I think finding volunteer StarFleet Personnel would be the lesser of evils then enslaving sentient tardigrades
Spore Drive, a few questions.
- Thread starter Elephant999
- Start date
Agree, but we probably are going to see some plausible reason why the network can't be used anymore, or at least some reasoning on how other civilizations are unlikely to come across and be able to use the network. If neither these (or some similar reasoning) does not come about, then it would make no sense why the Federation wouldn't continue (probably still secretly, since it would go against their ethics) using the technology.
Maybe they'll spray Khan's Blood™ all over the spores and they are fixed from now on, safe and unusable, except for the Mai Spore that lands on Dr Carol Marcus while she's sitting around bored in "Change Your Accent" class and encourages her to consider building terraforming world buster bombs as a new endeavour.
The only people who are told about this are the crew of the Defiant. Admiralty knows what's going to happen to Defiant and they've been carefully crewing it with all the fuckups and repeated review failures for the last few months. so why not tell them.
The only people who are told about this are the crew of the Defiant. Admiralty knows what's going to happen to Defiant and they've been carefully crewing it with all the fuckups and repeated review failures for the last few months. so why not tell them.
While they may forbid the use of the Mycelial Network for instantaneous intergalactic jumps, since that can damage the "fabric" of the network and have adverse effects on the galaxy/universe as a whole, I could see the data collected from the spore network maps being used as a basis for the frequently speculated fanon idea of "warp highways"; ie. areas of faster (conventional) warp travel between planets.
Perhaps the spores align themselves along well-traveled trade, refugee, travel, or patrol routes, explaining why travel between Earth and Vulcan or the Neutral Zone and Earth can be so fast while travel back to Earth from the Delta Quadrant, which hasn't been mapped as closely, moves at a slower rate. It's not just the distance that's the issue, it's knowing the "road" conditions and which path will get you to your destination faster.
Perhaps it can even tie back into the TNG episode where warp travel was damaging the fabric of subspace so they had to put a more restrictive speed limit on things, which lasted all of a few episodes and maybe was the reason for Voyager having variable geometry nacelles. Maybe what was being damaged about subspace was the spore network living within it, so they had to modify how they did things in order to protect the network.
I thought it was Mirror Universe Stamets & the soul/spirit of Doctor Culber that was hurting the Mycelial network?
Traveling through it by itself isn't harmful, but leaving incompatible organisms or mis-using it causes harm to the Mycelial Network.
Traveling through it by itself isn't harmful, but leaving incompatible organisms or mis-using it causes harm to the Mycelial Network.
I think Stamets mutated his DNA, by adding....The Roddenberry Gene. 
At least he wasn't a young teen and a full grown adult who's a Lt. Cmdr.I think Stamets mutated his DNA, by adding....The Roddenberry Gene.
I bet you a case of 'shrooms that the damage to the network (even through regular spore drive travel), and by extension the universe, will eventually come back into play and be used as a rationale for why the spore drive is never used again.
Shiitake or Portobello?
Meanwhile there’s a cargo hold full of mushrooms. Suppose they could sell them to the various worlds!
Sure, whatever!
But my reason for why they limit Spore Drive use in the future will be with a supposed catastrophe where They get sent far into the future and Federation (Departmant of Temporal Investigations) will prevent them from going back due to important changes in the current time line and they are all stuck in the future. Everybody in the old time will see wreckage / other stuff to indicate the dangers of using the Spore Drive and it'll get shunted into a classified project.
