Engineering Hazard gear?

[Crewman47]

Know the uniforms they had Engineers wear back in the Movie era, which I guess were meant for hazardous situations or just daily engineering work, why do you suppose they no longer have them for 24th century engineers or are the deemed useless because there are less hazardous situations about?

I know this has probably been asked before but it's just I was playing the game Voyager's ELite Force and as some of you might know, the first mission after they get pulled into the starship graveyard is our main character being ordered to Engineering to prevent a warp core breach and because there was some gas floating about in Engineering and the fact he had a Hazard Suit on it made him ideal for the job. I thought that if the Engineers had the proper materials for the job then this first mission would've been unneccesary.

Not that I'm complaining but thought I'd just bring it up and ask about it.

 

[Timo]

One might argue that every starship has two kinds of working areas around the power and propulsion systems: shirtsleeves and envirosuits.

In TOS, we simply only saw the shirtsleeves environment, the monitoring rooms and the circuit breaker panels. There were people in various kinds of protective suits walking about, but their working environment was not shown: at most, these folks would be shown descending the fancy ladders on the corridor set, perhaps on their way to the warp core or the plasma transfer conduits or the dilithium focus.

In TMP, we'd see virtually nothing but the envirosuit area, as Scotty would perform a lot of hands-on work on the new, experimental and finicky machinery. Once he got that working properly, he no doubt would retire to a shirtsleeves monitoring room somewhere on the upper decks, but we didn't see that room.

In ST2, we'd again see the very guts of the ship, as the trainees would be put through their paces: they would operate machinery that normally wasn't man-tended, such as the warp core or the torpedo systems, just to learn the ropes.

By the time of TNG, most of the former radsuit areas would be so extensively automated and protected that people could work entirely shirtsleeves - indeed, if there was a reason to access the grimier areas, there would be no envirosuit procedure, and a shirtsleeves maintenance worker might need to be sent down (to his death), as in "Thine Own Self".

Timo Saloniemi