10 Most Horrifying Technologies In Star Trek
7. Jefferies Tubes
Okay. So a Jefferies Tube isn't gonna outright kill you but how many times has a character been stuck in a metre-wide tube doing maintenance or something when all of a sudden it starts to fill up with poison gas or some monster starts chasing after them and they have to try to escape while crawling on all fours and bumping their head at a time where every second matters.
The funny thing is that Geordi La Forge sarcastically remarks in the Next Generation episode Power Play that the tubes were initially designed for “easy access.” One has to wonder then, why in the Voyager episode Learning Curve, Tuvok uses navigating them as an endurance training exercise. Talk about easy access...
Aside from the annoyance of engineers having to crawl through these tubes to do basic maintenance, the tubes were also the primary means of moving between decks if the turbolifts went down... Imagine all 1,000 of the Enterprise-D crew trying to squeeze through the Jefferies Tubes at once.
Like, would it really be so hard to put some maintenance hatches in the hallways, maybe? Also, think of all the back problems...