Come to think of it, why would Janeway and Co. be okay with basically stealing technology from the future? In other stories, there's always a hue and cry about not contaminating the past, but I guess if they're the ones in the past, it's all right. Bringing the emitter back is like putting a phaser in Captain Christopher' flight suit pocket, before he leaves in Tomorrow is Yesterday, isn't it? I don't see a difference...
Braxton is restored at the end of their time travel adventure and doesn't do anything to take the emitter back - the chances he didn't know full well they had it are slim, with the sensors on the Aeon... The implicit suggestion is he let it slide for the same reason Scotty got away with giving the formula for transparent aluminium away in TVH - it always happened that way. Without the emitter, Voyager would have been toast on several subsequent occasions. His history may depend on Voyager having that emitter.
Or then the temporal police simply isn't very effective or powerful. They probably have their hands full hunting down major manipulations of the timeline already, and a few planets lost or gained is peanuts compared with the magnitude of "crimes" they typically deal with. OTOH, they may be impotent to act on major "crime", too, having to settle on a niche that best matches the powers of the organization with the needs of the society they attempt to protect. That's how it works with normal police, too: there's very little in the way of resources to deal with domestic quarrels, and little incentive to do so, but there's also nothing the police can do about invasions or uprisings or upper league economic crime, so the emphasis is solidly on protecting middle class property and sleep. And I could see the middle class sleeping soundly even with the EMH in possession of a portable holoemitter. Timo Saloniemi
Btw...do you think there is any fundemental advantage a holodeck has over a holosuite? We know that holosuites are much smaller..otoh there is the treadmill effect. But even with the treadmill effect, shouldn´t the number of possible real persons in a holosuite at a given time be smaller then in a holodeck?
In my mind, at some point you're just hitting the physical limitations of the room, much like in an elevator. No matter how elaborate the optical and tactile illusions are, at some point people are going to physically run into each other or into the walls. So yeah, I think a larger holodeck like we saw on the Galaxy class should have a higher capacity than the holosuites on DS9.
On the other hand, even the small holosuites of DS9 can successfully simulate a baseball court, with at least two teamfuls of live users rather than mere holographic NPCs. Whether this is the result of packing 'em in real tight, or virtually linking together all of Quark's holosuites, we don't know. But the holosuites are rather tall rooms, so the computer could plausibly stack users in several layers if need be. And since it seems that holotech frequently involves the use of transporters or replicators or related technologies, it might also be that once a specific suite becomes too crowded, a user is discreetly beamed over to another, linked suite, or even to some sort of a "storage facility" that provides low-level simulations of fairly static situations for passive users at low cost. I guess much depends on whether a user running a "kinetic" holoprogram, one that requires lots of movement from the user such as running and swinging a bat, is really doing those moves - or is merely standing or lying down in a state of semi-sedation and is being fed false sensory information that makes him think he is doing the moves. I don't think there's much evidence for the latter in Trek, even though it might be how most VR in the real world will eventually be done. Timo Saloniemi
Actually the only difference between the two is that a holodeck is on a ship and a holosuite is on a stationary facility. After all, "deck" is a term used only on ships, so when DS9's creators decided that Quark's establishment would have holographic environment simulators, they needed to coin a different name for them. Quark's holosuites are no smaller than the smallest of the several holodeck sizes in use on the Enterprise-D. (The TNG Tech Manual and blueprints establish there are smaller "personal" holodecks on the ship in addition to the larger ones.)
The meaning of terminology changes over time, but "suite" in today's terms might be taken to mean a collection of multiple, joined rooms. Back in TAS, the holographic recreation facility was known as a "room", and indeed appeared to be a single room (but so vast that its appearance probably was another simulation!). The baseball example suggests Quark's facilities do interconnect (even if only virtually) and therefore meet the definition of "suite". So we might just as well declare the holodeck an entire "deck" of holographic rooms in keeping with the actual meaning of the terminology today... Timo Saloniemi
One should never underestimate the level of Tech that goes into a holo-deck. How big or complicated the environment is depends on where the computer distributes the power required. A logic based charisma of throwing around 3 dimensional stuff derived from stories or parameter lists. Really, how big an activated holo deck is how much power you'd throw into it.
