While I don't doubt Kelly's influence further down the line, credits to navy beans horses were a passion of Gene's from the get go.

Not to mention, Bones wasn't in "The Cage."

Pictured: serious riders

Glad someone said it

I'm always getting those 2 mixed up.

He also rides a horse in the first episode, when he'd first retired and had a scraggly beard.

Edit: Pike's love of horses was established in the first pilot during one of the illusion scenes.

There are industrial replicators, only ever shown on Prodigy.

if an engineer was even remotely clever, it would be a trivial, if tedious matter to replicate entire starships. there's absolutely no reason that the Enterprise or any other SF ship could use replication technology to regenerate the same way borg cubes do.

Even ignoring that application, you could still build a replication platform in space and just nudge things out of the build envelope for an infinite-z type set up, building off the end. at which point you would only be constrained by physical material limits, supplying the energy/matter necessary; and the X-Y size of the build envelope. and lets be clear, there's no reason they can't 'tile' the envelope to expand that as necessary. As for the resources necessary, park an asteroid off the other face of the platform and convert that to energy to power and supply the fabrication station.

Replicators are one of the things they never really thought all they way through. it was a TNG-era answer to explain away some tedium. but seriously. Imagine a federation ship equipped with a quantum singularity core instead of relying on antimatter. Voyager would have been trivial. Even if you don't want to power your ship with a blackhole, you could use some inert super-dense material to store the energy as mass, and that energy density would likely be way better than the antimater/matter reactors.