16.5 Rescue and Evac Operations

Rescue and evacuation operations generally fall into two categories, rescue and evacuation to the ship, and evacuation from the ship. The former will generally involve transport from another ship or a planetary surface. The latter will generally involve removal of the ship's company to another ship, a planetary surface, or into space.

Rescue Scenarios

Resources available for rescue and evacuation to the ship include:

• Ability to transport up to 1,000 persons per hour to the ship via personnel transporters.
• Availability of five personnel shuttlecraft on immediate standby and up to six additional shuttles available on twelve-hour notice. Additional shuttle vehicles may be available depending on other mission requirements and maintenance status. Total transport capacity of these vehicles varies with range and other factors, but averages 250 persons per hour from Class M planetary surfaces to standard orbit.
• Capacity to support up to 15,000 evacuees with conversion of shuttlebays and cargo bays to emergency living accommodations.
• Ability to convert secondary shuttlebays and Holodeck areas to emergency medical triage and treatment centers. Cross-training of sufficient starship personnel to handle such situations.
• Ability for short-term conversion of Shuttlebay 3 to Class H, K, or L environmental conditions.

Abandon-Ship Scenarios

Resources available for abandon-ship scenarios include:

• Ability to transport up to 1,850 persons per hour from the ship via personnel transporters, including the use of emergency beam-out-only transporters.
• Availability of five personnel shuttlecraft on immediate standby and up to six additional shuttles available on twelve-hour notice. Additional shuttle vehicles may be available depending on other mission requirements and maintenance status. Total transport capacity of these vehicles varies with range and other factors, but averages 250 persons per hour from standard orbit to a Class M planetary surface.
• Abandon-ship protocols include use of ASRV (autonomous survival and recovery vehicle) lifeboats, which provide free space survival accommodations for up to 1,400 individuals for up to fourteen days. A total of four hundred ASRVs are available (See: 16.4).
• In a lesser emergency in either the Saucer Module or the Stardrive Section, the saucer separation maneuver is an option, with evacuation of the ship's company to whichever section is not affected by the crisis. Evacuation protocols include options to leave behind a team of engineering personnel or other specialists who will attempt to deal with the emergency situation.
• Environmental suits are available for evacuation into the space environment. In such scenarios, personnel may exit through any of the exterior airlocks, through the shuttlebays, or through the exterior turbolift couplings (assuming that the turbolift system has been disabled). Environmental suits are available in storage lockers at all exit ports and shuttlebays, as well as in emergency equipment lockers located in corridor storage modules located throughout the habitable volume of the spacecraft.
• Many exterior windows are also equipped with emergency release mechanisms that will permit direct exterior access. These emergency release mechanisms, located near the base of most windows, are enabled only in the event of atmospheric pressure loss, power loss, certain Red Alert scenarios, and only if personnel within that contiguous compartment are protected with environmental suits.

We were consulting with writer Lee Sheldon, who wanted to know how long it would take the Enterprise to evacuate the entire population of a planet for the episode "Devil's Due." Based on maximum rates mentioned here, we estimated that the transporters and shuttlecraft could bring approximately 1,250 persons per hour to the ship. It would therefore take about twelve hours to bring up 15,000 people, the theoretical maximum. If they were taking these people to a planet five light years away at Warp 9, it would take about forty-eight hours for the round trip. Adding twenty-four hours for loading and off-loading, this would average out to about 200 people an hour. If the planet had four billion inhabitants, it would therefore take the Enterprise about 1,900 years to evacuate everyone, assuming they lived that long. (Melinda Bell points out that things would be made even worse if they had children.)