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Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
So "Horonium" was once so abundant that it was accessible even with Earth's limited capabilities in the NX-01 era, but somehow it's now gone from the entire quadrant? Seems like there must be a story there. I wonder if something like The Burn could have come into play (I never watched DISC past the first season, so I'm going off of hearsay of what that was.) Or possibly it was a material somehow created and scattered all throughout the galaxy at once with a limited lifespan. Given that it powers the time portal, maybe it has some weird temporal properties that made it disappear.
I think the easiest explanation is that it was extremely rare, the sol system just happened to have a useable deposit somewhere (probably an asteroid or two), and it was used up in the construction of the NX class ships (and perhaps their immediate successors).
Note that nobody is worried that the NX-01 component on the Enterprise might have been mysteriously de-horoniumed. They just knew they weren't going to find a fresh source anywhere.
My thought was that turning it into an alloy somehow stabilized it.