Wait--the Enterprise has 210 satellites on hand?
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I'm always more baffled at how Voyager managed to always have photon torpedoes on-hand for any situation, even up the last minute they were in the Delta Quadrant. A Galaxy-class ship can hold only 200 or 300 torpedoes at any given time, and that's WITH easy access to starbases for new weapons and equipment. An Intrepid-class ship is considerably smaller yet Janeway never ran out of torpedoes...OR gave any indication they could build new ones from scratch.
I always assumed Deneva was on the outter frontier of Federation space and the contaminated alien planets were off limits because the cryptic information they did get was recent and still coming in. Shows how much I assume and how little I know.
Still, I try not to think too much about these things and enjoy the episodes.
Considering most Constitution class ships carry a magasine of 200-300 torpedoes rather easily in the saucer section, I think carrying 300 probes or other deployable devices in the lower half of the ship where even more room is devoted to technical/mechanical systems isn't that unlikely.
Actually if you look, they've retconned the large yellow circle on the bottom of the ship as being the hatch to a large internal bay. It may be modular, carrying whatever the ship needs for certain missions.
Actually if you look, they've retconned the large yellow circle on the bottom of the ship as being the hatch to a large internal bay. It may be modular, carrying whatever the ship needs for certain missions.
No "can" there. A Galaxy holds that many torpedoes in "Conundrum", is all we know. A Galaxy could hold millions if needed, by volumetric concerns. It doesn't need to, though.
Huh?
Granted, it' s not as if we ever heard Kirk worry about running out of torpedoes or anything. But what is the source for there being hundreds of casings aboard?
In ST6:TUC, we see a graphical representation of the torpedo magazines of the E-A, suggesting more than a hundred torpedoes stored. The task of manually counting them is said to be daunting. But that's pretty much all we know onscreen. Is there an offscreen source for the TOS magazine size?
As for the Voyager, we never hear she'd have a hard limit to how many torpedoes can be carried. We only hear she had 38 at one point, then fired dozens, and still had more left than those figures would justify - suggesting that she indeed possessed the means to either build more, or buy more. And she did visit several high-tech ports in between, and may have purchased critical items needed for building new torps.
Not that there'd necessarily be many critical things about building a torp, or an UV satellite. In DS9 "Tribunal", we learn that torpedo warheads are difficult to come by and a valid target for Maquis theft - so a mere food replicator apparently can't create those. But the Voyager could easily possess advanced tooling capable of creating such warheads, just like she had tooling for building the Delta Flyer. Why should Kirk's ship be relatively less well equipped? Her workshops could easily create unlikely things like flintlocks or Nazi uniforms, supposedly in a matter of minutes. The raw materials for flintlocks and "SS" collar insignia could be used for UV satellites, too...
Timo Saloniemi
90-100 sounds more reasonable, I've seen many websites, books, MSD's depicting anywhere between 100-250 before now but was never sure of their canonicity. But I'll assume they can carry more in other parts of the ship.
Volume wise though I still think the stardrive could hold around 250-300 probes of various kinds should she need to carry that many. It does seem odd they happened to be carrying that many probes of exactly the kind they needed for that emergency. I would have thought they'd have a variety of different probe types aboard for deployment.
Volume wise though I still think the stardrive could hold around 250-300 probes of various kinds should she need to carry that many. It does seem odd they happened to be carrying that many probes of exactly the kind they needed for that emergency. I would have thought they'd have a variety of different probe types aboard for deployment.
Either way, the Voyager torpedo conundrum will probably never be adequately explained away to most people's satisfaction. It's like the
"where are the crew toilets" query. You know they're there. Something was available. But you just never saw anything on-screen.
"where are the crew toilets" query. You know they're there. Something was available. But you just never saw anything on-screen.
The question is just how large are these satellites... and what level of on-board fabrication capabilities the ship has.
I tend to assume that the reason that the Enterprise went from a crew of 200 to a crew of 430 was that they installed early replicator technology which freed up a lot of what was previously cargo space, and let the ship become a "multimission" explorer ship rather than a basic military vessel.
So, if they had fairly advanced replication technology or just very advanced fabrication, they could assemble this number of devices in just a few days.
However... consider this... 210 satellites could be stored on a single 7 x 10 x 3 rack. Assume that each satellite is less than a meter long... that's not a very large volume of storage you'd be talking about.
So while it does seem rather "contrived" it's probably well within the realm of possibility.
They're on TrekMovie here:
http://trekmovie.com/2008/02/22/operation-annihilate-screenshots-and-video/
http://trekmovie.com/2008/02/22/operation-annihilate-screenshots-and-video/
The Enterprise used the same lower hatch to deploy the satellites as it did(or will, chronologically speaking)to dump/spray the antifungal/antibacterial solution into the atmosphere of Arriannus in "Let That Be Your Last Battefield."
Thats what I was thinking, if the bay inside is just a multipurpose holding area then the tanks would have been loaded inside, opening the hatch only to dump the material into the atmosphere.
So having exactly the right number of satellites, or having them at all was lucky, but we don't know what mission profile she'd been kitted out for that she was carrying them all.
I could see the Constitutions doing something similar to the Echo Subspace repeater missions of the NX Class. Deploying sensor platforms and communication beacons further out.
So having exactly the right number of satellites, or having them at all was lucky, but we don't know what mission profile she'd been kitted out for that she was carrying them all.
I could see the Constitutions doing something similar to the Echo Subspace repeater missions of the NX Class. Deploying sensor platforms and communication beacons further out.
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