So I'm watching Alliances today and at the end after the Trabe Slaughter fails, just calls a staff meeting to prepare the ship to make a run for it and she makes a damned un Star Trek speech. She says in the delta quadrant there are no rules, and it's a wild frontier and before trying forge any more alliances they'd better hold fast to the principles and ideals of the Federation. Wasn't the Federation formed on mutual friendship, cooperation and the pursuit of knowledge? The Vulcans and Andorians had been at war a long time, the Romulans War devastated the Earth Forces and it was out of that horror of war that the Federation formed in the first place. The Trabe\Kazon conflict could have been used as a catalyst to reshape the quadrant from the lawless frontier into a place more peaceful, which ARE the principles the Federation was founded on
The federation forms alliances with the power of the federation behind it. When Janeway tries to form alliances, make peace etc.. she is often used (Dragon's Teeth for instance) because they are just one little ship with zero understanding of the history of the worlds of the DQ. They have nothing to offer anyone since what they DO have half the time Starfleet forbids them to share. I think she was bunkering down after seeing that sticking her nose into DQ politics was not doing anyone any good.
The previous thread 'Was Alliances the turning point for Voyager?' targets the ep. and targets Janeway and what possibly could have happened. It also targets Star Trek's end in shambles and the failures of the writers to provide a good story for all the audience. Personally I think Star Trek, and above all Voyager, is excellent in all venues that this area of fiction and screening suppose to provide. Soon these stories are to be scientific fact and to make the difficulties even more unsurmountable is the money to make it all happen-which isn't enough.
(There's always a previous thread M'Lord. It's just a chance to be more prefect through practice. Y'know like in Groundhog day... ) The command staff had a conversation in Flesh and Blood. Janeway thinks that the prime directive and the Non interference Directive, if they're not actually th same document, is toilet paper.
Considering that the Enterprise series came after Voyager (in terms of series production), did Janeway actually know about the Vulcans and Andorians? Or are you assuming a retcon? And how could ONE starship have ever been enough to get these aliens to cooperate with each other, assuming they even wanted to? Not every species' end goal is to live in peace.
They say that a Federation Torpedo has a yield of 25 isotons which can blow up a city. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Isoton but twice that, 50 isotons will just crak a damn planet in half rather than blow up a slightly bigger city. So. Two of Voyagers Torpedoes can frakk a(n unshielded) planet to death. That's plenty of damn diplomacy. Isotons and isograms are made up. They bare no realistic relationship to kilotons and megatons, but 20th and 21st century atomic weapons must be fire crackers compared to what even kirk was flinging at his enemies.
Watching Scorpion after you watch Alliances is really funny. Janeway in Alliances, "We must never dirty our Federation ideals by allying with intergalactic thugs and stay true to our values no matter the cost!" Janeway in Scorpion, "We must ally with the Borg and help them kill their enemies in order to get what we want!" Just have to love all the contradictions around her in the series.
If by flexible you mean selective in when she followed the rules and did whatever the heck she wanted, I would agree.
Spent most of yesterday on an airplane so just getting this now. Interesting discussion. Agree with Teacake that Janeway's lonely ship sure can't go and implement all the ideas of the Federation, but as Equinox indicates, she's sure keen on upholding its values in principle. One at a time. What was it Groucho Marx said -- "If you don't like my principles, I have others?" Or something like that. In RL diplomatic or military alliances are forged not for their inherent value, but out of necessity and with a strategic objective in mind. And, as one of my own personal Rules of Diplomacy (see chapter headings in my fic "The Andorian Incident") states, "alliances are fragile things." As for the Prime Directive, well, the idea of non-interference was one of Roddenberry's suckier ideas, which came out of the 1960s and the disasters in Latin and Central America. (Neville Chamberlain had a spectacular meltdown with it in the 1930s.) Things have moved on when the unworkability of non-interference as a political and strategic concept became obvious, and they have in Star Trek as well. So, yeah, I'm all about flexibility. Call it inconsistency if you wish. I call it Realpolitik, and love ST and Janeway all the more when they come to the same conclusion.
I'll agree that there are inconsisticies where Janeway's allegiance to protocol are concerned, but I look at much like teacake does. Janeway was in a completely unknown environment with species and challenges that she had no knowledge of, much of what she did she had to do in that moment. There were debates, granted (look at Equinox and Scorpion), but in the end the choices that Janeway made came from her knowledge and judgement of that particular situation. If she went by a single directive and tried to apply to these vastly different scenarios it is far less likely that she would have gotten her crew home. HOWEVER, and I want to make this clear, this does not mean that she can just abandon the principles that she abides by and do whatever the hell she wants. Clearly, from what we saw on the series, she did her best to uphold those principles, with some situations being more trying than others. The universe can be a very dangerous place for protocols.
Which is only relevant if the replicator can make a weapon that can't be made without it. Seriously Janeway, put a stinking parental lock on it first, you think the Kazon are smart enough actually program around one?
Mass production and raw resources. There's plenty of dangerous chemicals, poisons and explosives that can be replicated instead of fabricated, mined or cooked in a tiny fraction of the time it would take an industrialized society to industrialize the same resources with zero manpower used... And that's if they don't outright reverse engineer industrial replicators. So you've got one guy that's more productive than a city, or one city that's more productive than a planet or one planet that's more productive than an empire. It's about the balance of power. Those two ferengi set themselves up as gods, and all they had was a replicator.
Well, you could certainly replicate enough gold and diamonds to buy any of the smaller religions and 'suggest" that they worship you. Any attempt to outbuy the the Vatican, would just put the gold standard into an international bellyflop.
It's not about the gold.. it's about the magic. People will bring the goddess teacake dirt, rocks, shit.. whatever worthless substances they choose to represent their failings that they wish to repent of. Their character flaws and weaknesses. Their lusts and addictions. Their hatreds and their bitterness. The bile that corrodes their souls. The goddess teacake will take their offerings and after they have fasted and done other head trip inducing stuff she will give them in exchange something precious. A huge diamond, a rare orchid, a kilo of platinum. In the beginning she will make it more personal and people will be getting first edition books and whatnot but after the religion really takes off it will be mostly gems and ores. The goddess teacake will have seen their blackness and she will have made it precious in her sight. THEY WILL LOVE HER.
If you can replicate hypospray to keep radiation from burning you(how the hell does that even work? Does it keep fire and heat from burning you too?) I think you can replicate a pill you take to prevent that.