I want to like 'Conundrum', but....

[at Quark's]

...Which is what it means that it's difficult to invent a photon torpedo. And it's "later" if they don't go exploring and bothering Sleeping Dogs. Which they apparently don't do as a rule.

Well, 'difficult' as in 'it's difficult to invent FTL travel' . You don't think it up on a rainy Sunday afternoon. It may take time, but most races will apparently do it, eventually. The photon torpedo seems to be a weapon that's not exactly rare among races.

What penchant? They had little in the way of weapons. They just fought a lot, which generally goes with not having weapons, or else the fighting would lead into a result.

I was talking about the human penchant for weapons. I'm convinced they would have developed their own version on their own, eventually.

What we might be seeing here is a general Satarran inability to invent and/or manufacture weapons, possibly a result of all the fighting.
That, too. Which in this case means they were below the Photon Torpedo Level by quite a bit and had no way of gathering XP fast.

On these points, we agree.

Which is probably what they were doing here. Except they'd skip the manufacturing part because they could win the war without it already, with much less effort.

Except that the plan was extremely risky and highly likely to fail -. as it in fact did - due to the strong inner moral convictions of the crew they could not overwrite or block.

Not only does it appear that it's difficult to invent a photon torpedo, it's also hellishly difficult to make one. The Maquis were credibly framed for the theft of empty photon warheads in "Tribunal", even though they had replicators and demonstrably could steal other things from Starfleet, things that might attract less attention. Presumably mere knowhow doesn't get you far in your quest for photon torpedoes, then.

I'm not sure it follows they are so hard to produce. It doesn't appear these warheads were extremely heavily protected, those security devices were easily disabled. (Then again, we know in Trek all security is so easily cracked ) And perhaps the Maquis were simply 'lazy', as in 'if we're going to steal stuff anyway, we might as well steal the finished product'. Also, Voyager fired more photon torpedoes than they had, which would either mean they traded for them (meaning that several Delta Quadrant races have photon torpedo technology too, making the technology more ubiquitous), or that they acquired the ability at some point to manufacture them themselves (despite their statement very early in S1 they couldn't replace them). If the latter is the case, it would mean you don't need top-notch large-scale industrial machinery to produce them.

We see some arms trading in DS9, but the deals go south more often than north, even with seemingly streetwise folks such as the Maquis at it. There doesn't seem to be anything simple about buying that sort of stuff, as opposed to buying, say, random infantry weapons or used spacecraft.

I'm not sure if that has to do with the degree of restriction of the items, or with the fact that the Federation very much wants the Maquis issue to be ended and is therefore hot on its tail. I still have the feeling that acquiring photon torpedoes may be closer to illegally obtaining high-yield explosives in considerable quantities in our world than to obtaining nuclear warheads. It's probably quite doable if you have connections and you aren't already on the international terrorist watchlist.

Do you happen to have a list of such arms deals on DS9?

Although we might also suspect they wanted the Federation to destroy the Lysians, for deniability. As in, merely destroying the Lysian command center would not win the war, even if it turned the fighting into a guerrilla action rather than a series of pitched battles between fleets - but making the Lysians hate the Feds would stop the fighting, when it was in connection with the Lysians being dealt a weakening blow.

There might be something to that theory, yes.

 

[USS Excelsior]

Or how did he make himself not look like himself.

 

[RAMA]

Agreed, you have to really hold your disbelief with this one, but dammit, I find it really enjoyable, so it gets a pass.

RAMA

'Conundrum' is a nice episode if you just watch it without thinking too much. But we as Trekkies analyze every episode, so....

This episode raises so many questions while watching it. Why didn't "Kieran" just make himself the captain? Why didn't he just replace the entire bridge crew with his own crew, he was on a one man mission? If Satarrans were able to just take control of the Enterprise with that mindwipe thing then program the ship to take care of the mission? Or were Starfleet officers absolutely necessary? "Kieran" was able to control the crew's memories, why not give them new instructions on some level how to attack the Lysians? And so on, the power one little ship had over the Enterprise was odd. I want to like this episode but.... hard to avoid asking these questions while watching it.

 

[Marc]

The photon torpedo seems to be a weapon that's not exactly rare among races.

yes races that have warp drive or equivalent technology not so much pre-warp civilizations.

If the satarans don't have warp drive then they probably don't have anti-matter or know how to handle it either.

 

[at Quark's]

yes races that have warp drive or equivalent technology not so much pre-warp civilizations.

If the satarans don't have warp drive then they probably don't have anti-matter or know how to handle it either.

The Chase mentions "the Satarrans of sothis 3". If those are the same Satarrans as in this episode, it seems they inhabit a different star system than the Lysians, making it likely they have FTL drive.

Those Satarrans are said by the way to 'disdain a good mystery' - and species that aren't curious probably don't advance that quickly.

If their weapons technology is an indication for their general technology level, they'd be "over a hundred years behind" the Federation, so assuming they're not 2 centuries or more behind (they'd probably have said that instead), that would put them at the level the Federation had around, say, 2220 ? Except for their computer hacking and memory suppression skills, those'd be considerably more sophisticated.

 

[Oddish]

Too bad MacDuff didn't just get Enterprise to report to his own people, then transmit technical readouts to them. Maybe do the same with Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian, and Ferengi ships. With their stolen tech base, they could dominate the quadrant.

 

[Herbert]

Not a fan of this episode. It's not bad but I almost always skip it when rewatching TNG.

It's a good example of how TNG would have been better overall (my opinion) in the later seasons had they tried to recapture more of the wonder of space exploration that was present in season one and two (not to mention TOS).

 

[gakelly]

The whole chess is about intuition blah blah by Troi is pretty bad...is pretty bad. If I am thinking about the right episode.

 

[Timo]

Well, yeah, Troi is bluffing herself out of a situation where Data plays against himself and both loses and wins. For all we know, the game was a joke from start to finish, and Troi's comments were the punchline of that joke.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[NigellaDeanna20]

'Conundrum' is a nice episode if you just watch it without thinking too much. But we as Trekkies analyze every episode, so....

This episode raises so many questions while watching it. Why didn't "Kieran" just make himself the captain? Why didn't he just replace the entire bridge crew with his own crew, he was on a one man mission? If Satarrans were able to just take control of the Enterprise with that mindwipe thing then program the ship to take care of the mission? Or were Starfleet officers absolutely necessary? "Kieran" was able to control the crew's memories, why not give them new instructions on some level how to attack the Lysians? And so on, the power one little ship had over the Enterprise was odd. I want to like this episode but.... hard to avoid asking these questions while watching it.

have to agree. This isn't one of my personal faves. Good story idea though.

 

[Oddish]

That episode became far less interesting when they found out that Picard was in charge.