In some book or article or something on TOS (I’m going on memory here), the author says he asked one of the production people about seatbelts and was told, “Then the actors couldn’t fall all over the bridge.”
In Star Trek VI, there were fire extinguishers in many scenes on the Enterprise. One of the best jokes in the movies, I thought.
[McCoy]It’s that green blood of his.[/McCoy]
No need for insults.
Same reason he got replaced as the leader of the Enterprise Jazz Band.
He was a terrible conductor.
I’ll have to check my DVD. I’m sure I saw the scene and I never download anything that might be on the net. The only way I could have seen it is in the theater or the DVD.
I really hope this isn’t some kind of bizarre false memory :eek:
As for fire extinguishers, in Next Generation, the computer controlled them. There’s an episode where they pick up some colonists living a pastoral life because something bad is happening to their homeworld. They try to light a fire in the cargo bay to cook dinner and the computer puts it out.
As for circuit breakers, they interfere with phase inducers and since realigning phase inducers can solve almost any problem, the designers decided to go with those. This is just a guess.
Send In the Clones
I mean, Up the Long Ladder, Season II
Well, they could fix this propblem by not using explosive plasma conduits in their control consoles…
Jeez. No seatbelts, inertial dampers that don’t work right, control panels that will explode in your face if you look at them crosseyed, warp core ejection systems that fail about 90% of the time…
The Federation has some seriously retarded design engineers. I’m starting to wonder if Starfleet’s primary purpose is to serve as a population control device
Isn’t someone going to make a joke then, about never letting Hoshi drive*?
*I sure ain’t, 'cause I don’t want to get pitted for being an ignorant, racist bastard, perpetrating mean stereotypes.
they must have Bloody Stupid Johnson on staff as Head Engineer.
I prefer to think of that episode as The Schmucks of the Irish.
I blame the Eugenics Wars, which ingrained a deep distrust of genetic enhancement into the collective psyche of the Federation. However, at the same time, they doubtless realized that evolutionary stagnation would eventually place them at a severe disadvantage: within several generations, all the other starfaring cultures without an aversion to genetic engineering would be uplifting themselves to godlike amorphous energy beings, while the Federation would still be relying on the Vulcan inner eyelid to protect them. Clearly, the Federation has elected to compensate for this disparity by artificially enhancing the danger level of their home and work environments, and allowing natural selection to do the rest. Hence we see the fruits of this philosophy in the form of starships without seatbelts (and notice, during combat situations there are generally still large numbers of people who are not even seated at all!), exploding bridge consoles, turbolifts with gravity fields that don’t switch off when the rest of the power goes out, phasers that will disintegrate you if you handle them carelessly, the practice of taking large numbers of children on a vessel of exploration, holodecks that manufacture life-threatening scenarios as recreation…the conclusion is inevitable. The Federation relies on Darwinian selection to maintain the health of its population. In the Twenty-Fourth Century, Ralph Nader is probably regarded in the same light as Khan Noonian Singh and Colonel Green.
Inertial dampers are for flying about space, seat belts are useless cos if you’re screwed in space you’re *really[/i[ screwed 
Well you know what happened when they let Deanna Troi drive…
I like your theory, but you forgot one thing: Security personell that are given less training and equipment than the rent-a-cops at the mall, thus assuring that almost any invader can overrun the ship in a matter of minutes
“You’re a useless load of bloody loonies!”
I’m sorry, I was still thinking of the Hitchhiker’s thread.
Yeah, and when Crusher was in command, she ran the ship into a star!
re: No seatbelts…
They want to be thrown clear.
Bad writing. Seriously. It’s all a weak effort at a “dramatic” scene, rather than writing dramatic dialogue, they just have everybody fall out of their chairs. In a real spacecraft, assuming physics as generally described in the ST universe, nothing at all would happen to the ship until all it’s systems failed, and then it would be catastrophic. Weapons hitting energy shields wouldn’t cause the ship to shake-they’re not connected to the ship like physical shields would be. Same deal with inertial dampening-it’s absolutely vital, even at sublight, or the crew would be a thin smear of molecules across the walls at any speeds much faster then we can go now. If they failed even a little bit, everybody on the ship would be toast.
Just as an aside, in the actual U.S. Navy we do use seat belts for rough weather and combat conditions.
We even have straps on the bunks so we don’t fall out when the ship rolls heavily. This can be dangerous when you’re in the top bunk, about six feet above the deck.
Here’s an old article I wrote on this subject and similar subjects:
I think this is the real answer. Space is supposed to be empty, so you’re not expected to be crashing your city-sized starship into anything. And if you * do * hit something at 80% the speed of light, a seat belt isn’t going to do a damn thing except bisect your corpse.
Obviously, after seeing how Kirk commanded the ship, the Federation engineers should have gone back to the drawing board.
As an aside, did you ever notice that the Enterprise must have had a black hole in the basement? Because no matter how low the energy got and how many systems failed, artificial gravity never failed.