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Also consider the fact that the armor came from far into the future, so power efficeny could have been supremely high (and its likely it was design to be, as it is a combat-essential system).

Oh, and for all we know the stuff is as thin as tissue paper so the whole hull has a tiny volume.

Good point. We never actually got a good look at it.

As for where it came from I said before that they could of just gone past a astroid belt and beamed a bunch of matter on.

Hmm...
Could you just beam parts of wrecked enemy ships on and use the replicators to turn it into armour?
That would be usefull.

Don't see why not. The generators dematerialize the matter you want used then reforms it into the armor you want. Any sustance would work but some would be better than others.

*visualises federation warships tearing chunks out of the hulls of enemy starships and using to create constantly repairing armour*

That would be interesting to see.

I don't think you could do it during battle. You would have to drop sheilds to beam aboard. They would probably just salvage after the battle.

Forgot about that.

You know, as far as Voyager's ability to produce and sustain the armour goes, I had a thought. Like you all said, you can basically replicate anything into anything else. If Janeway knew that it was pretty much the last thing they'd be doing before going home, she wouldn't worry about fuel supplies.

I can see them basically emptying their deuterium tanks to replicate the armour! They wouldn't need to collect anything, and they have to have a lot of it, anyway.

Just an idea.

I could see that as being used as a last resort. But if they knew what they were getting into they would probably stock up on everything they needed.

It depends on whether they can replicate the armour from anything, or whether they need the exact compound/alloy/whatever it's made of. Everything we've seen of replicators implies that they require a stock of the right material, rather than being able to transmute elements (latinum) is precsious, and therefore probably unreplicateable, as are elements of Romulan blood).

What I ment was that they could take anything from inside the ship and turn it into the shape of armor on the ship but have the same propeties it had before hand. You dematerialize a cow inside the ship a chunk of your armor is going to be made of mince. It is a last resort but would still help.

Teaos wrote:What I ment was that they could take anything from inside the ship and turn it into the shape of armor on the ship but have the same propeties it had before hand. You dematerialize a cow inside the ship a chunk of your armor is going to be made of mince. It is a last resort but would still help.

Except Harry Kim would be devestated at the loss of his love-partner.

Oh, LOL! Armor made of hamburger.

One thing to consider, too, is that the armor isn't just the armor. I'm wondering if it isn't a sort of armor/shield hybrid -- that is, a shield so dense that it traps metal atoms between it's layers. Better still, it might be a material that's so tightly compressed (and perhaps therefore so thin and light relative to the mass of the ship) to be akin to neutronium (when I say "neutronium," I mean the theoretical substance you'd get where matter is so dense you cease to have atomic nuclei and instead have a "sea" of neutrons) Or it could be a material that conducts gravitic energy so well (I've always pictured the shields to be in part an application of artificial gravity) that it's a sort of synergy between armor and shield.

The other option I remember dwelling on years ago but forgot until recently, was that the armor was holographic in nature. We've seen the holodecks do a fairly incredible level of simulation when it comes to matter. Maybe the armor is made of some "virtual" matter that is reactive to weapons fire and adapts its structure accordingly. That way, it's not so much that the armor is very dense or incredibly strong, but rather that it's incredibly fast at adapting to incoming fire and turns itself into the most resistant configuration possible against a given attack within a fraction of a second of the weapon impact.