Of course the real-world reason is that it’s cheaper to shake the camera and set off a firecracker than to build a scale model just to paint a burn scar on the side.
But my thoughts were always that the in-universe reason had to do with the modular nature of federation starships.
In almost every episode, someone on a starship either suggests rerouting something, shunting power from one thing through another, bypassing something, compensating for one power source with another etc.
It seems that in space, being able to re-configure everything at a moment’s notice is important, and to be able to do that, you need easy, fast and direct, access to everything, therefore it needs to be immediately accessible, ergo high voltage power directly behind the controls.
The lack of seatbelts goes right along with it. If a console blows up in someone’s face, the next guy over needs to be able to quickly move down and take over. Don’t need to have to be fighting with seatbelts when nobody is steering the ship.
I don’t know why they don’t have safety glasses however…
At the same time, the gravity systems are designed by the best engineers in the Federation because they never, ever, give out, even when the rest of the ship is disintegrating.
I can’t remember which series this is from but I swear I remember them saying that the grav plating still holds a charge even in the event of total power failure. So even when the ship is disabled, gravity will maintain it’s hold for a period of time and then will slowly dissipate
If it was mentioned, it was probably in ENT. They talked a lot more about grav plating in that show than any of the others, probably more than all of them combined.
I used to put that one in the same category as the man-in-suit gorn from TOS: budget/tech restrictions. But even in the latest SNW episode, we see someone waking up on a piece of wreckage with gravity still perfectly fine, while also getting several zero gravity scenes in the same episode.
They did that one time on Undiscovered Country. I guess that was a Klingon ship though.
When a console overloads, it’s way better to be thrown from the seat than to be burned and electrocuted. The lack of seat belts is a safety feature.
In an episode of DS9 I heard some of the characters mention that they not only have deflector shields, but also “structural reinforcement shields.” So whatever science-fictiony force field is used to protect them from phasers and micrometeorites is also coursing through the skeletal structure of the ship.
When I heard this it immediately clicked in my mind: whenever the ship is hit with phaser fire the explosions happening inside are recoil from these internal shields. Perhaps the catastrophic damage prevented by structural reinforcement shields outweighs the localized damage of potentially fatal recoil.
That is my favorite explanation, anyway.
(This assumes all ships have structural reinforcement shields, and not just the Defiant.)
Voyager definitely has. I don’t remember it being mentioned in TNG or TOS though and Voyager is a newer ship than the Defiant…
Consoles are rigged with explosives to keep the lower decks in line.
Some engineer friends think it’s failure by design to avoid greater risks - much like a fuse burning out.
But why not do it more safely?
What about the rocks, though? It always seems like a starship is built around a massive quarry.
The rocks eat the eps plasma and turn it into console lights and computer food.
They also seem to mostly navigate on the same 2D plane of space, given the ships usually encounter each other the “right way up”.
TWOK’s nebula submarine hunt is my favorite Star Trek battle because it actually takes place in three dimensions.
“Haven’t you people ever heard of fuses?!?” -John Crichton
