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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Timo: [QB] A vain attempt at returning to the subject at hand: Picard could probably have replicated AND charged a disruptor just as easily as he got the tommy-gun. We've seen that phaser-type weapons can be replicated and then fired, in DS9 "Civil Defense". A Cardassian replicator first created the weapon, then fed a brief pulse of glowing something into it, and the weapon then started shooting around at anything non-Cardassian in the vicinity. And my original point was that even a "fake" holo-disruptor would have been just as good as the (fake/real) tommy-gun, merely because it was [b]different[/b] from phasers and thus surprised the Borg. A wiffle bat or a sharpened avocado would probably have done the trick, too. And now back to our scheduled diversions: The nature of a "hopper" was not completely clarified in DS9 "Nor the Battle". There's a second reference to "hoppers", though - in "Peak Performance" LaForge mentions a "water hopper". Now, these two mentions are COMPLETELY DISSIMILAR from the writers' point of view. In "Peak Performance", the writer was quite obviously postulating a vehicle that would literally hop around, so that when one popped the clutch on that one, the results would be [b]really[/b]spectacular. In turn, in "Nor the Battle" the writer was using a word that resembles "chopper" in order to evoke a post-Vietnam war movie type of feeling. However, from the POV of the audience, it makes sense to assume that these two "hoppers" were variations on a common theme. Which means that there are "water" hoppers in addition to "regular" hoppers. Which in turn suggests a rather sub-orbital role for the craft - it would be pretty silly to build space-capable craft in separate "land" and "water" variants. (TAS "aquashuttles" withstanding!) If the vehicle is primitive enough to have a "clutch", I suggest something vastly "inferior" to a shuttle. The difference between a shuttle and a hopper could be that between a helicopter and a tank. The latter does not fly (into space), but the sacrifice makes it more combatworthy in other ways. A "hopper" IMHO should have gotten its name from the fact that it "hops". And hops mechanically or physically, given the clutch, not e.g. through transporter magic. Like a frog, it considers ground or water its natural environment, and only utilizes air for changing its location every now and then. This would make it very different from a "shuttle" or an "aircraft", so different that we could safely postulate a whole family of dissimilar vehicles that would all still warrant the very specific designation "hopper". The water hopper LaForge mentioned would probably be a recreational vehicle of some sort, while the one in "Nor the Battle" would not... Timo Saloniemi [/QB][/QUOTE]
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