Voyager fleet...?

[AlboOfBorg]

Question... why didn't Voyager pick up a few extra ships along its journey...? You know, captured in battle, bartered for, etc? It would seem to me that it would be an excellent way to ensure the survival of the crew, such as if Voyager were attacked they'd have more than one ship to fight with, or in case one ship is heavily damaged they could always abandon that ship and move to another ship, or for spare parts. I know that Voyager was the sole ship of the TV show and the writers probably wouldn't want to focus on other ships, but it seems like Janeway and Co. missed an excellent opportunity to ensure their survival and ease their journey home. It would've made for an excellent story arc, but with the stipulation that in the end a large battle destroys most or all of the other ships so the main focus would go back to Voyager.

 

[Kadratis]

More ships = the larger need for more supplies = more time spent searching for supplies = long it takes to get home. LOL

 

[MiralParis]

Question... why didn't Voyager pick up a few extra ships along its journey...? You know, captured in battle, bartered for, etc? It would seem to me that it would be an excellent way to ensure the survival of the crew, such as if Voyager were attacked they'd have more than one ship to fight with, or in case one ship is heavily damaged they could always abandon that ship and move to another ship, or for spare parts. I know that Voyager was the sole ship of the TV show and the writers probably wouldn't want to focus on other ships, but it seems like Janeway and Co. missed an excellent opportunity to ensure their survival and ease their journey home. It would've made for an excellent story arc, but with the stipulation that in the end a large battle destroys most or all of the other ships so the main focus would go back to Voyager.

Well, Voyager has just enough crew members to tend to the ship, I don't think they'd have the manpower nor the supplies to pilot and tend to any number of other ships.

I get what you're saying I just don't think it is logistically possible for them. Not that anything being logistically possible has prevented other storylines. Eh, who knows.

 

[chancellorjake]

It would have been nice if Equinox hadn't been so messed up and Ransom hadn't committed genocide. Then, the two Federation ships could have journeyed home together.

 

[JNG]

I think many of the encountered alien ships were not as fast as Voyager, either.

However, a concerted effort to make temporary alliance and friendly contact along the chosen route was depicted.

 

[Deks]

It's doable.
Voyager can run with half of it's crew (70 crew-members), and even then I think the only SF personnel that would be on other ships could be in command positions or as part of the engineering crews that would help out in sharing of technologies and resources.

Think about it... in the 'Void' episode, Voyager was running low on resources due to the environment of the anomaly they were in.
But when they started having new members/ships, the resources flowed throughout the 'fleet' which of course prolonged survival of all ships.
And Voyager was able to triple their replicator efficiency (feeding over 500 people per day with only half the power it took them before) as a result of sharing technology.
So I say that picking up different ships would have been good actually.

At the very least it would have been interesting for the producers not to destroy the Equinox and have the ship join Voyager.
Janeway would be able to provide at least 30 or 40 people for the Equinox (which would leave Voyager with more than enough people to man/repair).
I guess Harry would also be in a position to get a new rank then.

The Equinox was heavily modified so it would be able to push well beyond Warp 6.
I think Torres and Gilmore would have been able to make sufficient modifications to allow the Equinox to travel beyond warp 6.
After all, even if the modified engines required them to kill living creatures, the modifications that were done would give them insight into new theories that would probably allow them to achieve similar velocities without resorting to murder of sentient beings.

Voyager was also assumed by star-fleet to travel at a cruising velocity of Warp 6.
And the ship was rarely beyond Warp 9 (at least on-screen).
So a fleet idea would have worked.

 

[Frodo Lives]

Soooo, you wanted Voyager to pick up its own Rag Tag Fleet, and for the second Battlestar -whoops, I mean Starfleet ship - they encountered to stick around for awhile?

Boy, have I got the show for you...

 

[anais]

Unless they could acquire ships more advanced than Voyager herself, dragging others along would be a liability and a drain on Voyager's resources. Stocking up on stuff onboard Voyager is more sensible, imo.

 

[Deks]

Unless they could acquire ships more advanced than Voyager herself, dragging others along would be a liability and a drain on Voyager's resources. Stocking up on stuff onboard Voyager is more sensible, imo.

Any vessel to join Voyager would be virtually on near same technological level and hardly a drain on the ships resources.
The resources would be flowing from one ship to the next using the concept from the 'Void' ... and I think it would work.

 

[Captain Proton]

They would have to rename the show 'Voyager and Friends'

I always wondered why in 'parallax' when Voyager first sees the 'other' ship Paris says, "It's The Voyager, it's us" instead of just "It's Voyager"

 

[kimc]

I always wondered why in 'parallax' when Voyager first sees the 'other' ship Paris says, "It's The Voyager, it's us" instead of just "It's Voyager"

That struck me as a bit off as well.

