I think it was one of the Night of the Living Dead movies.

Surviving? I intend to domesticate the zombies!

Don't know. And therein lies the problem. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the pod base idea, I think that's solid. It's just that the question "Can a nebula pod be made into a ground base?" is a pretty simple question: yes, it can. The real question is "What would it take for St...

Never underestimate the degree of stupid a person can possess. I am more than ready to believe that person actually believes what s/he posted there.

Main problem with this idea: Starfleet has nothing decent to put inside it.

Writes and narrates reviews, mostly of scifi. Click to OP link and give it a watch and you'll get the feel for what he does fairly quickly.

Unless you're using a very generous and relative definition of "soon", I really don't see it happening.

The number of places a gun could be isn't the same as the number of operational guns. As Teaos pointed out, energy could be a limiting factor. Those extra ports could also represent planned future upgrades.

Could have, but still wouldn't have. It wouldn't make much sense to add on another half dozen or so characters just for the odd away mission story when they were able to just have the existing characters do the job. While it might not have made perfect sense to have the station officers running off ...

Energy demands have to be considered though. Again, we don't know what the energy usage of a replicator is, but I would imagine it would take a hell of lot more energy to replicate several thousand tons of ship skeleton and hull plates than it does to make a cup of Earl Gray, hot.