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Did Picard switch it back to a 3 Shift Rotation?

How many Duty shifts per day after Chain of Command?

  • 3 Duty Shifts because it makes the old man Comfortable.

    Votes: 11 55.0%

  • 4 Duty Shifts because why rock the Boat.

    Votes: 5 25.0%

  • 5 Duty Shifts Because anything Eddie can do, Jean-Luc can do better.

    Votes: 4 20.0%
  • Total voters
    20
Guy Gardener

Guy Gardener

Fleet Admiral
Admiral
Chain of Command.

The snowflake crew of the 1701 D swat blood to reinvent themselves as 4 Duty shifts because their perfectly reasonable new Captain assumed the Federation was hours away from a war where most of these grumbling malcontents upset that they may not have time to be in a play, or ride horsies on the Holodeck, were likely going to burn to death on the inside from the warp core venting gamma radiation.

So after Jean-Luc mourns the passing of his fish, that was either spaced with the garbage or sent to the galley to appease the few carnivores in the crew... Did the old Captain embrace the new world order, or did he switch the crew rotation back to Day, Night and Swing creating just as big a disgruntled hump as Jellico did a week earlier?
 
I think the crew had a big sook until Picard changed it back. I'm sure it's no coincidence that they never mentioned delta shift on the Ent-D ever again.

As far as we know, no one cried like little bitches over on DS9 when they introduced a four-shift rotation. ;)
 
I would have expected shift rotations in SF to have been governed by SF policy rather than individual captains' preferences.

From a RL pov, making frequent changes just causes confusion. Once a change has been made, it needs to be given sufficient time to bed-in and to see if it works. Changes shouldn't be made at whim.

In the Jellicoe case, the 4 shift system introduction was handled badly (as a deliberate attempt to show how Jellicoe was different from Picard) but that doesn't make it the "wrong" decision.
 
It's never stated. Riker was informed that the switch would cause "significant personnel problems." Given that the department heads on the Enterprise were professionals, not whiners, we should assume that they spoke the truth. If that occured, then it's unlikely that they were over it in the short interval between Jellico's arrival and Picard's return.

So yes, they probably went back to three.
 
Victoria said:
I would have expected shift rotations in SF to have been governed by SF policy rather than individual captains' preferences.

From a RL pov, making frequent changes just causes confusion. Once a change has been made, it needs to be given sufficient time to bed-in and to see if it works. Changes shouldn't be made at whim.

In the Jellicoe case, the 4 shift system introduction was handled badly (as a deliberate attempt to show how Jellicoe was different from Picard) but that doesn't make it the "wrong" decision.
Click to expand...

Voyager's night-shift has 15 people running the ship. They just speed up or slow down, for a few hours, so that they are always in deep space during night shift, and it's always day shift when they get where they are going, like a planet or a space station.

But if we assume that the Enterprise D's shifts are evenly staffed, and only 300 souls were civilians who had nothing to do with running the ship or the duty shifts, then they have to figure out how to run the ship with 70 less people every 6 hours, or find masochists or Vulcans who are willing to work 2 x 6 hour shifts per day rather than 1 x 8 hour shift per day.

The only painless way around this, would have been for Jellicoe to have brought 267 crewmen from the Cairo with him, and called them Delta Shift.
 
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Guy Gardener said:
The only painless way around this, would have been for Jellicoe to have brought 267 crewmen from the Cairo with him, and called them Delta Shift.
Click to expand...
You might not need 267, because you could retrain and repurpose some crew. But you're right, a sizable infusion of new crew would be needed, and a shakedown period after that. Four shifts might be a better arrangement in the long run... but you can't make the change overnight.
 
They have redundant crew to get murdered by the holodeck every week, so if there's no recreation time, then there's all these living and breathing people walking around who are supposed to be dead, so the D has plenty of spare warm bodies to to fill in the holes in the new duty shifts.
 
Guy Gardener said:
Chain of Command.

The snowflake crew of the 1701 D swat blood to reinvent themselves as 4 Duty shifts because their perfectly reasonable new Captain assumed the Federation was hours away from a war where most of these grumbling malcontents upset that they may not have time to be in a play, or ride horsies on the Holodeck, were likely going to burn to death on the inside from the warp core venting gamma radiation.

So after Jean-Luc mourns the passing of his fish, that was either spaced with the garbage or sent to the galley to appease the few carnivores in the crew... Did the old Captain embrace the new world order, or did he switch the crew rotation back to Day, Night and Swing creating just as big a disgruntled hump as Jellico did a week earlier?
Click to expand...

Jellico was a dumbass and a stooge. This is why he was never given command of a ship like Enterprise up until "Chain of Command" and why there was no question of removing him the instant that Starfleet deemed it possible. Oh, and why he had to beg the CO he'd alienated to go do a job for him.

Bottom line: Riker and his crew beat the Borg. Jellico was a trudger at best.
 
Guy Gardener said:
But if we assume that the Enterprise D's shifts are evenly staffed, and only 300 souls were civilians who had nothing to do with running the ship or the duty shifts, then they have to figure out how to run the ship with 70 less people every 6 hours, or find masochists or Vulcans who are willing to work 2 x 6 hour shifts per day rather than 1 x 8 hour shift per day.
Click to expand...

It's the second one. More shifts wouldn't mean any individual gets more time off overall, just that their time and work and their rest periods are individually shorter and more frequent. It'd probably be offset so you work 1 six-hour on some calendar-days and 2 six-hours on others, but on average, you'd still be spending eight hours per day on shift, it just would take a couple weeks to even out.

But, as you point out in the beginning, in the highly-automated Star Trek future, it's likely "shifts" aren't entirely what we expect today, and there's a lot more downtime overall (nobody seems to have any problem finding time for multiple expert-level hobbies, for instance). The upshot, though, would be that four shifts doesn't spare anyone from any work, it just means they aren't on-call for as long, which may or may not be an acceptable trade-off depending on what you expect to run in to and the how the crew responds.

Either way, switching schedules on the eve of a crisis is not a great idea.
 
Serveaux said:
Bottom line: Riker and his crew beat the Borg. Jellico was a trudger at best.
Click to expand...
Riker and his crew were out of options and about to crash the ship into the cube until Picard literally gave them a cheat code. Jellico achieved everything he was supposed to do, prevented a war without firing a single shot and got Picard back as a cherry on top which sarfleet didn't even expect.
 
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