Sickbays on the Prommie

Captain Picard's Hair · Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:30 am

In "Message in a Bottle," it was implied that the Prometheus had one sickbay, like a typical ship. But, if the ship is meant to operate separated as a normal mode of operation, shouldn't it have three sickbays? I suppose the GCS should have a second sickbay as well, perhaps as a backup in docked mode. The Prometheus "other" two sickbays would serve as backups in docked mode as well.

Just a small nit that came to mind as I reflected on the discussion about the Prometheus recently.

Tiberius · Post by **Tiberius** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:38 am

There would have been several sickbays.

Even in the GCS there were several sickbays: a main sickbay in the saucer and a few more smaller ones in the engineering hull. We even saw one of the eng. hull sickbays being evacuated in Generations.

Captain Picard's Hair · Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:44 am

I wasn't aware that we've seen secondary sickbays on the E-D. I haven't seen Generations in years; it was never shown in TNG despite plenty of times when they would have been useful. Take "Ethics," when cargo bays were converted into triage units due to overflow. There wasn't even a single line of dialog relating to additional sickbays.

Jordanis · Post by **Jordanis** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 6:45 am

Trek writers have very bad etiquette re: settling problems by including one throwaway line.

Post by **Teaos** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 7:46 am

It would be a waste of space to have 3 sickbays. They would only need one and a place on the other 2 units that can act as a temp sickbay during seperation. Convert a lab or something else into a temp sickbay.

Tiberius · Post by **Tiberius** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 7:59 am

Apart from the main sickbay, the others are bare minimum, a few beds etc. So when they had to convert shuttlebays etc for triage, they probably didn't use the mini-sickbays because they were just too small to hold more than a handful of patients, and keeping the patients together was more important (so you don't have medical personnel having to run around the ship).

Jordanis · Post by **Jordanis** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:53 am

Tiberius wrote:Apart from the main sickbay, the others are bare minimum, a few beds etc. So when they had to convert shuttlebays etc for triage, they probably didn't use the mini-sickbays because they were just too small to hold more than a handful of patients, and keeping the patients together was more important (so you don't have medical personnel having to run around the ship).

That makes good sense. It still doesn't solve the issue of them not ever bothering with the one throwaway line to make speculation unnecessary, though.

Tiberius · Post by **Tiberius** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:07 am

Because it can't be done realistically.

Crusher: Captain, there was an accident in Engineering, and I took Geordi to the medical bay on Deck 36. As you know, we have such facilities on the Enterprise in addition to the main sickbay in the Saucer.
Picard: Yes I do know, doctor, so why are you telling me something I'm already awayre of instead of saving Geordi's life?
Crusher: Oh, he died while I was explaining it to you.

In short, the entire crew would have known about it, even passengers (it would have been in their welcome aboard speech, just like the safety breifings you get on airplanes), so everyone was aware of it, so they didn't bother explaining it.

We know for a fact that it was seen at least once in generations. That alone proves that there are medical facilities in the engineering hull. It's also possible that we saw the med facilities in the engineering hull other times, but there was now way for us to know that it was not the saucer's sickbay.

Jordanis · Post by **Jordanis** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 11:14 am

You are a very clumsy scriptwriter. Allow me to demonstrate in one minute of thought using your own example.

"Captain, there was an accident in engineering, Geordi was badly hurt. We got him to the secondary sick-bay, but it doesn't look good."

For the triage, you could make a line that runs like so: "There's too many even if we stack them in the secondary sick-bays. We'll have to convert a cargo bay into a triage facility."

This is known as 'Heinleining', after Robert Heinlein, who was very good at slipping the information the reader needed to know into casual description and dialog without resorting to Infodumps or As You Know Bob.

When you make strawman arguments, you victimize yourself.

(terms described here: http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html )

Sionnach Glic · Post by **Sionnach Glic** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 1:06 pm

Given that they spend quite a lot of time making up techno-babble that the audience A) doesn't need to know, and B) is completely pointless, I think it's safe to say it would be easy enough just to throw in a line now and again.
If things were never mentioned because everyone knew about them, then no one would know a thing about Starfleet or the ship itself.

Post by **Mikey** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:26 pm

As far as using cargo bays as triage centers, that doesn't prove anything. Given a high enough number of casualties, hospitals - mobile and otherwise - set up makeshift triage centers. Triage is designed to get people into the facility proper in the right order.

Post by **Captain Seafort** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:30 pm

And in the right bit of it - no use sending someone with a broken arm to the burns unit.

Reliant121 · Post by **Reliant121** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:33 pm

I would think the seperated sections without the main sickbay would a have a first aid center of some form. It would be a little daft just to let people in the non-sickbay sections die.

Post by **Mikey** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:33 pm

Apparently, that's normal operating procedure at Community Medical Center.

Sorry, local joke...

Sionnach Glic · Post by **Sionnach Glic** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:28 pm

I'd like to think that even Starfleet realises the stupidity of having one sickbay for what is effectively three ships. Hopefully, they have a small one in each section.