technical quibble

[Dal Rassak]

...everytime a flyer or even a spaceship takes a good hit in a fight, people tend to get knocked off their seats and go tumbling about the cockpit/bridge. Not very dignified is it.
In contemporary fighter aircraft, the pilot is strapped in.
Couldn't all that advanced 24th century technology have come up with something invisible that makes you adhere to your chair while you're in it??

[King Daniel]

They did, in the early movies. Those seat sides clamped down on the users' thighs during a red alert. Didn't much help the crewmen standing around. Thrn they mysteriously stopped using them. I guess the damatic effect of people going flying is more important than common sense in spaceship design.

Also, fuses must be a lost technology in the future.

[Timo]

For an in-universe apology, it could be argued that our heroes don't see themselves as fighter jockeys or tank drivers engaging in exciting battle - rather, they are more like the drivers of logistics trucks, doing some pretty dull driving for months at an end and never encountering much danger. In practice, such truck drivers typically drive without helmets and often without safety belts as well, because the discomfort of unnecessary safety overrules the benefits of wearing the gear.

Add to this that our heroes would have the analogy of airbags and vehicle armor to protect them, further reducing the incentive to wear the helmet and the belt.

None of this excuses the failure to quickly don the 24th century analogs to helmets and safety belts when a battle is joined, of course. Those might not be anything as clumsy as a pot on the head or a piece of fabric around the body, naturally, but rather something intangible like forcefields, something the user can activate with the push of a button or even without.

Timo Saloniemi

[Bry_Sinclair]

Seatbelts are for wimps.

Starfleeters are made of sterner stuff

[heavy lids]

Dal Rassak wrote:

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In contemporary fighter aircraft, the pilot is strapped in.

Because they don't have inertial dampers or artificial gravity.

[The Wormhole]

There is of course the deleted ending of Nemesis in which the Enterprise gets a new captain's chair with a seatbelt.

[Captain Rob]

^^ It's about time.

[CorporalCaptain]

During the wormhole emergency in The Motion Picture, the arms of Kirk's chair folded in over him. At least the Captain was secure.

But that was almost a bad thing, because Mr. Decker had to actually make his way over to Chekov's station to save the ship.

[Tosk]

I never liked that chair in TMP. Can you imagine how much that would hurt if the ship was severely rocked and you were held in place by clamps on your thighs? Fuuuuhhh!

[Deckerd]

heavy lids wrote:

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Because they don't have inertial dampers or artificial gravity.

Inertial dampers would surely stop people staggering around the bridge whenever anyone hits the ship?

One of the things I really appreciated about Battlestar Galactica was that the bridge was so far inside the ship that even when Galactica was getting a massive pounding the bridge was operational. It never made sense to me to have the Enterprise bridge top and centre, like a nice big target.

[Dal Rassak]

I always thought you could have s.th. like a very spatially circumscribed gravity field of some sort, that you could just turn on and off as needed.

[Timo]

These would indeed seem to be standard fare: the tiny shuttlepods have those, for one thing...

It just seems that, unlike standard starship gravity which unerringly keeps things falling towards the floor rather than the ceiling, this "special", "local" field technology never manages to keep people secure during emergencies. Why the discrepancy in reliability? Or, possibly, the absence of such local fields?

Timo Saloniemi

[Dal Rassak]

you're asking me?

[CoveTom]

In "Knight Rider" (the original, not the insipid remake), Michael Knight never wore a seatbelt, as you wanted the fast past action of him being able to jump into the car and speed off or get out quickly, etc. When it became a concern that kids were watching this and seeing him not wearing a seatbelt, the producers invented a new feature of KITT called the "passive laser restraint system."

How it worked was never explained. But from the beginning of season 3 onward, anytime they were going into a high speed chase, we'd see Michael turning it on, presumably protecting him without the need for seatbelts.

Logically, the Enterprise, with artificial gravity and inertial dampeners, should be able to do the same thing. Dramatically, of course, we know it's because they want to be able to show people flying around the bridge following a phaser hit. But it makes no logical sense.

[C.E. Evans]

It could be that just as many people are injured strapped into the chairs aboard a starship performing abrupt high-speed turns than without. If inertia dampers have a noticeable time lag when countering accleration forces, just as many (maybe even more) people might have encountered bruises, lacerations, and broken bones straining against seat restraints as they would have just falling to the deck.

An alternative might be to do away with traditional consoles & seating and have all stations be "mini-cockpits" instead that personnel can climb into and employ the more secure multi-point harness system used in aircraft.