this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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Adjusting ship time to standard planetary time is a weird way to phrase how this would actually be accomplished; in order to make ship time broadly sync up with planetary time, you'd have to park it in an orbit that puts you at the equivalent of the solar day planet-side.
Depending on the length of the mission and the difference in the length of day, you would either want to regularize your orbit to keep the crew's 24 hour schedule in parity with the equivalent solar day relative to the planet, or keep them parked in a geosynchronous orbit that slowly falls out of sync with the planet-side clock.
For reasons of crew health you would not simply set your clocks to an arbitrary point on the planet's surface, because that would screw up everyone's circadian rhythms and create unsafe levels of fatigue. It would be far more professional to staff the ship around the clock so that someone's always awake and fresh. Depending on availability of personnel, you could even stagger shifts so that staffing changes are seamless.
Not really. Presumably, they’d have a planetary mean time that the planetary government runs on. For earth that would probably be Greenwich mean time or San Diego time (federation/starfleet location on earth.) regardless, they’re going to a planet to meet with people. There’s going to be a standard time they’re using, whatever that is.
As for circadian rhythms, given enough time the crew would never notice. It’s an entirely artificial cycle in an entirely artificial environment. 15-30 minutes is fine. An 8 hour a/b/c shift could be rotated to b/c/a in 16 days with 30 minutes of time-shift per day, and by doing -30 minutes of time shift to c/b/a.
A 12 hour shift could be completely flipped in 24 days, as another example. And while more disruptive, you could probably push it to 2 hours a day and be okay, reducing the overall time even further.
As for things coming up, you see in the show Picard and the other officers/main crew getting woken up and taking over. And for diplomatic things, it’s always going to be the captain or the diplomatic staff no matter what time of “day”. They’re not going to let the junior officer make first contact if they can at all help it.
The only people active on the graveyard watch are basically essential ship crew and the guy making sure that the experimental doohickey doesn’t explode, maybe a sawbones in medical in case the doohickey does anyway.
In TNG it’s usually Data that’s in command, but sometimes it was given to junior officers who needed command experience and nothing was supposed to be going on, with Data (or whoever) summoning Picard whenever something comes up.
This is similar to how a submarine is run, btw.
I didn't know that about subs, interesting. Knowing sleep deprivation causes impairment on par with driving drunk I'd have assumed it was more of a concern.
Huh. Interesting. Everyone here is providing more deep background and hard-earned wisdom than any ten forward thread deserves. Do you flip over the upside down turtle? Is Kim Jong Un an idiot Y/N?