Sunday, January 23, 2011

Haircuts, Laundry, and Mail on a Fictional Ship.

The other part of the SHes job consists of various workspaces that serve the whole crew of the ship, such as the barbershop, post office, and ship’s laundry. You may have the barbershop run by robots on your ship or you may have it run by crew members, as on a modern ship. However, appearance is a major part of the military as it presents a clean appearance to others and helps prevent germs from spreading too fast.
Most space ships I’ve heard or read about have their letters all sent electronically, which would likely eliminate the need for a post office but what if your crew have souvenirs they want to send home? You may make your crew stash them until they pull in but if your ship isn’t too far from their main lines of commerce you may be able to have ships dock with each other to send packages home or send shuttles out to places that can send packages home. If you decide to do things that way than you’ll need a postal clerk, even if it is only part time, as well as storage space for mail.
The other major job the SHes have is ship’s laundry. There are two parts to this and they can be broken down into crew and officer laundry. Crew laundry is a room with a bunch of washers and dryers that often break at differing rates since everyone in the crew usesthose same machines. The SHes are in charge of fixing the machines if they can, otherwise putting a sign on the machine saying “Out of Commission.” The officer’s laundry is a little different. Every officer’s restroom has a washer and dryer in it so they can do loads whenever no one else is using them. For more delicate things like uniforms they hang the clothes outside their doors, carefully marked inside the uniforms on tags, and the SHes put them through the correct wash cycle in large washers and dryers not for everyone’s use and use a press to quickly and precisely iron and press the uniforms before returning them to the officer’s door that night. Oh the joys of being an officer… True, you may be planning that every time your crew opens their drawers they find perfectly cleaned and pressed uniforms thanks to tiny robots in each drawer or something similar to a replicator, but even those systems break sometimes. No matter how you decide that your crew will wash their laundry, clean clothes tend to make a story run smoother while wearing dirty laundry can add tension and personal problems.

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