On TNG and Voyager, they’re always talking about “duty shifts,” which just grates on my ears. In the Navy, don’t sailors stand a watch? Every time I hear someone say “I have the night shift again,” I cringe. Factory workers should have to do “night shifts,” not starship personnel.*
*Yes, I guess I do have too much free time on my hands. :rolleyes:
Standard reason: ST is a Navy analog, not a navy.
Real reason: Trying to explain watches to TV viewers is way too complicated. It also sounds too old fashioned.
Yes, sailors stand watches. A watch is 4 hours long. When everyone else is off and you have to work you are said to have the duty. Not duty, mind you, but the duty. As far as Star Trek goes I can’t say. It does take place way in the future, no? Maybe terminology has evolved.
Next you’ll be asking how the Enterprise manages with the same people on the bridge 24/7.
It’s a TV show. Everything is chosen in service to the story.
It’s 500 years in the future with magic technology. The point is to communicate to the audience what the characters are doing, not the exact lingual constructs used by modern-day man in similar organizations.
Sure, Star trek takes place in what are effectively Naval vessels. But that doesn’t mean they are going to use anything like the terminology used by one (or maybe a few counting the Brits or Aussies) for similar purposes. Heck, even everyone speaks English in the future, there’s no reason to assume they’ll use the same jargon.
OP == Silly.
I recall Data pretentiously ordering “Begin night watch” on STNG. I imagine it depends somewhat on the writer.
Most are. But the “dog” watches are 2 hours long. This leads to an odd number of watches in a day, and thus a rotation (i.e. you don’t stand the same watches every day).
They are cur-tailed.
Terminology aside, the only time I recall it being an issue was during “Chain of Command” where temporary-captain Jellico wanted to completely rearrange the duty schedule for some reason - he wanted four shifts instead of three, or three instead of four, or whatever, but it had some military realism in that:
-a new commanding officer imposes an arbitrary, somewhat nuisance-ish change just so he can point to a personal accomplishment (i.e. he “fixed” something); and
-everyone starts bitching to the second-in-command who had to implement it.
Always bothered me because on a star ship, there is no down time. There isn’t a “night”, there isn’t a time when nothing is possibly going to happen, and conversely, there isn’t a “day time” when everything important is going to happen.
Now upon arrival at a destination, they may well summon the top crew to the bridge. But that random encounter with the hostile aliens that immediately results in combat? If the captain is sleeping, he’s going to be still getting dressed by the time the battle is over. Or die in his/her bed when the ship gets blown up.
But like on DS9 where they’re a trading station, again, there is no ‘night’. Quarks would be open around the clock. Ships would be arriving and departing at all hours. You really wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between 2am and 2pm.
I figured Jellicoe just wanted to change the shift hours to something he was used to. Seems like no biggie to me. I didn’t think he was a dick because of that. This crew is supposed to be Star Fleet’s finest. They deal with mutating viruses, bloodthirsty aliens, malfunctioning holodecks, and god-like beings on a weekly basis. I think they should be able to adapt to a new watch rotation. 
Bit off-topic for ST, but I liked how this was described in the Mike Resnick ‘Starship’ books. You had Red Shift, White Shift, and Blue Shift (they weren’t ‘watches’ there either,) and the Captain picked his regular shift arbitrarily. But the First and Second Officers stand the other two shifts, and it’s important that they be officers with battle experience who can keep cool in a crisis, because the ship might be attacked at any time.
The one thing that was inconsistently explained in Star Trek (or maybe hand-waved by expanded universe writers trying to explain this) is that the day-night rotation on starship was put into place because humans (and apparently most aliens) work best under a diurnal cycle.
Deep Space Nine was explicitly said in one if the first episodes to be working on Bajoran time - it was a 26 hour day - and I think it was stated at one point to be tied to the time zone the “capital” was located in, for ease of communication, etc.
Peter David had a good thought in his New Frontier series where the position of “Executive Officer” was actually the “captain” on the night shift, and there was almost an entirely similar bridge crew/etc manning that shift … we just rarely saw them because the characters we followed were the day-shift ones. Kind of like how CSI Las Vegas does it with the night shift CSIs.
In the original series format, Roddenberry specifically mentioned the use of naval terminology as a way of connecting “our ‘today’ with Star Trek’s ‘tomorrow.’” Herb Solow made the same point in Star Trek: The Real Story: the ship was the Enterprise, not “Rocketship X-whatever”; it had bulkheads, not walls, and decks, not floors; it had a port side, a starboard side, a bow, and a stern; it was a “she,” not an “it,” and she belonged to Starfleet; and so on and so on. If they’re going to use naval terminology, fer Chrissakes, they should at least be consistent about it!
In the original series’ writer’s guide, it was specifically noted that night was simulated by dimming the lights for several hours out of every 24 so that the crew’s biological clocks wouldn’t be upset. Odors such as fresh rain and earth were regularly introduced into the ship’s ventilation system to produce a similar effect. Shipboard time was also measured using a 24-hour clock: we got to see the ship’s chronometer on TOS; on TNG and Voyager, they routinely used expressions like “Oh-seven hundred” and “Twenty-three hundred.”
Then the first thing you learn as an officer on a ship potentially hostile to the Federation is those schedules. So you can plan your attack for when the skilled and experienced crew is sleeping.
Rubbish! How semi-literate and/or retarded do you have to be not to understand the word “watch” in this context?
As for being “old fashioned,” whatever happened to the “bells” system of keeping time on board ship? Is it still used, or has the 24-hour clock replaced it completely? (I assume that all USN vessels operate on Zulu time.)
Yeah, like at 07:00 on a Sunday. 
Read Youtube comments for a while then get back to me about the intellectual level of the American viewing public.
How’s that really different than the modern Navy though? I’m sure that shit goes down at 3 am all the time- how do they handle it? I’m guessing that whoever’s the Officer of the Deck handles it unless it’s so serious they have to wake or otherwise get the Captain.
I’m guessing Starfleet does the “you have the conn” bit wrong from what I’ve read- when Kirk or Picard is going ashore or whatever, shouldn’t he be giving Riker or whoever the Deck, and not just the Conn?
Just for fun, compare it to this: