Voyager revisited - this time it’s Neelixy

Yeah most likely that's the real reason. Would the in-universe reason be the speed of the Bellerophon (Intrepid class), should she need to get the hell out of Romulan space in a hurry?

Almost like she was designed for a long range mission in the Delta quadrant.

(Wolf 359 was an inside job)

It makes sense that a starship would need to dock regularly at a starbase, especially after a battle or encounter with strange phenomena. And the Enterprise D wasn’t exploring the unknown, but acting as a flagship for the fleet - so it would never be too far away from one.

Allow engineers to check and repair the ship, senior management to debrief starfleet in person and give the crew some shore leave.

Obviously Voyager couldn’t do that so I wouldn’t expect them to explode because there’s no starbases about, but the fact they were able to keep the ship running at pretty much full power, while keeping the ship pristine and fully stocked with weaponry, while also developing state of the art facilities and shuttlecraft is a hell of a job for 140 people.

Yep, another eye roller holodeck theme. Voyager gave us Captain Proton/Queen of Aracnia AND Fair Haven....

I seem to remember an episode where a power loss plunged Voyager into darkness, including inside the *still running* holodeck program playing a Cpt. Proton story. It's almost like that damned thing was where all rules went to die.

At least Picard gave us a sort of retro-active cannon explination for this. Although it is a very grim notion that the holodeck was essentially delegated as a place to go to wait for death in a no-hope scenario.

The thing about holodecks having their own independent and incompatible power comes from Voyager season one.

I prefer Captain Proton and Fairhaven over the resort program. Sandrine's is still the best though.

Ah yes, Memory Alpha has an entry here https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holodeck_reactor

All I can remember from the resort program is the horror of Neelix's erotic foot massage.

I never knew about that. Seems a missed opportunity to make Voyager more unique. With limited holodeck time, they could have looked to turn some unused areas of the ship into physical recreational areas instead to make the ship more liveable - instead of Sandrines they could have had a physical bar, a parrises squares court, and old timey cinema etc etc etc

Instead another contrivance to allow the writers to write TNG episodes with different aliens

They always seemed to make good use of pooling their time with multiple people using the holodeck at once though.

I'd sooner sit through Captain Proton than Fairhaven anyway. I kinda liked those episodes, I know I'm in the minority but they were clearly written by someone who had a soft spot for the Flash Gordon serials

Reached a moment in my Voyager rewatch where Seven mentions that the Borg once encountered a Kazon ship but didn't assimilate them as the Borg didn't consider them worth the effort. It felt like the writers winking at the audience about how crap the Kazon were as antagonists in earlier seasons.

Agreed. They devoted so much time to the Kazon, and a lot of development, but never truly made them interesting enough to really appeal to viewers.... we'd seen it all done before really.

The Vidiians were properly interesting, and really should have had more development. The Hirogen also started very well (huge intimidating figures with an interesting and very cold hunting code), but faded quickly to generic bad guys version 65.

Being a teenage boy at the time I should have been the target demographic for this kind of thing, but frankly it just annoyed me. I was watching Trek out of the hope for some good Sci-fi, and after years of being mediocre the introduction of The Borg gave me some hope for a show that I had given up on in favor of watching DS9 instead. Putting their rescued Borg woman into a silly silver catsuit was a blatant attempt to use Jeri Ryan’s figure to promote the show. Luckily Ryan could actually act and carried the role even to this day.

From what I understand we can blame Berman for this. He was mainly focused on using Seven to inject sex-appeal into Voyager to improve ratings. Thing is though, I always found the female version of the fleet uniform to be more appealing than Seven’s catsuit, and when she did wear a uniform it looked good on her.

We even get this slightly later on in Enterprise where T’pol is dressed in a similar catsuit. You could partially explain this away as a Vulcan design, but when she joins United Earth Starfleet, she’s still wearing the catsuit, just with mission patches added. Again, I’d blame Burman.