[O]ne thing defines [Seska] in contrast to the Cardassians we’d been regularly seeing on Star Trek at that moment in time: she’s just kind of an absolute hot mess.
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But it’s kind of what makes Seska work as a character: despite all this, villainy or otherwise, nothing ever quite clicks for her. It’s a great mirror to uphold against Janeway’s decision to have the crew take the long way home in the first place, the idea that, if they did ultimately just go Seska’s route and exploit their advantageous power in an unknown quadrant, it would doom them.
The Kazon also had big logical fallacies, they are somehow very technologically advanced, but have weird gaps in their knowledge. They have space travel, but clean water is an issue? How is that even possible?
And Voyager, one of the fastest ships ever made flies at ultra high warp, but is somehow months inside their territory? And not like there is just a lot of them, no, they were interacting with the same people all the time. Later this is explained by Voyager needing to stop all the time getting supplies, which meant their speed dropped down to a crawl, but that’s a different issue. But the Kazon are season 1 when Voyager has plenty of supplies. So the Kazon, a backwards people, can somehow move people faster than Voyager?
They stole the tech. They don’t have replicators.
Sure but when you have space travel, its dead simple to get water. Just park up at any old moon or asteroid, a lot of them are almost all ice. Sure you need to filter and clean it, but that’s the easy part. Replicators seem like the hard way to get water.
You’re not remembering the season very well. There’s very little water in this region of space and people are always fighting over it.
That’s interesting. I’m no spaceologist, but I wonder if that’s consistent with our observations of the universe. My cursory searches lead me to believe that there’s just a boatload of ice out there. I’ll have to rewatch Voyager at some point, and see what the technobabble explanation is.
You are totally correct, hydrogen is by far the most common element out there, since it’s just a simple proton. Any space without a boatload of hydrogen is what we call empty space. Oxygen is also super abundant, so it’s basically everywhere. As far as we know water is everywhere and very easy to get. Like I said you’d need to filter and clean it, since it’s probably full of nasty stuff, but that’s something we could do 100 years ago so it should be easy.
Now it would be possible for some kind of weird system where there is just hydrogen for the star and not a lot else. I’m not sure how that would be possible, but lets say for the sake of argument that it is. Then you won’t have any planets as well and you for sure wouldn’t have any abundant life to get to civilization levels. The early universe was like this, because a lot of the heavier stuff needed stars to get made. So the early stars systems were just a whole lot of hydrogen and some helium and nothing else, but there obviously wasn’t life as we know it back then.
But I don’t know how this would extend to an entire region of space. And even if it’s for the entire region, why would you stay? Just move on, the region sucks, you have warp capable vessels so just get out of dodge. There’s plenty of stars around with a lot of water in their systems, Voyager gets to them within the year.
They also have, you know, space ships, so they have some level of technology. They say the stole the tech, but that’s a little too easy. Even if they stole the idea and the blueprints, they still understand a lot of it. They operate and maintain it, so they have some technical level at least. That means their space ships probably have pretty decent water recycling options. Or are they just venting their piss into space like we did in the 60s? If water is such a big deal, they would surely have their tech tree invested into recycling and water saving techniques. Even a ship with replicators like Voyager is a very sealed system, why waste the resources?
I think in the show it’s just hand waved away like this is a region with very little water and the audience is just supposed to go with it, instead of thinking even a little bit about it.
I think the idea is that it’s weird and different and has created a politically unstable area of space not unlike arid regions of earth. Probably exactly that when you include the later addition of the Trabe species who are the wealthy colonizers.