The hulls of the Gen1 Enterprise use at least triple layer walls at all points to provide triple redundancy. Triple redundancy is used to increase safety and reliability. However, the triple walls are still no match for a fast moving and sufficiently sized micro-meteor (or space debris) that might strike the ship. The potential exists for a large hole to be punched through virtually any part of the ship. To protect human inhabitants, an automatic hole-patching system will be included in all compartments within the ship.

The hole-patching system will consist of many semi-autonomous modules mounted inside of the hulls. The local hole-patching module within a compartment will automatically spring into action any time a hole is detected. In fact, multiple holes can be patched simultaneously as different hole-patching modules go about their work in different compartments of the ship.

Each hole-patching module will have small engines to move it to where the hole is located. From there, the module will launch multiple layers of thin, sticky sheets to cover the hole and seal it until permanent repairs can be made. Multiple sheets are launched to provide redundancy for increasing the probability that the hole will be successfully patched. Holes can be as large as several meters across. The size of a hole that can be patched will be for the future development team to figure out, but of course in general the bigger the hole that can be patched the better.