made the network, lost track or it, and then a thousand years later they say hot shit, look what we found!

But it's Talos IV all over again.

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

They could equally well have forgotten that they did not make it. Happens all the time ITRW...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

The communications network seem to be the infrastructure of a civilization that was similar to but much older and larger than the present day UFP, and after this mysterious civilization fell into ruin that large part of the galaxy became the comparative wilderness largely occupied by the Borge Collective (for all we know the Borg could've been a side effect or partial cause for the collapse of the ancient hegemony that once held together the Delta Quadrant).

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

I was going to say... Then why didn't they assimilate it?

Well, it's obviously substantially inferior technology to transsubspaceradio.

So I was going to say then... Why didn't they assimilate the raw resources?

The mass of teran garbage can stuffed with metal and wires every hundred light years in every direction?

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

They'd bypass hundreds of planetary systems to fetch a tiny relay/booster identical to the hundreds if not thousands which they've already assimilated?

Oh...

And who's to say that the network wasn't 4 times the size, 10 times the size, it is in that episode 800 years earlier when the Borg first started making waves?

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Thousands of years old. Spans half the galaxy.

...Janeway trashes it in two days

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Kathryn's Motto has always been "If You're gonna do it, do it up big (or with Coffee)"

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

The network was 100 000 years old...
Janeway merely weakened the damping field around the station to force the Hunters into retreat and protect her ship.
If you were in a similar situation, wouldn't you use whatever means at your disposal to protect your ship?

If anything... the race that built the relay network could have been constructed by the same race that built the Ocean Planet in the episode '30 days'.
The technologies certainly exhibit some similarities - especially in their estimated age (they are from the same era).

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Well, that is the question, in quite a few scifi shows. If you could save your own sorry ass by making the great pyramids collapse, should you? (Or, considering how functional this network was... If you could save your own sorry ass by making the internet disappear forever, should you? )

It wouldn't be difficult to imagine Starfleet hearing about this and ruling that Janeway's decision to save her own life at such a high cost was so faulty that she would have to give it up in (lamentably insufficient) retribution. OTOH, it isn't difficult, either, to imagine a Starfleet that wantonly destroys cultural relics or alien lifeforms simply because they aren't human and aren't useful to humans. But at least Star Trek is among those rare shows where the human players could recognize their own relative insignificance, even if it often takes quite a bit of effort...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Janeway had no idea or reason to think that destruction of a single communications relay station would cause a chain reaction that could disable the ENTIRE network - she also didn't know the Hirogen weapons would have such an effect on the station.
I do think that she expected at least on some level the Hirogen to retreat so she could restore the containment field - it WAS the Hirogen weapons fire that destabilized the containment field around the station further, destroying the relay station and the entire network along with it.

Besides, what was she supposed to do exactly?
The Hirogen overpowered Voyager, held 2 of the crew hostage, and were immune to phasers at that time.
Janeway took temporary actions that helped her equalize the playing field somewhat and she didn't intend to go through with it completely (as the station was in no danger and the field was still at a level strong enough to contain the singularity) - it was the Hirogen that caused the destruction.

Also, its possible the Hirogen merely 'took claim' of the relay network without actually constructing it.
I find it a bit implausible that they were in space for over 100 000 years given their culture being based around hunting - albeit, we've seen the Voth for example being in space for millions of years while making relatively small technological breakthroughs (significant enough to put them ahead of most races in the galaxy, yes, but the Federation from what we've observed of its possible future timelines will be on par if not surpass them within mere 100 years as some of the technologies seen from the Voth are within the Federations capabilities already in some way - needs more work done of course).

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Ah, agreed on all those points. This was a bad example of what I was speaking about: the great and deliberate sacrifice of ancient achievements made in order to save the lives of the heroes.

Curiously, while VOY should have been rife with that (what with the supposed "standard plot" being the promise of cross-galaxy travel or communication that fails at the last moment), I don't think there were actually too many examples of it. Even blowing up the Caretaker array was a rather minor offense, not really involving "ancient" or otherwise truly priceless technology. Stargate was a worse offender - but then again, the heroes of that show had a mandate and even a duty to destroy any and all alien technology because it could only hurt Earth and was not vitally important for anybody else they cared about. Starfleet supposedly isn't threatened by advanced tech existing out there, and does care about a wide range of potential allies, not to mention its supposed altruist obligation to protect the weak and the technologically retarded.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

Blowing up certaers array was a massive violation.

The kazon were completely diddled over.

It was their imminent and immediate destiny to take control of the array, turn off the Ocampas shield think about taking all their water, when they suddenly discover the caretakers replicator technology, and then set themselves up as robber barons of the entire sector.

Janeway was fine with this.

She ws even fine if the Ocampa did die out while the Kazon were still figure out how powerful they actually were.

It wasn't till Janeway said that she wanted the array "first" and the kazon said "no" and then she called them "uncivilized" that every one tried to kill everyone else and Janeway shelfed the Prime Directive.

it wasn't a logical and pragmatic decision.

Janeway picked a fight with a space hillbilly who tasked her.

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

If I remember correctly, the Caretaker himself initiated the self-destruct sequence of the array.
It was because of the Kazon ship that collided with the station that damaged the self-destruct mechanism and as such disrupted his plans.
The Kazon were the ones who fired first after all.

The Caretaker wanted to keep the station out of the Kazon hands in order to preserve the Ocampa, but at the same time, he knew that if his station fell into the hands of Kazon Ogla, it would radically alter the balance of power in the quadrant.

So, one could say that Janeway was upholding the prime directive in preventing one Kazon faction from getting an upper hand via superior technology (the same reason why she never shared her technology like transporters or replicators with the Kazon in the first place - and incidentally fulfilling the Caretaker's wishes which would happen just as well if the self-destruct mechanism wasn't destroyed and the Caretaker himself died a minute later preventing Janeway from initiating the recall program that would return Voyager to the AQ) as much as she violated it (by protecting the Ocampa).
The analogy would be 2 standing waves cancelling each other out.

Another thing is that Janeway couldn't risk setting timed photonic charges all over the station in order to get it destroyed after they are gone.
The Kazon could have interfered and Janeway needed to make sure the thing was destroyed.
Granted, leaving one person behind was not an option either as this is something SF finds unacceptable (if it can be prevented).

 

Re: The "Hirogen" communications network... good lord, was that thing

The Caretakers only fear was that the Kazon would take the Ocampa's water.

Afterwhich the Ocampa would die of thirst.

The Kazon were only an indirect threat to the Ocampa.

And in 5 years, when their shield runs out, the Kazon are still going to taker the Ocampa's water.

Stopping something from happening, or initiating a series events on a closed system is what we call "interference".

The Kazon might have taken the array until Janeway got in the way, the kazon would have certainly taken the array after they had accidentally broken the arrays self destruct, until janeway got in the way again and blew it up.

the natural balance of power there was the fall ofthe caretaker, the extermination of the ocampa and the rise of the kazon as a truely galactic power.

Janeway stopped that.

She interferred.

Destiny interrupted.

And for that, they declared war on the federation and hunted her for two years.