Internal Communication

Another major job the Communication Department does on a modern naval ship is to maintain internal communications. While email is a form of internal communications, I am referring to telephone lines and the ship wide intercom referred to as the 1MC. While underway the telephone lines run through the antennas to call off ship but are connected by landlines while in port when the antennas aren’t as active. The 1MC has speakers in almost every room in the ship and is used to give general announcements or summon people to the Quarterdeck or meetings they missed. Often if people can’t be contacted by the usual phone numbers their division uses the 1MC is used to tell them to call an extension number. Each phone has its own extension number and often there are many phones in a room, if the room is large and the people inside have many different duties.
Keeping the phones and 1MC going properly is a small part of what the Comms Department does as those systems rarely have problems, but it is an important job. If there is no way to communicate fast between people across ship, the work onboard the ship will slow down making less work get done a day and longer working hours while leads to lower moral and more exhaustion among both crew and officers. For that reason it is important to know what your ship uses as internal communications. Most ships in science fiction still tend to have some version of a general announcement system, even if it’s just a loud alarm heard ship-wide to call everyone to their battle stations or abandon ship. Star Trek usually has some version of the communicator, whether it’s the older version common in the original series that flipped open like a modern cell phone or the badge that they hit to talk to people. Other shows have had an intercom system where the scanners inside the ship found the receiver and the closest speaker was activated for the conversation but most science fiction television shows seem to like the idea of some sort of badge that the person hits to talk into on large space ships. I think it highly likely that the badge is in our future given how small cell phones already can be.
Whatever your mode of communication is, you definitely need to figure it out before you begin writing, even if you decide your fictional ship is small enough for them to merely shout and have the receiver get the message.