And that is why Voyager's execution didn't work, at least not from a characterization standpoint. They did have plenty enough to remain a TNG-lite show and that is contrary to a quadrant where they should be scarcity. The replicator is very useful, but even in this show, it couldn't just make all the complex alloys and materials they needed for all that fancy Borg technology nor could it just make bacon and coffee all the time. The most difficult aspect of Star Trek writing assignments going back to TOS was how to make sure technology didn't resolve the problem in ten minutes, hence the Prime Directive. Voyager didn't have consistent reasons to follow OR break the rules.
If one wanted to show that Voyager's crew was fundamentally different from the Equinox crew, Voyager should have been noble poor in comparison to Equinox's savage poor. "Yes, things don't quite work as well as it did years ago. Yes, Tom Paris is overworked and we can't do much about it, but we make the best of it." Which BSG does really well.
What we see instead is TNG-lite captain scolding Ransom for being a poor desperate savage jacking it to Seven of Nine.
except none of that makes sense, and why the common BSG comparison is dumb. in BSG they are literally hunted, there's simply no time to make stops and detours at your leisure. while voyager wanted to go home they were never under any real permanent threat (not to mention starfleet's exploration background and/or looking for a quicker way home). BSG space from what I remember was also pretty empty too, there's a big difference just trading something somewhere for the stuff you need than grow your own food or mine your own minerals.
for the same reason people constantly seem to miss that voyager is on the move, which means even if fully stocked up and repaired to 100% they're just one space anomaly away from getting fucked up again - and then what, fly back or keep limping on? either way shit will be fixed and restocked again at some point.
"run down" and other stuff is hollywood shit, for every "why isn't there a hole in the panel" you can equally ask "why is there a hole in the panel? why hasn't that been fixed in the weeks between episodes?!". short of having the power cut out so the actors can narrate "omg we're out of juice
again" there isn't really much you can do to show it, least of all that would make sense if you assume a military vessel, which voyager still is, having absolute unreliable operations (never mind it's literally what keeps the crew alive in foreign space, you can bet they want it work as good as possible, and made pretty because superiors don't like watching people do nothing, if it's not simple pride or mindset). it only starts too look like crap if you miss the manpower or material, both which isn't an issue for most stuff.
scarcity was also a theme for a while, just not in your face about it. for several episodes they barter and trade replicator rations buried in dialog because they haven't found a way to get new dilithium, so they had to reduce power consumption. they also can't just replace the reactor with what's common in the delta quadrant, that doesn't even work in the alpha quadrant (not to mention has the facilities for it) where romulans for example have their own incompatible stuff. can't remember how they fixed it but I think at some point they found a new deposit which is apparently rare enough. it's one of the reasons what made the equinox crew do what they it when they ran out of gas and found a suitable replacement (at great cost).
and besides that, no one ever wondered why they have a fucking cook on a spaceship that has the ability to turn energy into matter?
Yeah when Voyager did horror or drama, it did so in a unique way none of the others could pull off. (Aside from maybe Ds9, but even that still had its own feel) Im particularity fond of the episode where the doctor temporarily goes insane when he remembers he let one of the crew die to save Harry
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3rMNobbhdwk
that clip reminded me what annoyed me so much about it (and a few other plots, VOY is not alone in that):
first of all there are never complete equal factors, there's a reason the programming made the decision it did - chance of survival is just
one of them. on top of having several people in your crew who literally
run on logic and can thus explain it (fuck it, even deanna troi could easily explain that one), it's fucking code they can review and pinpoint exactly how and why.
I get what they were trying to do (software having "guilt") and it works fine enough to a degree, but if you think too much about it the premise doesn't make that much sense.
To be fair to the writers, Voyager doesn't actually replace any of their shuttles that get destroyed... they just inexplicably have new ones because the writers didn't keep track. I'll let you be the judge of whether that's an improvement or not.
wasn't it established in TNG that shuttles are easy to replicate and rebuilt like an ikea bookshelf? although my fuzzy memory might overlap with headcanon. always took it as one of the reasons why paris built the delta flyer in the first place, since stuff that works just fine in alpha doesn't cut it in the delta quadrant.
This is kind of splitting hairs, but Voyager is also supposed to be chiefly a science vessel, just a much bigger one that's fully equipped while the Equinox is more of a weedy little survey ship. Its commonly accepted to be why Voyager gets its ass beat in a lot of battles and needs to technobabble a way around an enemy, since combat isn't really the ship's primary mission, and also why it can technobabble much harder than even TNG could.
pretty sure right in the beginning of the first episode they exposition dump voyager's stats and mission details, among them long term deep space exploration (wew, foreshadowing) and being literally the fastest and top of the line with new tech like gel packs and shit.
equinox is just some dingy ship, but more importantly has a completely different crew. voyager's is selected for that kind of mission (and filled up with marquis with have their own independent operation background), while the equinox has just some nerds scanning nebula emissions for a week tops.
