member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist
zip's bf
no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good
rewatching some star trek: voyager with friends and it's killing me that deuterium, one of a handful of literally the most abundant isotopes in the universe, is a recurring macguffin that voyager has to do incredibly ill-advised things to get a few kilograms of
extremely mid show
(just finished again, watched endgame yesterday) the wildest thing is that they actually mention this a few times, that "you can get deuterium anywhere", and then later make it a macguffin
it's wild because they have dilithium. it's the original macguffin. why not just.................................................keep using that. it's a fuel. it's a consumable. why not just keep running out of it.
yeah we were watching the ep with the demon-class planet where paris and kim got cloned
my favorite exchange from that episode was chakotay volunteering to try and find them on the planet, then janeway saying "no, it's too dangerous, I can't afford to risk you" and landing the whole voyager there instead
well i think the implication was that it was too dangerous in a shuttle, whereas the ship would have the power to escape or defeat whatever they encountered
but yeah it's not at all debatable that voy has some really weak plots. i love the characters but the situations they're put in do not make sense.
plus like - star trek has some bad psuedoscience for sure, but much of the stuff on voy stretched imagination further than one would think possible, to the point where suspension of disbelief becomes difficult. the biomemetic gel cloning the entire ship, including a working warp reactor? so you're telling me the matter managed to turn itself into antimatter? because if not, there's no way the ship could have gotten off the surface.
yeah after this one we proceeded to the next episode, which was about everyone except seven and the EMH having to go into stasis while they crossed a nebula with heavy levels of radiation, and one of the plot points was that the radiation started affecting the bio-gel packs that run the ship's computers
the ship getting sick like a biological entity was also a plot point in an early ep where neelix made soup that gave the ship the flu, but in that ep they made a show of switching the ship over to the old isolinear circuitry that the older classes of federation ships had used as their computing substrate and trying to live normally, whereas this time they acted like if one more pack of goo had gotten radiation sickness the ship would be lost with all hands
they recycled this plot bit-for-bit for enterprise also, which is kind of wildly brazen
we should have taken it as a sign when their first crack at an ongoing threat for the ship was a bunch of dweebs who had access to warp drives but didn't know how to find any water
