What if the Val Jean had been the ship to lead the series?

Val Jean is surely a bit odd anyway? The character in Les Miserables is Jean Valjean.

 

Val Jean is the name of the character in the unlicensed holodeck version. Like how Chakotay is Cordero and Tuvok is Kovok in Renegades: The Requiem, the sequel to Star Trek: Renegades which had its serial numbers filed off.

 

Displays are a part of the overall presentation, just like dialog and the actors movements. Yes, the displays will sometimes include humor and inside jokes, but this isn't always the case, and isn't any worst than the jefferies tubes in dialog being named "jefferies."

 

Of course. Chuckles had only seen a loose adaptation, whereas Sisko and Eddington had actually read the book. And memorized it, possibly.

 

We don't need to assume the ship was named after Hugo's character. In comparison, the latest movie featured a ship honoring a guy named Frank Lin, with the space between K and L very prominent in the all-caps lettering in the dedication plaque (suggesting it was Frank Lin in-universe, too), even if not on the barely glimpsed hull.

Timo Saloniemi

 

This is like Blake's 7, where I like to assume that Soolin is a trade name for Susan Lynn [surname]. Whose twin sister was sent off for mutoid conversion.

 

The Val Jean didn't have the same space available and I doubt would have been able to sustain some of the punishment Voyager did. So either a lot more dead crew or lot less likely they make it home.

 

Is there any canon information as to exactly how many Maquis crew were on board the Val Jean? Damn thing didn't look much bigger than a runabout.

 

Considering the model first appeared as a two-man fighter in DS9: "For the Uniform", I'd say them making it look Runabout-sized is an accomplishment

They must have been packed in like sardines.

 

We know a runabout can carry sixty in a tight spot, as per the second season opener...

Thirty agrees with the suggested scale of the Maquis raider - that is, if you take the runabout cockpit set and match the windows to those on the modified scale model, you get plenty of interior space. But whether thirty is "crew" or "passengers"... When we first met him, Chakotay was on the run. Possibly he was evacuating his entire Maquis cell in a ship that only required four people to fly?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Exactly my point too. The Val Jean had about 30 crewmembers and I guess that was enough for a small ship like that.

But what would have happened if the Val jean hadn't crashed into that Kazon cruiser? I guess that Voyager would have had to tow it through the Delta Quadrant, no way that Janeway had abandoned them in the middle orf nowhere. Then we would have had a different scenario with two crews and two ships.

 

They might have dismantled it for spare parts

 

Well there is the scene in Repression where they are all gathered.



That's at least 15 people

 

The Val Jean was meant for a crew of ten or so. The maquis raiders are inconsistent, but we see the inside of them in TNG's Preemptive Strike also. Chakotay's ship is pretty darn small. And the name makes me think of Eddington.......and Eddington makes me angry.

There are about 30 Maquis crew members to join Voyager in Caretaker.

 

We don't see the inside of this type of Maquis raider in "Preemptive Strike". We see a different cabin interior (the generic Alien Shuttle set of TNG) inside a ship whose shooting model features a suitably differently shaped cockpit exterior. That ship is about half the size of the Eddington/Chakotay ship at most, but could be smaller still.

The manufacturer who makes these Maquis ships supposedly uses a standard shape in many different sizes. We see an even bigger version of the hull grafted to the Intrepid class bow in DS9, representing a Starfleet starship that apparently is to Intrepid what the Miranda is to the Constitution: a variant with a boxy aft hull instead of a separate secondary hull; downcanted warp engines; twin rectangular shuttlebays; no bow deflector; and some sort of bulky extra guns.

Nothing wrong with that. It's just boxes of different sizes, after all, an easily up-and downscaleable shape...

Timo Saloniemi

 

...Here's a nice MSD-style cutaway scaled according to the runabout cockpit set portholes:



Timo Saloniemi

 

Worst case scenario then is that the Maquis themselves lost a good number of their crew to the Caretaker. Obviously there's been Maquis crew casualties since the Caretaker incident (eg Suder, Hogan and Jonas off the top of my head) so this has depleted the former Maquis crew compliment to about 15.

I don't know why but I always had it in my mind that the Starfleet/Maquis split on Voyager was approximately a 50/50. I know now that this doesn't make any sense given how big the Val Jean was, but that's why I asked the original question.

 

Twenty-two years and I never knew Chuckles ship had a name.

 

In Repression, the number is given. Tuvok Melds with(i think) 6, and Chakotay says "There's still 23 more of our comrades to join us." So that's 29, plus the known dead Jonas, Hogan, Sudor, and Seska. I'm not sure if Tuvok gets counted or already was.