note by Jason Self

Jason Self at 2014-06-24T13:17:52Z

I watched Deep Space Nine, Season 5 Episode 24: Empok Nor. When Garak enters one of Empok Nor's airlocks he is able to restore artificial gravity and power to the entire station from within the airlock by seemingly moving a lever. It was probably done that way to make production easier so that the characters didn't have to continue "floating" until they reached Ops or some other appropriate place to restore gravity and power. Ignoring that for a moment I find myself wondering why anyone would design a space station that allows the occupant of an airlock to control such critical systems as gravity and power for the entire station. Shouldn't it be controlled from Ops or some other more appropriate place?

Christine Lemmer-Webber likes this.

I heard about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I heard that it's a show similiar to Babylon-5 but lower quality.

XRevan86 at 2014-06-24T13:50:23Z

For preparedness for various disasters that always seem to befall their crews, every system on a Star Trek ship or station should, naturally, be controllable from anywhere on said vessel, including the holodecks. For a rare example of loss of this redundancy, see DS9 4x07 "Starship Down".

Stephen Compall at 2014-06-24T14:07:07Z

>> Jason Self:

“Shouldn't it be controlled from Ops or some other more appropriate place?”

Part of the 'culture' of Star Trek was that at any given time, with the appropriate means, anyone could control anything, from anywhere. It didn't matter how critical the system was.

The Enterprise-D and other starships were often (partially) controlled by enemies or other entities who weren't even phisically inside the ships =)

That being said, DS9 rox!

JanKusanagi at 2014-06-24T14:14:06Z

When I installed GNU Hurd on my system in 2005ish, I was surprised to find out you could run guile or other commands without even logging in (but as a not-logged-in-user you couldn't really affect many things). Apparently this was somewhat inspired by the RMS-of-the-80s philosophy of "why lock people out?" Is this kind of like that?

Christine Lemmer-Webber at 2014-06-24T15:58:14Z

Jason Self, sazius, mnd likes this.