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This is one of the better explanations for the exploding consoles I’ve seen. It still doesn’t justify them, but at least it’s something.
The main issue is that there’s no reason that consoles should explode. These are effectively touchscreens. If you push a touchscreen beyond its operational parameters, it should glitch, it should have trouble recognizing inputs, but it shouldn’t blow up. If it was pushed beyond what was safe it should either break or be annoying to use. Not dangerous.
Even with 21st century technology, a touch-screen type thing basically sips power. Smart phones can sometimes explode, but that’s only because they contain a relatively huge battery. These things are hooked into the ship’s power so they should only be drawing a few watts.
Still, if we combine your suggestion about battleshorts with the idea that for some ridiculous reason they run everything on the ship on plasma that comes directly from the warp core, then maybe…
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As an Other Place fan whose experience with trying to befriend Star Trek fans IRL has hit the tragic third - thank you for being reasonable. I’ve met some people pretending that the Other Place is “space wizards for children”, while Star Trek is “real science fiction”. While in fact they’re the same - for most part space magic and for the select few areas, yes, real science fiction.
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I saw someone once theorize that the console designers knew their creations would get dumped with tons of heat and current under battleshort conditions, and had to come up with some fallbacks. So they just filled it with a ton of mass to soak it up as long as possible, a big hunk of basalt. Unfortunately, when it gets overloaded, it tends to explosively fracture. But that’s better than cooking every ensign to touch a panel when under fire
Warp core engineers: we need redundancies and safeguards here, here, and here
Bridge console engineers: don’t forget the high-voltage rail and the concussive feedback blasters
Chair engineers: fuck seatbelts wooooo
If the inertial dampers fail, wouldn’t the seat belt just cut you in half anyway?
The warp core was originally a space babble replacement for a boiler on a steam ship, since it was based on WW2 navy ships. On old steam ships literally almost everything ran directly on auxiliary steam. As a result of probably not revisiting this since the 60s: everything in trek runs directly on warp core plasma.
You mean WW 0? Even in WW1 ICE powered ships are commonplace.
