Things you wished were mention in Trek novels
- Thread starter Nyotarules
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A scene taking place in the toilets. Where someone desribes the flushing mechanism of the 24th century.
On DS9 they called it "waste extraction." I'm not sure I want to know what that means.
I always assumed, since there are no toilets anywhere, you just walk up to a replicator and say: "Computer, extract waste." and it just beams the unwanted matter directly out of your body. "Waste extraction" is like a bank of solid matter where the replicator stores extracted matter until it needs additional matter to make, like, a chicken sandwich or whatever.
I actually thought that waste extraction was a place where urine or fecal matter was processed so that only a minimum of contaminants were released into space. Why wouldn’t a head still be called a head?
Because DS9's writers liked the running gag of calling it waste extraction. It was a "clean" way to sneak bathroom references past the censors, since it wasn't immediately obvious what it was referring to, but once you figure it out, it sounds kind of nasty if you think about it.
(Mystery Science Theater 3000 did something similar with the robots on the Satellite of Love. It took me a while to figure out what "load pan bay" was a euphemism for.)
For an in-universe excuse, since the term was exclusive to DS9, one could assume it was an alien usage. It usually showed up in Ferengi scenes, so I'd think it was their idiom, but it was used by humans to refer to the station's systems as well, so maybe it's Cardassian and Quark & Rom just picked it up from living on the station.
I'm not positive since I haven't read it myself, but I believe one of DC's TNG special or annual comics covered what happened on Garon II.
^^Maybe all Cardassian military personnel have permanent colostomies so that they don’t have to interrupt their daily routines to use the restroom, and waste extraction is where the bags are deposited after being used.
There's a brief toilet scene in Where Sea Meets Sky. Pike goes to the bathroom at the Captain's Table bar and is amazed that instead of plumbing, the sink uses a transporter to beam the dirt off his hands.
Beaming the shit out of your body or dirt of your hands seems kinda unnecessarily dangerous. On the other hand having "They died because the waste extractor was beaming the wrong stuff out" as your death reason would be funny. Well, not for you, but others.
They came close to describing "Waste Extraction" in Enterprise (I forget the exact episode) but kids were asking questions of the Enterprise and Tucker got the 'poop' question. Basically everything is recycled--I forget the exact wording. I'd imagine by DS9 the methods are more advanced, but at the end of the day I'm sure a toilet is a toilet, probably something between an airplane toilet and a space shuttle toilet. Since they have artificial gravity I don't think it'd have to be fancy (though God help you if you were going number 1 and the gravity went out (or number 2, but liquid is harder to avoid then solid, I mean, unless, well, never mind 
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Not to mention in ENT: "The Catwalk," where (and I'm going mostly from memory, here) Trip or somebody offers to convert some storage lockers into "latrines," or something similar. Also, there's DS9: "Explorers," where Jake complains about having to use a zero-G toilet aboard the Bajoran lightship-replica.They came close to describing "Waste Extraction" in Enterprise (I forget the exact episode) but kids were asking questions of the Enterprise and Tucker got the 'poop' question. Basically everything is recycled--I forget the exact wording. I'd imagine by DS9 the methods are more advanced, but at the end of the day I'm sure a toilet is a toilet, probably something between an airplane toilet and a space shuttle toilet. Since they have artificial gravity I don't think it'd have to be fancy (though God help you if you were going number 1 and the gravity went out (or number 2, but liquid is harder to avoid then solid, I mean, unless, well, never mind
I always assumed that "waste extraction" referred to more than just bodily waste, but all manners of waste (i.e. the usual definition in our times). Garbage bins, replicators, and other material collected during clean-ups were all transported to the same waste extraction area that contained bodily waste processed from the various heads and crew quarters.
Waste extraction itself was a complicated process of breaking down all the components in an energy-efficient way in order to recycle necessary mass and elements for the replicators, the weapons systems, propulsion to maintain their relative orbit, and other needs as detailed to the extractors.
The body waste is probably transported, just from the toilet system itself (or, rather, a methodic cleansing of a sump pump like system underneath the floor), utilizing indiscrimate bulk cargo transporters instead of the finely-tuned people-friendly ones.
This doesn't really jibe with Star Trek V, which implies that the waste is shot straight into space, but maybe that warning was because Starfleet ships usually cease waste extraction duties when docked and expected to be empty for shore leave.
That's very interesting; I'd not come across that before. How does that square with Scotty at the beginning of V talking about the ship getting out of Spacedock and immediately breaking down?
Scotty didn't actually say that; we just inferred it. What he said was, "'Let's see what she's got,' said the captain. And then we found out, didn't we?" And a line before that, he opened his log entry with "Shakedown cruise report." Since he's filing that report when the ship is back at Earth, that implies it's a post-shakedown summary. He also said the ship had a fine engine but the doors wouldn't work. The impression is that the important systems work fine, but it's the little things that aren't working right. And it could be that being relaunched mid-repairs for the emergency was the reason the ship acted up so much on the mission.
I'd imagine "extraction" refers to what happens after you eliminate it; that is, all the useless/hazardous stuff (miniscule amounts of blood, toxins, pathogens, etc) is removed from what's left and quarantined/destroyed, and useful chemical components (iron, calcium, etc) are stored in reserve for replicating.
I did a little time computation (dates are from Memory Alpha and I'll go with those just for the sake of argument):
TWOK: Stardate 8130.3 (2285)
TSFS: Stardate 8210.3 (2285)
TVH: Stardate 8390.0 (2286)--and we are told that they are in the 3rd month of their Vulcan exile
TFF: Stardate 8454.1 (2287)
Now the latest I would estimate TVH could take place would be late March 2286 (maybe very early April). That's because of Kirk's line about the 3 months of the exile. Now I'm assuming of course that the 3 months began the date they landed. Now it could be earlier than March all the way back to January 2286.
But lets just take TSFS to the latest possible date, December 2285 and TVH toward the end of March 2386. That means if TFF was in 2287 it could not take place anything less than about 9 months later, January 2287 (again assuming the years are correct-which I'm using just for the sake of argument).
But assuming there really was 3 months between TSFS and TVH 180 stardates had passed in that time (60 dates per month). Then another 64 between TVH and TFF....ok, forget the stardates. I guess this proves Stardates were really picked at random. God, would it have really been that hard to use a little logic with the Stardates--they made no sense whatsoever, ugh.
Ok, long story short by my calculation TFF could not be much less than 9 months after TVH. I would guess they were probably on a shakedown cruise and malfunctions kept cropping up until they finally gave up and decided to return to spacedock. I figured Scotty probably at first thought he could fix things on the go but as things added up it just got to be too much. Which would make sense. I don't think the Enterprise would return right away at the first sign of trouble--they're a little tougher then that.
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