I don't think anybody was saying that there should be constant conflict, just a bit more than there was. You can show discontent in subtle ways. Have the Maquis and starfleet crew avodiing each other when off-duty and show a better progression of coming together. In the early days Torres called Kim "Starfleet" and Kim called Torres "Maquis", that could have evovled from what it was to a term of endearment
Any real tensions between the two crews wouldn't have lasted more than a season and a half at the very most. The Fleeters and Maquis weren't diehard enemies, and they both realized that they were the only familiar faces in the entire Quadrant. They'd realize they more or less had to work together or they'd all just die in a short while. This is part of the series' unsustainable stuff. They tensions wouldn't last that long even if they chose to be blatant with them, and the whole "Lost Ship" thing limited the show too much. Having no idea of how the flesh out their new surroundings into something interesting or give them long-lasting external plots wasn't a good idea.
For better or for worse, I can concede that DS9 and Voyager had two different reasons for existence and thus two different funding streams. Though I agree, I think the idea of having more and more reoccurring characters on Voyager would have given us more of a feel of a ship that's stranded with no rotating crew, it would have certainly helped us get more attached to their blight. We only ever kind of got that with the main cast and in truth, the only person in the main cast that ever gave us the sense of "I REALLY WANT TO GET HOME" was Harry. Everyone else was just very nonchalant about the whole ordeal. It would have been nice digging deeper and getting a stronger sense of "We're stranded". The thing is, when saying "They could have fixed this with a bigger Star Ship", well, that harmed the premise of the show, but it also was a premise of the show they didn't often use either. A Heavy Cruiser like an Excelsior or an Ambassador class would have had the resources to more easily manage itself if it gotten thrown far away from home like Voyager did. Being a Light Cruiser, Voygaer didn't and there just weren't a lot of episodes they actually touched on that, especially post first season. Not to mention the other premise of being a smaller ship was supposed to be so we could get a better feel for how being stranded 70,000 light years away from the federation would impact a small crew. We just didn't get that feeling either, at least not often. The sad part of this is there were very logical, great reasons for picking a newer, smaller ship as the premise for the series and they just didn't use most of them anywhere close to potential.
Making subspace contact with Starfleet while still in the Delta Quadrant was something I would have preferred not to see. Suddenly Voyager wasn't isolated anymore.
I think they were still plenty isolated. They only got letters once a month, and then they only had like three minutes to talk once a month.
What happened to them wasn't something new, it happened to Kirk and Picard. They just got home sooner. They knew all along it wasn't some hopeless thing. The premise wasn't all that sustainable in the first place. The show had some conceptual problems. It would mean they'd have to have an actual plot to the series beyond "Lost Ship going home." Every single show in the last 40 years that had a "Lost Ship" plot always had a bigger more self-sufficient vessel: Blakes Seven, LEXX, Farscape, NuBSG.
In the movie Eurotrip, the gang was trapped behind enemy lines in a backwards Russian Ghetto with nothing to their names but the coins in their pockets... But it just so turned out that a dollar 68 cents American was enough cold hard cash to buy them a night in the Ritz Carlton, a new Wardrobe, several three course meals, and transportation to a more civilized part of the country where their parents could wire them actual money to get back to the real world. Do I have to explain the metaphor?
Then there's series like Sliders where the odds are, each universe they slide into has a low probably of having the same currency but yet manage to do about the same :-| I would normally say this only has passing relevance except for the fact Sliders played, after a fashion, as a competing series to Voyager. You would have thought the producers of one of the series would have gotten the idea "Hey, resources are a LITTLE HARDER to manage then we're making them out to seem".
In an early episode where the Russians won the Cuban Missile Crisis (Or something?) the US Currency was practically the same but with red ink. Further more the old green currency was a callsign used by the "resistance" to proove that they weren't commies, and how the Sliders outted themselves as unusual and most likely according the secret police in the Resistance.
Yea, I won't deny there were some episodes that touched on it, but far too few. It's like Voyager had episodes where they were tapped for resources --- but far too few.
True but in the case of "Sliders" if there have duplicates in that universe it is possible that they will have similar signatures, use the same PIN number so they could goto a bank and get money out.
Still defending Sliders, and only the first two seasons earned any defence, but considering when the noticeable point of divergence in all those different universes, most of the Americas were all exactly the same if you got back 20 to 200 years, depending on the particular story. Early on they kept landing in different versions of Franco-America... Which again would suffice completely different currency... I might be thinking of Hienlein's novel Job, but I remember some one sticking up on gold and jewels on dead Earths.
If you look at some of the crew members, like for example Tom and B'Elanna, they don't have strong motivation to get back to the AQ. In the AQ Tom is a criminal serving a jail sentence, and B'Elanna is a maquis with a father who she hasn't seen since she was 5 or 6 and a mother who hasn't talked to her in 10 years. For both of them their lives ar much better on Voyager. B'Elanna is the chief engineer and Tom is a respected officer. If they made it back to the AQ quickly Tom would likely go back to jail and probably so would B'Elanna, chakotay and the rest of the Maquis on the ship
Tom got the remainder of his sentence cleared for leading Janeway to Chakotay's cell. He was free and clear. Even when he frakked that up in Non Sequitor by picking a fight with the Ferengi, he was still out in less than a year. The Maquis deserved a cell. The Equinox 5 doubly so. And both groups were idiots for not having their day in court on Voyager when they still had leverage.
There's nothing canon to say that he was cleared for helping Janeway. In Caretaker Janeway told him they would just give him some good words at his next review. That's it. And yea the Equinox people, another example of peolple who are better off on Voyager than going back to the AQ
I always thought that the few references to lack of resources on VOY felt out of place in the Star Trek universe. TNG showed 24th century tech to be essentially magic so VOY should have had no trouble sustaining itself for years IMO.
^Then they shouldn't have called attention to it ever. If a writers brings the audiances attention to something/point/event etc.. be it a novel/film or TV episode. The audinace is not at fault for holding them to what they have written. If the writter wants to get out of what they have written before then they should address it. i.e. the 38 torpedeos they can't replace. All you need do is have a throwaway line in one episode saying they have managed to find a way to manufacture more. Sci-Fi fans esp ST fans are well known for fnit-picking for a lack of a better term.