laughs I am, by no means, as well versed on Space/Engineering as you are. All I have to go on is my vast wealth of Sci-Fi knowledge. And I agree with you. I taught some physics & P-Chem in school, and I always laughted about the type of scenerio that you described.

And I am, by no means, going to defend my beloved Star Trek (and I loved me some Voyager, by the way). But there are a few episodes here and there where they get a bit...off. (like you decribed)

However, there was one episode where I had to laugh, because it flew in the face of all the others. They said that life support (or some such...it may have just been the atmospheric processors) were down. And they weren't so much worried about "running out of oxygen", but were more concerned about the heat from the warp core. The environmental systems were more to keep the crew alive, despite the ship trying to kill them (not space). The warp core would put off huge amounts of radiant heat that they had to deal with. Without those systems on, the ship would be a flying saunna. Then other systems would go down, and the crew would die from that (or one of the other critical systems going down).

And if you remember the episode from ST: Next Generation, when they run into the Quantum Filliment....all major systems were down, for a while, and they didn't freeze to death. Or the other episode from ST: Next Generation where the Enterprise (and the Britania) are caught in the Tycon's Rift (which sucked out their energy)...no one was cold.

But well yeah....I just always laugh and remember that we often don't let truth get in the way of a dramatic point.

~Jeordam