Why is there artificial gravity in Jeffries Tubes?

[Cary L. Brown]

Of course, if we lose the 1g tubes that we see so frequently, then things like chases through the tubes and climbing the ladders would lose a lot of their dramatic flair.

To the contrary, I'd think zero-gee chases would be the scifi equivalent of car chases if not for the expenses of filming such!

They might lose one sort of flair or flavor, but would certainly possess another. It's a bit strange this hasn't been done already to a greater extent...

Timo Saloniemi

I tend to agree... and this has been used, to great effect, in several first-person computer games, by the way.

The reason it isn't done on-film, at least not often, and almost never convincingly, is that it's impractical to do so.

The more advanced CG becomes, the more likely that the "zero-G" techniques used in games will become practical for generating the same effects for films and TV.

At which point, of course, we'll see it overused to horrendous extent, much like lens flares, or "bullet time," or so forth have been when they've first come into vogue.

 

[Ghrakh]

We see variable gravity in the Enterprise pilot (the "sweet spot" on the ship, where gravity plating doesn't reach).

Yeah, that was good, but it's too bad they didn't really take it anywhere. I guess they needed to fit more decon scenes in or something.

The best way (though not the cheapest, probably) would be to build a dedicated Jeffries tube set vertically.

There appeared to be two sets already, a vertical with a couple of levels and ladders, and the horizontal crawlway. So instead of making them distinctly different (very clearly one was a "hall" and the other a "shaft"), you make them identical in design, so that up and down are ambiguous, then film as you describe. The VOY sets look very much like TNGs, so they may have been the same ones with some redressing.

Of course, if we lose the 1g tubes that we see so frequently, then things like chases through the tubes and climbing the ladders would lose a lot of their dramatic flair. It would also take away a little bit of the drama from being stuck in turbolifts (turbolift malfunction? open the ceiling hatch and float away safely!)

It must be said that sometimes that drama came off as cliches…the dark corridor with something dangerous in the shadows, dangling above a bottomless well, escaping through the hatch and closing it just in time, stuff like that. TNGs tube sequences weren't terribly dramatic, that started appearing in VOY when they used them for some kind of creepy environment, like the Nostromo, which i had mixed feelings about.

Perhaps it's just simpler from an engineering perspective to give the whole ship a uniform down under artificial gravity. We just don't know enough/can't know enough really to say.

Well that's as good "in universe" answer as any. I agree about edge effects to a degree but for example people can easily step onto escalators and moving walkways, and someone uncomfortable doing so will simply apply extra caution. For the jefferies tubes there is a clear separation already in that in most cases you have to open a hatch and climb through, so already one's awareness level is heightened. But a buffer area of gradated gravity sounds good too.

By the way, it seems that Orci et al. are really leaning towards the uniform artificial gravity over the entire ship in the JJverse, given the reputed rationale for why the ships are constructed on the surface of the Earth.

Yeah, and the turbolifts get you from the shuttle bay to the bridge in like 4 seconds...

The obvious answer? It was cheaper to film than simulating 0g.

Saucer separation wasn't a cheap effect to film either. And it doesn't have to look like a NASA 0G video feed, but simply implied.

You mean sort of like how they did it in "2010," where everyone was clearly in full gravity all the time, but they inferred zero-G with a "floating pen" shot at one point?

No, that was stupid. 2001 was mentioned, so maybe like that.

 

[Timo]

You mean sort of like how they did it in "2010," where everyone was clearly in full gravity all the time, but they inferred zero-G with a "floating pen" shot at one point?

They sort of fumbled that one, though. The zero-gee pen was at the bridge set, which was shown in a long camera run to be continuous with the quarters set that was in the rotating section and experienced full one gee when the section rotated. During the floating pen scene, the rotation had not yet been stopped, though (the pen was used to demonstrate why the rotation should be stopped) - and the bridge had windows that never showed a rotating view!

Goes to show that it never pays to build continuous sets. They maximize the risk of TARDIS effects (unless one also builds a full exterior!), and they create the all-new risk for gaffes like this.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[sojourner]

^Despite the bridge being part of the continuous run of sets, it's location was at the nose of the ship which was full time 0g. The error is not in showing a static view out of the bridge windows. The error is the continuous run.

 

[Timo]

its location was at the nose of the ship

Or then in the rotating section, which would have made much more sense - why deprive the command center of gravity? Merely for the stability of a starscape view? Makes no sense, since synthetic views would be so much more useful. (Not to mention that one of the first gadgets the British Interplanetary Society designed when dreaming up ways of conquering space in the 1950s was a rotating mechanical periscope to compensate for the rotation of an artificial gravity spaceship section!)

The error would be that of the ship's original designers, not of the director who chose to film a continuous run, or of the set builders who made that run possible.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Green Mushroom]

This may be slightly off topic and I apologize if it has been done before....

Why even have Jeffries Tubes at all?

To me at least they seem a waste of space when they could easily have all of the equipment access points along the walls of the corridors. In the corridors, they would be easier to get to and it would easier to work on since the repair teams can sit or stand comfortably instead of having to crawl into place.

It seems even dumber that the ladders are hidden away back there. The ships clearly have enough situations where the ladders are necessary that it would make sense to keep them accessible, even if only so security could get to someone who is not supposed to be there.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

 

[Timo]

Oh, I totally agree. Early on in TNG, full standing height corridors and brightly lit rooms were used for accessing the bowels of major equipment; the narrow tubes seem to have been introduced solely for the dramatic possibilities: the claustrophobic mood, the intimacy, the limitations on mobility and visibility.

