i think it's interesting that the enterprise d had multifunction displays on the captain's armrests, yet he has to ask tactical to fire weapons. under normal circumstances, yes, that task would be delegated, but you'd think he would have an override. what if worf's dead
in my next post i begin getting really pedantic about toilets in star trek and lose all my followers
every time the ship is hit they’re slamming their hands or heads or whatever into the control surfaces anyway. so clearly the ship computer has some way of establishing whether an input was “intentional” or not, or else someone would slam self-destruct during a training exercise. if that’s the case why even have the control surfaces to begin with?
Oh, oh, this is another case where Voyager actually shined light on all of this!
First - the Captain's panels absolutely can fire weapons, or do anything else needed! But they have to be reconfigured to do so, and it's not in the standard layout. (Weapons status is on the default display, but not weapon activation.) I always imagined it's like dragging a new app to your homepage or something - it's there, but you've gotta set it up. Janeway sets her panels up at one point to be able to control propulsion and weapons at the same time from her chair, and Voyager just runs standard LCARS so presumably any other ship in the fleet could do it too.
The touchscreens also do have some limited sort of "intention-detection" - we know from several sources that they're biometric-coded (to an extent? There are definite cases of "person reaches over someone's shoulder to fire torpedoes" but there are also case examples of unauthorized people unable to use panels, so it's unclear here) but it seems the computers have some way to know who actually pushed a button.
And re: "touch displays suck", we can see in a few cases that people really did have that complaint too. Particularly Tom Paris, when building the Delta Flyer he insisted on having physical controls for better maneuverability and a more personal touch - just can't get that from touchscreens. There are a couple other small examples of a preference for physical controls, but it seems mixed. You can see how touchscreens would just be the default for them - everything else is touchscreens, so if that's all you've ever used that's what's most familiar, even if it feels foreign to us. (Increasingly less so, thanks smartphones.)
but the best way to illustrate the difference between a shuttle and what tom wants, is that starfleet shuttles are controlled like someone proficient in EVE Online, and tom paris wants to play Descent ][
so in most small ships, you've got crews of like, 3-5 but the shuttles are commonly shown being both pretty sturdy and pretty capable in combat. But the way they are is the crew is triaging tasks and giving the lowest priority ones to the computer, which performs simple actions towards that task.
need to focus on gunnery? hand off propulsion to a waypoint system. need to focus on evasive piloting? set the guns to auto cycle and sort your targets by range. you lose granularity and gain delegation
the delta flier is made by a wannabe fighter jock who doesn't understand tradeoffs and has ork heritage. but also the interface is much more intuitive with a more direct feedback loop, enabling faster proficiency gains even if you lose out on generalism
this post is not about star trek now that i think about it
