One important difference is that most Starfleet ships aren’t primarily warships. The big ones can be used as warships, but they also have many other roles, like science ships, diplomatic ships, transports, first contact duties, and the like. They’d routinely carry large numbers of crew whose main duties lay in those areas. While it’s possible to have a military emergency at almost any moment, that’s not so much a concern for the diplomats or stellar cartographers. So you’d probably have lots of departments with only one shift, who follow a more regular day/night schedule. The extra shifts of military-style crews would operate around those schedules.
Critical systems like the helm, sensors, and engineering would be in operation 24 hours a day, with a 6 or 8 hour rotation, and maybe some selections of the weapons systems, but everything else could take down time more regularly.
From what I understand, the Virginia class SSNs don’t require hot racking, but pretty much all of the previous classes do, including the Los Angeles class.
Does hot-racking happen at all? Yeah. But it’s not the norm. Hopefully a fast boat sailor can weigh in with how frequent it is. While I did a couple of brief stints on LA-class SSNs, I spent the bulk of my time on an old SSBN. I only ever saw it when we had riders on board, and usually we’d try to just put crew ashore to free up their rack, rather than have anybody hot racking.
I don’t think of Star Trek as existing in a universe that’s regularly in a sate of “full-on apocalypse.” Like, the number of episodes where they’re just cruising along and suddenly everything is on fire for some reason are pretty limited. The cliche Star Trek opening is a shot of the space ship orbiting a planet, and a voice over that says something like, “Star Date number point number point number. We’ve arrived at planet Argle Bargle VI as part of a resupply run/diplomatic mission/we just happened to find it and are checking it out.” Then they beam down, and the plot starts. In situations like that, it’d be trivial to arrange schedules to make sure that your “A” team is rested and ready to handle things when you arrive. Even the episodes that are all about shooting other space ships usually start with, “We’ve been ordered to the Greek Letter Quadrant to investigate reports of Romulan vessels,” or something. It’s pretty rare that they’re just cruising in hyperspace, and suddenly they’re being shot at by klingons with no warning.
Do I really need to emphasize “production” vs “pilot” episodes, with this crowd?
I guess so.
What a lot of viewers seem to miss is that “Captain Antagonist” didn’t change from 3 shift to 4 shift because he lurves him some 4 shift rotation. Or that he’s Capt Queeg.
He needed to establish command authority NOW because he knew they could get into combat on a moments’ notice, and he didn’t need the crybaby Enterprise crew going “but captain picard lets us do it this way! whaaaa!” (and you know they would, because they did it in past episodes). He needed them to snap to!
Whichever rotation Riker said the Enterprise was on, Capt A would have switched to the other one.
The way Picard does things works for him. He’s got the crew to know what to do without being told. That makes the Enterprise a top ship. But Capt Antagonist isn’t Picard, and he has no time to teach everyone what he wants.
Past episodes? Hell, they did it in that very episode, which just emphasized why he had to shake things up. That Captain got a lot more fan-hate than he deserved.
Are you kidding? The narrative universe of Star Trek is an existential horror that would make H.P. Lovecraft bleed from every orifice in terror. These people are beset by beings beyond their comprehension, flung across the galaxy by inexplicable space distortions, are captured by ‘temporal anomalies’ thrusting them into time loops or alternative timelines, have plasma conduits or other devices explode without warning, beings who can change form at will, have an entire ‘Mirror Universe’ full of distorted versions of themselves that they sometimes randomly get delivered into, and this doesn’t even get into the metaphysical issues of being rent atom by atom and then having a copy reconstituted somewhere else, all of which is explained only in terms of pure technogibberish which makes it clear that none of these people actually understand that they are in some kind of horrific psychosocial simulation designed to test the limits of human emotional endurance. The ‘doctors’ on their spacecraft are at best inept and bumbling and at worse a literal emergency projection, a sort of super-advanced AED that may or may not actually be capable of understanding the nature of your medical emergency.
At least in the universe of Aliens or John Carpenter’s The Thing there is a singular horror to be aware of, and can actually be destroyed by fire or normal weapons. In Star Trek, many of the ghastly threats are completely invulnerable to even their mystifyingly destructive and yet still mostly harmless ‘phaser’ weapons that defy thermodynamics or fundamental electrodynamics, and yet people just pretend that everything is all fine and they should just run around the galaxy in their pajamas surveying gaseous anomalies and “M-class planets” without a shred of curiosity about why their universe is both so habitable and yet full of existential threats.
And don’t get me started on synthehol. What even is that shit? I’m pretty sure it is a concoction made of Seagram’s 7, J&B, Wild Irish Rose, and ditch water, with the alcohol replaced by formalin which is why everybody just sits around like zombies starring out that the stars wizzing by while radiation from the CMB should be streaming through them blueshifted into hard gamma, cooking them from the inside out.
Wasn’t he the one who made Troi wear an appropriate uniform while she was on watch? Made her look much more professional, and a whole lot easier to take seriously.
I mean, look what he had to work with. In that episode, he gives Riker his very first order, namely to adjust the watch system, and what happens? Riker finds him about an hour later and casually mentions that he discussed it with the other officers and they were not sure they really felt like it. (We also learn that Riker — with the rank of only Commander, not post-captain — turned down command of his own vessel, because apparently nothing except a Galaxy-class ship of the line was good enough for him. Clearly the man does not quite have a grasp of how things work, and apparently someone in Starfleet has been letting him get away with “turning down” orders. It’s too bad he did not spend more time in the Klingon fleet; they might have actually whipped him into shape, or someone would have murdered him in ritual combat, either way problem solved.)
That should have been a disciplinary action right there, and I feel as if Michael Ironside was in the sector he would have immediately replaced Riker as the executive officer, and a damn effective one until he shot out the main viewer with his submachine pistol. “See you at the party, Ritchter!”