Endless ammo and other inconsistencies

[TheSeeker]

I just watched this video and while it's funny, it also shines a light on one of the weaker aspects of Voyager, namely, continuity.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIGxMENwq1k[/yt]

Just like the ship never showed any wear despite all it went through.

Now don't get me wrong, this is not meant to bash Voyager, it's just an observation.

What other examples of poor continuity did we see?

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I saw a website at one point which followed the count of living crew members and found that at some time a lot more crew members had been killed than the count had been decremented by.

And that's something where continuity would have been pretty easy, just have somebody write down the number somewhere and reduce it whenever a crewmember dies.

Attribute most of the continuity problems to poor writing and general production laziness, and some to network interference.

 

[Isolinear]

How many shuttlecraft were lost? More than one could fit in the shuttlebay I think.

But if Tom Paris can build the Delta Flyer all by himself, who's going to complain about a couple of Photon Torpedoes or Shuttlecraft?

 

[MacLeod]

^That's another problem the seemingly endless supply of shuttlecraft. TNG/DSN could get away with it, they just got a new one from one of the shipyards. But begins to stretch the suspension of disbelief to breaking point.

We are told point blank how many they have and that they can't replace them. It's not my fault as a viewer if I call them on it. All it would have taken is a line drop in an episode saying that they were able to procure some alien torpedeos and retrofitted them.

To create hull plates, one would suspect you would need an Industrial replicator of some type, DSN sort of gives the impression that these weren't as widespread as your ordinary food type replicators. It would make sense that an instalation as important as DSN which served as a repair station would have one. What amounts to light cruiser (Voyager) would seem likely not to have one. But once again they could have addresed that with a line, i.e. "Fortunantly we were transporting an industrial replicator.

I'm sure another inconsistancy is the holodeck power being incompatable with the rest of the ship (from a design view) that makes no sense. I supsect the real reason was related to the TNG ep "Booby Trap" they knew fans would no doubt call them an the holodeck 'wasting' power so they hoped to get around it by making it incompatable. Have they not heard of power converators in the 24th century. I after all charge my DC powered phone from my AC mains socket.

 

[Christopher]

Why shouldn't a starship have an industrial replicator aboard? How else are they going to do repairs if they're light-years away from a starbase? It makes perfect sense that they're able to build new shuttles and torpedoes. With replicators, you can build anything as long as you have raw materials and energy. The only reason Voyager had shortages early on was because their power was limited. There are plenty of legitimate inconsistencies in Voyager, but this is not one of them.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Why shouldn't a starship have an industrial replicator aboard? How else are they going to do repairs if they're light-years away from a starbase? It makes perfect sense that they're able to build new shuttles and torpedoes. With replicators, you can build anything as long as you have raw materials and energy. The only reason Voyager had shortages early on was because their power was limited. There are plenty of legitimate inconsistencies in Voyager, but this is not one of them.

Well, it would make perfect sense, if they hadn't said this [from "The Cloud", as in the first seconds of the OP video]:

CHAKOTAY: We have a complement of thirty eight photon torpedoes at our disposal, Captain.
JANEWAY: And no way to replace them after they're gone.

If the argument is that they built their own replication system, given how urgent it was and given that they'd have plenty of time to accomplish that, fine. But that they shipped out with the ability to make their own torpedoes at the push of a button? No way.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Yeah, that sort of explanation would have been fine if they said it in the show. "We've developed a way to build new photon torpedoes!" Great, now you don't have to count anymore and nobody can say anything. But they didn't say it in the show, they just kind of ignored the shortage.

 

[Christopher]

The point is that with replicator technology, the whole concept of material scarcity goes out the window. The assumption that it's possible to run out of stuff without some separate factory to replenish it is 20th-century thinking. They should be able to replace torpedoes -- it's a logical consequence of the existence of replicators. All you have to do is use your imagination to consider the ramifications of the technology and the conclusion is self-evident. They shouldn't have to spell it out.

The only thing in torpedoes that couldn't be replicated is the antimatter. Maybe that's what Janeway was talking about in "The Cloud." Now, according to the tech manuals, Starfleet vessels are equipped with "spin reversal systems" that can, with very low efficiency, convert matter to antimatter, allowing partial replenishment of the ship's supply. Maybe this component had been damaged, leaving them no way to replenish the antimatter payload of the torpedoes. But replicating the rest should be simply a matter of having enough energy.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I think that the idea of there being difficult-to-impossible elements to replicate is consistent with canon at various points. Even so, unreplicable elements, if there are any, wherever they are on Star Trek's periodic table, might still be mined, traded for, etc.

So, I agree that it's perfectly reasonable that torpedoes can be replaced eventually. Same goes for shuttles, too.

But, what's weird is that the show-runners thought it was a good idea to say what they said in "The Cloud" in the first place, especially the way they said it. It seems like just a cheap way to underscore how bad it was to be stranded in the Delta Quadrant, as if it wasn't clear already.

 

[MacLeod]

Not disagreeing with what you are saying Christopher, but shouldn't they have addressed it either verbally or visually within the show. It's like writing something in chapter 3 of a book and ingoring it in chapter 33. Isn't it a bit of disservice to your viewer/reader to contradict something you said earlier without at least addressing why it's no longer an issue? All it would have taken is a few seconds of dialouge i.e

Cpatain's Log Supplemental, My Chief Engineer informs me that she will be able construct an industrial replicator which will allow us to replace our Photon torpedeo amongest other things.

