What are the Jeffries Tubes that Captain Katherine Janeway and her crew are always able to use at the last minute to make their way through the Federation Ship Voyager when it has been taken over by aliens? Are these tubes something in science or were they made up for this series?
Jeffries Tubes have been around on Star Trek I know since ST:TNG, possibly the original series as well. They are handy little crawlspaces linking about every part of the ship. If lore serves me correctly (and when has he ever?), time to time you’ll see stickers in there that say GNDN, which stands for Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing. What’s that got to do with your OP? I dunno. Just wanted to show off my ever so little bit of Trek geek.
They’re named for Matt Jefferies (note the spelling), the original series set director. They’re used generically to describe any cramped crawlspace where a character needs to conduct emergency repairs or escape from intruders or reverse the polarity of the phase inducers or some crap like that.
And, I forgot to mention, the term has been used ever since the original series, when you would occasionally see Scotty crawling around, playing with his instruments.
Okay, so the fact that they’re called Jefferies Tubes is a Star Trek thing, but do real-life ships have something similar?
Well, real-life ships don’t usually warp through the galaxy, but any enlisted Navy doper can probably tell you about greasy smelly hot crawlspaces they’ve had to worm through at some point in their careers.
The phrase “Jefferies tube” is exclusive to Star Trek, though.
Must…resist impulse…to make cheap joke…about organs…
Too late.
I’ve used a similar plot device in a few of my short stories when they’re set on spaceships. I just had a character crawling through them to get to a space over the captain’s cabin and remove a ceiling panel so she could see what was going on inside his quarters. I might have subconsciously lifted the Jefferies tube idea, but it just seemed like a practical thing to do at the time.
Ok, I’ve got a Jefferies Tube story!
A good friend and I worked in offices inside a school building on an urban college campus. There was a service corridor behind the offices and classrooms that ran the length of the building. The corridor, which was off-limits to the general population, was a long dirty, poorly-lit hallway containing fuseboxes, junctionboxes, and miles of sloppy wiring, pipes, ducts, etc.
Every now and then my pal and I needed to get back there to run a cable or something. Being that we were both ST fans (him a big one, me a little one) I began calling the corridor the “Jefferies Tube.” It was sort of our little private jargon joke, but we used the term freely in front of other coworkers.
Well, a couple of years later (I’m still there, my friend is gone) I report to a coworker that there is some problem or other with something in the Jefferies Tube. So, while I look on, he phones up the Maintenance Dept. and proceeds to tell them that there’s a problem with such-and-such “inside the Jefferies tube.”
“What do you mean, where?” he asked the puzzled person on the other end. “On the second floor. INSIDE THE JEFFERIES TUBE!!!”
Needless to say, I laughed my ass off. Yes, I told him the joke when he hung up the phone.
Has any character every referred to it as a Jefferies tube? That would be kinda neat sneaking that in.
Sure they have. Not infrequently, either. Although, of course, I can’t think of a single time offhand.
A few weeks ago on Enterprise, i remember because it was the first time i recall hearing it on that show
I remember having a technical manual when I was just an ensign. It showed the Jeffrie’s Tubes as channels leading up those slanted pylons that hold up the engines, explaining why they were always slanted at an angle when viewed from inside.
FWIW.