 

[Captain Proton]

I always wondered why in 'parallax' when Voyager first sees the 'other' ship Paris says, "It's The Voyager, it's us" instead of just "It's Voyager"

That struck me as a bit off as well.

I assume it's just semantics, something the writers found to be correct but maybe not what Paris would instinctively say. Putting a 'the' in front makes it impersonal maybe? It seems they always say, "back on Voyager" or whatever and never "The Voyager"

Also about commandeering other starships maybe as a matter of safety it wouldn't be a good idea to for instance have a Borg Cube tag along with them, who knows what kind of enemies that would attract! But, I guess that could work to thier advantage as well scaring off potential enemies especially if they put 7 at the helm.

 

[kipron]

Keeping additional ships (especially the Equinox) would've required more serialised storytelling...precisely what UPN wanted to avoid.

Oh well. IMHO the 'single-ship' idea worked well enough, given Starfleets explicit policy towards non-interference.

Soooo, you wanted Voyager to pick up its own Rag Tag Fleet, and for the second Battlestar -whoops, I mean Starfleet ship - they encountered to stick around for awhile?

Boy, have I got the show for you...

So say we all.

 

[od0_ital]

Of course, the real world answer to this is that a small (at first) fleet that would, assumingly, grow through the series, would increase the cost of exterior shots of Voyager and its fleet, and cut down on the use of stock footage, which saves money.

An in show explanation would be that there just wasn't enough of a crew on Voyager for them to handle more than one ship. In 'The '37s', Janeway & Chakotay spit out a number of "acceptable" losses to the offer of stayin' on the planet, and any less than that, they'd be screwed.

So, if they had bartered (I just can't see Janeway takin' a ship as some sort of prize after battle...well, I can, but that's just 'cause Janeway was f*ckin' nuts have the time) for more ships, they wouldn't be able to crew 'em.

Plus, what would they have to trade for the ships?

 

[Deks]

Whoever said anything about putting SF personnel on other ships?
You would think any ships joining Voyager would already have their own crews.
Also Voyager would hardly be taking captured vessels along for the ride due to the problem of crewing them ... but as I said, even Janeway would have been able to spare 20 or 30 people for the Equinox so it would be populated again properly, and since it's a small ship it wouldn't need a large crew ... plus as it was previously noted, they'd need a minimum of 70 people on Voyager to man her (and the number was quite frankly too big taking into consideration the automation onboard SF ships in the 24th century).

 

[Odon]

Because then people would accuse TPTB of ripping off the "rag-tag fleet" from Battlestar Galactica!

 

[Guy Gardener]

They could have duplicated themselves hundrdds if not thousands of times if they cared to do so using the spacial scission from deadlock. there were a hundred thousand human beings on the 37s planet and none of them wanted to see the homewolrd? Janeway was worried about losing crew when she could have doubled her crew. Or even in the style of the Foundation novels or Live fast and prosper taken on fresh crew there and left enough behind to build a new Starfleet to follow behind her bridging a gap of a couple years as quickly as possible with a half a dozen defiants which has to be possible since those rebels from the mirror universe managed to make one with out any resources whatsoever... it only took two days to build the delt flyer. Why not build another 20? Probably half as long to build a Shuttle which they were replacing as sooon as Chokotay could crawl into the drivers seat.

Thousands of voyagers left the Quicksilver planet. hundreds each year arrive at earths boarder expecting a party.

 

[AlxxlA]

I assume it's just semantics, something the writers found to be correct but maybe not what Paris would instinctively say. Putting a 'the' in front makes it impersonal maybe? It seems they always say, "back on Voyager" or whatever and never "The Voyager"

And yet, for other ships, they always call it the Enterprise, the Prometheus, the Equinox, etc.

 

[speed_cochrane]

I get irritated when my satellite company calls it 'The Voyager'. It just doesn't sound right to me. I suppose if you're comparing the name to Nasa's Voyager probes, maybe but...eh.

Maybe they didn't institute any sort of fleet/extra ships etc. because the entire drive for the show was 'alone in the Delta Quadrant' (despite the fact that there doesn't have to be a whole other crew on the second/third/fourth/whathaveyou ships but a skeleton crew from Voyager). So perhaps having only one ship would emphasize that they were truly alone?

 

[Guy Gardener]

You mean opposed to calling it "A Voyager"?

Because when you consider the megadeath attached tot the other famous Voyager from Star trek lore, this ships Captain's name might as well have been Pol Pot.