Waste and recycking in TOS...

[T'Girl]

There could be both a more tradtional central kitchen, with a ajacent dining area, and also a automated food production/delivery system that services a larger number of dining rooms and rec rooms. The galley could have a more varied menu, and also cook special need meals. Things like meals with medical restrictions, and religious significance (passover for example).

Plus there could be a small third facility for crew members to cook their own foods, personal preferance and recreation. I believe TMOST mention this.

Modern warships have vending machines, candy and sodas.

Nonetheless a mechanical dumbwaiter system simply doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Verses every single observed food slot having it's own independent transporter mech behind the wall? Using small turbolifts for delivery make far more sense.

 

[Timo]

ST6 confirms the existence of a galley. Might be that it only serves special needs, such as banquets at the Officers' Lounge - tellingly, our bridge-duty heroes are among the first to arrive when Valeris triggers the phaser alarm, suggesting the galley is in the superstructure of the ship, right next to the officers' dining facilities with a view...

I could see the ship provided with "synthetic" food normally, some of which is the doing of the galley and its cooks, while most is prepared automatically. For special occasions, the galley works more intensely and prepares "traditional" food as well. Special locations get perks: Kirk has a food slot of some sort in his cabin (*), either a local synthesizer or then the end terminal of a delivery system (mechanical or transporter-based or merely stocked by hard-working yeomen, we don't know). But if the random officer wants basic food in privacy, he or she has to walk to a "communal" dispenser and get a tray; if he or she wants high quality food, a trip to the galley and a special request is required.

Timo Saloniemi

* Kirk just doesn't use his cabin in TOS. Instead, he slums it down on Deck 12 or Deck 3 or even Deck 5, on various pretexts, and deliberately vacates the more luxurious premises on Deck 2. His predecessor wasn't falsely modest that way.

 

[Marsden]

There could be both a more tradtional central kitchen, with a ajacent dining area, and also a automated food production/delivery system that services a larger number of dining rooms and rec rooms. The galley could have a more varied menu, and also cook special need meals. Things like meals with medical restrictions, and religious significance (passover for example).

Plus there could be a small third facility for crew members to cook their own foods, personal preferance and recreation. I believe TMOST mention this.

Modern warships have vending machines, candy and sodas.

Nonetheless a mechanical dumbwaiter system simply doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Verses every single observed food slot having it's own independent transporter mech behind the wall? Using small turbolifts for delivery make far more sense.

I think a miniaturized conveyor system is possible. It could even be a bit like a pnumatic tube system but obviously more advance so that everyone's sandwich doesn't have to be stuffed into a container, unless the receiving food slot removes it automatically.
I don't think there's any transporters involved, but just like there's Transporters specifically and transporter can mean anything that transports something, I don't believe these are Replicators but they do seem to create things in a similar but less advanced way.

As for turbolifts, why do they even need a car in the tube. It's artifical gravity, they could have a .1 gravity in the tube and you can float to where you want to go. Same for the litte food packages.

 

[Doug Otte]

What looks like a familiar toilet is actually the waste management system. Anything that needs to be disposed of (besides human waste) goes into this receptacle that seals tightly before disposing of the contents. A proccessing and recycling system reduces the materiel to its most basic elements and recycles whatever possible into usable elements. If there is anything that cannot safely be recycled then it is either placed into a temporary storage reseptacle or jettisoned into space via a small transporter.

One could also add a form of retractable curtain for additional privacy on the port side of the compartment.

Most of this thread has been a discussion about replication, but the above section made me wonder: why would the waste management system not include human waste? Most of us assume that all waste, including human, is recycled in the Trek era, so why would separate recycling units and toilets be required? It would only take more valuable space, especially on smaller vessels like a shuttle. If the waste is destined for the same recycled material, there's no need to process it separately.

 

[Warped9]

It was poor wording on my part. What I meant was that the toilet could be used for disposal of other things besides human waste. Thus it's more than just a toilet. Whatever goes into it is reduced to its basic elements mindful that there might be some things that perhaps cannot be recycled.

On one hand some might wonder or be creeped out about recycling human waste, but we give little thought to such things on Earth where animal waste has always been recycled back into the environment. And we eat many things where we give little to no thought of what went into getting that food to us. Those of us who enjoy meat might not be all that comfortable visiting a mass production slaughterhouse or production plant processing cattle and poultry.

On Earth we can drink clean water from a spring without thinking about what that water might have come in contact with along the way.

I envision a far future that manages waste far, far better than we do today. In context of Trek I don't expect to see growing mountains of plastic from disposable water bottles and personal coffee machines where each single cup of coffee results in yet another plastic container dumped into the environment. In Trek's context containers can be immediately reused either through cleaning or being broken down into basic elements and reformed into something else.

 

[UssGlenn]

What if the food slots use a hard wired transporter system? The food isn't beaming technically. That reduces the complexity of the system because you just need a pad in the slot, which is wired to all the hardware is back in the kitchen. Meaning that it's not a site to site transport which is shown as difficult in TOS.

 

[Warped9]

What if the food slots use a hard wired transporter system? The food isn't beaming technically. That reduces the complexity of the system because you just need a pad in the slot, which is wired to all the hardware is back in the kitchen. Meaning that it's not a site to site transport which is shown as difficult in TOS.

There is nothing wrong with that idea--I like it--but some folks still seemed to be hung up on the point that even if hard-wired you still have to dematerialize and rematerialize the matter.

If we assume foodstuffs are a lot less complex than living organisms (such as people) than hard-wired teleportation should work fine.

And remember that in TOS it wasn't impossible to do site-to-site transport, but that it wasn't recommended.

 

[aalenfae]

We also have to remember that /most/ of the food in TOS is really simple food to begin with: basic shapes with colors.