TOS had a couple of access tubes, horizontal and angled, but those appeared to be very short things where access wasn't so much a matter of crawling as it was of reaching. Sometimes it no doubt is necessary to have very narrow accessways to the innards of a machine that doesn't tolerate broader openings, but most machines can probably be built without the need for a fifty-meter-long crawlhole.

Ladders I like - especially combined with zero gravity. I wonder if the flimsy-looking three-faced ladders of the TOS corridor set weren't "really" inside a zero-gee shaft, so that the climbers could just pull themselves up and down with their hands... But such a shaft would not have been a claustrophobic and impractical affair, merely a means of going from one deck to another without having to wait for a turbolift, and without having to waste all the volume required by a full set of stairs or acutely angled "ship's ladders".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The TOS Jefferies tube is of course a different animal from those in TNG.

The TOS tube is really a tube. It protrudes directly off a corridor, penetrating into the wall and granting access to the depth of machinery behind. This is true no matter where they might actually be located on the ship. However, I, like others, am partial to the idea that they (or at least some of them) are at the base of the engine pylons.

Calling the ridiculous things in TNG Jefferies "tubes" is really a misnomer, since a "tube" is generally understood to be cylindrical in shape, which generally conveys being shaped like a right circular cylinder. I think we are supposed to believe that the crawl ways evolved from TOS tubes but the name stuck. They sure seem to go on and on though.

I completely agree with The Green Mushroom that the TNG Jefferies tubes should have simply been designed as corridors in which one could stand up. IMO, the TOS tube makes more sense, for what it's supposed to be.

 

[tighr]

Even the Delta Flyer had Jeffries Tubes.

 

[sojourner]

This may be slightly off topic and I apologize if it has been done before....

Why even have Jeffries Tubes at all?

To me at least they seem a waste of space when they could easily have all of the equipment access points along the walls of the corridors. In the corridors, they would be easier to get to and it would easier to work on since the repair teams can sit or stand comfortably instead of having to crawl into place.

It seems even dumber that the ladders are hidden away back there. The ships clearly have enough situations where the ladders are necessary that it would make sense to keep them accessible, even if only so security could get to someone who is not supposed to be there.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Because for a lot of the equipment you have to design the ship around the device rather than the device around the ship. There just isn't always room for a full hallway. I've worked in some really cramped areas on cruise ships that I would have paid to have the room afforded in a TNG Jefferies tube.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

This may be slightly off topic and I apologize if it has been done before....

Why even have Jeffries Tubes at all?

To me at least they seem a waste of space when they could easily have all of the equipment access points along the walls of the corridors. In the corridors, they would be easier to get to and it would easier to work on since the repair teams can sit or stand comfortably instead of having to crawl into place.

It seems even dumber that the ladders are hidden away back there. The ships clearly have enough situations where the ladders are necessary that it would make sense to keep them accessible, even if only so security could get to someone who is not supposed to be there.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Because for a lot of the equipment you have to design the ship around the device rather than the device around the ship. There just isn't always room for a full hallway. I've worked in some really cramped areas on cruise ships that I would have paid to have the room afforded in a TNG Jefferies tube.

...

Yep.

Remember, in Star Trek, these were never referred to by any such term. The term "Jefferies tubes" was invented by the production crew, and was never used on-screen. (I think that the first time it was ever referred to by this name "in-universe" was by Franz Joseph in the Star Trek blueprints.)

So, in TNG, they decided to give us something formally referred by this name. But they sort of missed the point, in many ways.

Basically, in TNG, and in later Trek series, these became like the access corridors behind shops in the mall (while the corridors themselves were like the main mall throughways with all the shopfronts).

Realistically, you WOULD have this sort of system in any ship of the type seen in Trek, but they would not be "small corridors" as we see them. Rather, these would be little hatches leading right into the middle of a mess of machinery, with perhaps a "catwalk" type floor with removable panels, allowing you to move right through the equipment.

Of course, for a TV show, doing this sort of thing would be impractical. It's much, much easier to have a "generic mini-corridor" to serve that same storytelling function. But if such a ship really existed... Enterprise, Voyager, etc... the "real" equipment accessways would be quite different than what we see on-screen. A lot messier, tighter, more convoluted, and less comfortable. The idea of two characters meeting in a "Jefferies Tube" for a romantic interlude would be pretty much laughable (see Voyager), unless both were really, really into "thrash metal," I suppose...

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The cramped crawl ways on TNG would have made more sense to me if they didn't seem to be part of virtual catacombs of Jefferies "tubes".

 

[UncleRice]

@ 0 g tubes:
Zero g environments create as many problems as they solve. Action reaction physics cannot be absorbed by the worker's body weight. The worker's body weight can't be leveraged against the task. Tools won't stay put without special additions that may add bulk or other problems. Remember, the Jeffries tubes are designed as work spaces, not tactical zones.

@ Jeffries tubes needed?:
The building engineer in me is split on this one.
Against: By rights you should be able to attach the vast majority of the conduits and plumbing a ship requires to the hallway ceilings. Unless Jeffries tubes double as secondary plasma containment for plasma conduits, you shouldn't need many. If they are secondary plasma containment devices, you wouldn't want other stuff in them as you wouldn't want other systems crashing because of a plasma leak.
For: I've spent time cursing the soandsos that installed drop ceilings right up against air ducts and conduits rendering the inaccessible without performing surgery on the ceiling. There have been times having a 3 by 3 utility "tube" to work on stuff in would have been an improvement.