this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
49 points (98.0% liked)

TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

3730 readers
776 users here now

/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!

Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.

~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.

~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.

~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.

~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.

~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.

~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.

~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'

~ **8. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.

Fun will now commence.


Sister Communities:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!


Honorary Badbitch:

@[email protected] for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.


Creator Resources:

Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)

Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)


founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
 

A stupid toilet joke from another post, a snow day, and a stronger edible than I was expecting got me wondering: have we ever seen a 24th century Starfleet toilet, and how would it function?

Edit: I meant 24th century / 2300's and not 23rd century.

Background

I know we've seen the sonic showers which seem to operate similar to, but also different from, a regular shower, but I don't ever recall seeing any other typical bathroom fixtures in the 24th century Starfleet vessels (well, mirrors still seem to be just mirrors, so there's that)

The only references I saw on Memory Alpha for the 24th century were:

  • A very blurry, zoomed-in shot of a section of the Enterprise-D when the Borg cut away a section of it.
  • Lower Decks where Boimler drops his tricorder in the toilet (Note: I am in-between P+ subscriptions until Disco comes back, so I can't reference the episode for evidence)
  • Various references to "waste extraction" on vessels of other civilizations

A very blurry shot of what Memory Alpha claims is a toilet on the Enterprise-D

A very blurry shot of what Memory Alpha claims is a toilet on the Enterprise-D

For the purposes of this episode of Shitty Daystrom, we'll only focus on Starfleet's facilities.

Would toilets still be the same as we know them, familiar but different, or something more exotic?

Option 1: Same As We Know Them

Without any evidence to the contrary, it would be relatively safe to assume nothing has really changed on that front between now and the 24th century. Furthermore, water conservation isn't much of a concern due to replicators existing. The waste would be carried via sewer pipes, similar to what we have now, to a waste reclamation system (which may operate differently but do the same thing as treatment plants we have now).

Evidence for this includes VOY: Projections where "sewage and waste reclamation" was a system that was reported to be offline when the computer was queried for a status update. While the episode existed in a malfunctioning holodeck program, there's no reason to assume those systems don't exist on the real ships.

I'm not a fan of this assumption since it would imply a huge lack of innovation and would be generally inefficient given other technological advances at their disposal. The supporting evidence is also vague in that it doesn't specify whether "sewage and waste reclamation" was a central or distributed system.

Option 2: Familiar But Different

As mentioned above, "sewage and waste reclamation" is a subsystem that exists on Starfleet ships. In this model, rather than being a centralized system like a treatment plant, it would be a distributed system.

The restroom fixtures would remain more or less familiar to what we have now, but instead of physically carrying the effluent away for central processing, they would simply dematerialize it and reclaim the energy (like putting your dirty dishes back into the replicator). This would simplify the engineering requirements and reduce mass since the EPS network is readily available; no extra pipes would need to traverse the ship.

Alternatively, instead of directly converting it from matter to energy, it's beamed from the fixture into a central processing unit. That seems inefficient to me because of the extra and unnecessary step of re-materializing it.

Option 3: Something Completely Exotic

I grant that this one is more of a stretch, but bear with me. Instead of anything we're familiar with, it would simply be a special type of transporter which locks onto your waste and just beams it out of you. From there, it's either immediately reclaimed as energy and stored or transported to a central processing unit for bulk conversion.

As said earlier, this theory is a bit out there, but with the one-piece uniforms, I can see how they would be practical.

Conclusion

Without the ability to reference the Lower Decks episode 'Grounded' for possible additional evidence, I'm going to stick with my personal head-canon of Option #2 as the standard Starfleet waste reclamation method. The reasoning is based on how I see the available technology being best utilized and the efficiency at which that method would operate.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

That's a good shout for any lurking SNW writers. Though I expect it's already up on a proverbial whiteboard somewhere. A comic (or otherwise, but I'm sure they'd get a couple of jokes in, regardless) pest infestation plot seems right up their alley. Tribbles with a twist.

E: Affer a moment's thought, this seems like something Lower Decks has definitely explored, but I'm not as caught up on it as I should be.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I have also not seen all of LD, so I don't know, but if they do, they should also point out that almost every planet they go to is almost totally free of small flying creatures like bugs.

I mean sure, Risa killed them all off because they interfered with people's vacations, but even the never before visited but almost exactly like Earth planets have no bugs.