If it's being prepared in a kitchen and ferried down in some kind of physical/mechanical operation, why only limit yourself to colored shapes?

I always thought that the overly-simplistic food in TOS could easily be explained away by saying that whatever technology they were using to make the food wasn't generally good enough to make realistic food - or that the requirements to make realistic food weren't worth the energy cost. In that light, the "hard-wired transporter" makes a lot of sense. It's a LOT easier to transport and re-materialize cubes of flavored matter than a realistic food item - much less a living, breathing human.

 

[Albertese]

We also have to remember that /most/ of the food in TOS is really simple food to begin with: basic shapes with colors.

If it's being prepared in a kitchen and ferried down in some kind of physical/mechanical operation, why only limit yourself to colored shapes?

I always thought that the overly-simplistic food in TOS could easily be explained away by saying that whatever technology they were using to make the food wasn't generally good enough to make realistic food - or that the requirements to make realistic food weren't worth the energy cost. In that light, the "hard-wired transporter" makes a lot of sense. It's a LOT easier to transport and re-materialize cubes of flavored matter than a realistic food item - much less a living, breathing human.

Hmmm.... I think in my next rewatch of the series, I'll have to pay attention to the food. I know there often were the colored cubes, but it seems to me that there are plenty of ham sandwiches and green salads. I cold be wrong about this. Need to review it and talley what's eaten.

--Alex

 

[T'Girl]

green salads

I believe the only time we saw a green salad, Yeoman Rand hand carried it into the Captain's quarters. Whether the salad came from a galley, or straight out of a machine is unknown.

ham sandwiches

In 'Tribbles, Kirk fully expected to receive a chicken sandwich out of the food slot (he didn't), so that would be a item the machine could produce.

It's interesting that the tribble would have had time to of eaten the sandwich. Unless the tribble was already inside the "sandwich machine," and it was the tribble that was dispensed onto the plate.

 

[aalenfae]

We also have to remember that /most/ of the food in TOS is really simple food to begin with: basic shapes with colors.

If it's being prepared in a kitchen and ferried down in some kind of physical/mechanical operation, why only limit yourself to colored shapes?

I always thought that the overly-simplistic food in TOS could easily be explained away by saying that whatever technology they were using to make the food wasn't generally good enough to make realistic food - or that the requirements to make realistic food weren't worth the energy cost. In that light, the "hard-wired transporter" makes a lot of sense. It's a LOT easier to transport and re-materialize cubes of flavored matter than a realistic food item - much less a living, breathing human.

Hmmm.... I think in my next rewatch of the series, I'll have to pay attention to the food. I know there often were the colored cubes, but it seems to me that there are plenty of ham sandwiches and green salads. I cold be wrong about this. Need to review it and talley what's eaten.

--Alex

I guess it could be that maybe colored cubes are just a really popular alien or otherwise futuristic food on the Enterprise.

I do encourage that tally, though - I'd be curious to know how often real food is eaten in relation to colored-cube food

 

[Marsden]

I guess there would be a third catagory of semi real food, as in pink celery and blue chicken. Or would that just count as "real food" as opposed to those colorful blobs of clay they had at times.

And would Plomeek soup count as "real"?

 

[Timo]

Gotta argue that the cubes must be haute cuisine even in terms of their looks - otherwise they wouldn't have been used in "Journey to Babel". Not dull astronaut paste, but simply a futuristic favorite!

And remember that in TOS it wasn't impossible to do site-to-site transport, but that it wasn't recommended.

Umm, what was "not recommended" was beaming into a confined space inside the starship itself while the ship is at uncontrollably high warp ("Day of the Dove"). It worked just fine anyway.

There was nothing said about site-to-site, that is, grabbing something at A and putting it at B where neither A nor B is the pad. But in "Cloud Minders", we saw evidence that this was actually flat out impossible in TOS: the adversary of the week was grabbed at A, briefly materialized on pad despite this being politically disastrous, and only then dumped at B.

Hardwired transporting might in fact be the easiest case of all, as it could be argued that there are pads at both A and B, and the route in between is well protected...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Warped9]

TOS' dirty secret: the coloured cubes were really popplers. Federation citizens of the 23rd century were addicted to munching on alien children.

Even the Vulcans are into it and they're supposed to be vegetarians.

 

[Timo]

Are they?

Surak is claimed to have established a pattern of pacifism for all Vulcans, but none of the dialogue of "Savage Curtain" really even confirms he himself would have supported such a worldview. Spock eating meat in "All Our Yesterdays" is supposed to be savage, but everything about him is savage there - perhaps he just eats his meat particularly savagely? If he's so off kilter, should we trust him if he says "Normally, my species only eats, shoots and leaves"?

Tuvok was comfortable with eating burritos...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Albertese]

^^^
Not all burritos are con carne. My personal favorites are just bean and cheese.

I'm not a big Enterprise fan... did T'Pol eat meat? I recall she had a weird thing about touching her food....


--Alex

 

[T'Girl]

Gotta argue that the cubes must be haute cuisine even in terms of their looks - otherwise they wouldn't have been used in "Journey to Babel". Not dull astronaut paste, but simply a futuristic favorite!

My take is that a automatic food machines will have a slab of potatoes, a slab of carrots, a slab of beef and when someone orders beef stew little blocks of potatoes/carrots/beef are cut off into a bowl, broth covers the blocks and away it goes.

 

[kirkfan]

I think brutally disintegrating something instead of gently recycling it is likely a huge waste of energy. That much is suggested by the principles of thermodynamics.

 

[T'Girl]

Depend on which of the two options requires less power. And in the case of the shuttle toilet, there's the consideration of available space in the small compartment that holds other equipment.

Disintegrating last nights tacos el grande with refried beans might be the best way to go.