Oof, I definitely did that once or twice.
It really does seem like they decided to bring this sequence up to introduce settlement building and power armor early. I get why they did it, but man, I do not think it ultimately has the effect they wanted.
Maybe a controversial suggestion, but my advice is to ignore the Minutemen stuff until late in the game. Just don’t even go to the museum until you’ve followed some leads and want something else to do for a bit.
This is definitely not the intended way to play, but I promise the story flows so much better without it. Setting out to find your kidnapped son just to immediately get sidetracked helping some uncharismatic misfits set up mattresses is just an underwhelming start to an otherwise decent game.
Doing all this stuff later on, when you’ve actually demonstrated you’re a badass survivor and the OP gear you get free from the Minutemen quest actually feels earned, just feels much smoother. It’s a great coda that they unf put two minutes into the game for some reason.
Some ships do have emergency antimatter generators per the TNG Technical Manual, but they’re hideously energy-intensive to run–something like a 10:1 ratio of deuterium used for each unit of antimatter. They only make sense to run in the rare situation you absolutely need to warp to safety when you somehow have deuterium and a warp core but no antimatter.
But holodecks apparently have their own infinite power supply incompatible with any other Starfleet technology, so perhaps Voyager used the holodeck replicators to generate deuterium to run their antimatter generator whenever the Doctor isn’t practicing his sermons.
Efficiency would be abysmal even by the normal standards of this process, but it beats walking back to the Alpha Quadrant.