Initial limitations of the holodeck, like Data throwing a stone against the wall, we're patched out by the Bynars a few episodes later. To them it was an end to a means to give the Enterprise a much more advanced holo system, but Starfleet kept using the new standard of course.
A limitation? More like the holodeck bending over backward to satisfy Data's need to demonstrate that the holodeck has a wall there. As far as the reactions of our heroes go, the only advancement seemed to be that one of the characters had spark. Realism of the milieu was already there in "The Big Goodbye" or, for all we know, in "Encounter at Farpoint" or back in Janeway's childhood when nothing was hotter than Flotter. One wonders whether "Elementary, Dear Data" could have taken place without the Bynar upgrade. But it obviously was already built in to the original machinery and programming that characters like Cyrus Redblock could emerge now and then, given a suitable breakdown of safeties and censors. Timo Saloniemi
How did Data know that there was a wall there? Can his senses perceive through the fantasy? Or did the holodeck computer manifest a wall where none actually existed to satify Data's needs?
If there's anybody on the ship that would be able to track through the holography and see the actual room dimensions, it's Data! MAYBE Geordi but he seemed quite ready to, shall we say, embrace the holodeck...
I think the holodeck would be designed to throw off the user's "inertial compass", that is, defeat any attempts at counting steps or counting turns. That's more or less the point of the entire exercise. But Data might have a means of tapping into an outside reference even when his dead-reckoning senses are being deceived. Say, Data claims his batteries constantly recharge themselves. Does he mean he is hooked up to wireless power transmitters aboard the ship, perhaps? He would then be aware of the locations of those transmitters, and could triangulate his position aboard the ship at any time no matter what the holodeck did to his gyroscopes. Timo Saloniemi
The problem with that explination IMO is when you watch DS9 episodes where 1/2 dozen crew members are all in Quark's holodecks which appear visually no larger than a 12' x 12' room. The simple volume of 12 people in such a confined space wouldn't make the treadmill explanation make sense logically. People would still bump into each other.
Plus, i always just assumed that holodecks can be networked like modern MMOs producing avatars of users in other holodecks running the shared simulations. No bumping into each other that way. I think that's pretty much a requirement for the baseball game episode.
Well Quark did house a full on baseball game between Deep Space Nine and a Vulcan crew. With some people rooting from the crowd. Thus you have a few dozen people spread out across a stadium. The stadium is probably larger than the Promenade.
Whatever techniques the holodeck uses, it appears to be very good at anticipating. That's a general requirement for producing enjoyable entertainment, and no doubt Federation science (especially any putative commercial sector thereof) would dedicate a lot of resources to making its AI systems meet the requirement; an AI that anticipates human needs has uses beyond entertainment, after all. With good anticipating skills, the holodeck could probably steer people around each other in confined spaces without embarrassing bumps. Say, Kira can be anticipated to start running from one base to another as the game proceeds; the computer will then put her on a treadmill. If Kira appears to risk hitting a Vulcan's legs while sliding to the next base, the computer can suddenly yank her up two meters so her hands don't reach the Vulcan and her legs don't kick Sisko who is standing two feet away (while thinking he is standing fifty yards away). Or the computer can tilt Kira 90 degrees so that she slides vertically, again avoiding collisions. Any bat that Nog swings can be cut in the middle, the tip replaced by a holoprojection, so that the swing doesn't decapitate Quark and Odo. Etc. All it involves is quick reflexes, inertialess ways of manipulating the users' bodies and gear, and visual illusions to hide the fact that this is happening, and Star Trek technology should cater for all of the above. Timo Saloniemi