Star Trek: Voyager holds a very distinct honor or dishonor, and that's the one show that Ronald D. Moore didn't want to work on during his time with the franchise. A young man when he joined Star Trek: The Next Generation, he wrote some of the show's best episodes, before going on to provide Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the same type of genius.
Yet, The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were syndicated shows. The work experience was vastly different there than say at Voyager. That show, after all, was the lynchpin in the UPN catalogue of shows. Being a new network, they were doing everything they could to get noticed and gain viewers. They needed Voyager to be a hit more than shows like The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine had to be.
Those two latter shows weren't owned by a channel but were instead syndicated to the highest bidder. Their futures were already secured. So the lack of certainty affected the Voyager work experience a bit differently. So when Moore landed on Voyager for a short time for the sixth season, he was in for a culture shock. He didn't stay long, but he did have one heck of an idea.
An idea that would've killed his take on Battlestar Galactica. Speaking to Mick Joest of CinemaBlend, Moore revealed that he nearly turned Voyager into Battlestar Galactica.
"I was only on Voyager for a few months. But in that period, there was a storyline being developed that was the Voyager for a time starts shepherding some other ships, some alien ships, through some region. I don't remember if it was a war-torn region or if it was some kind of spatial phenomenon or something. And I remember bringing up explicitly, ‘Oh, you could do a ragtag fleet here,’ sort of like [Battlestar] Galactica did, ‘And maybe that becomes something you do in multiple episodes. There's a whole community here.’"
Fans may remember that the end of season five and the start of season six was the Equinox two-parter. It featured a second Federation ship being found in the Delta Quadrant, which had arrived shortly before Voyager. Yet, instead of having a similar experience, they were met with far more hostility and were unable to farm as many resources.
This led to the ship having to rely on aliens as fuel. They would capture a specific alien and use its body as fuel for their engines. This of course drove the two ships into a conflict with one another. Yet, it seems like Moore wasn't interested in the end. In the show's original ending, the Equinox is destroyed and the surviving crew are folded into the crew of the Voyager (though we never see them again on screen).
Yet, it seems like Moore wanted to keep the Equinox and have the two ships go on through the Delta Quadrant together, bringing aboard more wayward ships along the way. Which is, if you remember, the rough premise of his Battlestar Galactica reboot. Ships, bound together for a common purpose, traveling the stars.
In fact, in season two of the show, the Galactica finds another one of their ships, the Pegasus. It also featured a similar storyline idea to that of Equinox, but instead of it being aliens that they were killing for fuel, their conflict was centered around the travesties that the crew of the Pegasus were allowed to get away with.
It's very likely that had Moore stayed on through season seven of Voyager, then the Battlestar Galactica reboot would've likely been very different if it had been done at all. After all, it seems like Moore was going to use a lot of his ideas for that rebooted series on Voyager had he stayed.