We all agree that, should this ever happen (incredibly unlikely as it may be), that they should NOT, under any circumstances, be allowed to wear those fugly jammies from "All Good Things"?
They might actually be the most comfortable Starfleet costumes TNG ever had. There were complaints by various castmembers about how tight and uncomfortable previous Starfleet costumes were (particularly around the shoulders).
The future jammies are rather unforgiving around the shoulders too though. Couple it with the crossover pinned down collar, & the high waist band nonsense, & it looks uncomfortable to me
Not like the earlier costumes, though. I believe Frakes said that it was hard to raise your arms in the TNG jumper, and once you did the whole thing nearly went up into your neck. I don't think the pinned down collar is a problem at all, and the high waistband is probably only an issue with folks with an, um, ample waist. I'm not defending the look of the costume, but I do think there were a lot more uncomfortable Starfleet costumes in the various Trek shows.
I know the registry numbers might have nothing to do with when the ship was commissioned, etc, but she does have a low one for a vessel of the 2390s. Perhaps the design has been about for decades and because it works so well as a hospital ship, Starfleet has kept it going for a long time (like the Excelsior-Class). She may not be attractive to most, but it would automatically make the series look different. It would be interesting to see what characters were used as the focus of a medical Trek series: Medical Administrator, Chief Physician, Chief Surgeon, Chief Nurse, Chief Counsellor, Chief Biomedical Researcher, then a number of other junior doctors and staff, also with the Captain in the main cast, but not focusing on them. The rest of the senior staff would be supporting characters, brought in as needed, though the focus should be on what the medics are up to.
i'm actually writing a fan fiction based on a medical vessel - because i thought it would work (and it was the USS Pasteur that gave me the idea). However due to some sources I didn't use the olypmic class vessel and created a whole new one. The problem I have with the series is that a pure medical emergency isn't as good a read to everyone, so to make it more accessiable I had to add elements into the stories. For example it is classified as a search and rescue ship. Some of the medical missions are in "combat/hostile zones". I agree that as a television show the premise would work out well.
Certainly even USS Pasteur already somewhat transcends the classic idea of hospital ship, as she appears capable of high deployment speed and carries armaments (seen on the model and mentioned in dialogue). The classic hospital ship doesn't really need to move much, and is protected by conventions rather than weaponry, conventions that indeed require the absence of weaponry. How Starfleet really operates the Olympics, we don't know. But Bev Crusher is apparently allowed to fly one of them in a solo mission without too many questions asked, so independent deployments to distant locations are probably fine with Starfleet. General rescue work sounds quite plausible... Timo Saloniemi
Let's remember that space, after all, is not an ocean. When you're sending a hospital ship into territories where there's a chance you'll make first contact with an alien species (who never signed, let alone heard of conventions) or possibly fatal space anomalies including but not limited to debris, rocks and chunks of planets coming your way, absence of weaponry equals loss of ship with all hands.
Re: Uniforms- They'd done a bunch of Trek by TNG (3 years of TV, several motion pictures -including TMP which had been notoriously *uncomfortable*), and yet they end up with something that critics would call pajamas, you've got awkward zippers in the back, they're tight and uncomfortable, *and* you've got constant "Picard Maneuvers". Why, why did they go this direction, why did they stick with that direction? Was that the only way to go to look futuristic? By DS9 they seemed okay but what a horrific start. Glad JJ went back to shirt and pants.
I've always wanted to see a series (or even a book series) about Starfleet Medical. It would be like James White's "Sector General" or Murray Leinster's "Med Ship" series (yes, I'm an olde skoole SF fan).