Maybe this is a dumb question that gets answered later, but I am watching "Caretaker" and the Kazon apparently have little to no access to water...and yet, they have FTL technology and ships that can destroy the Voyager. Is this apparent discrepancy ever explained?
I don't think it's a discrepancy. but I know what you mean....why can't they just find water in another system? Well it may be water in that area of the Galaxy is still rare.
Well, I guess the "discrepancy" is if they have the technology to create FTL ships, why wouldn't they have the ability to fuse atoms together to make water?
Well, I have a theory about that, a theory which I have predented on the Kes Website on the page "Voyager mysteries-and how to solve them". So I take the liberty to quote what I've written on that page: According to what we saw in "Caretaker" the Kazon-Ogla who were living on the Ocampa planet had problems with finding water. Neelix too did seem to have that problem. Now, that looks and sounds a bit strange because there would always be a chance to find ice in space, at least on some planet nearby. They did have spaceships of rather good quality after all. But there's a possible explanation for that problem. If we look at the Ocampa system, Ocampa is the fifth of six planets. According to the book "Star Trek Roleplaying Games, Aliens" which is the only source of information about the Ocampa system, except for the official Star Trek sources, the Ocampa system is the sun Caeleron plus six planet, five smaller ones plus a gas giant. The four inner planets are to small, hot and rocky to have any water. The fifth planet which is Ocampa has no water on the surface and the sixth planet is a gas giant, apparently without moons, maybe some small rocky asteroids orbiting it but in that case they are too small to contain any water or ice. We can also assume that the wars and conflicts between the Kazon sects has made it very difficult for the Kazon-Ogla who are living on the Ocampa surface to travel outside the system. Maybe they are under siege from the Kazon-Nistrim or some other Kazon sect which makes it difficult for them to travel outside the system and difficult for other Kazon-Ogla ships to deliver water to them. As they don't want to leave Ocampa with its valuable Cormaline which they use to trade with, they have to live with the water problem, at least until they can make peace with other Kazon sects nearby or find water in some other way.
The Trabe created those ships. We've never seen the Kazon have any ability to repair their ships. I would also say that creating water from the right atoms takes alot of power and not alot of water. Whether it's antimatter or H2O creating is alot harder than harvesting it.
They had them for how long? They have to have some idea to repair them or slaves who do it because they had those ships for 30 years.
Mabus, the guy in charge of the Trabe in Alliances, said that he was 8 years old when the Kazon revolted. For some reason I though that the revolt happened 5 decades earlier but I can't substantiate that. Replicator tech was unheard of. Were they too lazy to recycle, or did they just have too many standards to drink recycled urine? A space faring society can't be bogged down with feudal taboos and expect rigidity to be a plus.
Lynx's description make sense, but the show offers a simpler one that's more consistent with how we see the Kazon act in general: the Kazon are idiots. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if the idea of traveling to a planet with water in their spaceships never occurred to them.
It was established in the pilot that the Kazon were feudal and each sect possessed different areas of space with different resources... These kazon would trade for water, but if they tried to trade with other kazon from anything other than a position of strength it would turn int a hostage situation or cannibalism. Other Kazon sects had water to spare. I'm just wondering why Neelix was asking for water, unless he just needed it because the Kazon wanted it and he wanted Kes? Of course, these Kazon on Ocampa ran a mine and a refinery which means they were using water and other substances probably as a coolant in un-recyclable ways.
"laziness" is a dangerous floodgate to open here. Berman had too many leftover/unused/rejected TNG Scripts that he couldn't quite still use without more than cutting and pasting the name changes if everyone Voyager met were 4 hundred years behind/underneath them technologically. Ditto for all the 3rd pass pitches and rejected spec scripts Enterprise inherited from Voyager, which is how they had a holodeck adventure in their 5th episode.
Well, the Kazon weren't as bad as the Paklids... who gained tech by stealing it and were basically clueless about fixing most of it. I think Guy is right, that the particular Kazon sect on Ocampa were wasteful with their water sources and ran seriously low on clean drinkable water sources. And they lacked the refining technology to make whatever water existed drinkable or mine deeply enough to get new fresh water sources.
(Thank you.) The Caretaker's people destroyed the planets biosphere a thousand years earlier making "rain" impossible. A complete absence of Nucleogenic particles. You don't honestly think the Nacene took the entire population underground? Did the ocampan city sprawl out under the entire substrata of the continent or were their many cities? If we assume that their planet, during the apocalypse, still had millions or even billions of Ocampa on the surface (think Zardoz) and the Caretaker was able to save one single lonely solitary city.... Of those left on the surface playing out Mad Max II killing one another over the last of the water... No rain means no evaporation, stagnation and plague... How many decades or even centuries could some passable Ocampan civilization have lumbered on? There were ten centuries between the accident and Janeway's layover. All the easy to find water on the planet, probably to the depth of ten thousand feet had been found and used by anyone wanting to call that ball of dirt their home. However Unless there was something funky with the solar system, there would have been an astronomical (literally) weight of ice just floating about in space near by.
Basically, they're the Raiders from "Road Warrior" except they don't have anyone as cool as Lord Humungus or Wez. And fuel-producing civilization still exists in abundance all around them.
These Kazon were a fuel producing society. They mined, refined and sold cormaline on Ocampa. Neelix said that it was in great demand, which means that they probably traded with most everyone in that sector. http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Cormaline Wow. Cormaline has been mentioned twice as much on DS9 than it was on Voyager, and then they bitch-slapped the Voyagerism by saying that cormaline was common and uninteresting. DS9 is so classy.
It's probably also that gap of 400 years I mentioned. Imagine trying to run a steam engine on jet fuel, or a jet on coal? Maybe back when Kirk or Archer were topdog, Cormaline was very important to the federation?