page 673 – Where’s the fun in that?
Years and years of Star Trek have conditioned me to find it really weird to see mechanical stuff easily accessible without crawling around in a cramped tube. The fact that hiding your important systems in cramped, hard to access tubes would be REALLY STUPID is entirely irrelevant.
But you don’t care about that, you care about the NEW VOTING INCENTIVE WE FINALLY HAVE!!! Sorry it took so long, gang!
Speaking of which, here’s the deal on Voting Incentives for the next month or two: as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve got a bunch of conventions coming up, so incentives will be on hold while I focus on getting extra ACTUAL comics drawn. Once that blows over, I’m gonna try something a little different. See, the problem with doing Deleted Scenes is, well, most stuff gets deleted for a reason. They just don’t make very good comics (think about it, how many of these mini-arcs so far have actually had an ENDING?) So, instead, I’m gonna do some Incentives that just summarize these plot ideas and explain why they wouldn’t have worked. Don’t worry, there’ll still be pictures. I’m just not going to try and squeeze comics out of ideas I already decided DIDN’T have comics in them.
(Historical Notes: There was some debate as to whether or not my snark about Jefferies Tubes on Star Trek not making sense was warranted. After all, if you’re building a spaceship where all life on board relies on all the equipment working, you WOULDN’T leave all that equipment out where you could trip all over it, right? Well, no, but there’s still a big difference between keeping everything safely behind hatches and stuffing them deep at the end of a tube where, if they malfunction, you have to burn valuable time crawling around to get to it. Yes, there’s plenty of real-world precedents of people having to crawl into the bowels of a big machine to fix some tiny thing… but we generally hear about those examples thanks to people complaining about how BADLY said machine was designed to require that sort of thing in the first place.)
Look up fighter aircraft maintenance. From memory, there are people who have to crawl inside a tiny hole to enter the gas tank to check it out.
But that’s the thing, though: you can land fighter jets and get out to work on them. I’m snarking about spaceships in space, where you’d have to fix everything from within mid-flight.
Aircraft are designed to only be in the air for limited amounts of time, due to gravity. If you’re engineering snarking is being THAT specific to space ships, check how much time is needed for astronauts to spend outside per year to repair their ships or the international space station.
I have no idea what the answer is, but it would fit your hyper-specific, space-engineering snarking.
It gets even more fun when the “ships” in question are basically just treated like stationary, terrestrial buildings 90% of the time.