From Antenna to the Computer

Now that you have your antennas planned out and have decided on how your network on ship will work, it’s time to think about cabling. As you can see here, there are many types of cables. That site explains different types of cables and wires used to wire your own house safely. Those wires are designed to be low voltage cables safe for an amateur electrician to use. Ship wiring is high voltage, heavy conductivity cables that sometimes break, whether it’s from unusual weather, improper sealing jobs, or exposed cables getting tripped over or somehow worn down, cables do break or slow down. When that happens those cables need to be replaced. Granted, that usually occurs while the ship is docked somewhere and miles or the cables inside the walls and floating by the ceiling need to be traced then the bad cable removed and new cable put in to replace it. Sometimes cables go down on important systems that need to be patched immediately and the job can’t wait until the next port. For that reason there are always a certain number of people assigned to the ship that are specially trained to trace, test, and patch different types of cables and there is always test equipment onboard for troubleshooting any problems with systems. Often there are lengths of different cables kept on ship and all the maintainer needs to do is cut it and add connectors or end pieces to the cable and set up the patch.
Though you probably don’t want to learn the wiring diagrams of the ship or even of a single system it is still a good idea to keep in mind who to call if a bad wire is suspected or maybe an added evaluation point for advancement is that one person had documented training on one type of cabling while the other person had no training on cabling. The more facts you know, the less you need to search for that perfect plot twist or bragging point. Also, on a future ship run on computer systems, those cables will be going everywhere and Star Trek has cables replacing most piping on ship. However, that seems unstable as there seems to be a break a month somewhere on ship. Maybe that’s just to give people something to do or a reason for them to act oddly for a little while. Contamination can have such amusing plot points.