Every time a starship suffers damage in a battle, the instrument panels and workstations explode. Seems to be responsible for more deaths than any other cause. It's time to fire some engineers and invest in fuses or something That said, I'm enjoying my first viewing of Deep Space Nine.
My question is: When they go into battle and literal rubble starts flying on the bridge, carpeting areas of the floor when the battle is intense, whence cometh said rubble?
It could be worse. The bridge could be on an exposed conning tower where the attackers just have to blow up two golf balls and crash a fighter through the giant windows to take out the entire ship... Nothing in DS9 quite matches this for me:
I always get a kick out of the exploding terminals. It's like they're filled with fireworks. They also need harnesses for their chairs, at least for battle. They're always flying out of them like crash test dummies but they never learn.
Particularly during the era of crashed saucer sections. It seemed to be the Plan A for tight situations for a while there. They called it Plan C, but who were they kidding? You just knew that saucer was going down.
Yeah, how they missed the seatbelt thing is beyond me. You'd think after the first dude got thrown across the bridge they'd have done something.
Funnily enough, this comes up as a significant plot point in the most recent episode of Star Trek: Discovery.
Yeah, they never really explain how/why all their computers spark and burst into flames when shot with a phaser or torpedo. The new movies have seat belts, which probably breaks a few things from the very start being new cannon on the TOS, but it looks more dramatic when the crew goes flying around the bridge. Nor do they ever explain in TNG how Ryker hasn't started an incident sitting on all the consoles around the ship, by butt dialing in a torpedo launch or something else.
Well @Steerpike if you stuck with DS9 and have any thoughts about it, please regale us. I rewatched the first episode at some point recently and was struck by how explicit they made the break from TNG. There's a scene where Sisko literally yells at Picard! And they let him have the last word! Captain Voice of Reason and Morality would've never been so humiliated on his own show.
The biggest fantasy is imagining all the advance without real setback with anything having ever collapsed. I still enjoyed watching any of the episodes of the Star Trek series on television, and, I was really inspired for my writing that would use fantasy, though I consciously avoid trying to write for anything science fiction.
I love it when someone completely unrelated to engineering suggests fiddling with system settings in a way that the dedicated, top-class engineers somehow haven't even remotely considered, and despite the idea coming out of left field for them, the engineers are instantly confident that it will work.
Believe it or not but in real-world engineering and product development that really does tend to happen. Highly qualified engineers have been trained to filter out the dumb ideas and have been educated to within an inch of their lives. That tends to make a lot of them reliant on external fools to come up with the novel solutions. Four times out of five they get to roll their eyes at you for being so idiotic as to not know that the flux capacitor doesn't work that way, then the fifth time they think, actually that's quite an interesting idea and it should totally work and they kick themselves for not thinking of it. And it does work. The difference in Sci-Fi is you don't see the captain's four other dumb-as-a-brick ideas for "re-routing the drive system", unless its to undermine his authority (which it wouldn't in real life). Fiction can't really handle that, for whatever reason. I suppose that's a long way of saying, "Can't always see the wood for the trees."
Rising to command a ship would require a generalized knowledge of the ships systems and their interactions. Excluding JJ Abrahm's hand waving in the Star Trek reboot, which defied logic in putting someone failing out of the academy in charge of a ship, over experienced officers. Granted a captain would not have the specialized knowledge of the engineering officer, unless he came up through engineering, but he would know that rerouting power was possible. He wouldn't have the skill set generally to do the job at a step by step detail level.
