I mean, yeah. There’s test footage somewhere that I once saw of pre-TOS space battles and it’s so boring. It’s much more hard scifi, but so dreadfully boring. Just people at consoles describing damage. The network executives were like, nah, put some firecrackers in there and then stumble around a lot.
And seatbelts for consoles. People go flying every time they get hit or run over a space whale.
There was an anime I once saw, I can’t remember the name of it, where not only did they put on seatbelts for starship combat, but they also geared up in lightweight spacesuits.
That always seemed like a smart idea. At least for people whose dexterity isn’t immediately required.
Battlestar Galactica also had a good idea: the bridge where they commanded battles from was deep inside the ship. Unlike in Star Trek and Star Wars where the bridge is at the front top, Battlestar’s bridge is nearly impossible to target from other ships. This is especially baffling for Star Trek because they used screens, not windows.
Star Trek is modeled after Naval warfare, “photon torpedoes”, and all. So they have a bridge, which at sea needs to be high and with wide windows to provide the greatest situational awareness and long uninterrupted lines of sight for the officers.
Star Wars is modeled after aerial warfare, thus bombers can “open the bays” to bomb another spaceship in the vacuum of orbital space (god, I hate the new trilogy so much), and spaceships have roaring sounds, and fighters need to roll to turn in space, and their wingtips leave trails in vacuum. So you mostly have cockpits, front and center, like in airplanes. Big ships also have naval influence.
BG, and other franchises like The Expanse, are more realistic that space warfare will probably be more similar to submarine combat. There really isn’t much to see in space at all, so windows are useless in a confrontation. Space is also more likely to involve such enormous distances and complex movement, like when in orbit, that really you depend on a lot of sensors and machines to visualize and keep situational awareness. Much like a submarine, that depends on instruments, sonar and a lot of strategical maneuvering to succeed, and at the same time, the most basic hull breach can mean death for the whole crew.
True. Galactica is built like a bunker that happens to be spaceworthy.
Enterprise has a bridge with a proud vantage point so that they … :: checks notes :: … don’t run aground in shallow water or plow into things when coming to port. Wait a sec…
Detmer absolutely needed a seatbelt and airbag, and she was piloting the damn ship. Also, Discovery’s consoles keep ejecting rocks and flames every time the inertial dampeners fail, and there’s literally nothing to hold on to at most workstations.
shittiest inertial dampeners in the galaxy
Cathode Ray Dude did a video a while back about the real world equivalent of “Bypassing the relays!” and exploding bridge stations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpJ_6LCly4A Basically on military equipment like Navy ships, it can be important to be able to bypass circuit breakers and burn out motors if the difference is one last shot getting out.
“YouTuber talks at a camera for half an hour about something he found at the thrift store” is a well worn trope at this point, but CRD is a really good storyteller. It’s interesting to see out of all the technobabble and cliches on Star Trek, the exploding consoles and EPS relays are actually informed by writers who probably spent parts of their military careers toggling real world “battle shorts”.
I saw someone say that they are the way they are because having tactical, or the helm shutdown during combat is way more deadly to the whole crew than the console exploding on one person
If those Utopia Planitia engineers could read, they’d be very upset.
“We purposely designed the tactical stations incorrectly. As a joke.”
Well when you’re re-routing warp plasma to the bridge there are bound to be some explosions and casualties.
This is the thing. You can’t use a circuit breaker if you’re powering your control console directly with “tuned plasma”.
Halon Injectors. That shit will put out anything…including people which is why it’s banned.
Yeah, now they just use 50/50 Argon/CO2 and suffocate everything.
Yeah but the CO2 is very much going to encourage you to leave. If you breathe 50% CO2, you’re gonna know it.
Breathe Halon and I think your voice will get deeper but you won’t be in pain.
This. EPS conduit breakers haven’t been invented yet.
That would have serious implications on rock storage, though. Unfortunately, this is not an acceptable compromise.
They tried storing the rocks in blue barrels once, and you saw where that got us.
Health and safety gone mad, next you’ll be telling us no more storing rocks in the consoles, or that holodeck safety controls should be impossible to disengage by accident
And some emergency manual handles on the doors.
Circuit breakers were outlawed after the Butlerian Jihad
Now they just have super specialized weirdos who hold onto the circuits, having trained their minds to the point where they are able to control the electricity passing through their body.
The 2268 NEC now requires Arc Fault Circuit Interruptors and dedicated circuits on all consoles. Starfleet would be annoyed, if the upgrades cost them anything.
The 2272 code is supposed to require dedicated backup systems for shields so they don’t have to constantly “reroute power”
