On 'Freshers and Ship Design
Jeff Zeitlin 03 Jul 2025 23:53 UTC
It has been a long-standing tradition in ship design that each stateroom
have its own 'fresher. However, this would seem to be somewhat inefficient.
It is acknowledged that were one to designate a stateroom as suitable for
paying passengers it would be appropriate for the 'fresher to be private to
that stateroom. However, in ships that are not intended for passenger
carriage, or for certain specialty ships, common 'freshers might be a
better option.
For the portion of the crew that is "on-duty" at any time, small 'freshers,
perhaps omitting the shower, in reasonably accessible "crew-public" areas,
would serve for when crew members with nearby duty stations need to take
care of business. For off-duty crew, if they're in "public" areas of the
ship, they have access to the same facilities as on-duty crew; for those in
their own rooms, a common 'fresher nearby would serve, just as a single
'fresher in a residence can potentially serve four people without excessive
contention, provided that they're not all on identical schedules.
So why don't we see ship designs and plans with those "common-area" and
sleep-room-shared 'freshers?
(A note: for those of you who had the deckplans from _Star Trek_ (The
Original Series), you'll note that 'freshers were shared between two
staterooms, even though everything we saw on-screen was amazingly roomy
[because they needed to fit the cameras]. Even then, they didn't use the
one-per-stateroom model... I can't say whether the deckplans from TNG
followed that model; I never had them.)
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