3.2 Commander's Office

The station commander’s office has most recently been occupied by Captain Benjamin Sisko, assigned to Deep Space 9 in 2369. Previously, this space above the work areas of ops was the province of Gul Dukat of the Cardassian military. In his function as officer in charge of the occupation of Bajor and the head of the uridium mining operation, Dukat towered over underlings from a raised platform. The commander’s office has been studied by the various Starfleet directorates involved in the station rebuilding, as well as a handful of comparative ergonomicists, cultural anthropologists, psychologists, and neural biologists. The shapes, distances between points, and proportions of objects to spaces have led some to believe that the Cardassians, and possibly Dukat in particular, considered the divisions of areas and arrangements of structures to be of major psychological or even mystical importance. For example, a continuing topic for debate centers around the reason ops and the commander’s window are aligned on a vector that seems to relate to no other symmetrical division, 30 degrees away from the ops-Pylon 3 centerline and 30 degrees away from the ops-Pylon 1 centerline. The most plausible explanation involves the mechanics of Terok Nor’s synchronous orbit about Bajor and the thermal control rotation of the station. A possible correlation exists in which Cardassia Prime and its parent star would be visible through the window center at all times.

Despite these analyses and conjectures, the commander’s office is well suited for the daily operations of Deep Space 9. Seating, a large desk, shelves and cabinets, replicator, a washroom, and communications equipment now grace the environment. A small Cardassian gas-suspension communicator has been supplanted by a Starfleet desktop computer, through which contact can be provided to Starfleet Command and civilian com addresses.

The systems connections to the office are made through the central ops trunks for all atmospheric, water, EPS, ODN, and replicator feeds. Airflow is provided through three combined supply/return plenum groups. Water stored in a series of nine 5.5 m³ (cubic meter) tanks within the ops subflooring for routine and emergency use is shunted through two diverter valves to the office washroom. EPS plasma is shipped through a single stage-4 stepdown conduit. The office ODN network is configured to route encrypted com signals through Starfleet hardware in the computer cores, via the patch network, or by subspace transceiver. Replicator raw materials are fed by a single branch from the main ops replicator line.