 

[Lance]

One of my (very few) nitpicks about Voyager continuity is the way things like hand props got updated to the TNG movie designs, rather than staying with the TNG season 7 era designs that they started out with. Of course, this was down to them saving a few pennies by recycling props from the movies, but it does create a continuity clash if one is looking out for the subtle changes in detail.

Why would the Voyager crew, distanced entirely from the Federation, nevertheless coincidentally start using the same updated Phaser, PADD and Tricorder designs at the same time their counterparts back in the Alpha Quadrant started using updated Phasers, PADDs and Tricorders? Shouldn't Voyager have been stuck with retroactive technology? Wouldn't that have created a much better visual contrast to the other shows, similar to their decision to continue to use the old DS9 jumpsuits all the way through?

Of course, maintaining the 'TNG look' all the way along would have required creating whole new props out of the old TNG molds whenever a prop wore down too much to be usable anymore, which might have been a more costly process than just having a pool of identical props for use in all versions of the franchise. So, they just hoped that the audience wouldn't notice... and I'm sure that *most* of the audience probably didn't.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I always assumed that Voyager could replace torpedoes simply by trading with friendly alien races they happened to meet.

As for shuttles? Given how quickly they managed to design and build both Delta Flyers - a brand new design - it'd be a trivial task to repeatedly build new versions of existing shuttlecraft models.

 

[Christopher]

Not disagreeing with what you are saying Christopher, but shouldn't they have addressed it either verbally or visually within the show. It's like writing something in chapter 3 of a book and ingoring it in chapter 33. Isn't it a bit of disservice to your viewer/reader to contradict something you said earlier without at least addressing why it's no longer an issue?

Oh, I'm not denying there were continuity problems, mainly due to UPN pressuring the producers to minimize continuity. I'm just saying that the ability to manufacture new shuttles or torpedoes should not be hard to rationalize given the existence of replicators. Particularly since "Extreme Risk" actually showed us how they build new shuttles, with the construction of the Delta Flyer.

 

[Anwar]

The problem was that they never bothered explaining just WHY they couldn't make more torpedoes in the first place. It was bad enough they needlessly limited themselves, but they never even bothered giving us a reason why they'd be limited in the first place when the other series implied just the opposite.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

It should've been in the series bible the number of shuttlecraft, crew, torpedoes, etc they had, all of which couldn't be replaced without placing severe restrictions on rations and supplies.

VOY is very much a "bottle show", far more self-contained than any other Trek so errors like these are just all the more obvious.

 

[Stoo]

Limited ammo is a simple way of giving the ship a tougher time surviving, outside the reach and resources of the federation. Which is kind of the point of the show. That does however go against the way replication is depicted as straightforward and easy.

Perhaps a compromise would have been to make up some new kind of improvised torpedo\missile that's less powerful but easier to manufacture. Then save the photons for really critical situations.

 

[Michael]

I saw a website at one point which followed the count of living crew members and found that at some time a lot more crew members had been killed than the count had been decremented by.

Now wait a minute, this can't be right. Are you sure they were counting dead crewmembers? Or were they – which I assume – merely counting all crewmembers shown onscreen? The latter would make a little more sense, wouldn't it?

 

[Christopher]

It should've been in the series bible the number of shuttlecraft, crew, torpedoes, etc they had, all of which couldn't be replaced without placing severe restrictions on rations and supplies.

It's clear that they originally wanted to do it that way, given the numerous references to shortages and rationing in early episodes; but as I said, the network put a lot of restrictions on them and forced them to do something that was more of a low-continuity TNG clone than they had hoped.

 

[MacLeod]

Not disagreeing with what you are saying Christopher, but shouldn't they have addressed it either verbally or visually within the show. It's like writing something in chapter 3 of a book and ingoring it in chapter 33. Isn't it a bit of disservice to your viewer/reader to contradict something you said earlier without at least addressing why it's no longer an issue?

Oh, I'm not denying there were continuity problems, mainly due to UPN pressuring the producers to minimize continuity. I'm just saying that the ability to manufacture new shuttles or torpedoes should not be hard to rationalize given the existence of replicators. Particularly since "Extreme Risk" actually showed us how they build new shuttles, with the construction of the Delta Flyer.

That's the problem early on they told us time and time again that resources would be an issue. If they couldn't replace torpdeos then surely a much more complex peiece of machinary such as a shuttlecraft couldn't be replaced as well.

If they want to get rid of the resource limit they themselves put in, it's not really asking much for a few lines dropped into an episode to explain why is it?

Otherwise it basically amounts to a wizard did it.

 

[Anwar]

It should've been in the series bible the number of shuttlecraft, crew, torpedoes, etc they had, all of which couldn't be replaced without placing severe restrictions on rations and supplies.

It's clear that they originally wanted to do it that way, given the numerous references to shortages and rationing in early episodes; but as I said, the network put a lot of restrictions on them and forced them to do something that was more of a low-continuity TNG clone than they had hoped.

The problem was that Michael Piller wanted it this way, a survival based show with arc-storytelling.

Problem was that Jeri Taylor didn't want that at all, she just wanted to do more TNG, and the network backed her over Piller.