There are what, 3 holodecks for a ship with 1000 people? Seems like there should be huge lines, but Broccoli is always able to get in whenever he wants and spend hours in there.
My WAG is that it’s based on rank. On TNG & VOY we mainly see the main characters (who overlap with the senior staff) using it. On DS9 the holosuites were rented by the hour.
Think about it for a second. What was Barkley’s job on the ship? He was a moderately high ranking person in the engineering department with enough pull to make it on the occasional away team or to be the go-to guy when something fails for some minor plot-related, reason. All he has to do is hang an out-of-order sign on the holodeck hatch and lock the door behind him. When people ask him about the strange smells, explosions, livestock noises and one meter tall miniature Rikers, he just says “Oh, just running some diagnostics”.
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Shifts are probably staggered that maybe 1/7 of the crew or less is off at any given time, so maybe out of 1000, only 100-200 or so would be able to use it. Also, maybe time off is different in the future. They hardly slept, and you never saw replacement shifts (e.g. like how CSI’s main characters are actually the night shift.) My guess would be that they work 30-40 days in a row, sleep 1-3 hours per “day”, and maybe get a few days or a week off in between. I would imagine that life on the Enterprise would be similar to life on a submarine.
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How do you know there’s only 3? Maybe there’s 3 decks of holosuites, not just 3 rooms.
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Maybe to us, a holosuite is the be-all, end-all of entertainment. But, if you watch Futurama, the locals are bored by what we would consider fantastic technology.
My guess is people don’t use them because they’re freak’en dangerous. How many times do they malfunction?
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No, the producers didn’t think out almost any aspect of the holodeck technology. They try to make it seem superficially reasonable, but there’s no guarantee whether it actually reflects a consistent world, which means it typically (although not necessarily) doesn’t, although you can typically (although not necessarily) fill in some blanks to make it consistent if you like.
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If you assume official uses are rare, and it’s used regularly for recreational use, then 2 hours per person, for a 1000 people, for three holodecks, is a visit about once a month. That’s not very often, but some people see movies about that often, so it’s not totally implausible.
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Maybe recreation facilities are assigned on some sort of rota system, such that some people use the holodeck more, but others use a gym or swimming pool more often instead.
Question: Can a holodeck portion itself off? As in, can one half of the holodeck be a 1920’s gangster story and the other half of it be a Roman orgy? Maybe non-officer crew use it in groups.
Right? If it’s all “imaginary” space anyhow, shouldn’t the holodeck be capable of creating an infinite number of holodecks within itself?
It’d have to, as sometimes people will be further apart than the actual amount of space on the holodeck. I remember one episode where they were moving an tribe from one planet to another, using the holodeck to simulate the changing landscape, so they wouldn’t know they’d changed planets. One of the kids accidentally fell behind, and he was a pretty long way away when they found him.
Someone on that ship has the job of Holodeck Jizz Mopper. Or possibly Jizz Transporter.
Dude, you missed one hell of an awesome thread a few weeks ago.
Maybe the holodecks use time compression. As in, several apparent days elapse for the people inside the deck, but on the outside it is only a few minutes. That way there would rarely be a wait for an available one.
Alternate uses for the holodeck
You just know someone would do that, the holodeck’s potential is too great to waste on hanging out with Robin Hood or whatever.
Or maybe several different people go to a roman orgy at the same time.
Granted that this is sarcasm, you really make the opposite point. There’s an episode of TNG where Picard is off-ship for some reason and is replaced by an admiral who switch the crew from watch-in-three (8 hour shifts, one shift per day) to some sort of 4 watch system that Riker opposed. Clearly, the norm isn’t too far off of what we work today: work eight hours, sleep eight hours, and personal business eight hours.* So at any given time, only a third of the crew is both awake and off-work, and we could reasonably figure that half of that those are eating, bathing, spending quality time with friends and family, and drinking in 10-Forward. Leaving about a sixth of the crew (maybe 180 people) potentially interested in holodeck time. If some of these are kids who can’t go alone, some aren’t interested, many double or triple up, most do have other hobbies or responsibilities like extra work or kids, no one goes more than once a week**, and officers get a little extra time or even access to a private holodeck that the enlisted folks can’t use, it’d explain the way that we see it on TV. For that matter, we only see holodecks 1-3; maybe those are the officers’ holodecks, and ensigns and non-coms use 4-10.
*Assuming that they still use a 24-hour day and that Starfleet personnel don’t work overtime because, I don’t know, they have a good union or something. If we assume that they have a day off a week and work 9 or 10 hour days, it balances.
**Obviously this isn’t true, based on Barclay. Could be that there’s a stigma associated with it, the way we’d look down on someone who’s over 25 and gets trashed five nights a week.
There would probably be regularly scheduled events for groups of people as opposed to all time being individually allocated.
Third Thursday of the month is Roman Orgy Day in Holodeck 2!
Second Tuesday of the Month is Ski Slope Day in Holodeck 3!
I think the Enterprise has four holodecks. Lets see 1000 people divided by four divided by hours in a week, I get about 40.32 minutes per person per week of fun time.
I think there’d be a fair number of persons who wouldn’t use the holodeck, frankly; possibly from a fair of growing addicted, possibly because they simply didn’t like the idea. It’s akin to my lack of interest in video games; I just dont’ understand the appeal.
Especially if they, like Picard, think they’re all evolved beyond actually being Human.
Oh dear Lord. I actually have the Enterprise D blueprints, but they are in an another room occupied by a cranky person. I do have a cutaway poster, which shows off at least three holodecks of various size.
1014 crew. That means about 3 people per day day get holodeck usage once a year assuming 24 hour usage on three holodecks.
3 hour usage means 8 people per day per year.
Factor in, probably actually more holodecks.
Factor in, actual shared holodeck usage.
Also factor in, time-share holodeck: Each person only really needs a spherical portion of the holodeck of diameter slightly larger then their arm spread.
Also factor in, there’s probably holodecks on Earth. If someone wanted to just while their life away in a holodeck fantasy, there’s no need for them to join Starfleet. So there’s a automatic aversion to fantasy built in to Starfleet.